StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

Our primary use case for StarWind is providing our clients with a cost-effective HA storage solution utilizing existing virtualization technology already installed at the client site.

In the past, we have used other solutions. However, StarWind is our go-to and only virtual SAN solution at this point due to a number of factors which include reliability, simplicity, and the completeness of the offering. 

Further, StarWind has made no moves towards acquisition which was a large concern for us as previous vendors were acquired which ended our relationships.

StarWind has provided us with a top-notch, well-supported, robust vSAN offering when other vendors have moved to hyper-converged solutions that are outside of our average clients' reach from a financial and resource perspective. We are able to roll out solutions with confidence with StarWind as a partner.

StarWind has also provided us with a very stable platform that is extremely well-supported. Their support staff excels at identifying issues and guiding us to best practices ensuring each of our clients receives an excellent experience.

The level of confidence and support within the StarWind organization is second to none.

The simplicity of scaling the StarWind solution has also been a boon for us.  In the past, most solutions relied on a per GB or per TB model while StarWind is a simple licensing structure per node. This has enabled us to scale clients' infrastructure as needed without being concerned about running into an artificial ceiling. 

When StarWind considered a pricing model change we discussed and worked with them to ensure that the solutions and changes prevented did not have a negative impact. They are a true partner.  

We have, in rare cases, received conflicting guidance between different support folks within StarWind. The guidance is always pertinent. However, you can tell there are times when it's just a matter of preference from engineer to engineer. Although not a detriment to the product offering, it creates some minor quandaries within our own organization as to best practices.

Overall a simplified support model where each engineer provides a similar answer and not "what works for them" would be beneficial however the difference in style of each engineer has not had a negative impact on us.

We have been using this solution for five or more years.

We utilized HPE Lefthand vSAN as well as VMware vSAN. As noted previously, these products were simply not a good fit for us or were phased out.

Look at their HA appliances. The cost for these is competitive enough to our own hardware that we have begun to lean on these appliances as opposed to rolling and supporting our own.

We did. We evaluated a number of solutions which I won't name here. StarWind came out on top.

StarWind is an excellent solution with top-tier support.

StarWind was the perfect solution that I was looking for: a true, two-node virtual SAN solution.

We're too small for three physical hypervisors, however, we still have two and want high availability. Native vSAN for the hypervisor we use requires two nodes plus a witness, or three, and we just couldn't do that.

In a search for an alternative, I found StarWind. They offer a true two-node setup with agent VMs on each host and two high-bandwidth links to each other, and that's it!

We're a visiting nurse association and rely on redundant hypervisors to keep our patient software up and running around the clock.

It has cut costs that we would've spent on network links and SAN appliance(s), allowing us to just include drives with our hosts and run a Virtual SAN.

Not only that, but the addition of two 10GB links now means that our hypervisor can live-migrate virtual machines very fast between hosts, and data is also synced between StarWind RAID arrays quickly too.

All this combines into a very efficient, fast, and reliable Virtual SAN solution that blazes past our previous physical SAN infrastructure.

The accessibility is great. It's very easy to resize disks and they show up in VMware almost instantly. It's pretty darn fast at syncing and I appreciate how friendly it is to SMBs.

Pricing is also very fair and their support is top-notch. I had some trouble setting it up. That said, it didn't take long at all to get in touch with support reps and they were knowledgeable on the product, not just an agent reading a script.

PROS include:
• Relatively easy to use
• True two-node vSAN
• Redundancy
• Stability (no issues in the years thus far of using it)
• Friendly pricing for SMBs and great support
• Great solution for SMB environments overall

The only thing I could suggest to improve is the documentation. The initial setup got a little confusing at a few points with differences between the VMware version in documentation vs the latest, etc. However, they've improved the documentation greatly since I got started in 2022 (writing now as of 2025.02.19)

CONS include:
• Documentation for initial setup can be a bit ambiguous at times, yet support helps you get through it; you're good once you're up and running.
• It's not native and not a bad thing. Just keep in mind it's a third-party solution so it won't be as "drop-in" as a native solution offered by your hypervisor.

Since 2022

So far. I have had no issues or lapses in performance/stability.

The solution is scalable. It is very easy to add more virtual disks.

Customer support is very good! The support rep knew what they were talking about and quickly got back to me with an answer.

Positive

Before we had a physical SAN, maybe the HP MSA P2300 (I may have gotten the model number wrong).

It was just too expensive and demanding of physical links/resources to go with another MSA, so we decided to try a Virtual SAN.

The initial setup was both straightforward and complex. It wasn't too hard, however, there were some little parts in the documentation where I got stuck without much help other than calling for a support agent, which solved my issue and cleared up the confusion.

The implementation was done in-house.

Pricing is pretty fair and includes one year of support (as of purchase in August 2022).

The license is based on how many hosts you have and how much in TB you need the vSAN to accommodate.

We looked at our native Hypervisor's vSAN product, however, it required three nodes (or two with one witness node) and just wasn't feasible for our setup as an SMB.

We built a two-server Hyper-V failover cluster. We build typical servers like we normally would with NVME drives and plenty of storage. This software works hand in hand with Microsoft hyper-v failover manager for a seamless setup that has not given us any issues since implementation. 

Live failovers are tested every week, and the customer does not even notice when the failovers are tested. The performance was exceptional, and everything worked as expected. We went ahead and got the three-year 24/7 support contract since it's a critical customer. While the price is a bit steep, this process and product have given us a lot of peace of mind that the servers will continue running even if one of the physical hosts goes down.

It's a very easy Implementation with the help of support. We received quick responses from support for any questions we had throughout the entire process. StarWind is a stable product that allowed us to build the cluster exactly like we wanted hardware-wise. This product has allowed us to build a two-node failover cluster without a SAN. 

We also did not need the datacenter edition of server OS. We were very worried about the implementation process. However, they helped us with the entire implementation, leaving no stone unturned and all questions answered.

Overall, it was a great experience dealing with the various StarWind team members from the pre-sales all the way through to implementation. This was our first experience with a hyper-converged failover cluster, and the team at StarWind made it easy for us. 

Before making the choice, we were weighing out all the cluster options, and everything kept coming back to StarWind. I'm glad it did, as we definitely feel we made the right choice. We test live failovers every week, and so far, everything has been running smoothly without anything unexpected.

Pricing is a bit high. That said, the support is worth it. It's really hard to point out any other negatives. The licensing and support pricing structure could have been laid out a little simpler, and then pricing could have been less, of course. However, the truth is the support really does make up for the cost, in our opinion. We did decide to go with three-year 24/7 support due to implementation in a critical communications center. We feel like we won't need to use them for much at all since the products just work. Due to this, the pricing could have been better, especially with us purchasing all three years at once.

I've used the solution for one year. 

In my company, we employ a sophisticated infrastructure comprised of three distinct hypervisors and a dedicated storage server featuring vSAN technology. This intricate setup serves as the backbone for delivering a diverse range of services to our clients, encompassing web hosting plans, secure and efficient file sharing, compute power, and bespoke storage solutions. 

Leveraging the flexibility of multiple hypervisors allows us to scale our services to meet the unique requirements of our clients, ensuring optimal performance and resource allocation. 

It also acts as the centralized storage for my home environment as well. Within my home setup, this robust virtualized storage solution plays a role in supporting various functionalities, including the storage and retrieval of data from surveillance cameras. 

It also provides a seamless and efficient solution for personal storage requirements, showcasing the versatility and scalability of my Virtual SAN configuration.

Hypervisor offers agnosticism for flexibility. My company could seamlessly transition workloads on VMware without worrying about storage compatibility issues.

It has dynamic workload management. As business requirements change, my company might need to migrate virtual machines (VMs) between two or three (or more) hypervisors based on performance, licensing, or other considerations. With Virtual SAN, I can easily move VMs without the need for complex storage transformations and involving other solutions.

The customizability and reliability of Virtual SAN setup in our infrastructure stand out as the key pillars supporting the seamless delivery of services to my clients. 

The ability to provide my virtualization environment to meet specific client needs ensures that we can meet diverse requirements, from web hosting plans to file sharing and storage solutions. This degree of customization not only enhances the client experience but also allows us to optimize resource utilization and calculate future improvements.

Moreover, the reliability of Virtual SAN plays a critical role in maintaining the stability and availability of my services. The redundant and fault-tolerant features in the Virtual SAN architecture provide a resilient infrastructure that minimizes downtime and ensures a consistent and reliable service for my clients.

Embarking on a 14-day GUI trial is a good approach for enabling an exploration of Virtual SAN's capabilities. This period can facilitate a better understanding of real-world performance, interface, and overall system suitability. 

By affording users the opportunity to dive deeply into the product's features, this trial can ensure a comprehensive evaluation, regarding the adoption of Virtual SAN.

An extended trial period would serve as a way to get clean insights into the technology's adaptability and alignment with their specific needs before committing to long-term integration.

I've only used the solution for one year.

We had several aging servers that needed to be replaced, including a server from 2008 and one that was an old Microsoft Small Business Server from 2011. 

When we ended up needing to replace everything when they had all reached end of life, we had some hard choices to make. We could have replaced all of those old bulky servers with a new pile of power-hungry and massive machines, or replace them all and virtualize everything and put them on two single-unit rack-mounted servers. We ended up going with StarWind Virtual SAN, and have never looked back.

Want to talk about speed, performance, and reliability? We literally went from having four or five very large and powerful boxes to the two sister servers that were provided by StarWind, and we set them up to have much better performance. Even more importantly, we found support that is world-class. I have never worked with such an impressive and well-balanced crew as the techs that I have had the pleasure of working with over these years. They are absolutely mind-blowing in every aspect that I've had them help me out with, from preinstallation to rollout to maintenance. 

We are running Hyper-V on twin servers in failover, and being able to manage servers from anywhere I need to, virtually, has been a game changer. 

The most valuable feature has been their support and willingness to help me with issues that, frankly, were not their responsibility. Every time I've called or emailed them, they have jumped in anyway and helped me find success in figuring out the issues I was having. They even kept the ticket open until I asked them to close it, which is nice.

Every solution has plusses and minuses, and for someone like me, who has very little experience spending my time in CLI, I appreciate a good GUI. This is the one place I would love to see the experience of StarWind improved. I wish there were more of an explanation or set of instructions that could point me in the right direction when I wanted to increase the size of one of our VMs. I did end up being able to shut the machine down and increase the size of its virtual HDD, however, in the end, I missed the mark and allocated too much space - and in a production environment, that space comes at a premium. I'd love to see more clarification for us folks who are smart enough to do some damage yet not smart enough to use CLI. 

We have had our StarWind Virtual SAN for almost five years now.

Our StarWind Servers have only ever "gone down" when I have been applying an update to the server's software. They have been rock solid and have better than six nines on their stability.

So far, we've been able to add storage and new servers year after year and have never run into an issue.  

Their customer service and support have been world-class. There is no other company I've ever worked with that had the level of support and dedication that I've been able to experience with StarWind.

Positive

We did not have a "solution" like this before. We previously had a hodgepodge of parts, servers, and service providers, which is nothing compared to what we have now.

The setup was amazing. The hardware arrived, we plugged it in, and StarWind connected to them and was off to the races getting our servers converted and up and running within a week. I've never seen anything similar since then.

We used a combination of in-house IT/IS and StarWind support to get these set up and running. In the end, we were all happy with the speed and technical expertise that went into our setup and the dedicated technicians who stuck with us throughout the entire setup and implementation.

The ROI is impossible to know. That said, in terms of reliability and performance, it has paid for itself within the first two years of ownership in electrical costs. They have, in the five years we've had them, paid for themselves in that aspect of cost alone. There is not even a comparison in terms of cost per watt and performance that we have observed.

The solution has given us the best results that I have ever seen in any environment.

We did eliminate several other solutions. That said, it has been too long to remember which ones. I remember worrying that StarWind's performance was going to be one of those too-good-to-be-true situations. It wasn't. The hype lived up to the performance and reliability.

If you are on the fence about them, jump off and land on their side where you never have to look back.

In our environment, we are using a full-scale Hyper-V cluster and individual VMware hypervisors. StarWind provides highly scalable, highly accessible storage to all servers within the environment.  

Virtual machines requiring high availability are stored using the StarWind software virtual storage area network. The StarWind software itself is stored on a virtual machine on two nodes within our Hyper-V cluster.  

At present, we only have the two-node solution and would like to upgrade in the near future to provide even more redundancy/data durability.

StarWind Virtual SAN improved our organization by allowing us to sleep at night. The software allowed us to implement a highly scalable software-based storage area network using our existing commodity hardware.  

We didn't have to purchase anything extra to make this project "work"; we just installed the software on two virtual machines, set up the ISCSI networking, and attach the hosts to the ISCSI targets.  

Having the ability to migrate machines live in our environment was made possible by this software.  

The best part of the StarWind vSAN software is having the ability to add as many nodes as you need.  

You can instantly expand storage across a rack, data center, or geographical location. Support by StarWind is awesome. They are able to get on multiple remote sessions to help us go through our proof of concept with both Hyper-V and VMware environments.  

Support also contacted us multiple times after implementation to see how things were going, and if we had any questions or wanted to learn more about the product. If there was a question they couldn't answer, they were sure to get back to us - often within the same day.  The support for the product has been most valuable.  

StarWind really needs to market its product more. It's a game changer not only for our medium-sized business. However, I could see how organizations of all sizes could benefit from their solutions (not just their Virtual SAN product).  

I wish I could tell more people about how great the software is and how phenomenal their support team is. 

The only "improvement" for the software would be having a web-based GUI interface for monitoring their storage nodes. While the software has e-mail notifications and a desktop client for management, having a mobile, web-based solution could make management even easier. Hopefully, this is something that can be included in the next version.   

We have been using StarWind for over two years.

Any interaction with customer service and support has been awesome. They are quick to respond and very thorough.

Positive

I did not previously use a different solution. 

The initial setup was straightforward. The vendor has several Youtube videos showing how easy it is to set up. 

We implemented the solution in-house.  

The pricing can't be beaten. If StarWind is above a company's budget, they should contact them directly, and they may be able to assist with special pricing.  Licensing is based on TBs of data and the number of storage nodes.

We looked into a few other shared storage solutions, such as Dell and Nutanix.

We are using the product for a three-node stretched cluster spanning three buildings based on VMWare and StarWind vSAN technology.

We use this to host all the company servers (as VMs), which are a mix of Windows and Linux systems, providing various services such as domain controllers, file servers, print servers, application servers, license servers, etc.      

This setup allows us to quickly migrate servers between buildings for service or in case of a network outage.

The product allowed us to deploy the three-node stretched cluster, which has, in turn, allowed us to fully virtualize our infrastructure with all the resilience, performance and ease of management that comes with it.

The biggest improvements have been:

1. Resilience. The StarWind VSAN is always up and allows us to move VMS to other nodes for maintenance, without interruption to service. It also enables vSphere high availability, so when there is a problem, service can be maintained

2. Management. Having everything virtualized has made it much easier to manage.

The solution's best aspects include:

Rock-solid performance. Since it has been in production (three years), we have had 100% uptime. This means that services have only needed to be briefly interrupted for maintenance and has created a great user experience for our end-users.

Easy management. The interfaces are intuitive and all IT staff can quickly be brought up to speed on how to use

Superb support. The support really is second to none. You can always quickly get through to a technician, and it's usually the same one you are used to dealing with.

The documentation could be better. It's not bad, however, it is quite often out of date. That said, this is mitigated by the fact that the support is so good that you rarely need the documentation.                                        

If I am really searching for a fault. To be honest, the licensing model is a bit confusing. They could definitely make that a bit more intuitive. However this is a minor gripe as it is such good value, and you only have to deal with it very occasionally anyway.                   

I've been using the solution for three years.

This was our first move to a vSAN solution.

This solution is of excellent value.

We looked at VMware vSAN.

I highly recommended the product. It has transformed our IT infrastructure.

Hyperconverged lab and testing environments fulfill several special requirements for use cases. We use it for demonstration environments and for virtualization and containerization. We have a rather smaller footprint, ranging from two to three nodes over the years. 

Mainly, we have an edge use case. Another use case is refurbishing and second lifecycle evaluation, specifically I/O and disaster recovery capabilities, which are important in these lab environments. 

Modernization could also be counted as a use case since modernizing data centers on small-scale or edge deployments is becoming increasingly important, even for smaller businesses.

For my organization, StarWind vSAN has been a first of firsts in hyper-converged storage and has been, first and foremost, a technology demonstrator that should disclose and present the advantages of modern data center constellations. 

Over the years, it has also functioned as a lab environment and customer demonstrator specifically for refurbishing old hardware and educational objects for our internal apprentices, effectively transforming our mindset towards modern data center infrastructure. It also served as a proof of concept for refurbishing and cost-reducing existing infrastructures.

I have found the overall ergonomy and manageability outstanding during normal functioning. Specifically, the console GUI's monitoring and configuring capabilities can be counted towards that. 

Even when not administrated via GUI, the comprehensive Powershell automation module remains, which comes with templates prepopulated for the most common automation tasks. 

Furthermore, the solution provides great performance for the price it is listed with and can even run properly without proper hardware, however, it is even more efficient and performs better when procuring proper hardware is possible.

My impression has been mostly positive. However, there have been some pitfalls. For example, it runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear. This consequently follows a long learning curve and can take some time until this can be done efficiently. 

The feature log-structured file system has been removed. While I have not used it, I know some colleagues who have reported some performance benefits under certain circumstances. 

Additionally, vSAN does not offer extended SAN features like inline deduplication, compression, or S3-compatible access, which is part of most modern SAN feature sets, also in hyper-converged scenarios.

I have been using several editions of the solution for more than five years.

The stability of this solution is vastly dependent on the hardware procured beforehand. Network hardware is especially important, and bad or glitchy hardware (like the Intel X700 or X800 series) can quickly break things. It runs—until it does not. Be sure to learn or consult about the disaster recovery process, especially if you decide on a witness strategy hosted in vSAN.

The software can be pretty scalable; however, after reaching more and more nodes, one may look at StarWind's hyperconverged appliance instead of going through the hassle of administrating separate systems.

They have only friendly and positive experiences, always a helping hand. Also, they are offering proactive support, which, from the experience of some of my colleagues, is an outstanding experience unusual to many professional service providers.

Neutral

We did not use a different solution beforehand.

The initial setup was very straightforward and easy, although one could deep dive into the specific protocol configuration options. Also, I would have liked it if some features or procedures would have been better documented at the time.

We implemented it through our in-house R&D team.

I will not publish accurate numbers. However, the modernization aspect in terms of lab infrastructure and testing/demonstration environments has an educational benefit, strengthening our consultancy, demonstrating capabilities and our mindset towards data center innovation.

I would highly advise new users to consult the StarWind technical team beforehand. 

Also, consider the paid version if you want the ease of management through the console GUI and not just use it for monitoring. 

You can also apply for a testing or NFR license if you want to test it. StarWind vSAN is, by list price, vastly more competitive than some comparable solutions. The setup may be straightforward, fast, and easy; however, it can break things down if not done properly. Before setup, be sure to procure proper hardware components that are not known to cause instabilities.

Due to budget constraints, Ceph has been evaluated as an alternative. We also took a look at Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and VMware vSAN.

Consider StarWind's proactive support. It improves the software's already high value and defuses the long learning curve of some processes! When clustering resources, deeply consider your witness strategy! Especially when you can not guarantee 100% stable hardware (e.g., through firmware issues), this can break things very quickly if you have a witness device in the same vSAN.