StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

We had a need for some high speed I/O in our data center to run some specific high demand virtual machines. We currently have an older SAN unit, but it's slow, since it uses mechanical drives. Therefore, we decided to obtain a bunch of Intel SSDs and attach them directly to the two virtualized hosts, then I used StarWind virtual machines as the controllers to tie them together into a VSAN. After that, I moved the VMs over. Once everything was hooked up and talking to each other, it works fine.

It is more of a perceptual thing with the users. The system that we moved onto it is our ERP system, which handles everything. It handles our orders, workflow, and shop work orders. It was by far the slowest, clunkiest system that we have here. When we put it together the StarWind Virtual SAN, and we moved it onto the flash drives, everything seemed to run a lot faster. I went from a drive system that peaked out at 2000 IOPS to a system that could now do over 200,000 IOPS. It was absolutely a night and day difference. Everything is just snappier. When you open windows, they instantly pop up. It is not sitting there, twiddling its thumbs, waiting for stuff to come up, which is huge. It seems user systems and interfaces have gotten so slow over the last 10 to 15 years. When things happen fast and snappy, it is a huge bonus in the user's eyes.

The software just works. That is what I like about good IT software. I rarely, if ever, have to go into the StarWind servers. I go in every couple weeks just to check if there are any Windows updates for it. However, for the most part, it is all hands off. It just works. It just does its job. I don't have to mess with it. I don't have to monkey with it or do anything. I am going into our backup system more often than I am our VSAN controllers. I have to go into the email on Office 365 to change things around (or figure out why somebody lost emails) more often than I have to worry about StarWind. 

In the IT world, anything you can just let run is amazing.

• The control panel is nice. It gives you a lot of good feedback as to the status and health of the VSAN. 
• The synchronization is very nice. 
• I like its flexibility. It is more flexible than most VSAN solutions that I have seen. For example, you can run it across two hosts. You don't need a third host observing it.

For improvement, I would like to see how the software determines which networks to use for which purpose. It seems like the naming terminology changes a bit from here to there. When I access the console on the computer, where is it going in through:

• The computer's connections?
• The heartbeat connection?
• The iSCSI connection?

It is a little odd as far as making sure those networks are isolated just for their function.

On the console, there is no good way to see how all the networks are allocated. Other than that, once they are set up and allocated, everything seems to run nicely. I just don't want, e.g., my heartbeat network bleeding into other things, like the iSCSI.

For this market, in general, it would be nice if I could go to a website where they had all the pricing listed comparatively, then maybe I could shop around.

It just works. I don't even know if there is a new version of it out there. I haven't checked if there's a new version, though I should probably upgrade it. Now, that I have the system sort of pulled apart, I am in the middle of upgrading everything. I moved our ERP system back on to our old SANs for a while. Now, the whole StarWind array is cleared off to be pulled apart and have new drives put in, I should probably look at whether it is all at the latest version.

It has good scalability. You can add in almost anything that you want. The only oddball thing is with the three-tiered licensing. If you are looking to do anything highly scalable, such as replace your SAN, which is what we are doing now, you might as well go straight for the enterprise version. Just save yourself the headache of anything else. However, if you have a small project, and only need a couple VMs on some high speed stuff, you can use the free version or standard version. The standard version has the support, which if you are in corporate IT, it would be foolish not to get it.

The times that I have called the StarWind ProActive Support, they were immediate and right there. I have had no issues with their support. When I call them, I am talking with somebody in very little time, and the people that I have talked to have all been incredibly knowledgeable. They knew exactly what was going on.

The only issue that I had was, at one point, we had a power failure which took out our main power system. The battery system powering our whole data center and the main switch (or something) blew out, so the whole thing wasn't delivering any power, even though we had it coming out from the wall. It took down all our hosts, just dirty, with everything running. When we brought everything back up, we had a hard time getting the VSAN to reinitialize properly. So, I gave the support a call. They went through it, and we found because it went down like that, we had to step everything and ensure the first one comes up, then the second one, then sit and synchronize them. Afterwards, we sent things out for it to rescan the array, then once it got up and running, everything was fine again. However, that was the only time that I was on the phone's screaming, "Help!"

This is our first VSAN solution.

It was a little bit complex with VMware, because it seems like they are a little more used to Windows Hyper-V.

The initial setup didn't take long. The only hang up was I didn't have some of the networking in place. I had to get a pair of ten gigabit network cards to run between the two servers for iSCSI links and the synchronization (the heartbeat). Once I got those in place and plugged together, then it was pretty quick and easy. 

Once the solution was up and running, it was pretty good. There were some extra scripts that we had to run on our end. 

I do all the maintenance myself. Now that it is deployed, maintenance is approximately once every two weeks. It is not even StarWind, it is checking on the Windows machine that it's running on. 

Recently, we have been in the middle of a project to completely retire our mechanical SAN and replace all those drives, each of which are about a quarter terabyte. We want to replace them all with four terabyte drives (SSDs), then move everything to a giant StarWind Virtual SAN controlling it.

I did the deployment mostly myself. However, with the purchase, I was able to receive some help. Therefore, I brought StarWind in just to check things over, ensuring everything was good. That is when we tweaked the scripts a bit, so if the servers were to reboot, it would tell the machines to rescan for the iSCSI connection once it came up.

As for implementation strategy, I had always kept StarWind in the back of my head in case I had a need to use it. When we had a need, I decided to make the suggestion. I went onto Spiceworks, where I knew some people there from StarWind. While I don't know if they are full representatives, they definitely spoke highly of it. So, I hit them up, saying, "I'm looking to do this. Is this thing possible?" 

One of the guys from Spiceworks put me in contact with a StarWind sales rep. When I described my project to them, he said, "Yes, it's easily done. All you have to do is this and that." He pointed me to some documents on their network to read through, and it was simple from that point. It's like, "I could do that, and I could probably do this all myself."

I got the free version at first. Then, I got the thing up and running, for the most part, without any help, aside from the reboot scripts. 

I tested it on a couple like dummy VMs, checking what happens if I reboot a machine. Everything worked beautifully. It was totally transparent. I never lost my network connection nor storage. So, I saw it was a win. Later on, I got the actual licensing, and this is when the guy came in to check over my installation, etc. Everything worked at that point and has been running ever since. That is when I moved the ERP system over on one weekend and have never really looked back.

This solution helped maintain high performance and data high availability on minimalistic resources. For example, with our ERP system, we went from an old spinning rust array to a all-flash array. Because StarWind allows that and for it to be a VSAN for high availability, if I lose a host, the ERP system will still continue to run. If I have to put a host into maintenance mode, and move all of its processing to the another, I can do that because it is transparent. StarWind doesn't care. When I get the host powered back up, the array resynchronizes, and everything runs as normal. So, it works, as far as high availability. Like any other good system, it is transparent. Behind the scenes, it does what it's supposed to do.

I was so impressed by what I saw, because at first, you set it up for free. I set it up for free to see how it worked, because I was losing nothing but time. After I set it up, and everything worked, I was like, "Okay, I don't need anything else for this. Let's get the licensing and go."

The pricing is more than reasonable.

The licensing is a bit weird. If you license the standard version of StarWind, it allows you four terabytes. Then, they have a pro version, but with the pro version, the only difference is it doubles the terabytes to eight. However, that is just one drive size upwards in an array. You are first going from two terabyte drives to four terabyte drives, then you will soon be going to eight terabyte drives and upwards, for SSDs which are coming out.

Therefore, it is weird that they have the middle tier in there, their pro tier. Then, they have their enterprise, which is unlimited. I can see their licensing better structured if their lower tier either had less drive space or the middle tier had more, by maybe a factor of four rather than doubling it. 

From a sales and marketing point of view, the difference between going from pro to unlimited is unclear. It seems like, "Why not just go unlimited? Why even have the middle tier there?"

I did explore VMware's native VSAN solution. However, its biggest limitation is it requires three nodes. We have two very heavy duty host servers and getting a third one would have been costly. Each server is roughly around $25,000 USD. Therefore, getting a third one, so we could run a VSAN using VMware, was a bit prohibitive. This is why I went to StarWind in the first place.

Go for it. Just set it up and follow the instructions. Start with the free version. Make a test bed and play around with it. Then, see how you like it and how it works. because it works. There is nothing hard about it. Once you get it working and understand how the system is implemented in your data center, then everything else is dotting i's and crossing t's. You can get the official licensing for the support or any larger array sizes that you may need. You can allocate and tell it to transfer things as you normally would, as it is a very impressive system. It is probably one of the things that I have been happiest about in my environment.

The Log-structured Write Cache feature works works transparently, so I haven't really noticed it. I assume it helps with application resiliency and performance since it is working.

NVMe over Fabrics would definitely be incredibly fast. It is something that I don't have the architecture to even consider here, but it does sound very cool and fast. I have worked with NVMe drives and SSD systems, and the interface is much wider and faster than your typical, older systems, like SATA and SAS, which were meant for mechanical systems. It would be very impressive, and I would like to get a chance to work with something like that to see its performance.

I was not even aware that there was a way to integrate the solution with server OS native management tools, like vCenter. We are using the vCenter appliance, which is Linux based. It doesn't seem to integrate things too well into it, even though it is the recommended way that they have us doing it. If there is some plugin, or something for it to directly integrate, I would be totally up for that.

We use it for data redundancy and failover.

Instead of having to maintain two completely separate systems:

1. The cluster where all the data processing is happening.
2. Maintaining the SAN clustering.

Now, we can do everything in one location, because the storage and processing are all happening on the same cluster. It has reduced our overall maintenance and overhead by having to only maintain physical boxes for one cluster instead of having to manage physical boxes for two clusters. 

It also has reduced the amount of switching, network connections, etc., because the converged StarWind Virtual SAN allows us to connect high-speed network interfaces between different boxes instead of having to connect SANs via the network, then connect those two clusters together.

StarWind is more cost effective because it is converged storage. Instead of having to pay for a full-blown SAN, as we did in the past, and having to maintain that SAN as a separate cluster, we now can use local storage on each individual node. So, it reduces the cost and overhead drastically.

NVMe is sort of the future, because it's so fast. In our next round, we will use NVMe drives exclusively for our main storage. Then, we will probably use two and a half inch SSDs for our nearline. 

The most valuable feature is the ability to lose a node and not have my systems go down.

If there are domain controllers inside the cluster, there needs to be some sort of logic allowing them to boot independently so all the rest of the domain clients can gain the authority they need to come online. We made that mistake at first. We have since moved one of our domain controllers out of the cluster, so everything can obtain whatever authentication it needs on the initial boot. Ultimately, Microsoft says they support it, but we would like to see all of our domain controllers running within the cluster, too. We don't want to have additional hardware just to run domain controllers.

The stability is excellent. I have had a couple of stability problems, but they weren't related to StarWind. They were related to some power problems that we had in the data center. Once we had those sorted out, everything has been smooth as glass. I did follow their advice in getting network interface cards, and we put in some very fast 40GB network cards. This has helped us a bit because everything happens very quickly, and StarWind support even helped me on the management interface to team the 10GB connections. So, the stability has been phenomenal.

Scalability has been very easy, so far. We have had to resize some of the drives. The most complex thing which we have had to deal with was that one of the servers needed more than two terabytes of space, and it was an MBR formatted drive. I found some tools that allowed me to convert from MBR to GPT without having to reformat the drive or lose data. Then, we were able to expand that, too. Those are normal Windows management tasks, but we were able to do them within the StarWind environment without having to use anything besides one third-party tool for the GPT conversion. That part of the scalability has been excellent because we can just allocate disk space wherever we need it. 

Overall, we have about 200 users. For simultaneous users, who are on all the time during business hours, it is probably closer to 60 or 70.

When I've had a problem, I have had someone respond almost immediately. If not picking up the phone and helping me right then and there, it's within approximately 30 minutes. They have been able to help me with every single type of problem that I have had. They have also helped me with entirely different stuff in the server environment, which has helped me tremendously. I pay for that extra support, and I'll upgrade it each time because it's so helpful.

I recently ran into a problem where all my user profile disks were full, and it was not clear to me how to enlarge that user profile disk. Their support person, Artem, just jumped in with me, and within ten minutes, he'd provided me everything I needed for the PowerShell commands. He enlarged the ones that he could. For the ones that were in use, he showed me how to do it. So, when they were no longer in use, I went ahead and enlarged them. Then, I mounted each of them and expanded them to use the space. If I hadn't had him, I'd have had three users who were down today since this just happened yesterday. 

Today, all three of them are fully functional. If I hadn't have had that quick response and willingness to help, it would have created some headaches. Instead, their support works really well. I'm very pleased with the StarWind technical support. It is excellent. I have the Premium support. I have never worked with a company who is as responsive and helpful with everything I run into.

Knowing that I can call the technical support and get a senior level technician if I need it any time is a huge thing. Because if I have to wait until business hours to get a consultant, I have to make an arrangement in the schedule with them, and if it's after hours, you will lose 24 to 36 hours in there. With Starwind, I can get help almost immediately, so its a no-brainer.

I would do the ProActive, except that I have a contract that does not allow me to have third-party monitoring installed on any of our servers. 

The Premium support (or Pro support), which is what I have, is worth every dollar. The ProActive support has the same people running it, so I am sure it is good, too. Unfortunately, I can't take advantage of it because of the contractual obligations that I have.

Our SDS software before StarWind was a SAN. It wasn't converged storage. It was a full-blown, normal SAN configuration.

We switched to StarWind because we were upgrading everything all at one. We ran into budget constraints which would make building a new SAN almost impractical, if not impossible, to fit it into the budget. Secondarily, the SAN required a lot of maintenance, and we were looking for a less expensive solution. We also wanted something that would not require so much technician time.

Previously, we had two full-time people taking care of the SAN, cluster, etc. Now, we only have one. So, StarWind cut our technical labor force in half (cutting this cost in half), and we didn't lay anybody off. We were able to nicely redeploy resources.

The initial setup is mildly complex to fairly complex.

For our implementation strategy, we virtualized some of the physical servers, and we already had several virtualized machines. Therefore, as soon as the StarWind environment was set up, I just imported the virtual machines, bringing them up and online. We did a few network configuration tasks to make sure everything worked, then we were good to go.

It only takes me to maintain it once it is up and running. I have a backup person who handles stuff if I go on vacation (or whatever), but it only takes one person to maintain everything.

The StarWind support team goes through it and does the installation with you. It was super easy for me. I learned a lot in the process, but they set it up. The deployment took three hours from beginning to end with just the StarWind support and me.

This solution has helped maintain high performance and data high availability on minimalistic resources. Even though we got rid of our SAN, we are still getting higher performance for significantly less outlay, dollar-wise.

It is more efficient on the management side. 

The Log-structured Write Cache (LWC) feature speeds things up for us. Our performance is better than it was on the SAN. However, I don't know if it's directly related to the LWC or whether there is lower latency between the onboard storage and what was the SAN. I'm sure that it helps performance, but I wouldn't know a metric to measure it, specifically.

With the support that I receive from StarWind, it has saved me at least two full-blown, paid Microsoft tickets. For each of Microsoft ticket, we pay about $600 USD a piece for it. While this is not a big cost, it eliminated a headache for us. In addition, we saved on technical consultant costs.

For pricing, you have two things that come into it: 

1. The cost of the hardware.
2. The software licensing pricing. 

When we did all the analysis for StarWind, it was approximately 20 percent less than any of the other solutions that we looked at. This wasn't our only criteria, as you don't want to buy the cheapest thing, then find out you have a problem. Also, StarWind isn't the cheapest solution out there, but it is certainly cost-effective relative to the major players. I haven't seen any difference in quality overall. StarWind works as well as any of the major players would have for us.

The scalability limitation for us is its licensing. At some point in the fairly near future, we will probably have to upgrade our license so we can store eight terabytes instead of four. We are currently at four terabytes, but we're starting to knock on the door of that capacity. Going forward, we will probably pay for a license upgrade, then we can add more capacity. We just haven't done it yet.

We looked at StarWind Virtual SAN vs VMware vSAN and StarWind Virtual SAN vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct.

With converged storage, we studied a lot of solutions and went into them all. We looked at Microsoft's solution for converged storage along with some of the other ones. StarWind had better pricing and deployment strategy. It also didn't have as many hardware requirements, which allowed us to spend some extra money on things that we really wanted, like 40GB network cards.

We read everything we could find when evaluating the solution. When you are doing something this critical with so many users who will be working on it all the time, you can't afford to tinker with it. We not only went and read all the reviews on StarWind, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, and VMware vSAN, but we put them in some trials and tested everything on our test network. StarWind was the one that we ultimately decided would fulfill our requirements. Happily, it has lived up to our expectations.

Of course, the support was a huge bonus. You don't know that until after you have put your money in, but once we had purchased it, we found out how good the support was all the way around.

We have plans to increase the usage in the future. As we need data processing capability, we will add more nodes. As we need more storage, we will obviously upgrade the storage licenses. We will need more storage before we need more nodes because we are only using a fraction of our total processing power at this point, but we are slowly starting to fill up on disk space. The time frame for upgrading our disk space will probably be in six to eight months.

We run everything from accounting, databases, email VMs, SQL Servers, etc. on it, anything that someone would expect on an enterprise environment.

We are in the process of installing OS native management tools now. It should make things easier. The Admin Center looks like a good tool.

Follow their recommendations on hardware configurations. The faster you can put in the components, the better the experience will be.

I always recommend everybody do their own research. If you do your research, you will find out that cost-wise StarWind will be more competitive. In terms of form and function, from personal experience, their converged storage system works very well and is extremely reliable. What is most important to a lot of consumers is how good the support is behind the product. While you can research it, you never know until you spend your money. Experientially, their support is some of the best I've ever worked with, even though they are based outside of the US. You're not dealing with Indian accents. They speak very clear English, and there are not the communication issues that you have with non-Western countries.

StarWind Virtual SAN, along with two Fujitsu Primergy servers, forms the backbone of our hyper-converged solution. This storage, network, and compute solution is used for our Hyper-V cluster. From this cluster, we run all of our virtual servers, which in turn run our business-critical infrastructure. This includes domain controllers, file servers, database servers, application servers, and everything to support it.

We once operated with a physical SAN, several servers, along with the networking equipment and the required fiber-channel infrastructure.

StarWind Virtual SAN allowed us to eliminate the need for any physical SANs. We also got rid of the expensive fiber-channel equipment. Now, we just have two servers that form the StarWind nodes and that's it!

All of our storage, networking that includes 1GB and 10GB Ethernet, and compute power are all housed in the StarWind Virtual SAN solution. 

It's simple and very reliable.

The most valuable feature is the reliable storage replication, which enables me to create a robust infrastructure to run our business.

Presenting Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs) from StarWind Virtual SAN to Hyper-V simplifies my storage management and reduces costs vs having a physical SAN.  

The solution has matured and I have no points for improvement.  

We have had StarWind Virtual SAN for nearly nine years.

I've now been using StarWind Virtual SAN for over nine years. While I have had underlying hardware go bad during this time, the Virtual SAN never failed. I have replaced an entire hardware node with zero downtime. It's rock solid.  

Prior to adopting StarWind Virtual SAN, I had multiple Dell Equallogic SAN devices.  When it was time to replace the Equallogic with new hardware, the costs were unjustifiable after learning about and evaluating StarWind Virtual SAN.  

Communicate with StarWind, they will work with you and your team to size a solution that works for you.  

Our organization was using physical storage platforms where we were facing slowness issues, and the cost of a conventional platform was high. 

We heard about the solution from one of our partners, and we got a demo of the product. 

The core features of the product resolved our issues, like high availability and integration of the solution with the virtual platforms. 

The StarWind Virtual SAN solution is cheap compared to conventional physical storage platforms. StarWind Virtual SAN is a good product when it comes to virtualization.

StarWind Virtual SAN helps us to improve our organization as most of our infrastructure is on the virtualization platform. 

StarWind Virtual SAN helped us in the integration with the virtualization platforms. By using common X86 servers instead of pricey proprietary hardware, StarWind Virtual SAN lowers the cost of storage infrastructure.

It is straightforward to configure, monitor, and administer the storage infrastructure with StarWind Virtual SAN's intuitive administration interface.

When their data storage requirements increase, enterprises may quickly enhance storage capacity with the help of StarWind Virtual SAN without having to pay additional fees for specialized storage gear.

There are different features that helped our organization as compared to conventional storage platforms. These include:

Scalability. Without the need for any downtime, enterprises can simply grow their storage infrastructure using StarWind Virtual SAN by adding new servers or disks to the current infrastructure.

Flexibility. A variety of deployment options, including hyper-converged infrastructure, two-node cluster configurations, and conventional SAN designs, are supported by StarWind Virtual SAN.

Performance. The usage of RAM and SSD caching, as well as the capability to offload storage traffic from the network using RDMA technology, allow StarWind Virtual SAN to operate at a high-performance level.

Cost-effectiveness. By using common X86 servers instead of pricey proprietary hardware, StarWind Virtual SAN lowers the cost of storage infrastructure.

Usefulness. StarWind Virtual SAN offers a straightforward and user-friendly administration interface that makes it simple to set up, keep track of, and administer the storage infrastructure.

The interface of the management console of the StarWind Virtual SAN is complex, and it's difficult for the novice user to interact with the management having less knowledge or training in the product. 

The troubleshooting guide of the product is also for the technical resources. 

The product needs to improve its features in terms of customer support and the management interface. The improvements in the management interface for the product help the user to work with the storage node having less knowledge or interaction with the product.

I have been using the StarWind Virtual SAN solution for the last six months.

Previously, we were using a conventional storage platform, which was costly and not supporting many features. Now, we are using StarWind Virtual SAN, which is more reliable and has many features. 

It works by mirroring data between servers, creating a fault-tolerant storage infrastructure. StarWind Virtual SAN is a cost-effective solution as it uses commodity hardware, such as off-the-shelf servers and disks. This reduces the cost of storage hardware and maintenance. 

We are very satisfied with this product so far.

StarWind Virtual SAN provides a HA feature which actually immediately copies data to the second node over the network and ensures instant failover for our critical applications. 

StarWind Virtual SAN is a software-defined storage solution that helps organizations to reduce costs, improve performance, and increase availability. It works by mirroring data between servers, creating a fault-tolerant storage infrastructure.

StarWind Virtual SAN can improve an organization's storage infrastructure by providing high availability, scalability, cost-effectiveness, performance, and ease of use.

The HA feature is the most valuable to us. Moreover, support services are very satisfactory.  

StarWind Virtual SAN provides high-performance storage by leveraging the resources of multiple servers. 

This improves application performance and reduces latency. 

StarWind Virtual SAN provides the ability to scale out storage infrastructure as our needs grow. By adding more servers, we can increase storage capacity. StarWind Virtual SAN ensures that data is always available by replicating it between multiple servers. This means that if one server fails, data can still be accessed from another server. 

The documentation of StarWind Virtual SAN could be improved to provide more detailed and comprehensive information about the product's features, functionalities, and best practices. 

StarWind Virtual SAN could benefit from better integration with other tools and technologies, such as backup and disaster recovery solutions.  

StarWind Virtual SAN could benefit from better integration with other tools and technologies, such as backup and disaster recovery solutions. 

These are some areas where the product or service could potentially be improved

I've used the solution for one year.

This tool allows my team to be able to deploy NAS solutions in real-time, virtually, so that we can test those solutions quickly and easily before they are needed to be deployed in the real world.  

The user interface for this application is amazing. It's very easy to learn from the beginning and it has a great introductory period that allows you to get used to everything that the software has to offer. 

I can also say that another big advantage of this application is the amazing customer support that they offer. They are able to answer your questions very quickly, and they are always available at the most important times.

The solution has a great hypervisor storage platform. This saves the costs of having to deploy a physical environment to test. It also allows my team to work from anywhere at any time, which is important in the current times when remote work is vital to the proper workflow at our company.

Having large support for filesystems is important to our organization, as we sometimes use proprietary filesystems like WekaFS for some of the tasks, especially in the era of Exascale computing. Having support for additional features like importing filesystems and being able to do some testing with them is important. Besides not being able to use any filesystem, I do not have any additional cons. 

I've used the solution for one year.

Our primary use case for StarWind vSAN has been to reinforce networks for our clients in a two-node Hyper V setup by utilizing the Hyperconverged configuration. This enables us to create a failover cluster for a cheaper cost than purchasing a physical SAN (plus adds more redundancy as you technically get two vSANs as each host becomes a vSAN). The Failover Cluster then allows us to live-migrate Virtual Machines when required, for example, for maintenance, or in the event that we suffer hardware failure on one of the hosts.

It enables us to provide more solution options for our clients, with the reassurance that, when implemented, they will be efficient and stable. Unfortunately, due to the cost of it and the size of our clients, we find that we can't always use it. However, it's an option that we know is always available and one that we'd leap to recommend if the scenario can fit it. Personally, it's something I'd always want to implement, as, without it, most clients with two Hyper V hosts can only replicate virtual machines and not live migrate. 

The extra redundancy in a two-node hyper-converged setup has been the most valuable feature. If we wanted this with an actual SAN, we'd need to purchase not only one but two SANs and enable replication between the two. With StarWind, you get the vSAN replicated between the two hosts out of the box. The vSAN also offers fine-tuning options for the replication between these hosts. For example, if there was a host failure and we were to run off one for a period of time, once the secondary host is recovered, it will need to resync with the one that stayed up so that the data is up to date. You can choose whether to prioritize the replication speed or performance of the virtual machines. 

For me, the product could be improved by it being made cheaper. We can't use this as an option for some of our smaller clients. Being able to replicate RAM between the hosts would be a nice feature so that VMs could be live-migrated fully in the event of a full host failure. Currently, the vSAN offers the ability to live-migrate the virtual machine as the VHD is on shared storage, however, if the virtual machine were to be rebooted, it would lose the running configuration (e.g. memory, etc). If this could also be live-migrated, that would be gold. 

I've used the solution for two years.

We didn't have another solution previously. This was our first vSAN experience.

I tend to deal with the technical side more and stay away from the pricing.

I can't recall seeing anything else that caught my eye.

Overall, I really enjoy this product. It's easy to use and support is fantastic.