Free license error when installing in ESX VMs

[pcoreventures]

I'm trying to install StarWind using two Windows Serve 2012 R2 VMs on two separate ESXi hosts in a Homelab vSphere 5.5 cluster. I requested a free license key and said that I was going to use it for VMware, but I get the following error message during installation:

Error: Wrong license platform.
Error: License platform is not compatible! This license requires platform: Dedicated Physical Server. Your platform is: ESX VM.

error message

starwinderror.tiff (24.86 KiB) Viewed 7007 times

Any ideas how to fix this?

[darklight]

Hi pcoreventures,

It seems that in latest free version of StarWind was changed a lot. Now it supports only one type of installation. It's bare metal windows server.
So hyper-converged scenario is not able with free version anymore. Only compute and storage separated.

Your current free license means that you can create an HA device on StarWind using two physical servers and then connect this device to your other existing ESXi hosts.

[pcoreventures]

Hi pcoreventures,

It seems that in latest free version of StarWind was changed a lot. Now it supports only one type of installation. It's bare metal windows server.
So hyper-converged scenario is not able with free version anymore. Only compute and storage separated.

Your current free license means that you can create an HA device on StarWind using two physical servers and then connect this device to your other existing ESXi hosts.

Well that stinks. Their hyper-converged whitepaper for vSphere showing that it's possible is less than a year old, and they have occasional banner ads implying that the hyper-converged scenario is still free on the forums.

I mean this page even says that there's a special offer for VMware users and it's free, so I really don't get it.
https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwi ... aign=forum

[anton (staff)]

Thanks for information! We'll update the page to make offering up-to-date

Hi pcoreventures,

It seems that in latest free version of StarWind was changed a lot. Now it supports only one type of installation. It's bare metal windows server.
So hyper-converged scenario is not able with free version anymore. Only compute and storage separated.

Your current free license means that you can create an HA device on StarWind using two physical servers and then connect this device to your other existing ESXi hosts.

Well that stinks. Their hyper-converged whitepaper for vSphere showing that it's possible is less than a year old, and they have occasional banner ads implying that the hyper-converged scenario is still free on the forums.

I mean this page even says that there's a special offer for VMware users and it's free, so I really don't get it.
https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwi ... aign=forum

[anton (staff)]

Whole story about StarWind Virtual SAN Free here:

https://forums.starwindsoftware.com/vie ... 273#p24273