StarWind Software

I think I raised this before but is there an installation guide that explains what the installation options actually are?

iSCSI server: Assume this is the core StarWind server itself?
Loopback accelerator driver: haven't a clue!
Management console: yup - understand that one
VSAN deployment tool: pass
NAS configuration tool: know what a NAS is but what does it help you configure?
V2V convertor tool: guess this is for converting something to something else? Give us a clue what Any docs?
PowerShell management library: I *love* PowerShell - ditto documentation
SMS-S agent: the service that allows other software to interface with StarWind, e.g. VMM?
Software VSS provider: I know what VSS is but what is StarWind doing there? What's this actually do?
Hardware VSS provider: ditto

Cheers, Rob.

iSCSI server: Assume this is the core StarWind server itself? <-- Yes, it's a backbone of our product. Called StarWind Core Service or something like this in the most recent releases. Should be installed unless you want to install Management Console only.

Loopback accelerator driver: haven't a clue! <-- Hyper-Converged Hyper-V or Windows (SoFS, SQL Server or Exchange bare metal clusters) installs. We don't route I/O over TCP and iSCSI stacks (similar to SMB Direct starts life as TCP and then goes RDMA) and use DMA to accelerate IOPS.

Management console: yup - understand that one <-- Good That's the GUI thing we run to control StarWind service app.

VSAN deployment tool: pass <-- VMware Virtual SAN wizard. It takes Windows, StarWind install and compiles and provisions on VMware new VM running StarWind. In the upcoming version of StarWind we plan to have pre-build VM like others do as people don't really "buy" nice new approach we've used.

NAS configuration tool: know what a NAS is but what does it help you configure? <-- We allow to automatically configure failover SMB2.1 & SMB3 and NFSv4(1) shares on top of the HA block volumes. This did not really went anywhere except we've used core logic built here to configure SoFS SMB3 shares we use as a primary storage to feed content to Hyper-V and SQL Server in Compute and Storage separated setups.

V2V convertor tool: guess this is for converting something to something else? Give us a clue what Any docs? <-- Convert between VMware VMDK, StarWind IMG and Hyper-V (and others) VHD(x) formats. Upcoming version of StarWind will get rid of an IMG (we'll deploy completely VHDX), we'll remove V2V back to be a separate app and not part of StarWind Management Console and we'll also apply hardware change when doing VMs convert (VMware and Hyper-V represent different set of emulated hardware).

PowerShell management library: I *love* PowerShell - ditto documentation <-- Sorry about that we're working on this.

SMS-S agent: the service that allows other software to interface with StarWind, e.g. VMM? <-- Yes, you can control StarWind core from VMM2012. There's a whitepaper and manual on how to do that.

Software VSS provider: I know what VSS is but what is StarWind doing there? What's this actually do? <-- Non-server versions for Windows (7 and need this to make crash-consistent snapshots. This one should be running inside Virtual Machine (agent).

Hardware VSS provider: ditto <-- The same as above but for server (2008 R2 and 2012 R2) versions of Windows. When VM is running on StarWind that allow us to create crash-safe snapshots of it.