Late in 2012, Mellanox “promised” to have a Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) for Hyper-V in 2013.
Is this VSA close to being released?
Where can I download a beta?
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jmargolis Infrastructure & Networking - NVIDIA Developer Forums great use of the @ metions
Replication & dedupe might be helpful, they aren’t show stoppers (I’ll use Veeam for the Replication)
The main points are:
-Software solution (no appliance)
-Must support SMB3
-Must have Mellanox drivers
I had looked at some non windows solutions (Nexenta etc). They don’t do SMB3 & getting Mellanox to work is like pulling teeth
If all else fails, this is an option.
Was hoping for a few more bells & whistles like ZFS style “caching/accelerating” via SSDs
No prob, I was just giving you a hard time about the tweet
If one is really set on VSA, would SDP allow you to more fully use the throughput of IB?
AKA: Roll your own storage box.
jmargolis wrote:
We are looking into doing iSER for Microsoft…
As in Mellanox doing the development for Microsoft?
Now that’s interesting!
Is that considered breaking news? Can we tweet that?
iSER for Msft would be very cool! (I assume that would mean SMB3 via iSCSI?)
The VSA doesn’t exist today?
Re SMB Direct 3.0: there’s just not that many options from a Storage “storage” standpoint, after DataCore, Starwind & I guess Microsoft Storage server, the choices are limited. I don’t know of any others
VSA Exists, but again, you can only run it in TCP mode, so basically like an iSCSI target, not iSER.
Right now, SMB Direct (3.0) is the way to do fast RDMA storage on Microsoft Windows 2012.
We are looking into doing iSER for Microsoft, but I am not aware of the roadmap for this.
You could run VSA as an iSCSI target, but you won’t get the RDMA part yet.
Sockets Direct Protocol for TCP acceleration over RDMA. So in this case iSCSI using SDP because there is no support for a more native RDMA protocol like iSER.
My original post may have been better if I replied to your post.
“VSA Exists, but again, you can only run it in TCP mode, so basically like an iSCSI target, not iSER.”
Another customer of mine (mentioned above) has done a really slick design since he already had legacy FC, but you could do something similar. He has connected a few Windows 2012 servers (call them storage servers) and they have IB towards the Hyper-V nodes, and FC to his SAN. It’s a sort-of-bridge, but if you have no other storage, just creating a Windows 2012 ‘storage’ server of your own is possible in this concept. Are you looking for some value add on the storage side like replication, dedupe or something else?
Now I get it
No iSER for Windows?
You could setup VSA on a server and run it in iSCSI mode (essentially TCP mode, not RDMA), but Windows Server 2012 wouldn’t leverage the lower level RDMA for now.
X-IO has a box that I think is doing SMB 3.0:
Press Release: X-IO Exceeds 15 Gigabytes of Throughput in Demonstration Using Windows Server 2012 RC and a Single Rack o… http://xiostorage.com/press-release/press-release-x-io-exceeds-15-gigabytes-of-throughput-in-demonstration-using-windows-server-2012-rc-and-a-single-rack-of-equipment/
My SMB 3.0 statement should have been: I’m more interested in pure SAN software offerings (no appliances).
But the VSA doesn’t exist (at least not for Hyper-V) or does it?
No, not really, I didn’t mean for Microsoft, I meant for Windows 2012, but I cannot comment on a roadmap.
We are NOT doing development for Microsoft on iSER.
SMB Direct is our main target right now with Microsoft.
Sorry to confuse.
Right, so you could just use Windows servers as your storage box, it has everything you need
I haven’t even started drinking my coffee, that’s probably why my line of questioning is all over the place
VSA: Backend storage for Hyper-V infrastructure. Definitely want to take advantage of SMB3 & all the Mellanox 56gig goodness
jmargolis wrote:
VSA Exists, but again, you can only run it in TCP mode, so basically like an iSCSI target, not iSER.
I get the TCP mode, but where is this VSA you speak of?