ahh thanks for the info Anton, in that case my follow up question may be moot. but let me mention it anyway so you know where my first question was coming from.
So the reason I was asking was, I think I found a shortcoming to the current policy assuming the free version and licensed version work the same when monitoring how much data an end user uses, i.e. 128gb, 1tb,2tb, etc.. Please Humor me
for example.
lets say you create a 2 node 1tb disk with dedupe.
then lets say since you know the data that will be stored on this disk will be highly repeated, I.E store a whole bunch of VHD with the same OS data and nothing else.
in this case you may have a 400gb physical drive, but you know that data will dedupe to lets say 100gb.
when you present the spdata disk to windows iscsi and initialize, etc Windows will see an available 1 tb disk
Now, you proceed to copy over 50 VHD with identical data to the iscsi target. because Microsoft isn't aware of starwinds deduplication it shows the drive as almost full. but when you check the sws file it may only be a few hundred gb. At this point you want to Utilize more of your physical disk space but cant because windows stops you from adding more because it thinks its full (when I check size on disk its the same as file size). so the only solution is to make the dedupe ISCSI target Bigger like maybe 3tb (thin Provisioned) then you can keep copying VHD until you disk is more utilized. then just use windows partitioning to create a hard stop where the real stop point is. This works I tested
But there is one small road block, when using replicated dedupe the software Prevents you from specifying a size larger then what your licensed for even if you not even going to use that space for replication. so if for instance if we are using the free version, and create a 128gb dedupe disk on multiple nodes and copy repetitive VHD (lets say 20gb in size) windows will only let you copy 6 vhd's over even though from starwind spdata file your only using 30gb of physical space, If you try to create a bigger dedupe disk to be able to actually utilize the 128gb limit for replicating a dedupe volume you would need to create a larger thin provision disk but unfortunately cant because it seems like the software is only concerned with specified max size during wizard regardless of actual data usage.
so that's why I asked, is the software licensing based on what a customer actually utilizes or just what the max size of a disk is set to when creating a disk? if so, if a customer purchases the 1tb license and wants to use multi node dedupe for os data he will never be able to utilize the 1tb they purchased. because windows will prevent using more than the perceived disk size and starwind will prevent making a larger disk size to compensate for not being able to fill the physical 1 tb disk in a multimode replication.
hope that made sense, will the v8 correct this?
