NFR license expired, best way to access storage?

[scott27]

Odd question, my NFR license expired, and to my surprise Starwind went completely offline as a result (wasn't expecting that!). I had sent a request for a license renewal, and have since submitted another NFR request, but haven't gotten a response to either. So does anyone know the best way to get access to my storage to move the VM's off? I've been a bit swamped, so I haven't really looked at the situation yet, but figured I'd reach out here before doing anything. This would probably be pretty simple if I had been smart and provisioned the entire drive, but I didn't, so now I have a 2TB .img file to deal with.
Any thoughts or suggestions?
Thanks in advance!

[scott27]

In case anyone else has this issue, here was my solution.

I requested and received a license for the Starwind Free version, and applied that to my software. Now the my LUN was available via iSCSI, BUT, only locally. I could connect from 127.0.0.1, but not from any other host. So I used the MS initiator to connect and present this as a drive. Of course, I couldn't read my VMFS datastore from Windows, so that posed a smallish problem. From there I downloaded another Target server, and used that to present the storage to ESXi.

I totally see why you would feel the need to limit the NFR license, but I think it would be much more appropriate to disable replication when a license expires, as opposed to stopping all operation and disabling access to the storage being presented.

[Oles (staff)]

The license expiration should not have been a surprise for you as you should have been informed about the expiration date.
I will also address your question to our top management and in case NFR licensing policy will be changed, i will make sure to update the thread.