StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

We have a small private cloud for providing hosting to our clients. This allowed us to simplify our architecture in a way that previously required dedicated SAN hardware. 

The ability to migrate data and machines as we would with a central SAN is very helpful and has reduced our overall hardware costs, reduced our management costs, and provided additional uptime for our clients. 

We have two nodes currently with dedicated networking between them. This allows for quick migration and agile upgrades in the future. 

This has allowed us to spend less on hardware yet still have the same functionality of a full SAN. We will be able to provide additional uptime for our clients because of vSAN. 

Previously we were unable to migrate between nodes in our environment. This solution allows us to migrate virtual machines between nodes as if we had a dedicated $100,000 SAN in the mix without the additional cost and management of the SAN. 

We hope in the long run that we will be able to deploy this to our other nodes and save additional time and expense there. 

The ability to use two servers as a cluster instead of having to have a dedicated SAN environment to achieve the same results has been great. This has allowed us to spend less on hardware yet still have the same functionality of a full SAN. 

We will be able to provide additional uptime for our clients thanks to vSAN. 

Previously we were unable to migrate between nodes in our environment. This product now allows us to migrate virtual machines between nodes as if we had a dedicated $100,000 SAN in the mix without the additional cost and management of the SAN. 

We hope in the long run that we will be able to deploy this to our other nodes and save additional time and expense there.

We ran into an issue with alerts. The system uses email to send alerts, and we are a Microsoft 365 shop. They were not able to send them, thanks to the latest TLS updates at Microsoft. We were able to use a third-party SMTP relay in the meantime, however. 

Additionally, there was no way to send different levels of alerts, from informational to license to critical. This will require us to monitor each log generated as anyone could be critical coming across. They believe this will be incorporated into their next build and releases. 

I've been using the solution for one month.

We purchased StarWind Virtual SAN to replace the no longer supported SAN App. Since the hard drive is outdated, the warranty was expired, and the user interface is poor, we decided to upgrade to a newer system. 

We have four server rooms on site, which we equipped with storage servers, each with 45 TB of SSD storage, on which we installed StarWind Virtual SAN software. 

With the help of the fantastic support from the StarWind team, we connected five compute servers from our previous SAN setup running Hyper-V. Everything worked smoothly. All of our data is stored on the storage nodes and replicated almost instantly.

We tried several solutions, such as iSCSI storage and Hyper-V Replication. The results were good yet did not produce the expected results. We had many problems with scheduled and unscheduled failovers. There were also limitations in the application itself.

After some research, I decided to go with the free version of vSAN from StarWind. I followed the instructions and technical support to deploy the SQL cluster using the StarWind vSAN free version. I tested the application with many scenarios. All failover options worked without any interruption.

StarWind vSAN has a lot of great features and is a perfect solution for mirroring internal disks and flash between servers. It provides a high-performance mirrored central disk to perform any implantation with high profitability. 

In my case, I had a requirement to implement a SQL cluster solution with servers and internal disks. 

Without StarWind vSAN there would be a bigger cost for the company, as we would need to buy a lot of disks and, of course, hardware and software, to run everything. That's why we choose StarWind.

vSAN's free version does not have a graphical user interface - all options are available from the command line. The graphical user interface is very important when we need to check the status and fix errors quickly, even if it is not a technical expert team. 

There are a few other limitations in vSAN's free version. They could release a few premium features to its free-use version, as we believe then there would not be so much of support tickets, and not everyone knows how to use Powershell. 

They add auto-update features, so you don't need to do it manually.

I've been using the solution for two years. 

The solution offers great stability.

The scalability has been great.

We have found that we can get a quick response to questions on the forums.

Positive

We previously used an HP solution, however, it was unstable.

In order to do a seamless setup, users need to read the manuals.

We handled the setup with our in-house team.

The solution was free to use. 

I'd advise new users to try the free version first.

We only evaluated StarWind.

Our infrastructure uses VMware vSphere, and we use StarWind as our primary storage solution. We have three hosts and use a hyper-converged setup, so our computing and storage are spread across the same hosts. 

StarWind replicates the data between the hosts giving us 30 TB of usable redundant storage. StarWind allowed us to consolidate our hardware and grow without expanding our data center footprint. It also gave us more peace of mind since there is no single point of failure anywhere in the solution.

StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution.  

We were also able to avoid a data center expansion as we could combine our computing and storage without losing fault tolerance.  

We were also using another converged storage solution from HPE as well. That solution was strongly tied to ESXi and vCenter, which meant we could not apply WMware updates when they came out until the storage solution updated their product to match without risking compatibility problems.  

Since StarWind isn't tied to the hypervisor, we don't have to worry about how updates to one part of our infrastructure will affect the other.

StarWind support is really good. They help you with the initial setup and will support you down the road as well. The support staff really know their product.  StarWind isn't a black box, either. You can see exactly how the storage and replication are configured, so you know what is going on, and can quickly diagnose any problems.   

Many virtualized storage solutions are incredibly picky about what hardware you deploy them on - even down to the model of a hard drive. StarWind allows you to use any hardware, and they will support you on whatever infrastructure you want to deploy it on.

The management interface is missing some of the flashier features and hand-holding of other enterprise products.  It might be intimidating to someone without a lot of experience, yet StarWinds setup services are good for walking you through everything. The number of different ways you can set it up can make it a little daunting.  

The documentation on their website isn't bad, and yet it could use some better organization. There is also some feature disparity between the Windows-based solution and their virtual Linux-based solution. I'd love to see deduplication added to the virtual Linux appliance.  

I've used the solution for four years.

I only had one stability issue with StarWind. That said, that was down to me not following best practices and not reading their updated documentation. When configure properly, StarWind is very stable.

It's a great option for SMBs. If you start getting into double or triple-digit host count, the increased configuration time may not be worth it.

The StarWind support team is very knowledgeable. When you need support, you speak directly with someone who knows the product well. I was able to get on a Zoom call and have my issue resolved the same day I opened a ticket.

Positive

We previously used a traditional SAN from Nimble and the virtual storage solution, HPE Simplivity. Both other solutions were more expensive. HPE was strongly tied to both the underlying hardware and the hypervisor and didn't allow for any flexibility.

The initial setup was a little more complex than setting up a traditional SAN as additional networking was needed for the replication channels. Planning ahead and help setup help from Starwind makes this manageable.

We did our implementation in-house. We know our infrastructure better than an outside vendor and were confident in our ability to deploy it.

StarWind has the most straightforward licensing model of any storage solution we evaluated. Their pricing was also the best.

We had experience with HPE Simplivity and VMware vSAN.

In a VMware environment, StarWind works best if you can dedicate the RAID card or the HBA to the storage controller VM, so you should store the hypervisor on a separate RAID card or on an SD card. 

We originally had a three-node Nutanix cluster. However, we were asked to spend six figures on replacing it, as the Nutanix license was bound to the hardware. StarWind Virtual SAN could use this existing hardware without any special reconfiguration. 

We decided to go with their Linux appliance and quickly learned we could achieve the same resiliency with two nodes as we did with three nodes on Nutanix. 

They provided guides to help us set up the most efficient cluster, although we did have to use MD/RAID as there wasn't a guide available for ZFS.

Besides being 80% cheaper than the other alternatives, the simplicity makes reconfiguration and support much easier. The performance is much higher than we anticipated and outperforms the other solutions we've tried. 

They provide numerous guides and whitepapers to help set up your own environment, yet can also walk you through the setup, so you understand each component of it. Thanks to their extensive support community, we are no longer 100% dependent on support (or a support contract) for minor troubleshooting issues.

The most valuable feature to us is the basic setup, which makes it easy to understand what's happening under the hood. This, combined with the low price point, allowed us to rapidly implement the solution while giving us better performance than all other products we tested. 

All of the documentation is openly available and isn't hidden behind a support paywall like many other options. Since the setup was so simple, I opted to do the majority of setup myself, however, support was always available to answer any questions or to provide guidance.

A web management interface would be good, especially for those coming from other solutions that have one. All of the setup and configuration is done via a dedicated Windows application, so you'll have to install it on every machine that you want to manage the cluster with. 

Most of the documentation is heavily windows-based, so finding guides on their Linux VSA can be difficult, however, support can usually assist you in finding the documentation. 

An easy/native ZFS option would also be welcome, as we did end up having to use a mdadm setup, but none of these are deal-breakers.

I've used the solution for three months.

It's stable enough that I sometimes forget it's there. There are so few components in it that there's just less to go wrong.

We were able to have the same resiliency with two nodes as we did with three nodes under Nutanix. It also managed to outperform Nutanix by a fair amount.

Support has been phenomenal. They have always responded to emails in mere minutes, and everyone seems to know their stuff. I've never been transferred around, and they've always answered my question or resolved the issue in minutes.

Positive

We previously used Nutanix, which was extremely expensive and nearly ALL of the documentation was behind a support contract. Most of the components had cryptic names, and there were very few options for finding a solution yourself.

The initial setup is extremely simple, and support can walk you through it or give you guides if you are a do-it-yourself kind of person.

Most of the implementation was done in-house, but support was available at any time to answer questions or to provide suggestions. Everyone we worked with on support seemed to know what they were doing.

It came in 80% cheaper than all of the other solutions, and the yearly support contract was a third of the price as well.

If cost and performance are your goals, then definitely look at StarWind. It's a smaller company than almost all of the alternatives, yet they have very dedicated support staff and a great development team. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles as some others. However, if you're looking for a simple hyper-converged solution, this is your best bet.

We evaluated multiple options, including a software-only Nutanix solution and the VMware vSAN. These were both very expensive and had a very strict hardware compatibility list, which caused the project's budget to swell exponentially. We also looked at some open-source options such as ESOS and GlusterFS, however,  these required many hours of setup and there wasn't a real enterprise support option for either.

They have a great trial system with full support, they even extended mine due to my limited time to deploy and test everything.

We have two StarWind vSAN clusters (two nodes each) in two data centers on Dell PowerEdge servers. We're expanding to three-node clusters soon. Our IT footprint and budget are relatively small, so StarWind vSAN was an appealing alternative to VMware vSAN. At the initial time of purchase, and even to this day, for our use case, StarWind vSAN is a more mature product.

Since we began using the product, we have tripled the number of VMs (RHEL, Ubuntu Server, & Windows Server) and added significant storage. Growth has been easy. The vSAN runs as stable as you would hope, where it is generally never a factor when troubleshooting an outage or planning for growth.

StarWind vSAN allowed the retirement of an aging SAN, and availability expanded while keeping costs low. We're VMware customers, but we began using StarWind vSAN before VMware vSAN was very well established. It works just as well, yet at a more affordable price. I'm not sure if VMware has an option for a two-node cluster now; however, I know three nodes were the minimum in the past, which was a large difference for our relatively meager IT budget.

I've had to open a few support cases over the years due to administrator errors, and the support received was top-notch. I found it much more responsive than VMware support.

Support for only two-node clusters is amazing. Without this feature, we wouldn't have been able to modernize our Corporate MDF due to cost. To my knowledge, StarWind vSAN was a mature product already by the time VMware vSAN came to the market. Each additional node would require us to purchase another physical server, storage, and licensing for ESXi, Veeam, Windows data center, monitoring tool licenses, etc. These things quickly add up for a relatively small back-end infrastructure budget.

I don't have many ideas for improvement as the product "just works." I suppose if I had to pick something to say concerning improvement, I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit.

Another thing that isn't very important yet would be nice is an update to the OS of the Linux appliances. They're running CentOS 7, so I understand why they haven't been updated to something newer, due to Red Hat pulling the plug on CentOS 8 in favor of CentOS Stream.

I've used the solution for more than five years.

The stability is rock solid.

We will be adding a new node next year, and it seems highly scalable.

Customer support has gone above and beyond for me in the past, even though I'd forgotten to renew our support contract at one point.

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution. 

the setup was straightforward, however, we utilized support to ensure we had a proper build.

We used a vendor and would rate their services ten out of ten.

The cost is honestly negligible for us.

We looked at VMware vSAN.

Do not hesitate to use their technical support - even if it is just to review your configuration for their best practices.

We found StarWind when trying to look for a hybrid storage space that could handle various physical hardware as well as virtual operating systems.

Upon first contacting the company, the sales and technical demo were superb compared to other products and they clearly explained and showed us a live demo of our potential environment.

The whole purchase process was swift and followed up by calls and emails from their team.

Compared to other products that we looked at, the cost-saving was so great that choosing StarWind was a no-brainer.

When I need something urgently and very technical, I get the answer back that I want. I don't have to battle through with a first liner that tells me to "turn it off and on again".

The solution has improved our organization by:

1. The variety of services offered

2. The financial viability compared to the services offered

3. Product functionality and performance is suitable for our organization

4. The strong consultation accessibility for customers that wish to discuss the product first with their experts and start the process how they like it, not how the company wants it to

5. The support team has the expertise of a strong service in the products that their customers have purchased

6. StarWinds, in general, has a strong user community that offers help on forums and other sites

7. The company has a firm customer focus keeping in touch with us at all times, even after purchasing the initial product after two years

The features that I found most valuable are ease of use of the software that StarWind offers - with the first setup being a bit painful. However, now that we have a handle on it, it saves a great ton of time on management and caring about the hardware part of it as all it is is a software-based solution. I love managing the cluster that we have set up via the Virtual Storage Attached Network device, with the Web Management being so simple yet packed with all the features that I require. The management of the traffic and the speeds are awesome as well.

Some users have commented on online forums and others that the documentation and KB articles could be clearer or better written. However, I found this to be the case a couple of years ago. Now, in 2022, this has been rectified and you can usually find the information that you are looking for.

Another problem that we have come across is that when you will cease your contract with StarWind (for support) your product won't be updated and that is a big selling point, especially for us, as we have loads of products from StarWind.

I've been using the product for around two years now.

We previously used the standard SAN hardware solution from a big IT company - we switched to basically save on hardware costs and maintenance.

The initial setup cost will be great, especially with the new hardware. The StarWind pricing isn't that expensive compared to others, however, there are yearly maintenance costs to be aware of.

Yes, we had a look at Lenovo XClarity as well as Nutanix AOS and VMWare vSAN.

I'd advise new users to not hesitate and just go ahead with it.

After deploying a HA SQL Failover Cluster, we started to notice performance issues due to our storage, which was an off-the-shelf NAS.

I had already heard about StarWind and its VSAN software from previous blogs.

A VSAN solution seems like an ideal solution as we already had the hardware, minus the disks required. We already had two Dell R540's with six available bays in each server.

After reviewing their documentation, the setup process was simple enough to follow and so I decided to run a little test environment.

I was pleasantly surprised by the performance gains even on spinning disks and the overall setup being fairly painless.

I decided to go ahead with this solution, got the cost signed off, and implemented it in production.

We had some initial issues, however, their support was extremely helpful in resolving these and was very patient as we deployed this to a secure environment with no internet access. Yet they still offered support and worked closely with a single point of contact.

I then later moved to a different company and implement a similar solution in the Oracle Cloud using their free offering, again this was simple to set up using their collection of PowerShell scripts.

Immediately we noticed huge performance gains, even on older hardware and once we implemented a 10GB link between both servers, the sync was near-instant after the initial sync was complete.

In addition, their support contact was fantastic. They spent several hours troubleshooting an issue with me and due to the complexity of our environment this only made it more challenging, yet they were persistent and helped resolved any issues

Additionally, their white papers were a great starting point to get started.

The forums can lead to lots of topics with no resolutions.

The logs can also become very noisy when there is an issue, which is very infrequent. However, when they do occur, it makes it very challenging to figure out what the cause is.

A feature that would be helpful, is a way to update the software automatically on all the hosts. Instead, you must find the download link, which in itself can be challenging, and then manually upgrade each server one by one. This process can take a while depending on the time to resync your VDISKS. 

For about 3 years, in which I deployed it in 2 companies.

Previously we were using a Synology NAS

Try the free version and see if it meets your requirements. 

I did look at purchasing EqualLogic, however, the cost of that hardware would be far greater than StarWind's

I recently underwent a server migration process, which involved converting multiple virtual machines to the QCOW2 format. This challenge required adapting various VMs to ensure a seamless transition, highlighting the importance of flexibility in IT infrastructure management.

StarWind Virtual SAN proved indispensable during our server migration, offering flexibility, high availability, and performance optimization. Its user-friendly interface simplified management and vendor independence ensured adaptability. This software has left a lasting, positive impact on our organization's IT infrastructure, positioning us for future success.

The use of StarWind Virtual SAN during the server migration process and conversion of virtual machines to the qcow2 format provided significant benefits to our organization. The software offered the flexibility needed to smoothly carry out this complex transition. Ensuring high availability and optimizing VM performance, StarWind Virtual SAN improved our IT infrastructure, resulting in more efficient and reliable operations.

One of the standout features of StarWind Virtual SAN was its independence from specific hardware vendors. This vendor independence is a boon in today's dynamic IT environment. It allowed us to make procurement decisions based solely on our organization's needs, free from the constraints of vendor lock-in. This autonomy ensured that our IT infrastructure remained agile and adaptable, capable of swiftly adjusting to emerging technologies and changing requirements.

The ability to keep data accessible even in the event of hardware failures is highly valued, as it ensures business continuity.

A user-friendly and intuitive management interface makes system administration simpler, saving time and resources.

Optimizing the performance of virtualized storage is crucial, ensuring that VMs operate efficiently.

The ability to perform well with multiple hypervisors offers flexibility and avoids vendor lock-in.

Vendor independence allows organizations to choose hardware components that best suit their needs.

Ongoing improvements in read and write performance would help meet increasingly demanding workloads.

A more comprehensive monitoring system with proactive alerts can enhance visibility and responsiveness.

Advanced automation features for storage provisioning and resource management can save time and reduce errors.

Enhancements in disaster recovery capabilities, such as faster failover and streamlined recovery procedures, would be valuable.

Adding support for emerging or less common hypervisors can increase flexibility.

Enhancing security features, such as data encryption and two-factor authentication, to meet stricter compliance requirements.

Integration with cloud storage services for greater scalability and backup options.

I've used the solution for just under one year.

Considering that StarWind Virtual SAN allows for scalability, it is important to plan accordingly as you add more resources and storage capacity, ensuring that the system remains stable through all stages of growth.

StarWind Virtual SAN's performance is impressive and offers scalability as one of its main advantages. The solution is designed to grow with your IT infrastructure needs. This means that as your organization expands and requires more storage resources, you can add additional nodes to your StarWind cluster to accommodate this growth.

I did not use a different solution previously.

The setup is very simple. The tool is very educational.

It is advisable to conduct a detailed assessment of your infrastructure needs and compare setup costs, pricing, and licensing with alternatives in the market. Take into account scalability, technical support, and your specific environment requirements. Additionally, explore licensing options that best align with your budget and long-term planning. Evaluating your organization's needs and resources is crucial for making an informed decision regarding the investment in StarWind Virtual SAN.

I did not evaluate other options. 

Establish a good relationship with the vendor's support team. They can provide valuable assistance during setup, troubleshooting, and ongoing maintenance.

Keep the software up to date with the latest patches and updates to benefit from security enhancements and performance improvements.

Consider your organization's future growth and ensure the solution can scale accordingly. This avoids potential disruptions due to increased demands.

Implement a robust backup and disaster recovery strategy alongside your virtual SAN solution to safeguard critical data.

Stay informed about industry trends and emerging technologies to ensure your infrastructure remains competitive and efficient.

Invest in training for your IT team to maximize the value of the solution and facilitate knowledge transfer.

Continuously monitor the performance of your virtual SAN to identify and address any issues promptly.