StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

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.

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.

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.