Introduction

This article provides a guide on provisioning physical storage to StarWind Virtual SAN Controller Virtual Machine (CVM). It applies to both StarWind Virtual SAN and StarWind Virtual SAN Free versions, specifically: 

  • Version V8 (build 15260, CVM Version 20231016 and later) 
  • Version V8 (build 15260, OVF Version 20230901 or earlier)

Recommended configurations

When provisioning physical storage to StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) CVM, adhere to the following best practices: 

  • Ensure that all physical drives are connected through an HBA or RAID controller. 
  • Deploy StarWind VSAN CVM on each server that will be used for configuring fault-tolerant standalone or highly available storage. 
  • Store StarWind VSAN CVM on a separate storage device accessible to the hypervisor host (e.g., SSD, HDD). 
  • Add HBA, RAID controllers, or NVMe SSD drives to StarWind CVM via a passthrough device.

Platform-Specific Instructions 

Microsoft Hyper-V 

VMware vSphere/ESXi 

  • Add an HBA or RAID controller via a PCI Device to a Virtual Machine. 
  • If an HBA card cannot be passed through, physical disks can be added to VSAN CVM as Raw Device Mapping (RDM) disks. 
  • If a single RAID controller is installed on the server, the storage can be added to VSAN CVM as an RDM disk. For detailed instructions, refer to VMware’s documentation on adding an RDM disk. 

KVM (Proxmox, oVirt, RHEV) 

  • Add an HBA, RAID controller, or NVMe SSD drives via a PCI Device to a Virtual Machine. 
  • Ensure that the KVM host has IOMMU support enabled in the kernel to use PCIe passthrough for the RAID Controller, HBA, or NVMe drives. Update the GRUB configuration file as follows: 
    • For Intel CPUs: Add intel_iommu=on iommu=pt to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line in the /etc/default/grub file. 
    • For AMD CPUs: Add iommu=pt to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line in the /etc/default/grub file. 

Useful links

  • Add a PCI Device to a Hyper-V Virtual Machine: Follow the instructions from Microsoft on how to add a PCI device to StarWind VSAN CVM: Microsoft DDA Documentation 
  • Add an RDM Disk to a VMware vSphere ESXi Virtual Machine: Follow the instructions from VMware on how to add an RDM disk to a StarWind VSAN CVM: VMware RDM Disk Documentation 

Request a Product Feature

To request a new product feature or to provide feedback on a StarWind product, please email our support at support@starwind.com and put “Request a Product Feature” as the subject.

Back to Knowledge Base