StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

We have been using VMware vSphere as a fail-safe storage solution in a virtualization environment since 2009. Scaling options were initially two nodes. In industrial operation, there were solutions from three nodes. The storage is deployed on a 1Gb-10Gb ethernet network and HP servers with SAS and SSD drives.

To increase performance, caching technologies based on RAID controller functions were used, and later StarWind L2 Cache functionality was used. In 2020, it is planned to deploy storage that is based on new technologies: Intel Optane memory (DCPMM storage), VMware Vsphere Enterprise Plus 6.7, and 25Gb networks.

We hope that this solution will be able to provide maximum performance using StarWind VSAN for Vsphere.

This solution made it possible to make a quick start of the project on the transition from a physical environment to a virtual one in 2009 with minimal financial costs. It was possible to fulfill the requirements for reliable data storage, taking into account the transition to paperless document management with the use of digital signatures.

The scalability of the solution made it possible to increase the size of storage, without large additional costs for software. Within one series of servers, it was possible to repair equipment without stopping the use of storage in an industrial environment.

It is fast and easy to deploy to StarWind SAN for someone who is not even a professional.

The most valuable features are:

• Multipath I/O over iSCSI and Ethernet;
• Use of standard ethernet switches for storage networking;
• High availability-cluster (active-active), in a configuration of two or more nodes;
• When using new (warranty) servers, you can forget about the storage service for several years. The users will not even notice the failure of two servers out of three;
• Caching storage using RAM and SSD media;
• Fast synchronization in case of minor network failures.

For the StarWind VSA vSphere solution, I would like to see a simpler and automated virtual machine installation process in terms of network settings.

The areas where this solution should be improved are:

• Use as a node server without RAID volumes to ensure a longer period of use of the equipment and faster recovery of the complex;
• You need a separate server responsible for the main node, which is synchronized in case of failure of one of the nodes;
• Use SSD caching to write to industrial operation;
• Monitoring the status of server equipment. Programmatically bypasses the offline state of disks;
• To circumvent the speed restrictions of the network data when using virtual adapters VMware Vsphere VXNET3.

We have been using StarWind Virtual SAN for more than nine years.

The solution is stable in the case of failure of one node. When you exit more than one, sometimes there are problems choosing the main one.

Scaling to the size of the storage, thanks to the creation of a new target, does not affect the performance of the system as a whole.

Scaling by including new nodes-requires timing for synchronization.

Over a period of nine years, we applied three times to technical support. In all cases, the problem has been solved.

In parallel, the use of EMC ScaleIO. Unlike StarWind VSA, the license price depends on the amount of storage and only one copy of the data is used.

The initial installation in the version under Windows is very simple. In the virtual machine variant, you need to configure the network inside the virtual machines

Implementation was within the company.

The solution is cost-effective.

The cost of deployment is minimal, almost a product out of the box.

The cost takes into account the number of nodes, so the size of the storage is not important.

We evaluated free options including FreeNAS and Ceph. Our experience was that FreeNAS has low performance and reliability, and Ceph was complex to deploy.

This is an optimal product for large fault-tolerant solutions.

I started using this product when I had challenges with failover as one of the requirements for my client. I had to deploy the failover environment but the challenge was mirroring of the servers.

Now that I have implemented StarWind, everything is running perfectly.

The product I had bought for the client mirrors from one server to another. This means that an application installed on server A can still be accessed on server B. In my case, I had an access control system installed in one server but mirrored on the other server.

The most valuable features are easy installation, the appearance of the dashboard, the software runs as a native hypervisor component or in VM, and it does not require any deep storage and network administration or UNIX management skills.

A typical system administrator with minimal experience in Hyper-V, VMware, or Windows can do VSAN configuration and maintain VSAN operations.

This solution should be more self-sufficient, running without creating domains or failover clusters.

I have been using StarWind Virtual SAN for three months

The system is very stable.

Performance is uncompromised by the minimalistic hardware footprint, as well as the reduced deployment and management costs. StarWind VSAN brings to the table server-side flash and memory caches, log-structuring, and an absolutely minimalistic I/O path. The resulting performance is unmatched by either typical virtual appliances or physical shared storage.

I did not use another solution prior to this one.

The initial setup was easy and step-by-step, following the manuals.

Licensing is easy and the whole package is cost-effective.

I was directly recommended by the manufacturer.

For now, StarWind has satisfied my needs, as my requirement was to create a failover environment for the servers, also allowing the system to run with less administration. 

This solution provides us with high availability and failover with fault tolerance across two nodes. Implementing a highly available environment made way more sense to our company using StarWind’s Virtual SAN than other SAN or virtual SAN solutions we looked into over the past few months.

It allows me to configure high availability and failover clustering with some fault tolerance, at a cost point that doesn’t break the bank for a small business budget.

Doing failover testing, things have worked pretty flawlessly.

The support for two-node implementation was great.

I would like to see some additional, and possibly clearer, implementation videos with some slower and possibly more detailed descriptions of what the various steps of implementation are for someone who is unfamiliar with high availability and failover clustering in Windows.

I have been using StarWind Virtual SAN for two months.

This is a very stable solution.

Scalability is excellent.

The technical support team is very knowledgeable.

I did not use another solution prior to this one.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I was able to implement this configuration following a couple of online guides from StarWind and a couple of third-party articles. I also had the StarWind support team available to me if/when I had any issues.

We implement this solution in-house.

Within days, maybe weeks. How much is uptime worth?

There are two tiers of support and in my opinion, support is worth the cost.

I did not evaluate other products before choosing this one.

My advice for anybody who is considering this solution is to give it a try.

Implementing a UPS along with it is a good idea.

We tried StarWind because the other solutions we tried were not doing enough, and the performance of this solution was very good. The price is cheaper than other solutions. The physical server was very useful to set up a designer virtual server. 

This solution has given us real-time synchronization to make sure we don't have a single point of failure. Our company works seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day, and doesn't have the time to cut the production infrastructure.

The StarWind solution, in conjunction with our backup and disaster recovery strategy, provides improved performance and resilience. 

The most valuable feature of this solution is the support. They are excellent and you can learn a lot from the support team.

We have benefited a lot from its fast integration.

I wish there was online support because email return takes a long time and a faster solution should be found.

We have been using StarWind Virtual SAN for less than six months.

We have been using the product for a short time but have not seen any glitches.

The drives have been resized. This caused the loss of data and we noticed that you need a third-party vehicle. StarWind Training could do this. Scalability was very good in this respect.

Installation is not too complicated, but there should be more auxiliary resources. We used virtual and physical servers in the application. We have created a large number of virtual servers.

It took about three months from placing the order to fully up and running.

The StarWind team can do the installation together and help. You learn a lot from the support team. The installation takes a long time but the result is excellent.

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 technical advice and support is quite good.

The price is more affordable than other solutions. The product is excellent in value and benefit.

Overall, the Starwind software, support, and implementation was great. I would highly recommend it.

The solution provided me the ability to share storage between three physical VMware hosts in my environment. Hence, I have HA for my VMs to move across hosts once they are stored on the vSAN using VMotion. Moreover, I am able to utilize the storage I already have on servers and save the expense of purchasing a new storage appliance.

It has allowed me to effectively and confidently manage the maintenance of hosts where I can power off a host and have its VMs migrate to another one.

Also, in having the same storage shared between hosts I can have at least one host storing all of the VMs for my cluster.

The most valuable features of this solution are as follows:

• Consolidated storage among all three hosts
• Synchronization of data between hosts
• Using VMware VMotion
• Incorporating HA in VMware
• Management tools available to manage box
• Email alerts if there are any problems with managed storage
• Excellent support

The product can include a more simple way of synchronization after a forced shutdown as the current process has a few more steps to check that hosts have synchronized and this can be automated.

The service support should have in its basic plan a chat support 24x7 in addition to email.

Support for this solution is excellent.

We use this solution for a High-Availability cluster for Hyper-V on two nodes. We are running on Windows Server 2016.

StarWind Virtual SAN allowed us to increase the fault tolerance of our servers, which resulted in greater user loyalty.

In addition to the main functions of the software, I want to note the excellent work of technical support.

Perhaps the developer should refine the product management through PowerShell. It is not entirely clear and there quite a bit of documentation.

We have been using the product for a long time and have not seen any glitches.

We plan to implement this solution on seventy servers in our branches. StarWind Virtual SAN allows you to do this quickly and it is not expensive.

Technical support works very responsibly when we have questions. They connected remotely to our servers, performed an analysis and made detailed recommendations.

The initial installation was easy since there are very detailed instructions for almost every server configuration.

I managed to implement everything myself.

I think the software is very good.

At the moment, I have not encountered problems that I could not solve.

We were looking for a Microsoft Windows 2016 Hyper-V clustered solution that didn't require an external SAN network. Something that could utilize the local storage on each server, and also allowed us to configure the storage as we required it. We had looked at Storage Spaces Direct, but it was too restrictive in terms of configuration.

We are operational 24/7, every day of the year, so prior to having a clustered system, our users were faced with downtime anytime we applied patches or upgrades to the system.   With the StarWind VSAN software and Hyper-V Guest Cluster, we are able to create an environment where we can perform system updates without any downtime to the users.

We are not a very large organization and have a limited budget available for infrastructure.  

The most valuable feature for us is having the ability to configure our local storage using a limited number of disks and using the StarWind VSAN software to keep the cluster nodes in perfect sync.

The system performs as expected, but we're always looking for performance improvements regarding the best utilization of NVMe disks.

We have not experienced any failures or problems with the software.

It handles our environment very well and I don't see any reason why it wouldn't handle a much larger environment.

Their software support team had been very helpful in the initial setup of the system and also helped to reconfigure the system after we lost one node in the cluster.

Overall, their support has been excellent. They will stick with you until your issues are resolved!

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

Their technical support team was available to install the software both during the demo phase and when we installed the licensed version. It would have been complex for us, as it was our first cluster experience, but their support team made it look easy.

We evaluated Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, but it was too restrictive in terms of configuration.

So far, the software is doing everything we need.

We use VMware ESXi and needed a SAN replacement. Our old SAN is an HPE StoreVirtual VSA, but we are running out of space and it's getting old, so our support will be ending soon.

We will use the storage for our main cluster including OS and data drives. 

This has helped us gain a resilient and robust SAN for much less than anything else we could find. It also allows us to add storage without any license penalty. We will move from using six servers to three. We will also be able to stop using several stand-alone iSCSI devices. 

The best thing about the StarWind SAN is the HA we setup. We can lose a site or even two of our three, and we would lose no data and have no outage.

In testing, we found some features in the Linux appliance were missing. So, for full functionality, you will want to use the Windows version. Server-side snapshots are one thing the Linux appliance can't do yet. I hope the feature is added in the next update release.

Adding storage after its all setup is a little difficult.

So far, I have seen a service fail on one system during our test phase. Synchronization stopped and I had to start the service again. This was during a power outage but the server never went down. It has never happened again. 

The way we have this setup, scaling is difficult. We use three systems that are all synchronized and using MIMO iSCSI. Adding storage means adding it to all three, rather than just tossing another server at it. You can architect it differently, which would make scaling easier.

Technical support is great. They are very responsive, they always reply quickly, and seem very knowledgeable.

We used an HPE StoreVirtual VSA. Its support is ending and a replacement was going to cost too much for us.

The setup was easy, but afterward, support walked us through a bunch of settings that I would have missed.

The setup was all done by local IT staff with a final remote check with support, where they changed many advanced settings. 

It all cost about twenty-five percent less than the other solutions we looked at.

The basic setup is very easy and the cost is reasonable for support. 

We looked at Nimble, HPE VSA, and Tegile storage.

If you're at all interested then build a few systems using old hardware, or just spin up a few VMs. You get ninety percent of the features for free so there is no cost to try it out. The free version is great to use for labs or test environments.