StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

In our organization, we use this software for the first year. It is used to work with backup data storage. Still, it never lets us down, and we never lost our data.

StarWind made it quite easy to get started. The reliability of storing backup data and their processing speed has increased.

• Excellent performance
• High compatibility with software and hardware
• Fault tolerance
• It works well with Microsoft servers and Hyper-V.

The price is a bit more expensive than analogs.

Before, we used a cluster of two Windows servers with shared storage system on a single SAN. One of them was a working clustered SQL server with database mirroring. Every part of the system was redundant except for SAN.

It was almost satisfying.

Every cluster server system we know needs shared storage system. The cluster could be fully redundant, but this redundancy is worth nothing without a redundant storage system.

We had a single SAN system. As a single system, SAN was not redundant. But we needed a redundant storage system. We always were afraid that once upon a time our SAN will stop to work.

We, of course, had backups, but it was not enough.

What we needed was the system with no data loss in case of issues and with no interruption (or only several seconds of interruption) in data processing.

We were looking for a relatively simple and not very expensive solution.

Why have we selected StarWind among other storage solutions? Actually, I don’t know why. Simply, I was looking for a solution using Google. StarWind was the first system I found that gave me hope. When I did some tests with StarWind, I stopped looking for anything more.

Now we have a redundant storage system, so our cluster system is fully redundant. We now have two clusters of two nodes Windows Hyper-V servers with StarWind VSAN working as hosts.

• It was really very easy to implement, but without support, I couldn't optimize the system, and StarWind gave me technical support on a very good level.
• A good price is also considerable.

I would like to have an easy way of automatic notification about issues, even when I'm away. The system has the possibility to send e-mails, but only in an internal mail system. Simply there is no possiblity the e-mail sender to log on smtp server. Several years ago some smtp server didn't require user to log on. But now it's impossible to send e-mail without login on. So if I had my own company internal e-mail server I could use it. Otherwise not. It's not enough for me.

OK.

It's OK.

Support is on a high level.

I've used SAN hardware before with no redundancy.

It was easy. But to achieve optimal performance, I needed support.

In-house.

No idea.

No idea.

I didn't. StarWind was the first solution I found, and after the first tests, I stopped looking at other solutions.

No.

We are a gold mining partnership in Malartic, Québec where we are working 24 hours a day and seven days a week. About 1500 people are on our sites, 900 user computers and 100 different virtual servers run to maintain the production area. Single point of failure, no real-time synchronization with our disaster recovery site, and we are unable to make updates and upgrades without any cuts on the production infrastructure.

We can have two sites with real-time synchronization and no more single point of failure. Moreover, we can make updates and upgrades during any hour without cuts on the production infrastructure. All working perfectly, and we are able to make updates and upgrades without any cut on our current production where we work 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Real-time synchronization to make sure we don't have a single point of failure because our company works seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and doesn't have the time to cut the production infrastructure.

Central management webpage should be a must-have. We have three different sites where we use VSAN, and a single webpage to manage everything is necessary. For example a website where I can add each cluster and manage everything in one place rather by each physical server.

Started with a trial and then moved to the paid version. I have a 3 node cluster, (20) 1TB spinning drives, RAID 0, (3) 800 GB SSD drives, RAID 5 and 18GB RAM cache per node. Using 10G Infiniband for the iSCSI & SYNC network loops. This is to support local disks of VMware Horizon View full clone desktops.

• Very fast (replaced EMC SAN). Ultra reliable. I had many, many problems with one of the hosts (ended up being a motherboard) and I never lost a thing. Once you get used to it, it is fairly easy to manage, and the tech support is stellar.

• I would love to give it more RAM. Even marginal increases in RAM yield dramatic results. No more boot storms.

• Because of the way VMware has shuffled license "classes" over the years we got ripped off not getting the native VMware vSAN. It seems that maybe for our use case StarWind VSAN is even better and compared to re-negotiating VMware licenses cheaper.

Performance, reliability, I love the management console (once I got used to it). It works and it works well. Maybe not exactly a feature but tech support is beyond great. It is fantastic. The techs are supportive, understanding and really care about your implementation. I feel they really want to see you succeed. I'm so pleased with the tech support that I consider it better than any feature.

• The documentation is sub-par. The pre-sales documentation and information is sub-par.
• StarWind is not cheap. It is not hard to set up but not a cakewalk either. Having tech support set you up is certainly a good value. I would say the performance cost ratio is great, if not fantastic. Be sure to plan well and ask lots of questions.

• Next release needs to include complete documentation. Even if it's download only or even optional.

As I mentioned earlier in my review - one of my nodes had a sick motherboard. it would reboot for no good reason and the most inopportune times. With StarWind HA enabled it wouldn't miss a beat. VM's vMotioned across, storage was stable and when the host came back everything was always OK. Not the ideal way to test stability but it passed the test nonetheless.

I am planning on adding another node to the cluster in the coming weeks. It will be compute only and we will be adding (2) Infiniband switches to support that additional host. Note: only need a switch on the iSCSI side. The sync side will not be involved.

Seems that 2 node to 3 node is relatively easy. And 3 nodes or less and you don't need a 10G switch for your fabric. Gives you some options. Beyond that I'm not real sure.

Tech support is fantastic. As I mentioned I consider StarWind tech support one of the main features. And if the poo poo hits the fan they will back you up and get you going quickly.  I did have issues with quotations from customer support. But we worked it out in the end.  

We used a conventional hardware SAN. EMC VNXe. It was end of life and I even tried replacing it - EMC could not make it work right. It kept dropping connections. I kept running the old VNXe and discovered StarWind VSAN. Glad I did.

It was complex and had many steps and procedures but if you don't start with the FREE version they walk you through each step and procedure. I did it the hard way of course. 

I am the team. I did it in house. Then when we moved over to the paid version tech support helped me correct anything that was missing or wrong. 

I don't know.

Be very clear in what you want. I was misquoted what I needed and ended up having to go back to the boss two times. And was running crippled while doing that. It was not pretty. Make sure they know what you have and what you want. Especially sizes. --This really only applies if you do the FREE method first.  

I thought about another SAN but just didn't want to go down that road. The cost to upgrade my VMware licenses to get vSAN from them just didn't seem worth it. 

I think StarWind is a serious contendender. Especially if you don't have the right VMware licenses. But even then - I'm running a 3 node cluster and don't need a separate "witness" box. If you're an SMB and doing VMware you need to consider StarWind as your SAN solution. 

We're using it in our DR site for replicating virtual machines from a primary site. We needed a solution that took up less rack space, so we went with something that converged infrastructure. It's providing storage for our virtual platform.

It provides some fault-tolerance redundancy. Originally, we just had a single point of failure for storage. By having StarWind with a two-node device, we're able to replicate storage and then we can do updates, maintenance, and repairs, without having to bring down our entire storage platform.

It definitely saves us time. We are able to do a lot of our maintenance during production hours, rather than having to schedule after hours. We are able to do maintenance by bringing down one node at a time, rather than having to schedule a complete shutdown, and it's easier to schedule with Dell EMC or whoever else to make sure that they're available for any support during that process. By having StarWind, we're able to minimize maintenance impact and coordinating different support to be available around those timeframes.

It's helped maintain high-availability. Having a second unit replicating is providing us with the availability that we need to make sure our virtual machines have the storage connected they need to be operational.

We just use it for the storage replication. We haven't really utilized any of the other StarWind functionality in it.

It would be helpful to have a little more insight into what kind of performance the VSAN cluster is utilizing; something that would be more proactive on our side, versus their ProActive Support.

It has been rock-stable. No issues.

The scalability is there. We just have a two-node, so everything is connected together, not through a switch. I'm assuming that with the help of StarWind the scalability would be limitless.

We don't have any immediate plans to expand. If we did need to, it would be more of a compute expansion, so we would use the existing storage and use additional compute clusters.

We don't use the ProActive Support. We have the Standard level. It's very good. We haven't had any issues with it. They're very responsive and knowledgeable.

The only issues we had were during the implementation. We haven't had to reach out for any post-installation help.

We were using a single Dell EMC storage device. There was no software solution. We were looking to build out a DR site. We wanted to avoid having a single point of failure, like we did at our main location. If everything went well during our DR site rollout, we would configure a similar setup in our corporate location.

Surprisingly, the setup was straightforward. We were up and running with the VSAN within a few hours. Then we started doing some production virtual machines. We didn't really run into any issues with the VSAN part of it. The Windows updates caused an issue that we worked through. Support was very helpful with that.

It was a new deployment. There really wasn't any type of timeframe where we had to meet critical deadlines. We did have a plan to get our DR site up and running, and VSAN definitely made it a lot easier for us to do that.

The deployment required two of our IT staff and one person from StarWind.

It was just our internal IT and StarWind Support.

It has definitely made things a lot easier to deploy. Our biggest issue was not being tied to a hardware vendor, so if we decide to switch from EMC Dell to HPE or Supermicro, we can continue to use the StarWind solution across the different hardware brands. That's especially important with drive prices changing. We're able to use commodity drives instead of hardware-branded drives. That's an area where there have been some cost savings.

Also, the ability to be hardware agnostic means we're able to shop across vendors for better pricing.

It's priced fairly. It was definitely cheaper than the competition. The licensing terms are straightforward and reasonable.

We looked into Tegile and Tintri, about two years prior. We've also looked at some Dell EMC solutions. We were able to go with any hardware vendor we wanted to and the reviews for the software solution showed that it was highly recommended.

Utilize the StarWind installation team to get you up and running. They do everything from start to finish and even make sure that your production workload is running sufficiently.

We haven't used the Log-structured Write Cache feature or the NVMe over Fabrics target. Right now, our solution is all solid-state disk.

In terms of maintenance, a lot of it is scripted or managed automatically. It just takes one person to periodically check in to see if it's performing well and if there are any errors. That person is a systems administrator.

I would give StarWind VSAN a nine out of ten. They have good support. It's reasonably priced. It gives you the ability to scale. It offers good storage availability.

We have two StarWind VSAN nodes installed in a small company. We're mirroring these nodes where all services are installed.

StarWind Virtual SAN has made it easy to work with backups and save server data by mirroring two servers.

We found the most valuable features to be: 

• Easy installation,
• Easy to work with,
• Very good support.

• We would like the price to be lower. 
• In the next releases, we would like a new improved interface. 

We use StarWind for multiple 2-node hyperconverged Hyper-V Windows clusters in our datacenter environment.

It gave us a new template for upgrading aging infrastructure sans expensive enterprise storage hardware.

Ease of installation, configuration, and management. It literally took us less than two hours to have a fully functional 2-node cluster.

There is a limit on HA storage for standard and professional versions which is too low to be very useful for any but the smallest of SMBs or startups. Most SMBs we work with have more than 50TB of data, so the 4TB and 8TB limits are nothing more than a sales gimmick. The enterprise-level supports unlimited HA storage but starts competing with Windows Server (S2D) at the price point. The hardware requirement for S2D, however, puts the Windows HCI out of reach for most SMBs.

We needed to consolidate our physical servers, so we went with the StarWind cluster to virtualize our servers.

We went down from eight discrete servers to two, so it's saving us money and electricity in cooling.

It's definitely saving us a bunch of time as far as server maintenance is concerned, because it's all virtualized. I would guess it saves us a good 20 to 30 hours a year, just in maintenance. 

We've also seen some performance gains over accessing the discrete servers, approximately five to ten percent faster access times to data. It has helped to maintain high-performance and data high-availability on minimalistic resources by doing load-balancing and resource-sharing seamlessly. The user never sees any downtime, any performance issues. It's just all done very well behind the scenes.

There's also a peace of mind aspect, knowing that we have failover now. Before, if a server went down, it could take days to get things back up and running, whereas now, if a VM fails, it's just minutes to get it back up and running.

One of the most valuable features is the way it sets up the virtual SAN, because we don't have to buy a separate appliance for storage. It uses the existing storage on the servers, which is definitely a cost savings for us.

The documentation could be a little more concise, but, for the most part, it just works.

It's a very stable platform. The only way you can really break it is if you do something that you shouldn't, like shut a server, shut one of the nodes down without moving your VMs to the other node first.

As far as scalability goes, especially with adding storage, it's dirt-simple. It's so easy to do. I'm very impressed with that aspect of it.

StarWind Proactive Support is fairly responsive. They definitely go above and beyond to address the issues, when there are issues. We had a minor crisis a few months back, and they spent hours on the phone with me over a weekend to get our servers back up and running. The quality of service is really good.

If I were to say anything - not so much critical - there is a language barrier to overcome, but that's a minor issue. It doesn't affect their knowledge, ability, or willingness to help. It's just sometimes a little difficult to communicate adequately.

We did not have a previous solution. We went with it for virtualization, and we chose StarWind because it was a software-only solution and we could use off-the-shelf hardware. Everybody else that I looked at was basically selling appliances. They were just outside of our budget.

The initial setup was a little complex, just to get the cluster configured, the iSCSI, etc. That was a little bit confusing because I had conflicting documentation.

Overall, our deployment took about three weeks. Our implementation strategy was to get the StarWind cluster built, working, and tested before virtualizing our servers, and then migrating them a couple at a time.

We set it up ourselves.

Their pricing seems pretty good, and their licensing structure is pretty straightforward.

We looked into Nutanix, as well as Red Hat's solution, but StarWind seemed to be the best setup for us, the best fit for our environment.

Definitely get a trial license. I'm pretty sure they still have a free version that you can download. Set it up in a sandbox and see if it makes sense for your environment. The great thing about it is it is all Microsoft-based, so if you're familiar with Hyper-V, then it's really pretty simple.

In terms of our users, it's pretty much just me managing it. It's running our production environment. Ideally, I'd like to add our third node this year so that I have extra available overhead so that we can be more proactive with maintenance, etc.

I would rate StarWind at eight out of ten. There's always room for improvement.