Thanks for all of the help, I really appreciate it!

Do I need to do anything else or am I good to just leave that blank file in there? Is that a bug? I know the system is legacy but just curious.

Ok, thanks for the info. Here is the log. I also created that file and it worked! The settings stayed with it there. webinit_2.log is the log file after a reboot with ran_customization added. webinit.log is before I created the file.

Great! thank you.

more logs

more screenshots and logs

Ok, here you go. Same thing, hostname changed back to default, Data nic was cleared out. Before reboot: After reboot: I changed the hostname back from here before logging in. And here are some logs. The zip was too big to attach here so I had to remove some logs. Let me know if this is enough to see...

Pretty sure everything is to static but I'll check.

Not sure what SR-IOV is but I'll check that too. I do have a PCI 10gb nic in one of the hosts that the iscsi runs on. If it's enabled should it be disabled?

UPDATE:
SR-IOV is disabled on the pci nic

Thank you again for the help. Now I'm having a different problem. I have 2 vSAN nodes configured in HA, one on each Esxi host. Anytime I reboot either one of the appliances, the host name resets back to the default name, Starwind-xxxxxx and the iscsi data ip disappears from the config in the web gui...

Ok thanks, I understand now.

I meant create a RAID0 storage pool in the starwind appliance settings in the GUI, not in the VM settings. I simply had 5 virtual hard drives attached to the vm and created a RAID from that inside Starwind.

Thanks for the info. So you're saying I should just create one large virtual disk in vmware, then create a storage pool with RAID0 in the appliance? Don't do multiple vmdks? If you plan that RAID only for StarWind HA devices, you can use RDM. RDM eliminates the VMFS+VMDK overheads and allows skippin...

I am setting up a 2-node HA system with SAN & NAS Free on 2 ESXi hosts (i know this is legacy). I only have 1 RAID controller on each and the HDD's are configured in RAID 5 presented to the hosts as local datastores. This means I have to use virtual disks as the storage disks on the appliances. ...