StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

We needed an efficient solution to replace SAN-based clustering that we can build and drop into branch offices without consuming too much rack space or requiring a great deal of expertise. Starwind VSAN delivers exactly this alongside best-in-class support services.

The value for money is fantastic, and the product's simplicity makes it accessible even for beginners. It's easy to recommend Starwind for its support, pricing, scalability, and compatibility with both Windows and Linux. 

We are more confident than ever in the reliability of our office services thanks to the mini-clusters that Starwind has facilitated. We no longer have to plan outages to perform updates, which betters our ability to harden the security in our offices.

Starwind VSAN exceeded our expectations as a two-node cluster storage solution. It offered a cost-effective alternative to expensive hardware SANs and is a great product offering good value for money.

One remarkable feature is the elimination of any single point of failure of storage, which was common with traditional 3-2-1 approaches.

The ability to run a two-node cluster without a dedicated witness has made this an excellent product for small deployments, which is right on target for our needs in regional offices.

One of the most crucial aspects of Starwind VSAN is its ability to provide high availability and redundancy across our Hyper-V clusters. By creating a fault-tolerant environment with redundant storage, it ensures that our VMs keep running even if a node or storage component fails. This feature has proven invaluable in maintaining uninterrupted operations, especially during critical times.

The software could benefit from more tooling to help with initial deployment. The iSCSI configuration stage would benefit from some sort of bootstrapping to get it set up the way Starwind recommends.

Introducing a centralized web-based management interface would streamline the administration process. A user-friendly web console that allows for easy monitoring and configuration of the entire VSAN infrastructure would be a significant improvement.

While the product currently supports Hyper-V, expanding compatibility to other popular hypervisors like VMware vSphere and KVM would increase its market reach and cater to a wider range of users.

We've used the solution for four months.

Since implementing StarWind VSAN, we've experienced little to no downtime. The system has been running like a champ, handling our workloads without a hitch. I can't stress enough how crucial this stability is for our business operations. Knowing that our critical data and virtual machines are in safe hands brings a sense of relief.

The scalability of StarWind Virtual SAN is one of its standout features that really impressed me. It's been a game-changer for our storage needs, allowing us to grow our infrastructure seamlessly as our business expands. The way it handles scaling is just so smooth and efficient.

The customer service and support provided by StarWind were exceptional. Whenever we reached out with questions or concerns, they were quick to respond and genuinely attentive to our needs. 

The support team was knowledgeable and patient and went above and beyond to ensure our issues were resolved quickly. 

Their dedication and responsiveness made us feel valued as customers, and it was a pleasure working with them throughout our journey with StarWind.

We used native Hyper-V replication before this, which didn't provide the high availability we were looking for.

Setting up StarWind Virtual SAN was remarkably smooth and user-friendly. 

The installation process was well-documented, and the setup wizard guided us seamlessly through the steps. Using our existing hardware was a breeze, saving us costs without compromising on the benefits. 

The management console was intuitive, and real-time status updates provided confidence. The support team was responsive and helpful, making the initial setup a positive experience. 

The scale-out architecture allowed us to grow our storage infrastructure effortlessly. 

Overall, StarWind made it easy to deploy a solid and reliable storage solution.

We handled the initial setup in-house.

I can't speak to the current ROI.

Compared to other vendors in the shared storage space, Starwind is extremely price competitive and has a simple licensing model. I recommend it highly if you're on a budget.

We did not evaluate other options.

I am using it to replace an end-of-life NetApp SAN after moving about half of our storage to the cloud. It is reducing the cost when it comes time to replace existing on-site storage (this was part of the cost justification of moving systems to the cloud but quotes provided by several vendors and consultants for replacement systems were actually more than what we paid for the EOL system six years ago). I was greatly relieved that I was able to deliver on my promise to reduce storage costs by half with StarWind vSAN.

We were able to reduce our on-site storage costs by roughly half what we paid for the previous NetApp SAN six years ago (with no noticeable loss of performance or loss of High Availability). This allowed us to help cost justify the investment we had already made in cloud and Software as a Service (SaaS) offerings with existing vendors without breaking the bank when it came time to replace our end-of-life NetApp SAN. Since only two VMWare ESXi host servers are required, it's allowing us to use local storage; we should also be able to replace the system again the next go around for a similar cost. 

The product only requires two VMWare ESXi host servers versus three host servers for VMware's comparable solution.  

We have detected zero loss of performance and we still have High Availability in place. vSAN has run smoothly with zero issues whatsoever so far.  

It's easy to administer.  

Support has been great with knowledgeable, helpful, and professional engineers responding quickly.  

I had initial concerns there might be a language barrier yet have had zero issues in this area. Communication has been great with both sales and service before and after the sale.

I struggled when bit figuring out how to go about doing the evaluation. It would have been helpful to have been able to watch a video or two showing a quick track way to do an evaluation including the easiest approach to take, benchmark tools to use, and step-by-step instructions on how to go about it.  

I asked for assistance and was sent information on some tools to use but I struggled with understanding the best way to use them. Having a live person suggest the best, most meaningful way to go about the evaluation based on my individual situation, would have been helpful too. 

I've used the solution for three months.

The stability is rock solid. There is no downtime so far and I have no performance issues.

The scalability seems solid. You could add nodes if needed.

Support is fantastic. It is quick, responsive, knowledgeable, and professional. 

Positive

We have a NetApp SAN. We switched as our storage was downsized by about half due to moving systems to the cloud and the SAN was EOL.

The initial setup was straightforward. A couple of hours on a remote support session with an engineer and we were up and running.

The solution was implemented in-house.

I'm not sure how to quantify ROI.

The setup cost was included with the price - so that was great! Buy from them directly rather than going through a reseller and you get 20% off.

We evaluated NetApp, Dell, SAN, and NAS solutions. All were way too costly.

Sales and support have been great to work with and the solution is solid without breaking the bank.

Our organization was facing issues with storage. The main challenge was the secure backup and its restoration. 

StarWind Virtual SAN helps us get rid of storage issues within the organization. The best part is StarWind Virtual SAN supports a hypervisor environment and our organization was also using the same platform for infrastructure which makes it easier for us to deploy and implement. 

It also has built-in multifactor authentication which makes it compliant with our local regulations for the banking sector.

Our organization now can easily back up and have the data also available. Our main issue was to have a solution that has high availability of data and this solution solves that problem. In the internal audit, we also observed how helpful it was to have a proper backup solution with high availability which is now achieved by StarWind Virtual SAN. The solution has high performance which means the backups do not suffer from restoration and availability. It also has different storage RAIDs which helps to manage data in a proper way. We can use it without any latency.

The management console of the StarWind Virtual SAN is user-friendly.

You can also manage the storage in different segregated RAIDS.

It has built-in multifactor authentication available.

The performance of the solution is accurate and concise.

It gives great high availability.

The cost of the solution is overall effective.

Reporting is a great tool available in the product to demonstrate it to senior management.

StarWind Virtual SAN has very appropriate features available with the solution and it is all in one solution.

Overall the experience with StarWind Virtual SAN is good. One main thing this product needs to work on is reporting. It has all predefined reporting. They should introduce reporting which can be customized according to the organization's needs. 

They need to have local support available for the product which will make response to the support cases easier and more effective.

Overall, the experience with StarWind is good and the product is precise and readily available.

I've used the solution for less than one year.

The solution is overall stable and effective.

The solution is highly scalable.

They have very responsive customer support.

Positive

We did not use a different solution previously. Only the backup was done on local systems.

The deployment is pretty straightforward and we implemented it with the help of the vendor.

The overall vendor team is professional and skillful. They helped us a lot. 

It gives good ROI to the organization since it is cost-effective.

They also offer a free trial version of the product with basic features. An organization should test the product before implementing it.

We have evaluated VMware and found the cost was a bit high compared to StarWind Virtual SAN.

We have a hypervisor environment and it works best with that. If your organization is running any other environment for infrastructure, you need to ensure all features are up and running before implementing them in production.

We have a  pair of StarWind hypervisor servers that share the internal storage using Starwind's Virtual SAN, eliminating the need for a separate, physical SAN. The primary purpose of this deployment is to provide highly available hypervisors to run file servers, domain controllers, critical servers, and DNS servers.

The vSAN allows us to use Starwind Management Console to confirm the health of the sync. The high availability nature of the deployment means we can fail over VMs without end-users noticing any downtime. While it isn't used for StarWind exclusively, the Remote Console access on the Enterprise iDRAC is invaluable to me in my daily duties. We have had great success live migrating VMs as necessary and adding, removing, backing up, or restoring VMs.  

I like StarWind's high availability. The failover is almost immediate, so the end users have no idea the guest VM moved at all. We can failover all guest VMs onto a single hypervisor, place it into maintenance mode, install updates, and reboot a hypervisor all during the daytime and remotely, with confidence the process will be successful.

The Command Center, a free guest VM for management and monitoring, leaves something to be desired. It could have more accurate real-time information and better reporting visuals, which seem to be an afterthought.

Our inability to use Azure File Sync Share meant we had to deploy a separate hypervisor for a file server that isn't on the Starwind High Availability setup. We could not install SentinelOne EDR on the hypervisors without getting too many warnings in the storage event logs.

We deployed a pair of StarWind vSAN hypervisors in January 2020 and have been using them for more than three years.

StarWind seems highly stable after three and a half years.

StarWind vSAN is highly scalable and easy to configure.

I rate StarWind support 10 out of 10. They are fantastic. The StarWind team proactively alerts us about the latest firmware, including iDRAC and BIOS. They reach out and schedule a remote session when they see warnings on our event logs, such as the time we deployed SentinelOne to the host machine. The StarWind engineers are always knowledgeable and take control to "drive " the session. 

Positive

We used single hypervisors but had never had a failover cluster before StarWind vSAN.

Support walked us through everything after we got the server racked and online.

The in-house team provided access to StarWind support for deployment. After that, we sat back and learned from the support person. StarWind later provided us some training materials.

It is hard for me to quantify the ROI as an IT person, but we would buy it again in an instant.

We underestimated how many guest VMs we would have running on these hypervisors after three years, and would have bought more Windows licenses upfront.

We briefly researched Dell and Microsoft options, but those were physical SAN solutions, not vSAN.

I rate StarWind Virtual SAN 10 out of 10. I recommend purchasing support and contacting them before you install any new agents or sync with Azure File Sync share.

We have faced performance issues due to less storage in our organization. 

We decided to shift to a product that led us to automate the worry of being out of space. 

First, we tried the free license, which has more than the expected features. By using the free version, we were capable of using it in production. One month's trial can be used as proof of concept. It has an easy software-based visualizing environment. Setup is easy and all in one place.

The trial version can be upgraded to the production one if required, which will cause less hassle to start it all over again.

It eliminates the use of expensive physical shared storage.

We have gotten the most out of the trial version. Once done, we easily shifted to the production one. StarWind Virtual SAN offers faster performance than conventional storage solutions since it pools the storage space of several servers or disks.

We get fast responses from the support team. There is proactive monitoring of storage.

There is high availability. StarWind Virtual SAN is designed to provide high availability for mission-critical workloads. It uses a variety of technologies, such as synchronous replication, automatic failover, and real-time replication monitoring, to ensure that data is always available and accessible.

The segregation of the concept of memory virtualization is quick and effective. All the storage features RAD0, RAD1, RAD10, and RAD5 are available. You can also have the local backup option available. The best part of StarWind Virtual Scan is that you can move your trial 30-day license to production. The instance can be shifted easily, which makes it easy to convert and use in production. Both two-factor authentication and multi-factor authentication are also available. Cloud backup is also available.

The management interface is too techie for those new to the specific product.

Proper training sessions should be included with the licensing.

Trial licenses should be around two months so that the end user can get most of it.

The guides and documentation are not always up-to-date, and old documentation is not labeled as having been superseded by newer documentation.

It is slightly difficult to manage. This is being addressed with the new StarWind Command Center.

Overall it is a cost-effective product.

I've used the solution for more than six months.

This solution is stable.

It was straightforward to set up as it is an all-in-one appliance solution.

The vendor team helped us set it up. They are extremely professional, and response from them is quick.

We set up a virtualized environment with the need for extreme flexibility and reliability to provide our IT-Services. 

We had to implement a solution that could take on this task and was very pleased with StarWind Virtual SAN. 

We could implement it into our environment easily with low maintenance and could focus on achieving our central task. 

It made our whole project a lot simpler and more user-friendly. We benefited from the scalability to expand our Service capability and were able to do so easily with StarWind vSAN.

We had a rough time using our previous solution. StarWind vSAN made our whole operation much easier and added a lot of particularly useful features. 

In our highly virtualized environment, we had a requirement for high flexibility due to our wide spectrum of services. 

StarWind vSAN was very easy to integrate into our system and ran flawlessly during our entire use time. 

Scaling our systems was something we'd been worried about before due to growing demands and the complicated software we had before. With StarWind vSAN, we could easily accomplish all of our tasks and could benefit from the amazing performance and reliability this software had to offer.

The web-user interface was very user-friendly, and it did not take a lot of time to school our employees about this product. 

All administrative tasks could easily be done, and integrating new systems was easier than ever before. 

This saves us a lot of time as even more complicated tasks can be resolved in way less time than before. We used vCenter and were very happy to see a dedicated vCenter plugin for StarWind vSAN. 

It made our whole operation much more smooth and reliable, not to mention the saved time on schooling employees.

I would say a point that could be improved upon would be the level of documentation and guides that are available. 

While we had no problems setting the system up, and service technicians from StarWind could assist us very well, they could provide some form of in-depth documentation. User guides would be greatly appreciated by all of us. 

Preferably these documents could be directly in the console. That said, I wouldn't mind having it not as tightly integrated. We have some apprentices that use the console, and we don't want to make them call support every time they don't understand something.

I've used the solution for six months.

It is very reliable, and we were confident storing data using StarWind vSAN.

The scalability is great. We were able to scale our systems effortlessly.

They were very friendly and helpful, staying professional and competent at all times.

Positive

We did use another solution. The previous solution was open source, and we needed some kind of real support on the other end to guarantee reliability.

The initial setup was very simple and straightforward. We were able to implement StarWind into our system, and we did not require special help.

We implemented it ourselves, in-house.

We prefer not to publish our ROI.

StarWind vSAN has great value and is definitely worth the price.

We did not evaluate other options. We used other software from StarWind beforehand and were convinced of the quality of their products, so the first thing we looked into was StarWind's solution to our problems.

I highly recommend the solution. It saves a lot of stress, hassle, and time.

We used StarWind's Virtual SAN to create a cluster of hypervisors and databases that utilize iSCSI to access the SAN.  

StarWind's Virtual SAN allowed us to implement a virtual server environment that lets us scale our applications quicker and easier compared to the bare metal environment we had before. The database is also centralized, which makes it more fault tolerant than using a single-node database.

We are able to leverage the HA capabilities that StarWind offers in the event there is an issue with one of the SAN nodes.

We didn't have a SAN solution before StarWind, which meant all of our servers were bare metal. By implementing StarWind's Virtual SAN solution, we were able to transform our bare-metal environment into a hybrid of bare-metal and virtual servers. 

By utilizing virtual servers, we are able to scale and test our applications easier and quicker than by using bare-metal servers. This saved us in cost by not needing to order expensive parts whenever we needed a simple server. Now we can just spin up a VM.

StarWind is very easy to use, even if you have had no experience using a SAN before. It's very easy to create groups, targets, and review logs.

The management software is a clean and simple GUI. During implementation, StarWind's support assisted in getting everything configured properly, quickly, and to their best practices. On the rare occasion when I contact StarWind support, I always get a prompt reply and a quality answer. Having good support is one of the most important things I look for in a vendor, and StarWind excels with this.

The NFS functionality is a Windows-based NFS which has caused issues and forced us to implement a Linux-based NFS solution. You have to do a "full" sync on write-back cache disks instead of a quick sync if there is an issue. This is annoying since, if you have a very large volume, it can take upwards of 30+ hours to do a full sync. With a "fast" sync, you can just sync the difference instead of needing to do a full copy. 

It would be nice if you could control the software via web GUI instead of the desktop application management software.

I've used the solution for over five years.

The solution is very stable.

We can easily add nodes. It is scalable. 

We have had a very good experience with technical support.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward since they did most of the setup for us.

We handled the setup in-house.

StarWind is very reasonably priced.

We previously evaluated FreeNAS.

One of the biggest hydroelectric power plants in the world asked us to prepare a project using HA Virtualization for environmental weather monitoring. In this project, we used three hosts virtualized by VMWare ESXI+VCenter (Essential Plus License). However, one of the prerequisites was that it should be able to integrate with other preexisting virtualized systems that were deployed by other suppliers and use other hypervisors like HyperV or Proxmox. That is where StarWind Virtual SAN comes in. It is really flexible and reliable. We were able to assemble this pilot project using it, and it is in testing, so far, without failures or any malfunctions. It is really an excellent solution.

The flexibility of StarWind Virtual San allowed us to create a system that is integrated into pre-existing solutions and is also independent of VMware itself, making it more reliable and robust.  

It made the system much easier to operate, maintain and manage inside the data center alongside many other systems. It is very easy to migrate the entire virtual system to other hosts or other data centers safely. 

It is really a good solution when you need to be flexible and, at the same time, reliable in a critical system.

First of all, the flexibility and reliability are great. 

The ability to be managed by PowerShell scripts made the management of the system really easy and efficient. We're able to do remote operations or even some operations different from the standard ones (allowed by the GUI).

It also runs under a Windows OS, so it is able to be installed in any virtualized system, independent from the Hypervisor itself.

The available GUI is excellent for monitoring and operating the system in an easy and direct way. It also makes it very easy to deploy and configure. 

It has good documentation, and I did not need technical support once during the entire deployment.

It should be improved in the way it detects the right filesystem image after a complete shutdown of the system or in the case of disaster recovery. I would also recommend an easier way to back up/restore and export the filesystem images.

Another feature that I would like to see implemented is a configurable email alert and report system. While it can be managed using Powershell, it would not be hard at all to configure reports using PowerShell scripts, it would be nice to have some additional features in the GUI.

I've used the solution for about two years.

It is really stable and reliable. It perfectly fits our solution with an active-active failover solution.

The free version is limited, so it is not so scalable. If you need more scalability, you have different license options from the paid versions and the cost is totally worth it.

I did not need any service and support as it is really well documented.

Positive

We also used VMware VSAN and Nutanix. The StarWind Virtual SAN seems to be more flexible and easier to manage in the case we were developing.

The initial setup took about ten days. This included the studying of the documentation, setup, testing, and commissioning. It is well-documented and really easy to operate.

We handled the initial setup in-house.

The Star Wind Virtual SAN has a free/trial version that can be used for study and is suitable for simple solutions. The pricing for the paid versions is really worth it. When you need flexibility and reliability with good technical support, you are paying for what you get. 

We also evaluated VMware vSAN.

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.

The primary use case is for on-premise synchronous replication of high-availability fileservers. If the primary node fails in our virtualization environment, thanks to simultaneous replication, the backup is immediately available. StarWind keeps both of the disks mirrored.

We are using StarWind as a virtual SAN Solution for our Microsoft Hyper-V Cluster environment. We were looking for a simple-to-use, reliable and cost-effective solution. For our purposes, we also tested Veeam and VMware vSAN. StarWind suits us better.  

StarWind Virtual SAN improved our disaster recovery strategy and made it much more secure. The software is cost-effective when it comes to licensing and maintenance. We don't need any extra hardware just install it on our existing virtual machines

The config, which was initially prepared in cooperation with StarWind technical support, is easy to replicate for purposes of maintenance (the user didn't notice anything in performance during the maintenance).

The main benefit is that StarWind is almost maintenance-free.

It's a reliable software, which you set up once, and doesn't need much maintenance. 

Thanks to detailed technical documentation, it is easy to set up. The technical support team from StarWind is experienced and collaborative. 

We did the implementation by ourselves without any third party (StarWind's technical support team checked the configuration made by our administrators), which is cost-saving. Also, our technical team can provide effective first-level support (which you don't often need as it's a reliable product).

We don't find any parts in need of improvement. We don't use all functionalities which StarWind offers. Maybe we could find a cheaper solution, however, when it comes to the above-mentioned pros at the end of the day it's good value for money.

For every issue we had during the implementation or during the period of usage, StarWind Virtual SAN's technical support helped us to find an effective solution.

If I have to find any area of improvement, there is only one thing - other vendors such as VMware vSAN have a bigger community of users, so it is easier to find more pre-sale or post-sale information from users. 

We've used StarWind Virtual SAN for more than three years.

We did not previously use a different solution.

We took into consideration VMware vSAN or Veeam. However, we chose StarWind Virtual SAN.