StarWind Software

First off want to say thanks for offering the free 2 host VMware SAN/license.

I currently have existing 2 host equallogic setup working fine however my 2 hosts both have 4-500GB SATA drives and 2-256GB SSD SATA drives. I have read the starwind virtual san manual and have watched several videos. I am not understanding how I am supposed to build the starwind SAN. Am I supposed to make a Windows server VM and then install the starwind on said VM and then do a vmware passthrough of all the drives to the starwind server? If so am I supposed to pass each drive through individually or should I say create a RAID 0 2TB HDD drive for bulk strorage and create a RAID 0 512GB SSD drive for caching?

From my understanding this is not a VSA is it, like vmwares old product or like say Maxta?

Example 1:
Host 1 - Raid 0 2TB HDD and RAID 0 512GB SSD
Host 2 - Raid 0 2TB HDD and RAID 0 512GB SSD

Example 2:
Host 1 - Raid 0 HDD 1(512GB), Raid 0 HDD 1(512GB), Raid 0 HDD 1(512GB), Raid 0 HDD 1(512GB), Raid 0 SSD 1(256GB), Raid 0 SSD 1(256GB)
Host 2 - Raid 0 HDD 1(512GB), Raid 0 HDD 1(512GB), Raid 0 HDD 1(512GB), Raid 0 HDD 1(512GB), Raid 0 SSD 1(256GB), Raid 0 SSD 1(256GB)

You spawn StarWind inside a Windows-running VM (your license or free Hyper-V Server, we do provide a wizard that does everything for you so it's pretty much straight-forward process, also we'll offer an OEM Embedded quite soon) and put StarWind-controlled VMDK on a VMFS-formatted volume you want to "mirror" between hosts. That's all Yes, similar to VMware VSA (except they did wrap NFS on top of iSCSI and we can do it but don't recommend because of the performance reasons).