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Starwind Virtual SAN® and Hyper-V Over SMB 3.0 #1 HyperConverged Appliance for SMB and ROBO StarWind Virtual SAN® and Hyper-V over SMB 3.0 DECEMBER 2014 WHITE PAPER BY AIDAN FINN StarWind Virtual SAN® and Hyper-V over SMB 3.0 Trademarks “StarWind”, “StarWind Software” and the StarWind and the StarWind Software logos are registered trademarks of StarWind Software. “StarWind LSFS” is a trademark of StarWind Software which may be registered in some jurisdictions. All other trademarks are owned by their respective owners. Changes The material in this document is for information only and is subject to change without notice. While reasonable efforts have been made in the preparation of this document to assure its accuracy, StarWind Software assumes no liability resulting from errors or omissions in this document, or from the use of the information contained herein. StarWind Software reserves the right to make changes in the product design without reservation and without notification to its users. Technical Support and Services If you have questions about installing or using this software, check this and other documents first - you will find answers to most of your questions on the Technical Papers webpage or in StarWind Forum. If you need further assistance, please contact us. Copyright ©2009-2016 StarWind Software Inc. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written consent of StarWind Software. In 2016, Gartner named StarWind “Cool Vendor for Compute Platforms”. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. About StarWind StarWind is a pioneer in virtualization and a company that participated in the development of this technology from its earliest days. Now the company is among the leading vendors of software and hardware hyper- converged solutions. The company’s core product is the years-proven StarWind Virtual SAN, which allows SMB and ROBO to benefit from cost-efficient hyperconverged IT infrastructure. Having earned a reputation of reliability, StarWind created a hardware product line and is actively tapping into hyperconverged and storage appliances market. In 2016, Gartner named StarWind “Cool Vendor for Compute Platforms” following the success and popularity of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance. StarWind partners with world-known companies: Microsoft, VMware, Veeam, Intel, Dell, Mellanox, Citrix, Western Digital, etc. WHITE PAPER 2 StarWind Virtual SAN® and Hyper-V over SMB 3.0 The demand of storage has grown for organizations of all sizes: small businesses, large enterprises, government, and public/private cloud hosting companies. We are generating more data and keeping it longer, but the costs of traditional hardware-defined storage continue to remain high, and the solutions are inflexible. Software-defined storage offers us a new way to meet the demands of our business or our customers. We can build hardware agnostic solutions based on lower cost hardware and components of our choice, which are flexible. Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V, Microsoft’s enterprise class hypervisor, introduced a new way to connect virtualization hosts to storage. Instead of using protocols such as iSCSI or fiber channel, we can use a new generation of the file and print protocol, Server Message Block. SMB 3.0 offers high bandwidth and low latency connections that can leverage hardware offloading. Microsoft built upon this “Hyper-V over SMB 3.0” storage connectivity to create a new software-defined storage solution called a Scale-Out File Server (SOFS). A SOFS is intended to provide customers, who would have otherwise deploy a traditional hardware-based storage area network (SAN), with storage that offers the same kind of core features and uptime that a SAN offers but at a fraction of the cost by using commodity hardware. A SOFS can use any cluster-supported hardware solution as its physical disk array. However, by adding another tier of hardware, the cost and complexity of the solution increases, and the performance can drop due to an increase in latency. StarWind Virtual SAN can be deployed as a part of a Hyper-V over SMB 3.0 solution to provide a SOFS that converges the cluster node and storage hardware. This will reduce costs, increase hardware choice, and improve storage performance. Several features of StarWind Virtual SAN will offer further enhancements to increase the value of the implementation. This whitepaper will discuss what Hyper-V over SMB 3.0 is and how you can use StarWind Virtual SAN to create a Scale-Out File Server for Hyper-V virtual machine storage. WHITE PAPER 3 StarWind Virtual SAN® and Hyper-V over SMB 3.0 Hyper-V over SMB 3.0 The traditional method of storing a virtual machine is to create a logical unit (a LUN) in some physical storage system, such as a RAID array in the host or in a SAN, create an NTFS (Hyper-V) or VMFS (VMware) volume in that LUN, and to place the virtual machine’s files in that volume. If the LUN is created in a SAN, then the host requires a connection, typically provided by iSCSI or fiber channel. The key benefit of using shared storage, such as a SAN, is that virtual machine files are abstracted from the hosts; virtual machines execute on the hosts but are stored on a different tier of storage. Virtual machines are mobile and can be moved using Live Migration (planned) or failover (reactive). With the release of Windows Server 2012, Microsoft upgraded their Server Message Block (SMB) file sharing protocol to support storing virtual machines on a shared folder on a file server (the host and file server must both be running Windows Server 2012 or later). This was unsupported and unthinkable prior to the release of SMB 3.0. SMB 3.0 added two features that enabled high throughput and low latency connectivity between Hyper-V hosts and virtual machine storage on of a file server: • SMB Multichannel: When a host is connecting to a shared folder on a host, there is a discovery of mutually capable features. Part of this discovery process is to decide which connection(s) will be used between the host and the file server to access virtual machine files. If the host and file server share multiple common connections (1 Gbps or faster), then SMB Multichannel will automatically aggregate the bandwidth with fault tolerance – one can think of this as auto-configured multipath IO (MPIO). If SMB 3.0 discovers a higher capacity NIC (10 Gbps or faster) with Receive Side Scaling (RSS) enabled, then it can use the full bandwidth of that NIC and can even spread this load over multiple similar connections. • SMB Direct: SMB 3.0 can offload processing of data flow to NICs that offer support for Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA, offered in iWARP, ROCE, and Infiniband hardware). SMB Direct reduces latency and improves the performance of hosts and file servers. SMB 3.0 was improved in Windows Server 2012 R2 and will see further improvements in the next version of Windows Server, scheduled for release in H2 of 2015. SMB is Microsoft’s strategic protocol for data transmission in the data center, and we have seen Microsoft adopt it for other purposes such as high speed Hyper-V Live Migration and storage-based replication. WHITE PAPER 4 StarWind Virtual SAN® and Hyper-V over SMB 3.0 Scale-Out File Server The Scale-Out File Server, or SOFS, is a relatively new architecture that provides software-defined, transparent failover (fault tolerant) and scalable storage. A SOFS is a cluster of file servers that share some common storage. The SOFS appears on the network as a single file server that shares the physical storage as file shares with Hyper-V hosts over the SMB 3.0 protocol. A SOFS is built on off-the shelf hardware. Benefits of this approach are: • Lower costs: Businesses of all kinds struggle with the cost of storage. SOFS offers you a choice of individual components, and this allows customers to build lower cost shared storage solutions without the constraints of vendor lock-in. • More choice: Vendor lock-in restricts choice, and this can preclude some businesses from adopting best of breed components. A software-defined storage solution opens up a world of opportunity, letting the architect pick from a wider variety of components (servers, NICs, HDDs, PCIe flash, SSDs, and so on) to build the storage platform. • Problem avoidance: An unfortunate side-effect of vendor lock-in is that many customers have had problems when component drivers/firmware have not been maintained sufficiently; their customers have no choice but to live with the problem. A customer with an open hardware design has choice and can pick components from more responsible vendors. The low cost per terabyte has made SOFS an appealing alternative to legacy SANs for organizations of all kinds including businesses with smaller budgets, organizations that struggle with data growth or virtual machine sprawl, and hosting companies that must be price competitive. StarWind Virtual SAN® StarWind Software is an award winning company that has been providing software-defined storage solutions since 2003, long before the term “software defined” became trendy in the IT industry. Their flagship product is StarWind Virtual SAN, which enables a business to deploy a number of physical servers and to unify their internal disks as a unified block of replicated storage to Windows, Linux, UNIX, vSphere, or Hyper-V servers.
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