StarWind Native SAN for Microsoft Hyper-V

StarWind Native SAN for Microsoft Hyper-V - The Company StarWind, which produces the product number 1 to create a fault tolerant iSCSI Storage Virtualization StarWind's the Enterprise the HA, last week released a new product to create a cluster of virtual machines storage StarWind's the Native the SAN for the Microsoft the Hyper-the V (more here and here). A distinguishing feature of the product is that it permits a fault-tolerant configuration organization based servers and storage only Hyper-V Servers 2, which is 2 times reduces equipment costs (servers, switches) and service solutions.

StarWind Native SAN for Microsoft Hyper-V

So, generally speaking, the StarWind Native SAN for Microsoft Hyper-V allows you to get away from the 4-node configuration to create a failover cluster storage when building general storage with support for HA and Live Migration features that previously required additional equipment in the form of two servers storage and the physical switch ports.

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Now everything can be done using two servers connected directly via 10G-connection:
This requires not only less switches and servers, but also less than 10G adapters on Hyper-V host servers (4 pieces instead of eight). It is important that all the I/O requests go directly to the DAS Store Server, without requiring them to transfer over the network, which significantly increases the performance.

If this count, we can provide cost savings of up to 50% compared with all the other solutions, which provide fault tolerance at the level of storage and virtual machines:

We now turn to the functionality of the product. StarWind Native SAN for Microsoft Hyper-V is a fully symmetrical active-active storage cluster of virtual machines in which there is simultaneous recording to both disk storage (combined into one logical) with full synchronization between nodes is (synchronized only changed blocks). If one of the Hyper-V nodes continues continuous operation without stopping the second I/O request virtual machines.

Hypervisor StarWind Virtual SAN

This StarWind Native SAN automatically handles not only the node failure (Fail-over), but storage and synchronization in cases of its recovery (Fail-back). All this is traditionally achieved by monitoring nodes by means of the availability of signals on channel Heartbeat.

One of the features of StarWind Native SAN for Microsoft Hyper-V is a built-in reduplication, a mechanism that allows you to record only the unique blocks on disk drives, resulting in space savings of 20-30% for many environments. All this takes place in-line, i.e. while recording data to the disk.

Additionally, StarWind SAN uses a disk caching technology blocks in the main memory, which significantly increases the performance of the solution in terms of high performance I/O and low latency. Well, the important point, you can adjust the block size to optimize storage for different types of application workloads.

The following function StarWind Native SAN for Microsoft Hyper-V is the ability to use storage that grows as its data content (Thin Provisioning).

All this allows us to save money on the purchase of storage and its flexibility to scale as needed disk space.

Well, another interesting feature of StarWind Native SAN for Microsoft Hyper-V is the possibility of organizing an asynchronous storage replication to a remote site on the WAN connection in order to create a disaster recovery solution for virtualization.

All this will allow you to create a Disaster Recovery is a plan to restore the services running in virtual machines.

We also note a number of useful functions StarWind Native SAN for Microsoft Hyper-V:

• The ability to use snapshots (Snapshots) and clones at the level of storage
• Monitoring the performance of the cluster nodes
• Using different types of cache (write-back and white-through)
• Standards support the IPSec ,  the CHAP ,  the MPIO
• Support for Microsoft Windows Server Core