@LAH3385 said:
So the question is in the title.. Can I use Starwind with Hyper-v 2012 R2 core? The core edition is command line base and doesn't has any GUI so I don't know how to manage Starwind nor install it. What's your thought on this?
[ ... ]
You don't install GUI on Core / free Hyper-V / Nano you do only server app (it will also install set of drivers but that's still no GUI thing). GUI will run on a separate mgmt box.
@LAH3385 said:
I was under the impression from multiple threads that I can use starwind vSAN FREE edition with Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 (Core). However, after reaching out to Starwind for their Free edition license they said that it cannot be sue with Hyper-V Server 2012 R2. "The free license cannot be installed inside a VM or on a server with Hyper-V role".
From this post: http://www.vladan.fr/install-free-starwind-san-free-hyper-v/
What did I missed?
My intention is to create a Hyper-V server 2012 R2 on Dell R430 (with dual/mirrored 32GB SD card). Then spin up a VM with Windows server 2012 R2 on it for file server. Using starwind vSAN to mirror both server storage partition.
If you ABSOLUTELY want to run inside a VM you CAN do that but it's going to be SLOWER. MUCH slower because you'll route all iSCSI/TCP traffic over vSwitch and thru VMBus (hardware emulation layer done by Hyper-V). Running in a loopback inside "parent partition" StarWind does not do much of TCP and takes care of data locality for RAM (and flash) cache. But if you want VM - you'll get a VM! BTW, we do even ship pre-built VM-based appliance with StarWind inside so you don't even need to manually do any installations. <-- Pre-built Windows VM appliance is something VERY few companies can actually do! We've been one of the few to jump on this program bandwagon and MSFT does not accept any new members so far! Very rare and special opportunity 
There are multiple different versions of a free StarWind version. There's one EVERYBODY can get and what it does: spawns some Windows-based OS on a pair of physical x86 / x64 with any Windows OS (desktop will not work but free Hyper-V Server WILL work - you pay nothing for OS here!), install StarWind here and we'll build a dual-controller SAN. This SAN will lock iSCSI inside (we don't want it outside for management simplicity here) for synchronization and now depending on a requested version (Hyper-V Vs VMware) you'll get either failover NFS or failover SMB3 file server here (you can request both just sales will ask you WTF are you doing). NFS and SMB3 are very easy to manage from hypervisor point of view so it's very error-free way to go. <-- This is version EVERYBODY can get and it comes w/out any restrictions. Commercial use is OK, capacity is unlimited, time is unlimited, amount of consumers is unlimited. So this dual-controller failover NAS will serve N nodes for hypervisor, your file server clients etc.
There's a HYPERCONVERGED version of StarWind. It installs into parent partition again or inside a VM (for Hyper-V and ESXi / vSphere accordingly) and you build with it a N-node cluster with storage being fault-tolerant and sitting on a 2 nodes. So 2 nodes keep storage for N. Not "just two node StarWind is free"! It's N. This version is iSCSI (kind of iSCSI for Hyper-V actually same way SMB Direct start as TCP and then goes RDMA we start as iSCSI and go DMA) but you can do SMB3 from a VM on Hyper-V and NFS from a VM on VMware (not recommended). This version is restricted and you have to be vExpert, MVP, MCT, MCP, blogger or whatever to get either time-unlimited or limited versions. You can also be Spiceworks user with level of Serrano and up and Mangolassi user with some points (we did not decide yet). Or... You just come and ask
So before we've been doing "two node hyper converged" version for free and not we can do "2 for N hyper converged", "2 for N node converged" but you specify your scenario and hypervisor. We're trying to be very flexible here so if you think we do something wrong and miss something obvious you just come and ask. We'll fix that.
Technically we're shifting focus to appliances so I'm pretty sure we'll end with completely unrestricted versions for N nodes in terms of storage but selling just hardware (ready nodes).
So what you did - got wrong license
I've dropped you PM asking for e-mail so Icould bring you in touch with StarWind PM who'll help with a key. The only thing you need is to describe what you do actually (hyper converged still will not allow to install itself into VM by default on Hyper-V as we don't like this in terms of mgmt and support, need a special key for that for EVERY kind of version).
Hope this makes sense
P.S. And SAM is 200% correct on naming. It's just difficult to have different names for everything so have to pick up how to confuse people.
@LAH3385 said:
Didn't saw any PM so just PMed KOOLER. Very detail explanation. I don't think I understand the whole thing either.
Thanks MangoLassi and Kooler. Will await for a reply.
Got. Responded. Please give Tolya a couple of hours for turnaround
@Minion-Queen said:
I love how awesome our vendors are around here.
Doing our best to keep you guys and gals happy
@marcinozga said:
Such a shame. I was a beta tester, and their product was really nice. I had plans to put it into production with next server refresh.
Give a call to StarWind We can seamlessly replace NIMBOXX (as we do run Hyper-V and VMware and not cheesy hypervisors still needs years of forging to catch up even with Hyper-V).
We can also buy old NIMBOXX gear from sad guys managed to actually buy from AWOL company. People we'll help to everybody! We're not trying to rip off poor little souls who spend money on something already we can move on and do free StarWind on top of existing SuperMicro gear + VMware or Hyper-V. Just in case.
@scottalanmiller said:
Yeah, the industry has put a lot of effort into all kinds of both software and hardware research based around a pricing model that has now changed.
The real lesson here is, as it has been many times in the past, that Windows is the wrong place to be making investments when you can help it.
I've been making money on tipping holes in MSFT product / licensing / marketing strategy since maybe 1998 but... You can make SOME money but it's very difficult to build a healthy growing company this way 
So SAM you're 200% right on this..........
@garak0410 said:
I've got a ghost writer...nice...
I am just crazy busy at work but this post reflects a fraction of what's on my plate right now. SO let me take a piece at a time.
We are running production VM's on that aging (but licensed) PowerEdge 2900. Do I need replacing that as my priority or perhaps look at the Starwind solution first? We are going to need more storage since we are adopting DocuWare.
Could be! there will be some mess with licensing as we don't do Xen so for NFS storage you'll need VMware key 
Either way I've asked engineers to jump in here and help you so ping me if they would not get in and respond to you ASAP
@BRRABill said:
I have a new server that has seen me go from an H310 to an H710. It's also seen a change from 7200RPM SATA drives to EDGE SSD.
I'd like to post the numbers that I got from testing, and have some questions answered. I am sure this all makes sense somewhere, I'm just not sure where.
I'll post the numbers, and then my questions.
Hopefully this thread can bring about some configuration settings for anyone looking to configure their RAID cards optimally.
CrystalMark should be renamed to CrystalCrap.
Intel I/O meter, DiskSPD or Oracle VDBench.
@Jason said:
Anyone else contemplating leaving dell? We've seen their quality drop a lot for desktops and laptops in the past 6-12 months.
Who are you using? Reality is there is only 1 other company for us to really consider and that's HP.
We do Dell servers. Dell laptops are crap indeed. recently. But who does not do crap thee days? ;((
@scottalanmiller said:
@KOOLER said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Nope, I have mentioned to @olivier that XO should work to incorporate Hyper-V into XO, it would really be a slam dunk and leverage the work that they have already done.
what product name?
XO = Xen Orchestra
It is a third party interface for XenServer but is extremely powerful and open source. Having it handle Hyper-V in addition to XenServer would be an amazing addition to the platform and it would be the only sensible Hyper-V console on the market if they did that.
SAM you're pure gold !! Thank you !!
Very nice! I want it or something derived from it on my Raspberry and Banana Pis
@scottalanmiller said in KVM Backups:
It's very basic. Just full images and automated exports. Nothing extensive. But for firms needing a basic, free backup mechanism, it gets them that. In most cases you would still want something more robust, like StorageCraft, Unitrends or the like. A Veeam product for it would be awesome. But it is enough to get automated data protection in place.
See Inbox
@BBigford said in Solus 1.1 Linux on Scale HC3:
@KOOLER said in Solus 1.1 Linux on Scale HC3:
They will catch up definitely! ARM is getting a very good kick now. Raspberry Pi is somehow underpowered by current "modern" means but Banana Pi solves most of the business cases AFAIK. That's NOT thin client if you care.
I haven't looked at RBP 3 vs. BP. Sounds like you've tried them both, what'd you find?
We got a bunch of both as a gifts to employees (you know, hardware company we actually gave Pis away to people who did MUCH more complex things themselves LOL) and I also kept few to feed video to old LCD TVs (rented apartments where I live now don't have USB ports and I like stream video on demand from IP directly). Raspberry Pis are OK never had any issue with those but both of my Banana's M3 are dead now and sent back for replacement. In theory Banana is better because CPU cycles / $ ar higher, R-Pi is still quirky when playing back video, also B-Pi has more OSes available incl. Android and some cool stuff I don't even remember now (I;m using Raspbian everywhere now).
zroot is #1 reason to love ZFS !!
@John-Nicholson said in StarWind vs Storage Spaces Direct:
@scottalanmiller said in StarWind vs Storage Spaces Direct:
My take on it is that after 20 years of Windows Software RAID being totally insane to implement in production, we need to wait at least one or two server release cycles before we have enough time for Storage Spaces Direct to have collected enough reliability data to even be a remote consideration. Microsoft's track record here speaks for itself. The entire hardware RAID industry exists almost solely to tackle this one software issue with Windows. Storage Spaces was just an attempt to rename it to hopefully get out of touch Windows Admins to think that there was some hot, new feature worth putting their data on and a lot got burned.
There's some nasty @#$@ in there. Mainly write order fidelity isn't working yet with ReFS...
ReFS with integrity streams enabled is a 100% log-structured file system pretty much like StarWind LSFS or NetApp WAFL or Nimble CASL (except StarWind and Nimle and NetApp are much more effective because of 4MB+ pages touching all spindles in a parity RAID, MSFT is still below 64KB most of the time). With integrity disabled it's just an NTFS without a scrub process (and with no dedupe). We did a cool review here take a look:
https://slog.starwindsoftware.com/refs-virtualization-workloads-test-part-1/
Good luck!
@scottalanmiller said in Xen Orchestra on Ubuntu 15.10 - Complete installation instructions:
DRBD is used as the base for HA in many NAS storage systems.
I think "many" should be "majority" BTW.
@aaron said in Best Whiskey (Hypervisor) versus the most sold Whiskey (Hypervisor):
Huh, I thought Jack was the best selling whiskey.
Jack isn't a whisky technically and it's not a "whiskey" for sure ;))
if you don't pay for electricity from your own pocket just get R5xx from xByte and load FreeBSD on it (or Linux?) with ZFS
don't do syno or netgear if yo plan more than 4 spindles
opensuse forever
openbsd + xfce is another one ;))
@scottalanmiller said in OpenSuse 12.3 with Cinnamon:
I can honestly say that I have never run OpenBSD with XFCE. Or any GUI, for that matter.
it's really easy with a modern youtube howto guides
p.s. you have to have a good reason to run openbsd however back to gui... i'm spoiled with windows nt so if I can do guy I do gui and no cli
