StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

The primary use case is backup storage for our VM servers. 

Our day-to-day servers are all on StarWind and our backups went from nightly to every minute. That improves disaster recovery time from hours to minutes.

In addition, it has helped us to maintain high performance and data high availability on minimalistic resources. We haven't bought any hardware, it was all stuff we already had. We just reconfigured it and got new features. In terms of costs, it has reduced what we would have had to pay. We have saved approximately 80 percent. We would have had to buy a $100,000 server. Instead, we ended up with a $20,000 server and a little bit of software.

I like the asynchronous replication and failover features. They are what I'm primarily using it for. The asynchronous replication is helpful because our servers are backed up continuously throughout the day. If anything goes wrong we just fail over immediately. That is a very nice feature to have.

In addition, we have it integrated with vCenter which makes the failover automatic. It's basically set-it-and-forget-it.

I'm sure it needs bug fixes, and there are new features coming down the pipe, but it works great.

It's been completely stable for us. There were some bugs initially which slowed us down, but those were related to VMware and not StarWind.

You can resize things on the fly as needed, add more storage as needed. Since it's all on Windows, you can expand the disk as much as needed and as quickly as possible.

Their support has been excellent. They will walk you through every step of the way and help you with anything you need. They're great.

We were using direct-attached for the primary servers and FreeNAS for the backups. We switched for the real-time replication and the failover.

The initial setup was straightforward but it was also complex. There were a bunch of steps, but it was all very well documented and very well laid out. You follow steps and you end up with a working system at the end.

It took me a couple weeks, but that was because I had other things going on and a rather complex system. But if you just wanted the basics, you could probably get it set up in a couple of hours.

As part of my implementation strategy, I first set it up on three-way replication servers and after that was done, put it into production.

The pricing is excellent. It will run on anything. You don't have to buy a $100,000 server, with hardware you don't need. You just pay for the license and you're good to go.

We didn't evaluate any other vendors. In our price range, this was the only vendor.

The pricing is based on the amount of storage, so you should evaluate how much storage you're going to need for your license. I believe there's an unlimited tier which is also very reasonable.

In our organization, it's the backing data-store for the entire company, which is about 85 users. Programmers and management people make up our studio. For deployment and maintenance, it's just me with the support team at StarWind.

We don't have plans to increase usage. We're a small studio and we're not going to get bigger.

I give StarWind a ten out of ten. They have great support, a great product, it's simple and easy to use, and has a great price.

StarWind is the highly redundant storage solution for our company-wide hardware agnostic Hyper-V environment.

StarWind VSAN allowed our small business to build a fault-tolerant storage architecture using SSDs and off-the-shelf chassis that is high-performing, high-functional, fault-tolerant, highly available, reliable, and easy to use. Best of all, we achieved all of this for a fraction of the cost of other solutions. For eight years now, StarWind has been extremely reliable and easy to use.

• Very simple to use
• Hardware agnostic
• Extremely reliable
• Feature rich
• Cost-effective!
• StarWind also has excellent support in the rare case you need them.

Encryption: I would love to see "at rest" data encryption as a new feature for organizations like mine looking for ways to simplify this mandated compliance issue.

We have not had a single major issue in eight years of using StarWind. Every release upgrade has been seamless and required no downtime. It has saved us from multiple hardware failures with no downtime. A truly redundant, reliable solution!

Very easy to scale. I am not aware of any limitations.

In eight years we have never needed support for an issue with the software. I have called a handful of times to have them confirm my understanding and review my configuration.  They have always been very helpful and thorough. A+.

No.

Very simple to use. Most of the UI is self-explanatory but StarWind's website has easy-to-follow documentation and recommendations, and their support staff is one of the most thorough and patient I have had the honor to work with in this industry. A+.

In-house with minimal StarWind support.

I have not seen any other storage solution that delivers the features that StarWind does for anywhere near the price. Licensing and support costs are very simple and straightforward.  

Dell EMC, Nimble, 3PAR.

Make the switch to StarWind! Your life will be much easier, and you will have extra budget to spend elsewhere!

We had decentralized storage, inefficient storage and computer utilization, non-utilization of VMware vSphere advanced features like HA, FT, vMotion which require shared storage like StarWind.

StarWind VSAN provided us an efficient performance with HA. We tried other solutions as well and found StarWind’s VSAN easy to install and manage. The unlimited capacity license is also a very good feature.

• StarWind’s VSAN applications for VMware
• Easy to install and manage
• The unlimited capacity license is also a very good feature.

• A detailed performance monitoring of the storage system.
• A tool/wizard which analyzes the installed system and its configuration and gives a recommendation for improvement.

• I've used StarWind VSAN for replicating vSphere datastores and in Microsoft SQL and file systems clusters. 

• I used one in mission-critical systems like a call center, SQL, SharePoint, etc.

My company data is essential to us, and we never lost data, so building the HA storage was our absolute priority. 

For the last six years, StarWind VSAN protected our transactions of more than 100 billions of dollars.

• Stability
• Performance
• Security
• Easy to solve problems
• Vendor support always is ready to help :) 

• Linux version for vSphere could incorporate deduplication. 
• Also, the documentation for configuring alerts in vSphere is not simple.

It's stable as a rock.

Performance is very good but the bottleneck is the network. It is good to have 10gb links. 

Very good. I've got standard support but the reaction time is always 1-2 hours. 

I used StarWind and VMware vSAN, but StarWind is 10x cheaper and gives us a solution independent from the hypervisor. This is more secure.

The initial setup is easy, but after buying, support can help you with the installation and optimization.

I implemented through my team, but support helped me optimize the iSCSI paths.

StarWind has the best price.

The version for vSphere is very cheap, and anyone interested should buy a three-node version for the test environment.

No.

Thanks support for the quick help: I think you never sleep!

StarWind VSAN eliminates the NAS/SAN as a single point of failure. It's an affordable synchronous HA storage solution which allows us to use extremely fast direct-attached SSD storage in an HA environment. 

• We have deployed StarWind VSAN for several customers. 
• Super affordable HA solution for SMB private cloud infrastructure. StarWind VSAN is our go-to solution.

Support is outstanding, responsive, and goes above and beyond. They were able to help with some existing AD issues that would typically be out of scope.

I would like additional documentation regarding possible networking configurations with 10GbE switching.

Their support goes above and beyond with the integration of their software.

• It is a fairly straightforward product. 
• The support is great.
• It just works. 
• It meets all my criteria for success. 

I use StarWind Virtual SAN software to change our old HPE Fibre Channel storage into an iSCSI solution for our development environment.

We have an old HPE Fibre Channel SAN that we wanted to reutilize for a development environment. However, we didn't want to spend too much on fiber infrastructure or replace the controller with iSCSI, since this would cost thousands of dollars. 

StarWind Virtual SAN software solves our problems. The software is easy to setup and manage, and the support is excellent.

I like the simple management interface:

• It is easy to setup.
• It has good support feature.                                                   

• It would be great if it provided thin provisioned virtual disks.
• It should reclaim white spaces after big files are deleted.

I have not faced any issues with stability.

Not applicable.

We are happy with the price. 

Replicated, high availability storage for VMware vSphere cluster of VMware ESX 2-nodes in an HA cluster for Virtual SAN storage, only this software can do a 2-node cluster.

It provides cost-friendly replacements for VMware vSAN or the dedicated storage solution that I am using it for to build shared, replicated storage for my VMware vSphere.

You can build cheap, reliable, replicated virtual machines clusters using simple servers with an all flash disk or SAS/SATA hybrid tiered by performance storage.

• I would like to replace Windows nodes to Linux. As of today, Linux nodes are ready for production. 
• Ability to to test the virtual storage are network area and storage speed from StarWind Management Console.
• Ability to check network card settings (such as MTU), VMware settings, and other settings needed for work under StarWind best practices. I would like to have something like a StarWind Best Practices Analyzer.

The setup is fast.

The setup cost is very low. The pricing is great.

We evaluated VMware vSAN and HPE StoreVirtual VSA.

To give us the ability to install a cluster environment, increasing reliability for our plant infrastructure.

This product allowed gave us the ability to implement a cluster environment which allowed us to implement a stable infrastructure for our plants.

The best feature of the StarWind Virtual San product is its ease of installation and integration within a current infrastructure.

One area that could be improved is the reconnection of the attached drives upon a reboot. Rarely, the shared drive will not connect automatically.