StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

We purchased this product to manage storage between our two-node Hyper-V cluster. We're running a pair of Dell R740's with 16 core CPUs and RAID 6 storage arrays, all solid-state.  

We wanted this product to facilitate a hyper-converged environment while still maintaining two host redundancy. We're running about 25 virtual machines on this cluster, none of which are particularly storage IO intensive, yet we've still not seen any issues with performance when it comes to Starwind vSAN. We ended up on this option as it seemed to be simple, robust, and affordable.

This software lets us maintain storage redundancy across both of our Hyper-V hosts, so if one goes down the environment fails over to the other and we have minimal to no downtime.  

Keeping things running is an obvious benefit, and we opted to purchase their higher-tier support (for a very minor price increase). Knowing we've got them to fall back on if we can't fix something ourselves is good for peace of mind. The notifications built into the software mean we aren't constantly checking for issues as this is a very critical piece of our infrastructure.

Starwind support was extremely helpful throughout the entire process, from the trial period to the actual production implementation. They responded to my emails quickly and did a walkthrough to validate the final production configuration to ensure there were no issues.  

The engineer that assisted me with the walkthrough was very knowledgeable, and not just on Starwind software. He had several recommendations about our Hyper-V cluster configuration, and he always made sure to explain why he was making those recommendations. 

Some of the documentation seems to be a bit older and refers to deprecated items. This wasn't a huge issue as the technician that walked me through the install was very knowledgeable and gave me a clear list of steps to take.

The only major issue we had was with the NIC drivers we were using on the link between the two hosts. For reference, we're using a direct connection between a 40 gig QSFP+ NIC in each of our hosts. The issue was that the iSCSI connection between the two hosts would drop after about ten minutes during a full sync of the two storage arrays. The support tech was able to quickly identify the drivers as the issue to get it resolved quickly and prior to our production deadline.

We've used the solution for two months.

It's been very stable for our usage. We've had no issues since implementation two months ago.

I hear it scales well, however, we've not used it beyond our own small scale.

Technical support was very good.

Previously, we were using Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct across a three-node environment. We switched due to the fact that we sold a portion of our company and downsized to two nodes. Storage Spaces Direct doesn't seem ideal for a two-node system.

The initial setup was a bit confusing based on the documentation, however, support was very knowledgeable and able to assist with any issues and questions I had.

I implemented it myself with assistance from Starwind support. It's not a complex process.

Pricing is very simple and a setup walkthrough is included in the price of the software. It's a perpetual license and you only pay to renew support, which was a reasonable price.

We considered storage spaces direct, however, didn't ever implement it on our new two-node cluster.

I really can't overstate how responsive their support was.

Our company's needs are simple, and I like redundancy, so I was looking for the least expensive way to achieve as close to full hardware redundancy as possible without breaking the bank. 

I learned about vSAN technology, and it made sense to me to just get two hosts with identical hardware, and configure their storage as shared, providing full hardware redundancy (on top of the already partially redundant aspects of the hosts themselves), then just get a decent SAN for off-site DR backup storage (we settled on Synology's Flashstation for that), and I'm really glad we did.

StarWind's solution provided me the peace of mind knowing I had full hardware redundancy with my new servers and local storage, and it was less expensive than the VMware native license/solution would have been. 

It has been rock solid from day one. I've engaged with their expert support multiple times for maintenance sessions, to upgrade their software, and once to migrate from their Windows Server-based appliance to their Linux version once it was ready. We have only ever had one issue during an upgrade that was quickly resolved by their engineer.

By far, the best features are the cost, implementation, and support. The VMWare equivalent license upgrade would have been quite a bit more than the StarWind solution, and the only additional hardware requirements were the dual 25GB fiber NICs needed for the storage Sync functionality. 

They also worked with our preferred reseller (PCM at the time) and had our two brand new Dell hosts shipped to them first for pre-configuration, which they then turned around and shipped to us pre-configured and ready to go.

Implementation, maintenance, and support were and have been virtually painless, however, I would definitely like to see quite a bit more on the monitoring side of things. 

I would really like to be able to see a lot more of what is going on under the hood metrics-wise. It would be great to be able to see at least a little bit more. Specifically, things like performance, bandwidth utilization of the synchronization connection, and how it impacts the overall performance of the hosts.

I've used the solution for three years.

It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it. There hasn't been one operational hiccup and only one issue which happened during a support session performing an upgrade, which was quickly resolved by the engineer.

Our needs are simple. Therefore, we only have ever used or needed two hosts. That said, it is nice to know that it can scale to clusters if we ever need to go that route, as unlikely as that seems right now. 

The few times I've ever engaged with technical support were for upgrades, and it was always pretty painless, with the one exception I mentioned before, where we had a problem with a host that ultimately required a hard reset. We're still not sure what happened to cause it to lock up, however, once it was back up everything was fine.

Positive

I had looked at other vSAN technology in the past, however, the cost was beyond our budget, especially after factoring in the cost of the support needed, since I am not a storage engineer.

The initial setup was easy. We simply had to unbox the servers, rack them, connect the cables, and turn them on. It was that simple.

The initial setup was handled in-house - meaning, yours truly. All I had to do after firing them up was add the hosts to my existing vCenter server, migrate all of the VMs over to the new Hosts/Storage, and, once done, shut down and remove the old hosts from vCenter.

ROI is hard to quantify since we've never used anything else. That said, at least without it there would have been many thousands of dollars just for the licensing costs and appropriate support would have been even more than that. StarWind provides comprehensive support on everything, as long as you buy the hardware through them too.

I'd advise users to do their due diligence, however, StarWind's technology works as advertised, at a much lower cost than the native VMware solution. Their licensing is simple and affordable, and their support is impeccable.

We considered VMware's native vSAN technology and may have gone with it if I hadn't found StarWind while searching for alternatives.

If you are looking at a simple, affordable vSAN technology, you can't go wrong with StarWind.

We use the StarWind Virtual SAN in a HA stack. We then use readily available HPE servers (DL380DL - 26 disk) to be the hardware. This allows us to have reliable hardware with reliable software and no downtime. It also drives costs down to almost nothing compared to hardware-based SAN devices. 

Year after year costs are also down with not needing to keep hardware warranties up, due to parts being available easily. Overall, we have saved many thousands of dollars by going this way. We see no difference in IOPS or any other performance metrics. 

We have also tested the high availability a few times (once on purpose and a few not). It seems to work flawlessly.

We are able to scale our storage much easier and cheaper than we would with traditional SAN or NAS systems. 

The cost justification is very easy since the overall cost is literally support for the software. We do not keep any sort of hardware support since we can just buy hardware as needed from anywhere. This means that you have to have some knowledge of hardware if you are picking it out - or their support is more than willing to help. I like this as it allows me to pick out how resilient I want my system to be and how much I want it to cost.

The ability to use off-the-shelf standard servers to increase storage space is great. For example, we use Gen 9 DL380 servers with 26 bays. This allows us to migrate to newer hardware at any time without having to buy new shelves or head units of expensive SAN solutions (or even worse, have multiple SAN support contracts going at once in order to swing data between them). This also makes it so we can easily keep older data without immense cost to our organization. 

Training is also easy as it is just one system to learn.

We just need more integration with Veeam. Overall, I like the fire and forget model, so really there isn't an immense amount of things that I would request. 

Possibly some reporting via SMTP of some metrics would be nice to have. That said, quite honestly I get that from enough systems already and end up ignoring most of them. 

If this was something I was logged into every day then maybe I would request more features. Then again, I would be more concerned with its quality (we shouldn't need to log in daily). I'm not really sure what more to ask for.

We have been using the solution for around six years.

Been using the solution for six years and have not had it fail.

I have scaled quite large. It scales well.

Technical support seems responsive. We've only used them a few times.

Positive

We had three different systems (Dell PowerVault, HPE Lefthand, Lenovo NAS) and they were expensive to keep and more expensive to expand.

The setup takes about five minutes.

I implemented the solution myself. 

The ROI is almost immediate.

I'd advise new users to just do some homework on what they need. Pick out hardware that can support it and get a license. The setup would be about 5 minutes.

Yes, we looked at Dell PowerVault, HPE Lefthand, and Lenovo NAS.

The solution offers great ROI.

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.

We're using Starwind as a failover cluster for load balancing and increased availability.

We had no failover solution before, so if our standalone VMware server went down, we'd be out of operation until we restored from backup. Now we have a Hyper-V cluster with shared storage. We can lose one server and stay online. Failover happens smoothly, recovery and maintenance are less stressful, and we no longer need to worry about downtime. When we tested StarWind, we confirmed that the high availability performs as expected. That level of confidence helps me sleep better at night. 

We only had to purchase two new servers and no other storage or networking equipment. Virtual SAN runs on iSCSI, which is free and easy to configure. It's easy to manage from StarWind's GUI console, and it only required a few extra switch ports. StarWind has specialized in storage solutions for many years, and its track record reassures us that the solution will continue to exist and be supported in the future. I scheduled an interactive validation and tuning session before we went live. I found this to be very valuable, and it proved to us how much the company is committed to its product.

It would be helpful if StarWind provided more precise and detailed documentation explaining how to configure the solution in various scenarios, including the advantages and disadvantages of each. 

I'd also like a mechanism for notifying us when updates are available as well as a visual interface for iSCSI and physical storage. A mobile app for alerts and notifications would be helpful, too. We should still have access to security patches even if we don't pay for support. Lastly, StarWind should make it easier to perform an orderly shutdown of the entire environment in a power outage when everything is running on battery.

We've been using StarWind Virtual SAN for less than a year

We had an old standalone VMware server hosting several virtual machines that we wanted to replace with something highly available at a low cost. I researched and found StarWind Virtual SAN to be the best solution. We only had to purchase two new servers and no other storage or networking equipment. 

I'd recommend purchasing at least one year of support. It helps to have support on the initial configuration.

I rate StarWind Virtual SAN nine out of 10. 

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 needed a reliable shared storage solution for our VMware vSphere Essentials solution so we could implement vMotion and High Availability features. We decided to utilise a vSAN solution to reduce costs after looking at the price of external storage solutions.

In our environment, we have a 3-server VMware vSphere Essentials Plus solution that consists of 16 x HDD and 8 x SDD on-server storage. The solution is attached to 1GB network for production but we also have 10GB network connections available for direct-connectivity between servers.

The StarWind vSAN solution was implemented as a hyper-converged solution meaning that everything runs on the VMware vSphere solution. 

The StarWind vSAN solution was implemented according to our project plan with minimal outages to existing workloads. We have had no issues with the solution and it works very well with minimal administrative effort.

Recently, we had a memory failure that caused one of our VMware servers to crash. Due to the shared storage provided by the StarWind vSAN, all virtual machines on the failed server were able to failover to another server. Our helpdesk didn't receive any user complaints during the time that this happened. Once we resolved the issue, the shared storage resynched itself automatically.

We now have the ability to run critical workloads on the VMware infrastructure and have already proceeded to migrate active directory and SAP Business One workloads onto this platform.

We have found the solution surprisingly simple to use. The management console allows us to monitor the solution and we have configured email alerts to alert us about critical issues. These alerts have been proven to work in an actual failure scenario, for example, when we had a memory issue with one of our servers that caused the entire server to crash. The management console also allows us to monitor the solution performance and provides us with access to system logs.

The level of support provided by StarWind both during pre-sales and post-implementation has been excellent. The solution validation session with StarWind engineers was one of the best we have experienced and the vendor has also demonstrated a willingness to create a long-term relationship.

The solution is also quite flexible. As an example, other vSAN solutions that we looked at had more stringent requirements regarding mixed HDD/SSD storage which wouldn't have worked in our environment.

The main thing I would like to see improved is the level of documentation. I had some initial difficulties understanding the solution which could have been solved via additional documentation aimed at newcomers to their solution. Although the solution does admittedly have many moving parts, I found that internal knowledge transfer to my peers was not that difficult. Hence I'm convinced that better documentation would have helped.

I would also like to see a better system implemented for obtaining updates for solution components. The system at the moment works on a request/response model.

We've been using this solution since the start of this year (2021).

The solution has proven to be reliable with the need for minimal administrative effort. During an actual failure with memory on one of our servers, everything worked exactly as planned. We didn't even receive any issues/complaints from users via our helpdesk.

During the solution validation session with the vendor, we spoke about benchmarking the product. After performing the recommended tests, we were satisfied that the solution would meet our performance needs (both in terms of storage and networking).

We haven't had any issues with the solution so have had no need to request service/technical support. However, our experience during our project makes us believe we are in good hands if we ever need anything in the future.

We did not use a different solution. We initially implemented our VMware vSphere Essentials solution using direct storage and didn't have access to features such as vMotion and high availability. The StarWind vSAN solution allowed us to implement shared storage and pave the way to migrate critical workloads onto the VMware infrastructure.

We complicated the initial setup process a bit because we wanted to perform the design, implementation, and migration ourselves. This led to some difficulties in terms of initially understanding the solution. StarWind helped to fill in the gaps and our implementation and migration went completely to plan with little need for downtime. We were able to implement the solution on two servers while keeping our workloads running on the third server. We then migrated the workloads and built the remaining server.

We wanted to perform the design, implementation, and migration of the solution ourselves. We asked for help where needed during the design stage and found the vendor was very knowledgeable and could quickly answer all of our questions. We performed the implementation ourselves and then conducted a solution validation session with the vendor. During this session, the vendor validated that everything was configured according to their best practices and also performed some advanced tuning. We also had an open-ended discussion about how to operate the system. This solution validation session was one of the best I have ever experienced.

The level of support from the vendor throughout the entire project has been excellent and they have been more than willing to develop a long-term relationship. 

We were price-sensitive and wanted to minimize expenditure on additional hardware. The ability to utilize vMotion and High Availability features in our VMware infrastructure has already repaid the cost of the solution.

We found the StarWind vSAN solution was cost-effective compared to alternatives. You should talk to the vendor (or a good partner) about your needs because there are some differences in price based on your environment. We also recommend purchasing support.

In our case, we purchased StarWind vSAN for vSphere Essentials Edition which included 1 year of standard annual support and maintenance.

We initially looked at several external shared storage solutions and found them to be cost-prohibitive. We then evaluated vSAN solutions from HPE (this was discontinued) and the native solution from VMware. The native solution from VMware had fewer moving parts than the StarWind vSAN solution, but was more expensive and didn't provide the required level of flexibility that we needed regarding mixed HDD/SDD storage.

We strongly recommend that you develop a good relationship with the vendor (or a good partner). In our experience, they played a key role in the success of the solution.