@stacksofplates said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@scottalanmiller said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

@stacksofplates said in What Are You Doing Right Now:

Is Starwind available on Linux yet?

Yes

Just the appliance? I was looking this morning on my phone and got tired of searching.

Well, only quite limited amount of people got access to our Linux-based virtual storage appliance so far. We plan (I hold my breath here) to release new unrestricted StarWind free upcoming week and an official VSA thing is going to follow after that next-next week. Stay tuned

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-ovf

P.S. There are no plans to support Linux bare metal for now. We need your feedback guys and gals!

This is great one! Hope more Hyper-V related stuff is coming

@scottalanmiller said in Tech Field Day Stairway to Cloud:

@KOOLER said in Tech Field Day Stairway to Cloud:

Do you guys like my T-shirt?

LOL, I definitely noticed it.

I hope it's not something most valuable on this video

OK, so a gateway (with acceleration, RDMA and integration to vCenter & SCVMM) for Ceph & GlusterFS is on the way.

StarWind Virtual SAN

Do you guys like my T-shirt?

@scottalanmiller said in Hyper-converged infrastructure (I missed the storage part):

@msff-amman-Itofficer said in Hyper-converged infrastructure (I missed the storage part):

Why sometimes I hear about users running BTRFS or ZFS insides VMs and then allocating that storage to other VMs. Is this normal ?

No, that is not normal nor sensible unless you are building high availability clustering within those VMs. But you would not likely use BtrFS or ZFS for this, but more typically a clustered file system like GFS2. More or less, anytime you hear of someone using ZFS it's for something incredibly stupid. ZFS is amazing and I've been working with it for twelve years, but the recent belief that it is magic is just another example of SMB IT people hearing a word and deciding that since they don't understand it, it must be magic.

There are good times to do what you describe here, it's called a VSA approach. Vendors like @StarWind_Software and @HPEStorageGuy do this, but they don't do it with ZFS, they have custom software that handles HA clustering, that they do it in a VM is just a limitation of their access to the underlying hypervisor. VMware used to do this, but has VSAN now. Starwind only does this on non-Hyper-V platforms, on Hyper-V they skip the VM and run right on the hypervisor itself.

Building your own HA Storage VMs on top of your hypervisor is certainly possible, but is most definitely an "expert level" process. And what is available to build for yourself is quite limited. For all intents and purposes, doing this in this manner will only be done with either Starwind or HPE VSA products, this is exactly what they are built for and they both do it very well.

Just a tiny remark: depending on how VM does actual storage virtualization it can be either slow (doing data wires over vSwitch and using TCP) or extremely fast (PCI pass through or SR-IOV network and storage adapters inside a VM and using VM's vCPU(s) in polling mode), so it's not always beneficial to have in-kernel implementation of something.

Virtual Storage Appliance

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-ovf

FYI

@DustinB3403 said in XenOrchestra XOSAN...a pic is worth 1000 words:

@JaredBusch said in XenOrchestra XOSAN...a pic is worth 1000 words:

What is XOSAN? Their answer to Starwind vSAN thing?

Yes, so everything is hosted within the same environment. No need to go out to StarWinds or HALizard.

XOSAN is a paid option? If yes - good luck, both HALizard and Starwind VSA for Xen are (will be?) free. if XOSAN is free - very cool!

@NetworkNerd said in Vendor Mistake - VMware Infrastructure Decisions:

Before I started here a couple of months ago, my boss purchased a couple of Dell R630s and a PowerVault MD3820i (20 drive bays) to be our new infrastructure at HQ. We have dual 10Gb PowerConnect switches and two UPS devices, each connected to a different circuit. The plan is to rebuild the infrastructure on vSphere Standard (licenses already purchased) and have a similar setup in a datacenter somewhere (replicate the SANs, etc.). We're using AppAssure for backups (again, already purchased).

The PowerVault has 16 SAS drives that are 1.8 TB 7200 RPM SED drives and 4 SAS drives that are 400 GB SSD for caching. Well, we made disk groups and virtual disks using the SEDs (letting the SAN manage the keys), but it turns out we cannot use the SSDs they sent us for caching. In fact, they don't have SED SSDs for this model SAN.

At the time the sale was made, Dell ensured my boss everything would work as he requested (being able to use the SSDs for caching with the 7200 RPM SED drives). Now that we know this isn't going to be the case, we have some options.

First, they recommended we trade in the PowerVault for a Compellent and Equalogic. The boss did not want that because he was saying you are forced to do RAID 6 on those devices and cannot go with RAID 10 in your disk groups. As another option, Dell recommended we put the SSDs in our two hosts and use Infinio so we can do caching with the drives we have. In this case we would make Dell pay for the Infinio licenses and possibly more RAM since they made the mistake.

But I'm wondering if perhaps there is another option. Each server has 6 drive bays. So we have 20 drives total. Couldn't we have Dell take the SAN back, give us another R630, and pay for licenses of VMware vSAN for all 3 hosts? Each server has four 10 Gb NICs and two 1 Gb NICs. That might require we get additional NICs. But in this case, I'm not sure drive encryption is an option or if we can utilize the SEDs at all.

I've not double-checked the vSAN HCL or anything for the gear in our servers as this is just me spit balling. Is there some other option we have not considered? We're looking to get the 14 TB or so of usable space that RAID 10 will provide, but the self-encrypting drives were deemed a necessity by the boss. And without some type of caching, we will not hit our IOPs requirements.

Any advice is much appreciated.

Keep R630s, refund PowerVault, refund AppAss. Get VMware VSAN and Veeam (accordingly).

@openit said in Hyper V replica VS Veeam B&R Replica.:

Hi all,

This is my future plan to setup Windows Server Redundancy ( DC+File Server).

Part 1: Physical Server

Currently our DC + File Server is running on one Physical Server. Is there any option at all for physical server replication ? with other server, so that we can make second server as primary manually or automatically in case of main server failure ?

Part 2: Virtual Server

I believe, physical server replication is not available and VM Replica is the best option.

Now I am trying to understand Hyper V Free Replica VS Veeam Replica Paid:

1. Hyper V Replica : I know it's poor man's DC. So there should some limitations or hard work as it comes for free. For me, redundancy matters and ok with Veeam pricing.

2. Hyper V Failover Cluster : As it will require two virtual servers (of course best option to be on different servers), so two physical servers and SAN/NAS, which is out of budget (not an option for me) and I know don't understand how it's redundant incase of SAN failure ?

3. Veeam B&R Replica Standard : I have chosen standard (perpetual) , as it's ok for pricing and features. Here my confusion is, as it's saying Backup and Replication, for the Backup if we set backup target to NAS, it's fine,

a) But for replication we should set target to Physical Server ? which is with Hyper-V, so that we can Fire UP to make it as primary server in case of Actual Server failure, right ? I believe everything will be up and runs normally within some 30 minutes with around 1 hour data loss (let's say) ?

b) Once the main (original) server is okay and ready to run again (from failure), how about changed/updated data with secondary server ?( which was acting as primary server), whether Veeam software will update back ?

c) How it's going to work as Backup ? as it's replicating with all changes at the same time (like mirroring) ? Is that because of restore point or versioning of replica ?

Thanks for your time !!

You still need VM backup because you can't live with VM replication only. So if you got Veeam for VM backup - just leave VM replication to Veeam as well!

@whizzard said in The SMB Two Server Dilema, What to Do:

In scenarios such as these what would be the recommended backup approach: DAS, NAS, Backup Appliance, lower end server, removable disk storage, tapes (intentionally left out cloud)?

Should be separate (physically!) entity non-related to your production cluster. Cheap NAS is OK.

@scottalanmiller said in Cheap Cloud Storage for Offsite Backup.:

Check out BackBlaze B2.

...and make sure you're OK with their Glacier-like "get data back!" plan!

@Dashrender said in Understanding 3-2-1 backup rule and son/father/grandfather model backups.:

@Net-Runner said in Understanding 3-2-1 backup rule and son/father/grandfather model backups.:

Here are some good explanations on the rule:
https://knowledgebase.starwindsoftware.com/explanation/the-3-2-1-backup-rule/
https://www.veeam.com/blog/the-3-2-1-0-rule-to-high-availability.html

We have a highly-available cluster based on StarWind https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san and thus having 2 copies of data as a synchronous replica and a third copy as an on-site backup (which is part 3 of the rule). Obviously, cluster is running on primary internal storage and backups are stored on a separate NAS (wich is 2 part of the rule). And we have a VTL virtual machine https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/partners/starwind/starwindvtl/ running in Azure that hosts our offsite backups (which is part 1).

I don't agree that StarWinds provides two copies of data - this is like saying that RAID 1 is two copies of the data. They are in real time sync, so if one become corrupted, so does the other.

This is true! Unless snapshot-based async replication is configured instead of a sync. I mean 1+1 or 2+1 instead of HA(2).

@Dashrender said in Announcing the Death of RAID:

@Net-Runner said in Announcing the Death of RAID:

I would treat RAID as a kind of hardware offload since RAIN is known to consume more resources and thus resulting in less performance from the storage array. That is probably one of the major reasons why vendors like StarWind keep using hardware RAID. Especially on smaller deployments (storage capacities).

I wonder if this flies in the face of what @scottalanmiller has been saying that hardware RAID isn't needed for performance reasons?

There are many ways to skin a cat and there are some things you can't do w/out hardware components: f.e. SAS in HBA mode can't allow write cache enabled on the disks and can't enable aggressive write-back battery-protected cache because... HBA has none This means either you acknowledge writes in DRAM (synchronized with some other hosts) or you have to use Enterprise-grade SSDs. Guys like VMware and Microsoft who claim they don't rely on hardware and you can throw away RAID cards are... cheating you! Because now you have to swap RAID cards -> Enterprise grade SSDs they can use as a cache. Pay money to save money. Sweet!

@scottalanmiller said in Public Cloud vs. Hosted Hyperconvergence Costing Project:

So doing cost comparisons seem to be very popular and I'm going to try to do a bit more of them. I thought that it might be useful if we had some real world workloads to use to compare the two approaches. Coming up with contrived examples is useful, but only so useful. Getting examples of what people actually need to compare would be far more interesting.

What are we comparing?

In the first corner: public cloud. Services like Amazon AWS and Vultr. An average mainline Windows server there is about $96/mo and Linux is about $40.

In the second corner: hosted hyperconvergence. We can play around with different options, but Scale and Colocation America are the easiest and are very comparable as it is enterprise, full support, single price and Tier IV datacenters with Amazon-like full time support.

Comparing these two is very useful because both are off-premises approaches that overlap in what they provide. Two different approaches to essentially identical needs for SMB customers.

Let me know some workloads and let's get to comparing!

@colocationamerica
@scale
@ScaleLegion

I don't get the "hosted colocation" idea. If I want to move move workload out of my own datacenter, why should I trust to somebody small running SMB solution on steroids, if I can go for AWS or Azure? Are we comparing costs only?

P.S. I'd also get hyper grid (ex-gridstore) pricing here as well. My $0.02 ;))

@scottalanmiller said in Announcing the Death of RAID:

@coliver said in Announcing the Death of RAID:

Is StarWinds vSAN considered RAIN?

We'd have to dig in under the hood. I think that they are mostly focused on network RAID, just really advanced.

StarWind uses local reconstruction codes (for now - stand-alone software or hardware RAID on every node; can be RAID0, 1, 5, 6 or 10) and inter-node n-way replication between the nodes, can be considered as a network RAID1. There's no network parity RAID like HPE (ex-Left Hand) or Ceph does.

P.S. We're working on our own local reconstruction codes now, so local protection (SimpliVity style) won't be required soon. FYI.

@Net-Runner said in Views on Halizard:

@KOOLER said in Views on Halizard:

We'll keep free version CLI-managed, like Hyper-V is. Initially Linux-based VSA with a web mgmt will be free as well

That's awesome! Do you have any ETA's yet?

Mid-January 2017.

P.S. I hope so ;)))

@Dashrender said in Views on Halizard:

@scottalanmiller said in Views on Halizard:

HALizard probably doesn't make sense soon as Starwind is about to be free.

I still don't understand this move - but it is awesome!

1. we make more and more money from appliances
2. competition on SDS market alone gets stiffer (more competitors every day there are 2-3 companies coming out from the closet)
3. we're good guys and are trying to help to ones who don't have $ to buy but still short in time to do 100% DIY

P.S. We'll keep free version CLI-managed, like Hyper-V is. Initially Linux-based VSA with a web mgmt will be free as well but I don't know for how long and what limitations we'll put into Linux VSA one. More info to come soon closer to release

@scottalanmiller said in Setup 3 node cluster:

@matthewaroth35 said in Setup 3 node cluster:

Ok. I have 3 hp g7 same model. I want to set them all up as a cluster. same way scale does.

What Scale does is highly unique. What you have is a modified hypervisor that knows about the storage, a customer storage layer that is very advanced and designed specifically for this use and a then a customer web management layer that controls it all for you. That's not something you can build at home.

You can use VMware + VSAN (very expensive) or Hyper-V + StarWind (not cheap) to do this without some crazy complication. But I'm assuming that for an "old cluster" you aren't looking for an investment. If you were, you'd just buy more Scale gear.

So you are going to be looking at free. And probably Xen or KVM + CEPH is going to do that and that's not trivial, at all.

We'll try to fix that immediately after our V8 R5 release after NY giving away unrestricted StarWind vSAN for free. Switching to appliance business ;))

CONGRATS !!!!

@scottalanmiller said in Ideas for how to use new, free gear from HPE?:

So the good options are....

If you want high availability from your storage, which doesn't make a lot of sense since you have only one blade chassis, so no failover should it have any issue, you would likely get an HA SAN which would either be something like a 3PAR or something like a dual Proliant Starwind cluster. @KOOLER

If you don't want high availability, but are just going to add reasonable low cost storage to make the blades have some place to store VMs, then a single Proliant based SAM-SD running CentOS or FreeBSD is perfect.

Easy! I'm pushing really hard to release now pre-built ESXi, KVM and Xen Virtual Machine based appliances to get this done free of charge and with as small traction as possible!