Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

I am doing some work with a FusionIO solid state flash storage card at the moment (more on this in a future post) as part of this I need a windows based iSCSI target for my testing, and rather handily you can download an evaluation copy of the Starwind Enterprise Edition from here 

I usually use OpenFiler for this sort of thing, but not being a particular Linux wizz (ok, and being a bit lazy and in a hurry) I wanted to try out the Fusion IO Duo card I have been loaned, and the Linux drivers are an .RPM or .deb package for which OpenFiler doesn’t have the required package management software – so I have installed it in a Windows 2008 machine and will use the Starwind software as an iSCSI target.

(In terms of disclosure, whilst i was writing this post up last week VMware vExperts were offered an NFR license for the product, this test was done with the freely downloadable eval version rather than the NFR license we have been offered – but I urge you to check it out, it’s pretty cool.

Anyway – when you first install the software on Windows 2008 , there is a Starwind icon on the desktop

When you double-click on it (or any of the start menu entries nothing happens, you don’t get a UI or anything. this confused me for a while until I discovered that it places a system tray icon on boot, which you use to configure the software.

by default on my Windows 2008 R2 machine this icon is hidden, and set to only show notifications – of which there were none yet.

A quick trip to the customize button on the Notification area menu options on the properties of the task bar shows the default setting which is hiding it

Setting this to show icon and notifications made it re-appear on the taskbar/notification area

You can now right-click and launch the management console

The management console

It’s a bit strange that the desktop or start-menu icon doesn’t launch the manager ‘out of the box’ with Windows 2008 – but this is how to resolve it, the hint eventually came from the online help, which said to go via the system tray icon, so it just goes to show – maybe sometimes you should look at the help files!

Hopefully that will save you some time with your eval!