Hyper-V Cluster on SAN + SSD Local Storage

Question

I wanted to know if there are any methods that anyone has done with the following:

All of my servers on the hyper-v cluster are stored on the SANS. I have a desire to have the speed of SSD on two of these guest servers, and I have a local blank SSD installed on just one of my hosts in the cluster.

Is there a way to have this server run on the SSD, and somehow sync to cluster?

Even if I were to break it from the cluster, just on Hyper-V, is there a way to sync the file to the cluster's shared storage?

Looking for ideas!

Thanks!

Answer 1

Depending on the number of hosts in your cluster, you can look at creating a virtual SAN. There's a number of products that exist out there to do just that, but the top hit on Google is StarWind's version.

Basically, it creates network RAID with the disks in question and allows you to expose them to the cluster as shared storage.

I've never tried it, or any other similar products, but the concepts are the basis of almost all hyper-converged solutions on the market.

Answer 2

There is nothing quite like you're asking for. If you're invested in SAN and don't want to look at tiered storage spaces, but still want to go down the SSD optimization route, then there's a few options:

• Local SSD caching: There's a few solutions out there. SanDISK just announced one for Hyper-V. Stuff is still stored on the SAN, but a host-local SSD caches reads. I tested this kind of solution with 1 Gb iSCSI and the results were super.
• Tiered storage. Transparent tiering between SSD and HDD moves hot blocks to the SSD tier and cold blocks to the HDD tier giving you budget capacity and peak performance.