StarWind SAN V8 – Beta Initial Testing

Last Friday, 9/6/2013, StarWind released a beta of version 8 of their core SAN product – iSCSI SAN. This version has been in the works for several months – it includes what appears to be a major rewrite of the core storage code as well as a simplified management console. The core includes:

Please note that this release is a beta release. That said, I could not wait to give it a shot…even though it’s not quite the same setup as in previous tests. My physical SAN\NAS is now based on FreeNAS with NFS storage presented to VMware – this test will have to be virtual. As a basic first test, I have a 2vCPU, 8GB RAM 2008R2 virtual machine with StarWind iSCSI SAN V8 installed. It is presenting a 50GB volume (which is presented by NFS from FreeNAS) backed by 5GB write-back cache. The initial install of StarWind shows a vastly different console:

Additionally, I am prompted to store data somewhere – either the C: drive, or another volume:

Next, I created the LSFS based iSCSI target – using the advanced device wizard:

 

After all that, I presented the target to VMware, and cloned a 2008R2 VM from template. Note that the datastore shows full VAAI support, and according to StarWind it is supported. I ended up cloning 2 VMs to the datastore – each with 10GB worth of data. The StarWind server itself showed only 10.1 GB used with DeDupe turned on, but VMware showed 20GB used. The real test: IOMeter:

Again – please note that this is an iSCSI volume based on a VMDK presented by NFS to an ESX host…so there’s a few layers of storage virtualization here…plus it’s only 8GB of virtual RAM, which is not that much (and it’s virtual). All that being said, a write-heavy, random IO test produced EXTREMELY favorable results:

3400 IOPS???!?!?! That’s AMAZING! and it’s all virtual? Imagine if this were a physical server, with tons of RAM and an SSD L2 cache. I would imagine that it would only get better from here. More tests to come!

2 thoughts on “StarWind SAN V8 – Beta Initial Testing”

  1. Where did you get the VAAI drivers for v8? Is it supported in the Free SAN version? I'm going to deploy this to a Dell R510 (S310 RAID) running Windows 2012R2: 1x QC Xeon 12g RAM. Disk layout 8×750 (Raid5) with 2x 60g SSD (R0) for 2nd Cache. Do you think this would work? I'm also considering 10g Ethernet (crossover to my two hosts)

    Regards,
    Ben Mitchell

    Reply
  2. Benjamin –

    I don't believe that there is a VAAI plugin for StarWind since it is presenting block storage – it was my understanding only file storage (NFS) needs a plugin.

    To be completely honest, my environment is 100% ZFS now, so I can't speak that well to Windows\StarWind iSCSI any more. In ZFS terms, that sounds like a decent setup, though a bit low on RAM (for ZFS at least).

    My current storage server serves NFS for VMware on 4×2 pairs of 10K drives with SSD for SLOG and L2ARC and CIFS on RAIDZ 2T drives. I'm still using 1Gb networking for everything…10G would be nice, but it's $$$ and I just don't see the cost\benefit being worth it at all – 1G does fine for me….spend $$ elsewhere like for RAM, more\faster spindles, etc.

    Here's why I like NFS better: http://blogs.serioustek.net/post.aspx?id=82299de2-05d4-4ab6-be34-634cc2825b12

    Reply

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