#1 HyperConverged Appliance for SMB and ROBO

StarWind Virtual SAN®

and Hyper-V over SMB 3.0

DECEMBER 2014

WHITE PAPER BY AIDAN FINN

WHITE PAPER 2

StarWind Virtual SAN® and

Hyper-V over SMB 3.0

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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 3

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 4

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 5

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.

WHITE PAPER 6

StarWind Virtual SAN® and

Hyper-V over SMB 3.0

Possible 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 hosts

The goal of StarWind Virtual SAN is to make high-end storage features available in a fault-tolerant

and 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-V

storage.

Log Structured File System

In 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 the

kind of storage activity that storage systems struggle to deal with. StarWind uses a combination of

RAM and flash storage as a multi-layered cache to coalesce many smaller writes into one larger

write. This Log Structuring process in the Log Structure File System can improve raw sequential

writes by 90%, many times more than competing solutions can offer.

Log Structured File System improves raw write performance

WHITE PAPER 7

StarWind Virtual SAN® and

Hyper-V over SMB 3.0

Server-Side Cache

StarWind Virtual SAN can combine three tiers of storage to cost-effectively improve the

performance of storage:

RAM is used as a level 1 cache and write buffer; this offers the best possible performance for reads

and writes. In-line deduplication and compression also reduce storage space utilization. These

combined systems protect level 2 (PCIe or SAS) flash storage from huge amount of write activity,

and this extends the life of costly flash storage. Using RAM and flash for the hot working set data

allows colder data to sit on affordable and lower speed/cost HDD storage, thus enabling a

business to get the right balance between cost and performance.

Using RAM and flash storage for Server-Side Cache

Hardware Agnostic

StarWind Virtual SAN runs on top of Windows, and this abstracts the storage system from the

physical hardware. A StarWind customer can choose any server vendor and use any hardware

components that are compatible with their servers. This allows customers to deploy best of breed

or more economical solutions.

WHITE PAPER 8

StarWind Virtual SAN® and

Hyper-V over SMB 3.0

In-line Deduplication and Compression

Two techniques are used in combination to reduce space utilization of the shared storage and

lengthen the life of expensive flash storage, both of which will minimize the costs of storage. In-line

deduplication, based on 4K blocks, reduces the amount of data that is sent to the disks in a virtual

SAN. Compression reduces the amount of space consumed by data that is actually stored on the

disks (flash and HDD).

Saving space and protecting flash storage with in-line deduplication and compression

StarWind Virtual SAN will dramatically reduce the TCO of any Hyper-V deployment because it

doesn’t require any hardware storage equipment, typically required, for example, by Clustered

Storage Spaces. This means no iSCSI, FC, NAS or SAN. StarWind Virtual SAN starts with just two

hosts already running Microsoft Windows or Hyper-V and literally no other hardware.

Main benefits:

• Savings in OpEx and CapEx. StarWind Virtual SAN starts with a minimalistic configuration

of 2 nodes – less than other solutions. It doesn’t require SAS JBODS, wiring and switches

with stellar prices and utilizes inexpensive SATA and Ethernet instead.

• Uncompromised Performance. StarWind Virtual SAN uses proprietary sophisticated

algorithms, namely Log-Structuring, In-line Deduplication and so on to keep performance

at the top.

• Native to Windows. StarWind Virtual SAN is a native Windows application, which means

that any system administrator can configure and run it in less than five minutes without

special training. It seamlessly integrates with different management tools like SCVMM,

SMI-S, PowerShell and others, supporting SMI-S, VMM, SMB3, iSCSI, SoFS, etc.

WHITE PAPER 9

StarWind Virtual SAN® and

Hyper-V over SMB 3.0

Hyper-V over SMB 3.0 with StarWind Virtual SAN®

The term “Hyper-V over SMB 3.0” refers to a deployment scenario where Hyper-V hosts access

virtual machines that are stored on a shared folder on a file server of some kind. The best practice

is that this is a continuously available shared folder on a Scale-Out File Server or SOFS. A SOFS is a

Windows Server Failover Cluster made up of between two and eight file servers with some

common, cluster-supported storage.

The physical storage might be:

• SAS-attached JBOD (just a bunch of disks) trays

• PCI RAID

• Fiber channel, FCoE, iSCSI, or SAS attached SAN

One could deploy a Scale-Out File Server with a number of shared JBOD trays, as depicted below.

In this illustration, two file servers are clustered and run a special Windows Server Failover

Clustering role called the Scale-Out File Server. The servers are connected to shared JBOD trays

using SAS cables; it is these trays that the file shares

(and hence the virtual machine files) will be stored on. Many Hyper-V hosts can connect to the

Scale-Out File Server to access the shared folders that reside on the JBOD trays.

A SOFS made with SAS-attached JBODs

WHITE PAPER 10

StarWind Virtual SAN® and

Hyper-V over SMB 3.0

Alternatively, one can deploy a SOFS using StarWind Virtual SAN, as shown in the following

diagram. SOFS further leverages the flexibility of software-defined storage by reducing the

reliance on another tier of physical hardware. This solution reduces the cost of the SOFS by

removing the entire SAS layer (host bus adapters, cables, and JBODs); instead, StarWind aggregates

the internal storage of the SOFS cluster nodes to create shared cluster storage. The shared folders

of the SOFS (and hence the virtual machine files) are stored on the disks in the servers.

A SOFS made using StarWind Virtual SAN

The functionality of SOFS is also enhanced with the features of StarWind Virtual SAN.

This means that:

• Small write operations are coalesced into more efficient larger writes

• RAM can be used as high speed level 1 cache

• In-line deduplication will reduce writes to the necessary minimum

• Low-cost SSDs can be used without fear of burnout

• Compression will reduce the amount of physical capacity that is used

WHITE PAPER 11

StarWind Virtual SAN® and

Hyper-V over SMB 3.0

Summary

StarWind is a visionary of software-defined storage producing StarWind Virtual SAN with enterprise

SAN functionality for organizations of all sizes. StarWind Virtual SAN can be in a number of

interesting ways to provide storage for a Hyper-V environment; it can be used as an iSCSI SAN, a

hyper-converged (storage and compute on the same physical tier of servers) enabler, or as a

replacement for the SAS layer in a Scale-Out File Server. StarWind Virtual SAN is more than just a

SAS replacement; it will also add functionality that will reduce the cost of the solution, increase

performance, and add manageability.

WHITE PAPER 12

StarWind Virtual SAN and

Hyper-V over SMB 3.0

Aidan Finn

Web-site:

http://www.aidanfinn.com

Twitter:

http://twitter.com/joe_elway

E-mail: aidan@aidanfinn.com

StarWind Software

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©2016, StarWind Software Inc. All rights reserved.

Aidan Finn, MCSE, Microsoft MVP

Aidan Finn, MVP, has been working in IT since 1996. He has worked as a consultant and

administrator for the likes of Amdahl DMR, Fujitsu, Barclays and Hypo Real Estate Bank International

where he dealt with large and complex IT infrastructures. Aidan has worked in the server hosting

and outsourcing industry in Ireland where he focused on server management, including VMware VI3,

Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center. Currently, Aidan is working as a technical sales lead for a

distributor in Dublin, Ireland, specialising in Microsoft technology. In this role he evanglesizes

Microsoft infrastructure solutions, trains partners, and speaks at events around the island of Ireland.

Aidan is a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP), on System Center Configuration Manager in

2008, and was switched the Hyper-V expertise in 2009 and has been renewed annually since

then. As an MVP, he contributes to the community, speaking at events in Ireland and around Europe

and further afield from time to time. He has worked on roadshows and launch events, blog posts,

articles, podcasts, and so on.