Physical Disk As Target

Francesco · Mon Jun 22, 2015 2:36 pm

I was thinking of using a physical disk as target instead of files and sharing it with 2 VMWare hosts. Advantage is that I can access the drive storage directly and volumes are managed by VMware instead of SW.

Is there anything else I should be aware of? Advantages/disadvantages? Recommendations?

darklight · Fri Jun 26, 2015 10:17 am

I would recommend you to consider using native StarWind devices because of significant performance increase possibilities granted by L1 cache, L2 cache or LSFS or all of them at the same time. This combination is proven to be much more faster than the raw drive. You can run the IOMeter tests according to StarWinds recommendations here http://knowledgebase.starwindsoftware.c ... -of-tests/. After you will face the results you decision may change

BTW, yesterday a guy from StarWind performed a nice webinar showing the performance advantages of LSFS. I believe you can find it recorded here https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resour ... ry?type=rw soon.

bubu · Mon Jul 06, 2015 3:55 pm

StarWind ensures storage Fault Tolerance, single drive - not.

Mon Jul 06, 2015 4:27 pm

I think, that FLAT drives are the best option since almost everyone uses them. They are well tested, stable and the community will be able to provide you with a solution should you run into issue.