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#1 HyperConverged Appliance for SMB and ROBOStarWind Virtual SAN and Hyper-V over SMB 3.0DECEMBER 2014WHITE PAPER BY AIDAN FINN

StarWind Virtual SAN andHyper-V over SMB 3.0Trademarks“StarWind”, “StarWind Software” and the StarWind and the StarWind Software logos are registeredtrademarks of StarWind Software. “StarWind LSFS” is a trademark of StarWind Software which may beregistered in some jurisdictions. All other trademarks are owned by their respective owners.ChangesThe material in this document is for information only and is subject to change without notice. Whilereasonable efforts have been made in the preparation of this document to assure its accuracy, StarWindSoftware assumes no liability resulting from errors or omissions in this document, or from the use of theinformation contained herein. StarWind Software reserves the right to make changes in the product designwithout reservation and without notification to its users.Technical Support and ServicesIf you have questions about installing or using this software, check this and other documents first - you willfind answers to most of your questions on the Technical Papers webpage or in StarWind Forum. If you needfurther 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 byany means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written consentof 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 notadvise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartnerresearch publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not beconstrued as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to thisresearch, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.About StarWindStarWind is a pioneer in virtualization and a company that participated in the development of this technologyfrom its earliest days. Now the company is among the leading vendors of software and hardware hyperconverged solutions. The company’s core product is the years-proven StarWind Virtual SAN, which allowsSMB and ROBO to benefit from cost-efficient hyperconverged IT infrastructure. Having earned a reputationof reliability, StarWind created a hardware product line and is actively tapping into hyperconverged andstorage appliances market. In 2016, Gartner named StarWind “Cool Vendor for Compute Platforms” followingthe success and popularity of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance. StarWind partners with world-knowncompanies: Microsoft, VMware, Veeam, Intel, Dell, Mellanox, Citrix, Western Digital, etc.WHITE PAPER2

StarWind Virtual SAN andHyper-V over SMB 3.0The 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 andkeeping 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 thedemands of our business or our customers. We can build hardware agnostic solutions based onlower cost hardware and components of our choice, which are flexible.Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V, Microsoft’s enterprise class hypervisor, introduced a new way toconnect 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 offershigh bandwidth and low latency connections that can leverage hardware offloading. Microsoft builtupon this “Hyper-V over SMB 3.0” storage connectivity to create a new software-defined storagesolution called a Scale-Out File Server (SOFS). A SOFS is intended to provide customers, who wouldhave otherwise deploy a traditional hardware-based storage area network (SAN), with storage thatoffers the same kind of core features and uptime that a SAN offers but at a fraction of the cost byusing commodity hardware. A SOFS can use any cluster-supported hardware solution as itsphysical disk array. However, by adding another tier of hardware, the cost and complexity of thesolution 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 aSOFS that converges the cluster node and storage hardware. This will reduce costs, increasehardware choice, and improve storage performance. Several features of StarWind Virtual SAN willoffer 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 VirtualSAN to create a Scale-Out File Server for Hyper-V virtual machine storage.WHITE PAPER3

StarWind Virtual SAN andHyper-V over SMB 3.0Hyper-V over SMB 3.0The traditional method of storing a virtual machine is to create a logical unit (a LUN) in somephysical storage system, such as a RAID array in the host or in a SAN, create an NTFS (Hyper-V) orVMFS (VMware) volume in that LUN, and to place the virtual machine’s files in that volume. If theLUN is created in a SAN, then the host requires a connection, typically provided by iSCSI or fiberchannel. The key benefit of using shared storage, such as a SAN, is that virtual machine files areabstracted from the hosts; virtual machines execute on the hosts but are stored on a different tierof storage. Virtual machines are mobile and can be moved using Live Migration (planned) orfailover (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 (thehost and file server must both be running Windows Server 2012 or later). This was unsupportedand unthinkable prior to the release of SMB 3.0. SMB 3.0 added two features that enabled highthroughput and low latency connectivity between Hyper-V hosts and virtual machine storage on ofa file server: SMB Multichannel: When a host is connecting to a shared folder on a host, there is adiscovery of mutually capable features. Part of this discovery process is to decide whichconnection(s) will be used between the host and the file server to access virtual machinefiles. 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 ahigher capacity NIC (10 Gbps or faster) with Receive Side Scaling (RSS) enabled, then itcan use the full bandwidth of that NIC and can even spread this load over multiple similarconnections. SMB Direct: SMB 3.0 can offload processing of data flow to NICs that offer support forRemote 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 nextversion of Windows Server, scheduled for release in H2 of 2015. SMB is Microsoft’s strategicprotocol for data transmission in the data center, and we have seen Microsoft adopt it for otherpurposes such as high speed Hyper-V Live Migration and storage-based replication.WHITE PAPER4

StarWind Virtual SAN andHyper-V over SMB 3.0Scale-Out File ServerThe 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 thatshare some common storage. The SOFS appears on the network as a single file server that sharesthe 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 achoice of individual components, and this allows customers to build lower cost sharedstorage solutions without the constraints of vendor lock-in. More choice: Vendor lock-in restricts choice, and this can preclude some businesses fromadopting best of breed components. A software-defined storage solution opens up aworld 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 customershave had problems when component drivers/firmware have not been maintainedsufficiently; their customers have no choice but to live with the problem. A customer withan open hardware design has choice and can pick components from more responsiblevendors.The low cost per terabyte has made SOFS an appealing alternative to legacy SANs for organizationsof all kinds including businesses with smaller budgets, organizations that struggle with data growthor 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 storagesolutions 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 ofphysical servers and to unify their internal disks as a unified block of replicated storage toWindows, Linux, UNIX, vSphere, or Hyper-V servers.WHITE PAPER5

StarWind Virtual SAN andHyper-V over SMB 3.0Possible scenarios based on StarWind Virtual SAN include: Shared iSCSI storage for physical servers Hyper-converged storage for Hyper-V hosts A tier of shared iSCSI storage for Hyper-V hosts A SOFS for Hyper-V hostsThe goal of StarWind Virtual SAN is to make high-end storage features available in a fault-tolerantand scalable software-based solution that is affordable for small, medium, and large enterprises.These innovative features improve performance, availability, and reduce the costs of Hyper-Vstorage.Log Structured File SystemIn virtualization, there are normally lots of virtual machine siles stored on a single LUN or volume.The applications in each virtual machine generate a lot of small parallel random writes – this is thekind of storage activity that storage systems struggle to deal with. StarWind uses a combination ofRAM and flash storage as a multi-layered cache to coalesce many smaller writes into one largerwrite. This Log Structuring process in the Log Structure File System can improve raw sequentialwrites by 90%, many times more than competing solutions can offer.Log Structured File System improves raw write performanceWHITE PAPER6