StarWind Virtual SAN 8: How to install

Let’s say you are IT admin/engineer in small or medium company, and you want to cluster services in your environment but you don’t have enough money for “serious” SAN. You have (at least) two servers with enough storage and (at least) two switches, and you are ready to start.

But when you bring up Failover Clustering Feature you realize that storage will be your single point of failure.
You don`t have budget for additional SAN (or NAS) hardware, and clustering looked so nice and promising…

Solution is Starwind VirtualSAN – https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-free
It is software solution that will enable you to bring up virtual SAN and cluster storage on your servers, in hypervisor. Two nodes edition is free for production use, you can read about details here -> https://www.starwindsoftware.com/styles-v2/pdf/starwind-free/Free_vs_Paid.pdf

This (and connected) LAB will be presented as follows:

Two separate servers with Windows Server 2012 R2 STD and HyperV installed on each.
On every physical server inside HyperV is VM based on Windows Server 2012 R2 STD that will host Starwind VirtualSAN, one VM for every physical server. One additional virtual machine will be used for trying and testing storage what we created with Starwind Virtual SAN Free.

Machines that are hosting Starwind Virtual SAN:

Server 1:
HyperV machine with Windows Server 2012 R2 STD
Server name: Role1
2NICs: LAN: 10.10.10.6 Private: 192.168.1.10
Disk config: Windows system disk C:\ and disk that will store Starwind virtual disk E:

Server 2:
HyperV machine with Windows Server 2012 R2 STD
Server name: Role2
2NICs: LAN: 10.10.10.7 Private: 192.168.1.11
Disk config: Windows system disk C:\ and disk that will store Starwind virtual disk E:

Additional machine on which we`ll attach created virtual disks via iSCSI initiator
HyperV machine with Windows Server 2012 R2 STD
Server name: DC2012
NIC: LAN: 10.10.10.3

So, you will need at least two machines which will host Starwind Virtual SAN in order for it to make sense. You can install single installation of Starwind Virtual SAN and it will work as iSCSI Target but you`ll still have storage as single point of failure.
This article will cover installation of Starwind Virtual SAN on server Role1, same procedure needs to be done on the second server, in my case Role2 server.