StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

Highly available HyperV cluster. Our environment includes 2 Hyper-V hosts with onboard storage running about 20 virtual machines. StarWind allowed for a redundant cluster to be configured without any extra storage and easily create an HA cluster. StarWind Virtual San functions as the primary drivers for all of our storage needs in the highly available cluster. It is used almost daily to allow for live migration of machines and failover in the event of maintenance or physical host hardware problems.

StarWind Virtual SAN improved my hyper-v deployment by making it highly available. It was easy to roll out and it is easy to manage. It has greatly improved virtual machine reliability and accessibility. Deployment of StarWind Virtual SAN has helped reduce the stress of not having a cluster that would allow for virtual machine failover if a host has a hardware problem. It is reassuring to know that all virtual machines are in a safer environment versus running on standalone hosts with no shared storage.

Highly available storage is the most valuable feature. The entire rollout is hyper-converged and requires no extra storage further than the hosts in which Hyper-V is running. Another feature that has been great is the support from StarWind in general. We have their proactive support package on the main cluster that employs Starwind Virtual SAN. The StarWind support team is right on top of all monitoring activities. If I am maintaining a physical host and it has been down for too long, I will get a notice from StarWind to confirm a problem or inform them that maintenance is being performed. They are top-notch.

Management of VSAN itself could be improved. A Web UI for management would be great rather than an application installation. StarWind is testing a command center virtual appliance that I have installed in my environment. It is very much a step in the right direction to make StarWind Virtual SAN management easier and even Hyper-V as a whole. Something Hyper-V has lacked for years is a good Web UI to manage a host or cluster. StarWind has taken upon themselves to help with this as well as manage the Virtual SAN in a single pane of glass.

Five Years

Very stable. I've had little to no problem since rolling it out.

It should be easy to add a host to a cluster once VSAN is installed.

Excellent! 10/10

No. We used standalone hosts.

Setup is a bit complex but StarWind has great documentation to get setup and a great support team to assist in setup.

Implementation has been done using StarWind support and with an in-house team as we have 2 separate clusters both using StarWind Virtual SAN

12-24 months.

Evaluate your solutions. This is a great solution for those user Hyper-V and ready to hyper-converge.

Maxta, Nutanix, VMware, KVM.

I use the solution for running vSphere for a highly tech-driven SMB. We are running a 2-node vSAN for running ~40 VMs servicing mostly internal users. We are running VMs/apps that are either compute-intensive, storage-intensive, or memory-intensive.  

We have limited staff and staff time for managing infrastructure so it was important for us to find a solution that works well and doesn't require a lot of daily human interaction.  We like rock-solid solutions that just work. StarWind vSAN provides us with exactly this.

StarWind vSAN has provided us with improved performance (since the storage is Direct Attached and therefore faster than a SAN). It has reduced single points of failure (the compute and storage are fully duplicated) and reduced maintenance since we no longer have to manage a separate SAN or storage networking. Furthermore, our hardware is simplified taking up less room in our rack and requires far less wiring.

On another note, StarWind vSAN has improved our organization by providing us with third-party proactive support to help us diagnose issues quickly - especially when we don't notice them right away.

The solution offers fully redundant computation and storage.  

We are now more tolerant of hardware failures without vastly reduced performance or increase human workload.  

We are very sensitive to making sure our infrastructure is reliable, bulletproof, and resilient to issues. StarWind vSAN helps with this since we now have two identical nodes with compute and storage that can both independently serve our needs without and a drastic reduction in available services or reduction in performance.  

On top of that, having the ability to scale horizontally if needed is a huge plus for future growth.

Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer. Some of the documents are not the best at describing how the StarWind vSAN system is designed or implemented, and although unimportant (as "long as it works") it is still nice to read the nitty-gritty details.  

Some of the documentation is a bit rough in spelling or sentence structure. I would imagine this is due to translation and non-English as the primary language. These are not deal breakers since the support staff is very helpful.

I've used the solution for less than 6 months.

We switched products due to an expiring warranty as well as the need for a general hardware refresh. We were also looking for newer and better; we wanted to improve resiliency, improve server/application performance, reduce rack space utilization and wiring, and just get an all-around new solution since the IT market has changed quite a bit since our previous refresh (about 6 years prior).  Ultimately, the new StarWind solution reduces our single points of failure and improves our system performance.

The cost structure for us was on par with just a general server plus a SAN purchase, however, we would not have received the pre-configured software, the reduced single points of failure, the reduced wiring complexity, or the proactive support.  

We looked at VMware vSAN and a generic server plus SAN solution.

I would highly recommend StarWind vSAN for pretty much any SMB infrastructure project.  The reduced single points of failure, increased performance, and reliable support is great.

We are currently running a Microsoft environment. The Virtualisation stack is currently hosted through Microsoft Hyper-V. We are using local storage and hosting our storage via Starwind Virtual SAN for our production systems.  

Currently, we are only running a two-node cluster to serve our Hyper-V storage. Both nodes are directly connected. This little two-node cluster currently supports all of our offices across the country.  

Our business has a heavy reliance on the systems and systems uptime of 24/7 is required.

Starwind has significantly improved our performance in comparison to our previous environment. Our uptime and our internal SLAs are great. Over the years, it has not failed us once. 

Their support has been amazing and is always there for us when needed. We have worked with various support members over the years and every single one of them knows the product without needing to escalate. Being Hardware agnostic has also helped us a lot to maintain our systems and update to new hardware without worrying about the usual compatibility issues.

Starwind is very easy to configure and even easier to provision.  

Even better is how simple it is to maintain and patch without any downtime.  

Over the years we have updated both the operating system and the hardware on several of our nodes without any downtime incurred.  

The cache features that are available have significantly improved our performance.  

The ability for us to manage all of our nodes from the same console makes systems administration very easy.  

Tasks such as adding, removing, and expanding volumes are very easy.

Starwind Virtual SAN has fulfilled all of our requirements. There is not anything additional we require. The product does everything we need and more.  

If there was one thing we could request, it would be the ability to shrink volumes. For example, we want to be able to decrease in the size of the volume. We understand this is not a limitation in the product as it can potentially cause more problems by leaving things behind. Also, even though we cannot decrease the volume at this time, it is easily addressed by creating a new volume with the appropriate size and migrating data over to it.

We have been using Starwind since 2015.

The solution is very stable. We have not had a single outage or drop due to Starwind.  Software has never crashed or not performed as specified.  Our uptime is only disrupted by server maintenance and scheduled periods.

The product is very scalable as you can add as many nodes as you require along with additional hardware.

In over 20 years of working in the IT industry, I have never encountered better support than I have with the team at Starwind. 

We previously used Microsoft Storage Spaces.

It was as if we didn't need to do anything. Starwind was there from the start to help us provision.

We handled the initial setup all in-house.

I would strongly advise companies to engage with Starwind very early in the design process as they can help with finding the appropriate path. The pricing model is very simple.

We evaluated HP SAN, Nutanix, and Dell Storage.

We have two servers in an HA configuration. The two servers having an identical configuration. On each server we have: two disks in RAID 1 (for the operating system), two arrays of four disks in RAID 5 (for virtual servers that require high data transfer speed), one array of six SAS disks in RAID 6 (for virtual servers containing a lot of data), and two arrays of six SAS disks in RAID 10 (for medium servers in terms of data volume and speed required). On the network side, SAN servers are connected to HOSTs via a 10 GB ethernet connection and between them for HB and SYNC via 1GB connections.

Until the installation of StarWind, we only use physical servers. After installing, I migrated all physical servers as virtual servers and added other new servers. We currently have approximately 30 virtual servers on only three hosts and the two SAN servers. Thus, we get significant savings from the necessary hardware. In addition, we have much more flexibility in allocating available resources. 

Having a configuration of two servers in HA, we can perform maintenance and upgrade operations without having to interrupt the operation of production servers.

From my point of view, the main advantages of this solution are the drastic reduction of the number of physical servers required and the reduction of acquisition costs for servers. 

In addition, there is less electricity consumption for servers and for their cooling and the possibility of dynamic and fast allocation of storage resources where needed. This simplifies the backup and restore process. The product has the ability to take snapshots on production servers before any major upgrade so that if problems occur you can quickly return to the previous configuration.

It would help if the manufacturer provided clearer and more detailed documentation, with explanations of how the application can be installed in various HA configurations. They should include advantages and disadvantages for each proposed configuration. Currently, you can only find information on this on the manufacturer's website, but it does not contain very detailed information regarding each proposed configuration.

It might help to add the functionality to automatically send an email to a predefined address when errors occur in the application.

We have been using StarWind Virtual SAN for more than 10 years and, in that time, without encountering major operating problems.

It is extremely stable. Currently, it is not necessary to intervene or restart the SA servers for years at a time.

It is easy to expand the storage space. The only limitation is the space that the license allows you to use in the HA configuration.

The support provided is very prompt.

Previously, I only used physical servers.

Initially, the implementation of this solution seems complex, however, once you understand how the application is designed, it becomes relatively simple.

Before deciding on the solution offered by StarWind, we also analyzed HPE LeftHand SAN Solutions, however, this was significantly more expensive.

There are 2 server clusters with a software-defined SAN. They are Hyper-V Windows 2016 clusters and have been working fine for several years. We are using both NVME and SSD disks with both are working fine with good levels of performance. We provide a SaaS solution hosted in external datacenters in one cluster and the other hosts our internal servers. Starwind replaced a Dell SAN that had failed. The SaaS solution runs on an Oracle database which has had excellent price-performance using Linux in Hyper-V VM.  

The product allows extreme flexibility for SAN and hyperconverged infrastructure. Using Hyper-V combined with Linux VMs has allowed us to scale our solutions with additional clients and client volumes. We have customers using our platform with over 1.3 million accounts. The databases have scaled seamlessly. We now have over 16 TB of disks in our hyperconverged SD-WAN and Starwind has managed them flawlessly. The ability to grow SAN size by just buying more cheap SSDs or NVME disks has been very useful.

The most useful aspect is the hyper-converged SD SAN and the ease to expand it by just adding cheap SSD or NVME disks. 

A great feature would be a wizard and to include a new disk in the SAN. At the moment, including a new disk requires several steps - some that must be done at the OS level and others in each node. We have no more recommendations for the product beyond that.

We have been using the product for over 3 years.

We have had no stability problems whatsoever.

The solution is very scalable. Right now, we have over 16TB of disks. 

Technical support is always available and helpful

Previously, we used a Dell EMC SAN which was failing. 

The initial setup was supported by Starwind. 

We did look at DataCore.

We built an HCI Hyper-V two-node cluster without SAN or S2D at our main site. It is used to run 25 virtual machines that host operating systems and applications including Windows 2016/2019, Debian, SQL, and PostgreSQL. It provides business continuity to my organization.

We also implemented a "Windows 2019 Guest Cluster" inside a Hyper-V Cluster without any problem. 

I'm not an IT Manager but an insurance broker with limited IT knowledge, and I was able to install, configure, and manage a hyper-converged cluster in a couple of hours without any problem.

VSAN works great; it's very easy to install, configure, and manage. I received precious support before buying, during the installation, and after.

All of our mission-critical applications and services are now completely redundant.

VSAN doesn't require either an expensive SAN or the expensive hardware required for Microsoft S2D on Windows Server Datacenter Edition. I can have an HCI two-cluster node using our 2,5" SAS HDD in RAID 10 without an SSD and the performance is great.

In the case of power failure or critical events, it's very simple to get back in production. The console is very simple and clear, and the PowerShell commands are very useful. 

Using one of the numerous tutorials, we created scripts to shut down and restart the cluster in case of a power outage.

There is no Italian-language version of the software available. Although I'd prefer an Italian version, I received extensive and comprehensive support in all of the deployment steps. This included communication by email, call, and video.

During a long power outage our UPS batteries was completely discharged, on power on Starwind vSAN wasn't able to choose which node was the correct node to sync from so we had to "mark as Syncronize" one of them. Then we wrote some powershell scripts to power off and power on   the nodes in sequence  before ups completely discharghe and then on power on. I'd like to manage these cases directly on GUI. Something like "in case vSAN isn't be able to mark as Syncronized a node, mark this node as sync"

We have been using StarWind Virtual SAN for six months.

StarWind is extremely stable.

In case we should decide to add other nodes, I think that this solution will scale easily.

Technical support is perfect.

We did not use another similar solution prior to StarWind.

The initial setup is very simple.

I was able to install VSAN on my own and I'm not an IT manager but an insurance broker. I received great support from StarWind technicians.

We found that the pricing was perfect; simple and clear.

We evaluated Microsoft S2D before choosing this product.

In summary, I think it's the best solution I could buy to achieve my goals.