vSAN Free or Trial license does not provide raw LUN

[anhdzung88]

When applying Free or Trial license, I cannot create raw LUN target, default is NVMe-oF and cannot change. So that my iSCSI Initiator cannot see the target. How to fix or work around this issue?

[yaroslav (staff)]

Welcome to StarWind Forum! NVMe-oF is not yet available so the RAW LUN. Please consider using a Simple layout.
P.S. You can reach out to the person who shared the trial key with you for technical assistance.

[anhdzung88]

Hi yaroslav, when choosing LUN protocol (as below depiction) on CVM web UI, I can only choose NVMe-oF instead of iSCSI. While hovering on iSCSI item, it says that my license does not support (Free/Trial).

[yaroslav (staff)]

I am afraid there is some confusion here.
You have iSCSI selected. For free version, you need to use scripts. For Trial, you can continue with GUI.

[anhdzung88]

The image I sent is for illustration purposes only and not the actual image. What I mean is that when selecting the LUN protocol, it defaults to NVMe-oF instead of iSCSI as expected (opposite to the image).

[yaroslav (staff)]

Can you please share the screenshot?

[anhdzung88]

Please find attachment.

nvmeof.png (25.85 KiB) Viewed 1862 times

[yaroslav (staff)]

Can you please share the version of the StarWind VSAN VM?
Also, is it a FREE or TRIAL license?

[anhdzung88]

The latest version (8.4).
I have tried both Free and Trial license, the same result as capture.

[yaroslav (staff)]

Can I see the screenshot with the version, please?
NVMe-oF transport is not yet available in the current build. So is the RAW volume. It should not be possible to unlock NVMe-oF transport without RAW volume.

[anhdzung88]

Yes, I have created a RAW volume, then NVMe-oF LUN with Free (or Trial) license.
You can download the latest version from your website to recreate the case.

[yaroslav (staff)]

Since August, I deployed StarWind VSAN in multiple systems. None of them had RAW volume available.
Furthermore, NVMe-oF transport is not available in the latest release build.

[dmytro (staff)]

Hello anhdzung88,

Please create a Standard volume to create and utilize iSCSI devices connected to your client host machines via iSCSI Initiator.
For iSCSI LUNs a Standard volume is used while a Raw volume is required for creating NVMe-oF LUNs.

[anhdzung88]

But I need Raw volume via iSCSI LUN (for VMFS datastores).
Standard Volume as I understand is an XFS file system, right? And it cannot be used to make datastores (VMFS).

[dmytro (staff)]

Hi anhdzung88,

Please check the VSAN configuration guide - https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resour ... ng-web-ui/

iSCSI LUNs utilize the Standard volume only. Indeed it is the XFS file system under the hood. This is the only option to be made to expose the iSCSI device as a VMware VMFS datastore.