Starwind VSAN NFR License?
Is anyone running an NFR license of Starwind virtual SAN? I see that they have NFR licenses available and are good for a year. For those running this license, have you been able to renew the license when it's coming up to expire, or after a year are you hosed? I'm considering ditching my FreeNAS SAN and am wanting to run Starwind VSAN in lieu of vmware's inferior VSAN on my 3x ESXi cluster, even though I can get licensing for it.
Note: I know Starwind has a free version, but I want the GUI.
submitted by
audioeptesicus to
homelab
VMware or Hyper-V and what to use for shared storage??
Hello everyone,
My boss and I have been looking at new servers for all this as their hardware is old (pre xeon E5 era) and we need Windows 2016 to really take advantage of more recent features geared to manage Windows 10 devices. Virtualizing is obviously the way to go in my opinion as its flexibility is key to testing out new services, as well as being able to virtualize the rest of their 10 or so current servers. Were looking at two refurb DL360 or DL380 with dual Xeon E5-2660v3 (10 core) processors and 128gb ram each from ServerMonkey.
Were looking to get it all running, hopefully with HA, at the least possible licensing cost. We had SA with Microsoft for Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard for 6 processors, but I'm not sure what that translated to in Server 2016 since licensing is based on core count now. Plus standard edition only allows 2 VM instances in Hyper-V, so we'd have to get Datacenter edition. It seems like getting licensing to run Hyper-V with what we want to do ends up being way more than going with VMware, so I've been pushing to get vSphere Essentials Plus. It provides all the features we need, but in order to take advantage of HA, we need a shared storage solution which I'm stuck on.
VMware's vSAN ends up being like an extra 10k for our setup so I was looking at StarWind's vSAN solution since it's less than half that but was questioning its performance. Since it runs within a VM and uses a VMDK as it's storage device, wouldn't its performance be significantly degraded across all our VM's? Plus, if we did go with Hyper-V solution, it looks like we could just use Storage Spaces Direct which wouldn't cost any extra and would allow for HA.
Really lost on this shared storage part of it all and appreciate any suggestions!
submitted by
kwaleeb to
sysadmin
