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Best way to configure Starwind VSAN

Hi Experts, I'm trying out StarWind Virtual SAN. Pardon my ignorance but may I know the best way to setup a 2 node StarWind Virtual SAN machine? Do I set them up using actual physical servers running on RAID and WIndows OS installed on them? I'm also confused about the Storage Pool that is supposed to be the 'Shared Storage for other VMs'. Say I want to allocate 1TB as shared storage for all my guests' VM. Do I do create a physical partition on the StarWind Windows machine and assign a drive letter to it (D:Drive)? Or can I point it to somewhere else for example a NAS drive mapped in the Windows machine.

I have tried installing StarWind machine as a guest VM in Vsphere and configure the storage pool as its D:\ but performance is incredibly slow (a very old machine as VMware host just to try it out). It works though. I need to know how do people actually configure a simple 2 node VSAN cluster. Many thanks for your help.

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Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

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totallypatrick

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Hi Andrew, many thanks for the reply. How about storage pool? Am I right to say they're actually local drives on the server i.e. D drive?

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Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)

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Luciano Patrão

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Vladislav Karaiev

performance is incredibly slow (a very old machine as VMware host just to try it out).

Heavy iSCSI traffic introduces a significant CPU overhead which can lead to the poor performance on an older hardware. Virtualization overhead is another factor that can steal 10-30% of a bare-metal performance depending on hardware configuration and workload pattern.