StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far)
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Good reference HC systems would be....
Scale HC3, StarWind, Vmware with VSAN, Simplivity (for hardware offload), and XO. This gives a range of packaged HC solutions that show how HC can't be what you imagine it to be, all are well made and none of the issues you are stuck on.
Then you should look at the more traditional HC examples that we've had for even longer, like KVM and Xen with DRBD or BHive with HASP where you build your own HC and also, don't have these issues.
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@scottalanmiller said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
This just doesn't hold up in the real world.
HCI doesn't hold up in the real world. See, I can keep doing this too
Most companies and workloads are not trying to do things where this makes sense at all.
Maybe in the SMB space there is less planning and more "lets just deliver something and let someone else support it", but it doesn't work in the enterprise.
All this SDS like this is doing is making new SAN pools, right back to the complexity, costs, and risks that we had before.
Exactly. SDS or SANs - you can pick whatever you want and suits you best. But if you are going to be running a replicated distributed storage service on hardware that is already quite busy running VMs, you'll end up in trouble as soon as you go anywhere near capacity.
If your design creates all this overhead, whether you address it in one box or many, chances are that design itself is the flaw. Not always, but generally. But whether you have RAID or RAIN, the overhead to do this stuff just isn't there when implemented well.
How exactly can there be no overhead, when you are synchronizing large chunks of blocks over the network? Especially with high replication factors? Add encryption to that, add all the extra logic for local tiering, and there's no wonder the minimal sizing for SDS is so high.
Now sure, if we only look at totally garbage solutions, we can make any design seem like a problem. but you have to separate good design from good products. Bad products exist even in well designed solutions.
Right, but because we measure it and there isn't means that there isn't. Just because you claim a load that no one has, which is all you are doing, doesn't make it real. You have created problems that no one faces and are acting like we are all impacted by them.
More sophistry. Can you be more specific please, instead?
You are literally claiming that contrary to all evidence, common sense, and industry knowledge, that software RAID is not just a huge load, but so large that we now need not only hardware RAID cards to do it, but entire hardware RAID servers!
I'm not talking about simple software RAID, I'm talking about keeping a distributed storage system in sync, and then on top of that keep constantly rebalancing to satisfy the local tiering requirements. And while doing all that juggling, also ensure the system remains resilient to node failure. This is a lot of work, unless like @Dashrender says there is magic at play. I don't believe in magic.
So to skip the rest of your quotes, in general, what you are saying is that a system which is essentially something like a simple KVM with DRBD, is the perfect solution. I am saying sure, for two nodes. How about 200?
Do you think AWS/GCP/Azure are running HCI solutions for example?
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If you look at any one product, from any field, you might easily assume that the problems that that product has might be the result of the design or approach, rather than the product itself.
Example: If you use Cisco as the example of networking, you might assume that all networking equipment is expensive, slow, and riddled with security problems.
If you only look at Ubiquiti you might think that all networking has limited support, limited selection, and can't do SDN.
If you only look at Meraki, you might think that all networking uses a cloud controller.
And so forth. Or with databases, tons of people do this today and believe that all databases must have the limitations of Oracle and SQL Server because those two share a lot of licensing and tech similarities and without looking further, they will often associate their problems or caveats with databases as a category, rather than realizing that they are just similarities shared between those two.
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@dyasny said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
HCI doesn't hold up in the real world. See, I can keep doing this too
Except it does, tons of places are using it, and show me ANY example where it didn't shine... any. WHile somewhere, one must exist, dollars to donuts you can't find one.
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@dyasny said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
Maybe in the SMB space there is less planning and more "lets just deliver something and let someone else support it", but it doesn't work in the enterprise.
Actually, that's exactly what loads and loads of enterprises do. But regardless of that, this has nothing to do with HC whatsoever and is neither here nor there.
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@scottalanmiller said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
@dyasny said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
HCI doesn't hold up in the real world. See, I can keep doing this too
Except it does, tons of places are using it, and show me ANY example where it didn't shine... any. WHile somewhere, one must exist, dollars to donuts you can't find one.
I've worked with several Openstack and K8s clusters where the storage was local to the hypervisors, served from Ceph/Gluster/AFS/SheepDog. Horrible experience each time.
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@dyasny said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
Exactly. SDS or SANs - you can pick whatever you want and suits you best. But if you are going to be running a replicated distributed storage service on hardware that is already quite busy running VMs, you'll end up in trouble as soon as you go anywhere near capacity.
Maybe you are running into these problems due to bad products, planning or design, but you are hoisting problems you've had onto everyone else where we aren't experiencing these problems.
You are "projecting". I'm not saying you or people you know having implemented HC and had it not work well. But you are confusing a bad implementation or planning with the architecture being bad. The two are different things.
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@dyasny said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
@scottalanmiller said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
@dyasny said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
HCI doesn't hold up in the real world. See, I can keep doing this too
Except it does, tons of places are using it, and show me ANY example where it didn't shine... any. WHile somewhere, one must exist, dollars to donuts you can't find one.
I've worked with several Openstack and K8s clusters where the storage was local to the hypervisors, served from Ceph/Gluster/AFS/SheepDog. Horrible experience each time.
Right, that's my point, doing things badly doesn't mean that design is wrong. Your logic doesn't make sense... no matter how many times you fail at something doesn't mean that the task can't be done. It just means that you did it poorly, or wrong, or something.
Ceph and Gluster are both known to be bad for that, that should have been known going into the project. That someone didn't head you off at the pass shows that the mistakes and oversights were happening early on. We could easily have warned you that that wasn't meant to have good local performance.
So you are proving my point over and over again... you are using clearly wrong tech and looking at failures of one thing and misassociating them with another.
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@scottalanmiller said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
The two are different things.
Like hugging your girlfriend while driving your car.
Both can be done poorly.
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@dyasny said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
I'm not talking about simple software RAID, I'm talking about keeping a distributed storage system in sync, and then on top of that keep constantly rebalancing to satisfy the local tiering requirements.
Okay... so thebig question is... since this is not part of HC... why? Stop doing that. You can never have a rational, useful discussion about HC until you talk about HC and not something else.
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@dyasny said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
So to skip the rest of your quotes, in general, what you are saying is that a system which is essentially something like a simple KVM with DRBD, is the perfect solution. I am saying sure, for two nodes. How about 200?
- No one anywhere recommends 200 nodes in a single cluster. If you think this is a good idea, SAN, SDS, HC, or otherwise, we are on different pages. That's a scale that literally no one, not MS, not StarWind, not VMware, not RedHat recommends as a single failure domain. DO they support it? Yup. Do they think you are crazy? Yup.
- Even in the enterprise, which you claim to know, they often use workloads scopes of this size for performance and safety. The larger the pool, the bigger the problems.
- If you want to get into giant pools you have to pick your battles. Let's talk reasonable size, like 10-80 nodes. If you need screaming performance that no SAN can match, then you are looking at StarWind network RAID which does that. If you just want cheap pooled storage, you look at CEPH (and there are accelerators for that to make it fast,if you need to). If you want a blend of things you might look at VMware, Scale, or HPE Simplivity depending on your mix of needs. But good solutions exist at pretty much any scale, that meet or exceed the alternatives. Nothing is perfect, as with all things, the goal is to find what is best.
At truly giant scale, the only real benefit to totally external storage, is when speed and reliability are so unimportant that you are willing to sacrifice them to a huge degree to save a few dollars. But with HC's low cost today, even that is approaching the impossible.
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@dyasny said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
How exactly can there be no overhead, when you are synchronizing large chunks of blocks over the network? Especially with high replication factors? Add encryption to that, add all the extra logic for local tiering, and there's no wonder the minimal sizing for SDS is so high.
Because you don't have all those things. Large chunks over the network takes like no resources. No idea where you think the overhead comes from, but for most of us, things like copying data is not a high overhead activity. It's a dedicated network in most cases, with offload engines on the NICs, and things like tiering and such take extremely little overhead (if done well.) These just aren't CPU or RAM intensive activities.
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@dyasny said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
Do you think AWS/GCP/Azure are running HCI solutions for example?
Those aren't HA, so not applicable to the discussion. HCI is assumed to be replicating to other nodes, something those providers don't provide. They are stand alone compute nodes. Very different animal.
One minute you are assuming tiering, HA, and all kinds of things in your definition of HCI. Then the next you are skipping all of that and talking about players like these. You are jumping around with your definitions.
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@scottalanmiller said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
Maybe you are running into these problems due to bad products, planning or design, but you are hoisting problems you've had onto everyone else where we aren't experiencing these problems.
You are "projecting". I'm not saying you or people you know having implemented HC and had it not work well. But you are confusing a bad implementation or planning with the architecture being bad. The two are different things.
Or maybe I'm just speaking from experience, and there's plenty of it. Local storage that is not shared is great, but it doesn't scale and pretty much kills all the nice features you can have in a virtualized DC - live migration, HA, all those things you don't care about in SMBs I suppose. Getting that storage replicated in a scalable fashion is hard, simple CBT pushed over network (what the folks at Linbit basically do) does not scale. And hard tasks require resources, those resoutces have to come from somewhere.
Ceph and Gluster are both known to be bad for that, that should have been known going into the project. That someone didn't head you off at the pass shows that the mistakes and oversights were happening early on. We could easily have warned you that that wasn't meant to have good local performance.
Mixing any distributed storage solution with any other workload is known to be bad, this is exactly what I'm saying. I've come into those projects when they were already implemented and got things working by breaking up those overloaded hosts into hardware that was doing one job and doing it well on either side.
Okay... so thebig question is... since this is not part of HC... why? Stop doing that. You can never have a rational, useful discussion about HC until you talk about HC and not something else.
But I am, at least at scale. DRBD and any similar system does not scale. When things are small (SMB level again) this is peanuts, we can do anything because our tasks are smaller than the hardware we can get. What happens at scale though?
No one anywhere recommends 200 nodes in a single cluster. If you think this is a good idea, SAN, SDS, HC, or otherwise, we are on different pages. That's a scale that literally no one, not MS, not StarWind, not VMware, not RedHat recommends as a single failure domain. DO they support it? Yup. Do they think you are crazy? Yup.
200 nodes is small for the scale I typically deal with. Red Hat has solutions that can deal with this kind of scale easily. I know of a few other companies that do. MS, VMW and probably StarWind do not, because of the nature of their clustering implementation, but that's basically all about how you manage locking.
Even in the enterprise, which you claim to know, they often use workloads scopes of this size for performance and safety. The larger the pool, the bigger the problems.
Not really. In a large pool, a dead node simply gets easily replaced. The effect is very small.
If you want to get into giant pools you have to pick your battles.
I usually am in those numbers, but ok
Let's talk reasonable size, like 10-80 nodes. If you need screaming performance that no SAN can match, then you are looking at StarWind network RAID which does that.
OK, so we have a network RAID, a bunch of blocks get streamed to other nodes when writes occur on one. When all there is is pushing block across, things are simple. What happens when a node dies, and I have to suddenly rebalance the data distribution? How is consistency kept? How does the system decide which blocks get streamed where? Even in a 10 node cluster, it would be plain out stupid to keep all the data replicated to everywhere, 10x the data on local disks would be too expensive
If you just want cheap pooled storage, you look at CEPH (and there are accelerators for that to make it fast,if you need to).
Here we have a distributed system, which starts at a least a core per RBD, and 32Gb or RAM to even get started properly. In SMB, I doubt you see many monstrous hypervisors with hundreds of cores, so what is there left to run your actual VMs?
At truly giant scale, the only real benefit to totally external storage, is when speed and reliability are so unimportant that you are willing to sacrifice them to a huge degree to save a few dollars. But with HC's low cost today, even that is approaching the impossible.
Only having a good storage fabric can give you excellent speed and very low latencies, and as for reliability - you can build whatever you want on the SAN side depending on your requirements. The only good thing about HC is local storage access, and it isn't really that far ahead of any decent fabric anyway, if at all.
Because you don't have all those things. Large chunks over the network takes like no resources. No idea where you think the overhead comes from, but for most of us, things like copying data is not a high overhead activity. It's a dedicated network in most cases, with offload engines on the NICs, and things like tiering and such take extremely little overhead (if done well.) These just aren't CPU or RAM intensive activities.
That is simply not true. Pushing large amount of data over the network is not cheap, and that is in the case of simple streaming. When you start running synchronizations and tiering stuff gets harder. And when you have to rebalance (which ceph does often) you need even more resources. Yes, you can dedicate NICs to just that (and those NICs will not be there to provide more bandwidth to the workload traffic) but in order to push large amounts of data into the NICs you also need CPU cycles and and RAM. It's CS 101, there are no free rides.
Those aren't HA, so not applicable to the discussion. HCI is assumed to be replicating to other nodes, something those providers don't provide. They are stand alone compute nodes. Very different animal.
My point exactly. If HC was so great, why wouldn't they be using it?
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@dyasny said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
Or maybe I'm just speaking from experience, and there's plenty of it. Local storage that is not shared is great, but it doesn't scale
Right, but we aren't talking about not sharing it. So, again, you are talking about something different. I'm not sure where you are getting lost, but you are talking about totally different things than everyone else. This has nothing to do with the discussion here.
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@dyasny said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
Getting that storage replicated in a scalable fashion is hard, simple CBT pushed over network (what the folks at Linbit basically do) does not scale. And hard tasks require resources, those resoutces have to come from somewhere.
Again, didn't scale for you, but your failures do not extend to everyone else. I'm not sure why you feel it can't scale, but it does successfully for others. The common factor here is "your attempts have failed". You have to stop looking at that as a guide to what "can't be done."
That logic is like me claiming that humans can't speak Chinese or do pull ups because I can't do them. Yet anyone can see that a billion or more Chinese people can speak Chinese and billions of healthier than me people can do pull ups. Arguing that they aren't really able to them, even though everyone can see them doing them, because I can't do them, is clearly crazy.
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@dyasny said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
Mixing any distributed storage solution with any other workload is known to be bad, this is exactly what I'm saying. I've come into those projects when they were already implemented and got things working by breaking up those overloaded hosts into hardware that was doing one job and doing it well on either side.
Again... you are not understanding that because something can be bad doesn't mean it is always bad. This are basic logical constructs. You are missing the basic logic that absolutely no amount of observation of failures makes other people's observations of success impossible.
You use the logic of "can" to mean "has to". But that logic, our observation of HC working well would mean that HC always works no matter how badly implemented. neither makes the slightest sense.
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@dyasny said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
OK, so we have a network RAID, a bunch of blocks get streamed to other nodes when writes occur on one. When all there is is pushing block across, things are simple. What happens when a node dies, and I have to suddenly rebalance the data distribution? How is consistency kept? How does the system decide which blocks get streamed where? Even in a 10 node cluster, it would be plain out stupid to keep all the data replicated to everywhere, 10x the data on local disks would be too expensive
You are assuming automated rebalance. I can't believe that I have to do this again but, that's not part of HC. That's a great feature and useful in some cases, but comes at high cost and is just one of many optional things you might want to do when you have HC. You can't continue to have this discussion until you separate what you have made up to be part of HC and what actually is.
In many cases with network RAID, rebalancing is insanely straightforward, because it goes back to the replacement node. Just like replacing a single RAID drive. It's self explanatory. Could you do something else that is more complex? Sure. Might it be good? Sure. Is it implied? No.
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@dyasny said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
Even in the enterprise, which you claim to know, they often use workloads scopes of this size for performance and safety. The larger the pool, the bigger the problems.
Not really. In a large pool, a dead node simply gets easily replaced. The effect is very small.
So you don't understand the pool risks and think that node risks alone exist and that the system as a whole carries no risks? This would explain a lot of the misconceptions around HC. The cluster itself carries risks, it's a single pool of software. Every platform vendor will tell you the same.
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@dyasny said in StarWind HCA is one of the 10 coolest HCI systems of 2019 (so far):
Only having a good storage fabric can give you excellent speed and very low latencies, and as for reliability - you can build whatever you want on the SAN side depending on your requirements. The only good thing about HC is local storage access, and it isn't really that far ahead of any decent fabric anyway, if at all.
Actually, that breaks the laws of physics. So obviously not true. SAN can't match speed or reliability of non-SAN. That's pure physics. You can't break the laws of math or physicals just by saying so.
HC has EVERY possible advantage of SAN by definition, it just has to there is no way around it, but adds the advantages of reduction in risk points and adds the option of storage locality. Basic logic proves that HC has to be superior. You are constantly arguing demonstrably impossible "facts" as the bases for your conclucsions. But everyone knows that that's impossible.
