ESX Virtualization

VMware ESXi, vSphere, VMware Backup, Hyper-V... how-to, videos....

Nakivo Backup and Replication - #1 Backup solution for Virtual, physical, cloud, NAS and SaaS

Menu
  • Certification
      • VCP-DCV vSphere 8
          • vcp2024-125.
        • Close
    • Close
  • VMware
    • Configuration Maximums
    • vSphere
      • vSphere 8.0
      • vSphere 7.0
      • vSphere 6.7
      • vSphere 6.5
      • vSphere 6.0
      • Close
    • VMworld
      • VMware EXPLORE 2024
      • VMware EXPLORE 2023
      • VMware EXPLORE 2022
      • VMworld 2019
      • VMworld 2018
      • VMworld 2017
      • VMworld 2016
      • VMworld 2015
      • VMworld 2014
      • VMworld 2013
      • VMworld 2012
      • VMworld 2011
      • Close
    • Close
  • Microsoft
    • Windows Server 2012
    • Windows Server 2016
    • Windows Server 2019
    • Close
  • Categories
    • Tips – VMware, Microsoft and General IT tips and definitions, What is this?, How this works?
    • Server Virtualization – VMware ESXi, ESXi Free Hypervizor, VMware vSphere Server Virtualization, VMware Cloud and Datacenter Virtualization
    • Backup – Virtualization Backup Solutions, VMware vSphere Backup and ESXi backup solutions.
    • Desktop Virtualization – Desktop Virtualization, VMware Workstation, VMware Fusion, VMware Horizon View, tips and tutorials
    • How To – ESXi Tutorials, IT and virtualization tutorials, VMware ESXi 4.x, ESXi 5.x and VMware vSphere. VMware Workstation and other IT tutorials.
    • Free – Free virtualization utilities, ESXi Free, Monitoring and free backup utilities for ESXi and Hyper-V. Free IT tools.
    • Videos – VMware Virtualization Videos, VMware ESXi Videos, ESXi 4.x, ESXi 5.x tips and videos.
    • Home Lab
    • Reviews – Virtualization Software and reviews, Disaster and backup recovery software reviews. Virtual infrastructure monitoring software review.
    • Close
  • Partners
    • NAKIVO
    • StarWind
    • Zerto
    • Xorux
    • Close
  • This Web
    • News
    • ESXi Lab
    • About
    • Advertise
    • Archives
    • Disclaimer
    • PDFs and Books
    • Close
  • Free
  • Privacy policy

StarWind Virtual SAN Best Practices

By Vladan SEGET | Last Updated: November 12, 2019

Shares

Every software solution has its own best practices. Admins must follow those best practices for VMware, Microsoft or other vendors and all software solutions including software-defined storage solutions, do have their best practices. Today we'll be talking about StarWind Virtual SAN Best Practices.

As you know, StarWind Virtual SAN has been for a while and it proved to be one of the most cost-effective solutions for different architectures providing either shared storage for virtualized infrastructure, redundant storage for backup infrastructure, or being used as Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) solution.

StarWind Virtual SAN is software-based storage and as such, any misconfiguration or non-respecting of requirements is “paid” by performance hit or the environment at risk. That's why the following best practices are important for any environment.

By respecting best practices you not only obtain a resilient storage solution with a minimum of 2 hosts but at the same time, you also get good performance out of the box. StarWind High Availability (HA) relies on redundant network links between the StarWind hosts to ensure storage resilience.

Yes, StarWind only needs 2 hosts where other solutions also needs a third host. It's done by design.

StarWind Virtual SAN for VMware is now distributed as a Linux VM (VSA) with pass-through disks, and pass-through NICs to achieve the best possible performance. StarWind VSAN which pulls the local storage of each host and creates a shared storage pool. 

What is StarWind HA?

Some of you who do not know StarWind might need to hear this before being convinced. StarWind HA relies on redundant network links between the StarWind hosts to maintain storage resilience. Those links are used for monitoring and failures. If any of the nodes fail or stop processing requests properly, the failover is instantly initiated from the client OS/Hypervisor side.

StarWind has also an internal heartbeat mechanism, which ensures proper storage path isolation in the event of synchronization network failures and prevents so-called storage “split-brain”.

Below you can see that different NICs carries on different traffic for different service. Heartbeat, synchronization etc.

As you can see, you don't even need a switch for 2-nodes direct-connect configuration. Same as for VMware vSAN direct-connect scenarios.

Design Considerations

Hosts – you should have redundant and hot-swap parts available ahead of time. Hardware fails. Hardware RAID cards should be identical across clusters. In fact, StarWind recommends using the identical storage configuration across HA SAN cluster. This includes RAID controllers, volumes, and settings, as well as OS-level partitioning.

Storage – you have two options and it depends which types of workloads you'll be running:

  1. FLAT image file architecture – traditional data layout on the disks. The storage used for the general purpose.
  2. Log-Structured File System (LSFS) architecture – log-structured-based data layout. Recommended for intense write workloads. VM-centric file systems don`t support certain workload types. Read more about LSFS here.

StarWind recommends RAID10 (HDD) and RAID5 or RAID10 (SSD) for implementing the HA environment. More details about Stripe size, volumes or partitioning and file system considerations can be found at a source article at Starwind. Read the source article at StarWind Here.

Additionally, you might want to check  Recommended RAID settings for HDD and SSD disks..

HA Device – There are different recommendations for VMware vSphere or Hyper-V. For example for Hyper-V it recommended creating at least two HA devices per Hyper-V/Microsoft Failover Cluster for optimum performance.

Heartbeat channel – it is recommended to enable additional heartbeat connections for other physically separated links and NICs between the HA SANs, but not the ones used for HA device synchronization. If the synchronization channel fails, StarWind attempts to ping the partner nodes using the provided heartbeat links. If the partner nodes do not respond, StarWind assumes that they are offline. In this case, StarWind marks the other nodes as not synchronized, and all HA devices on the node flush the write cache to the disk to preserve data integrity in case the node goes out of service unexpectedly.

Heartbeat avoids split-brain scenarios.

Benchmarks – you should always benchmark the system before production. Not only for copy operations but also or IOPS. For this, many tools are available, such as IOmeter, FIO, VDbench and others. For network performance, you can use iPerf. It is necessary to measure the network performance and tune the network to get the maximum throughput for the StarWind Virtual SAN environment. For details on network performance testing, use this post at StarWind.

Final Words

Whether the setup of StarWind VSAN seems easy, the overall configuration and performance tuning can be lengthy and not straight forward if you don't know how to design, what to test etc. That's why there is a paid StarWind version where you have it set up by StarWind engineers, who will also ensure proper support.

StarWind VSAN Free is supported by community forums only and after 30 days trial, you only have PowerShell for the management. Hence to get the full version if the production is business-critical.

StarWind Virtual SAN eliminates the single point of failure (SPOF) for storage in virtualized infrastructure by using duplication (or triplication of data), caches and I/O controllers. All resources are “mirrored” between different physical hosts.

The shared storage becomes fault-tolerant (because backed by 2 or more hosts) and provides high availability to higher performance and low-cost.

More posts about StarWind on ESX Virtualization:

  • Free StarWind iSCSI accelerator download
  • VMware ESXi Free and StarWind – Two node setup for remote offices
  • VMware vSphere and HyperConverged 2-Node Scenario from StarWind – Step By Step
  • StarWind Storage Gateway for Wasabi Released
  • How To Create NVMe-Of Target With StarWind VSAN
  • Veeam 3-2-1 Backup Rule Now With Starwind VTL
  • StarWind and Highly Available NFS
  • StarWind VVOLS Support and details of integration with VMware vSphere
  • StarWind VSAN on 3 ESXi Nodes detailed setup
  • VMware VSAN Ready Nodes in StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

More posts from ESX Virtualization:

  • How to Patch vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) – [Guide]
  • VCP6.7-DCV Objective 4.2 – Create and configure vSphere objects
  • What is The Difference between VMware vSphere, ESXi and vCenter
  • How to Configure VMware High Availability (HA) Cluster
  • VMware Certification Changes in 2019

Stay tuned through RSS, and social media channels (Twitter, FB, YouTube)

Shares
Vote !

| Filed Under: Cloud, Server Virtualization Tagged With: StarWind Virtual SAN Best Practices

About Vladan SEGET

This website is maintained by Vladan SEGET. Vladan is as an Independent consultant, professional blogger, vExpert x16, Veeam Vanguard x9, VCAP-DCA/DCD, ESX Virtualization site has started as a simple bookmarking site, but quickly found a large following of readers and subscribers.

Connect on: Facebook. Feel free to network via Twitter @vladan.

Private Sponsors

Featured

  • Thinking about HCI? G2, an independent tech solutions peer review platform, has published its Winter 2023 Reports on Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) Solutions.
  • Zerto: One Platform for Disaster Recovery, Backup & Cloud Mobility: Try FREE Hands-On Labs Today!
Click to Become a Sponsor

Most Recent

  • FREE version of StarWind VSAN vs Trial of Full version
  • Commvault’s Innovations at RSA Conference 2025 San Francisco
  • VMware ESXi FREE is FREE again!
  • Installation of StarWind VSAN Plugin for vSphere
  • Protect Mixed environments with Nakivo Physical Machine recovery (bare metal)
  • No more FREE licenses of VMware vSphere for vExperts – What’s your options?
  • Tails – Your Private OS on USB Stick
  • StarWind V2V Converter Now has CLI
  • Veeam VHR ISO v2 – 2025 Download and Install
  • Deployment OVA and Installation of Nakivo Backup and Replication for VMware

Get new posts by email:

 

 

 

 

Support us on Ko-Fi

 

 

Buy Me a Coffee at ko-fi.com

Sponsors

Free Trials

  • DC Scope for VMware vSphere – optimization, capacity planning, and cost management. Download FREE Trial Here.
  • Augmented Inline Deduplication, Altaro VM Backup v9 For #VMware and #Hyper-V – Grab your copy now download TRIAL.

VMware Engineer Jobs

VMware Engineer Jobs

YouTube

…

Find us on Facebook

ESX Virtualization

…

Copyright © 2025 ·Dynamik-Gen · Genesis Framework · Log in