Issues adding additional "appliance" nodes to starwind vsan free vms on proxmox

[yaroslav (staff)]

This is a known UI issue. This should be addressed in future releases.
As a side note, you do not need to configure data and replication links in CVM FREE. Those links are used for simplified HA device creation via GUI. Free version has the LUN wizard locked.

[NinthTurtle]

Ah okay so I don't need to create HA networking for my nodes. I'll be honest, I've found the documentation a bit confusing on what I actually need to do for setup. I should probably book a demo.

[NinthTurtle]

You do not need to add the nodes to Appliances if you use the Free version: there is no GUI for LUN creation. Therefore, the settings you make in Networks and Appliances do not help for further LUN creation.
You still can do that so that things look neat.

Okay so I'm using this license: StarWind VSAN Free (KVM)
And from what I'm seeing the GUI I can make a LUN for ISSCI, and my proxmox hosts can see it as storage.

lun i've made.png (19.07 KiB) Viewed 1163 times

I can see there's also options to create SMB and NFS file shares, although these appear to be standalone shares that aren't shared between the nodes, which is something I was hoping to use. Is that part of the paid version of CVM? I've put in a request for both a quote and a demo.

[yaroslav (staff)]

Hi,
Thanks for your feedback. I will be glad to help you more if needed.
The guide covers GUI-based deployment. There, setting the networks correctly saves a lot of time for device creation. For Free (i.e., GUI-less) systems this step is optional. It will fit the Trial-licensed system though.
The shares are not highly available, yet, you can connect a highly available volume over iSCSI to a file server and that should do the trick.
Let me know if you have more questions.
P.s. Hope to see you during the installation call.

[NinthTurtle]

Thanks for your feedback. I will be glad to help you more if needed.
The shares are not highly available, yet, you can connect a highly available volume over iSCSI to a file server and that should do the trick.

So I can't make one SMB/NFS share that's in a HA setup. Are you suggesting this might be a future feature, Your wording of "...not highly available, yet, you can.." confuses me. I don't know how you'd go about doing it for SMB but I'm pretty sure NFS does allow you to have a HA setup like that.
I was hoping to use a HA NFS (or SMB) setup, iSCSI doesn't work for docker container storage (which is one of the 3 things I wanted to use the storage for) so I'd still need a middleman to act as the "file server" if I mounted iSCSI to that host and then shared those mounts out over SMB/NFS.

P.s. Hope to see you during the installation call.

I eagerly await the emails with further information.

[yaroslav (staff)]

So I can't make one SMB/NFS share that's in a HA setup.

You need a middleman File Server.
You can create a StarWind HA device and connect it to the file server over iSCSI. You can connect the storage over iSCSI to the MS failover cluster, for instance, and create a share there. StarWind VSAN will be acting as the shared storage provider; file sharing will be done by clustering.
You cannot create a HA share ONLY from the StarWind CVM GUI.