@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.
- There's no point to spawn any VMs inside Hyper-V to run StarWind as StarWind is native Windows application (OK, a combination of a user-land service and set of kernel-mode drivers) and it installs itself into so-called "parent partition" where actual OS runs.
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 
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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.
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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.
Either way there's no point to be shy - you know my e-mail address so there's an easy way to get your questions answered. For now I'm brining in StarWind engineers to see what's up with your case as I'm still head over heals till January 15th, 2016.
So SAM you're 200% right on this..........