StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

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 It's not bad, however, it is quite often out of date.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.

I was hoping to implement a High Availability and redundant system without sacrificing performance or my budget. Looking at various HCI and vSAN solutions, the cost was a bit prohibitive.  

I really wanted my cake and to eat it to; however, VMware's vSAN offering and looking at a few HCI solutions (vXRails, Nutanix, etc.) just did not fit my budget. That is when I read a review on StarWind free vSAN, which got me interested, but I knew I wanted (and needed) support.

We set up a three-node cluster on new, identical servers with VMware's vSphere and added StarWind's vSAN product to expand our capabilities.

Our servers started out with 8 HDDs, and after production, we added 4 SSDs which StarWind assisted in getting online in the vSAN.

We have High Availability, failover, redundancy, and the ability to move workloads on the fly with no impact on the organization. It is great for patching and updates to the servers.

The ROI is great on this product.  We did have to upgrade our licensing to enterprise level as we surpassed the 8TB limit by adding additional storage.  Purchasing a three-year term helped bolster our ROI even further.

We did have a vCenter failure during an upgrade. StarWind support was able to get the systems back online and syncing with no data loss or impact on production (and even improve the installation by moving the critical StarWind components on the Boss Card).

I feel very confident in the support team's abilities.

First and foremost, StarWind has awesome support. You work with the same engineer throughout implementation or any issues.  

They explain the process of what and why they are doing whatever it is. You are not left high and dry when looking to implement the vSAN and can solve issues that may arise or even configure additional added storage.

The stability is great. The solution has been running with no issues due to vSAN itself. It is one of those "set it and forget it" types of systems. Perhaps this is a bad thing as you kind of do not think about it.

The documentation is good yet is still lacking in a few areas. I would love to see more comprehensive walk-throughs or perhaps even videos. With this being such a critical piece of infrastructure, I do not like to take chances. Fortunately, support will be there to help hold your hand or even perform the process for you, ensuring everything is working.

It would be really nice to have a documented "Best Practices" list to ensure you are doing everything you can to ensure stability and performance. I have to be a bit nitpicky; overall, there is not much I can really add.

We demoed the product in early 2021. We have been using it in production for over a year now.

It is extremely stable thus far. We've been running well over a year without any issues due to StarWind itself.

It offers great performance and has the ability to add additional nodes to your cluster.

I would say StarWind has the best customer service and support. They are quick and aggressive in resolving any issues as quickly as possible. Not enough good things can be said about how they treat customers.

Positive

We used an MS 2008r2 Cluster many years ago. Prior to StarWind vSAN, were using static servers.

For a three-node cluster, the setup seemed complex. However, upon purchasing a license, StarWind's excellent support took over and created a PoC install for us.

We worked with the vendor team. They were great to work with. Over multiple days, you work with the same engineer, which is a great way to work versus getting transferred from tech to tech.

While you can add nodes later on, I would suggest really putting thought into how many nodes you want to start with, as networking can get challenging if you omit a good 10+GB switch.

I looked at a few HCI (Dell, vxRail, and Nutanix) and the VMware vSAN solution.  It was cost-prohibitive for me

I cannot say enough good things about the support this company gives; more companies need to model this.

This solution replaced some old IBM DS 3400 SANs that we had for many years and we used it to build new, highly available storage. Most of our servers use Hyper-V, and this solution is the storage backbone for our Hyper-V Clusters.

We use the virtual SAN piece of the solution because we're not hyper-converged, so I value the highly available storage that all of my clustered servers can see and utilize.

I had an occasion last year where I needed emergency support from them, and the support we normally pay for didn't cover it. I had to buy upgraded support, which was not a problem, but it wasn't a prorated amount, so I paid for the support, the full upgrade, but I only got a couple of months out of it because it was only good until renewal time. That kind of thing should either be prorated or extended past the renewal time, so whenever you buy it, you get a year's worth of upgraded support. That's my only real problem with them. Otherwise, I think they're pretty good.

I have been using this solution for five years.

The solution has been stable.

The solution is scalable. The version I have has unlimited storage, so as long as I have the space in my servers to add storage, then the solution will support it.

The initial setup was easy, but mainly because we didn't do it ourselves. We had the support team work through it with us when we set it up, and just by working with their support, we got everything up and running. Once we had the hardware set up and ready to go, it took a half a day or so to get everything configured with the install. Then, because of the size of our volumes, it took several days for them to sync, but we did the initial setup in a day.

Once the solution is set, you kind of forget about it because you don't need to touch it that often. Anytime I've needed to get back in there and add more volumes, or if I have any problems, I just call their support team, and we work through it together, so it's been pretty easy. I imagine if someone had to deal with it daily, it would probably be pretty easy to understand and work with, but we don't touch it that much.

ROI is difficult to quantify because we used this solution to replace really old IBM SAN hardware. We can do everything that we need to do with it, and I've had it five years and other than one time that I had to upgrade support, I've had to pay nothing extra. I consider the cost of ownership low, because anybody who has to have on-premises storage, especially if you want to be compliant with backups, needs something like this and I'm sure there's other solutions out there that do it, but this is what we chose and it's worked perfectly.

I have the Enterprise version, which has unlimited storage, and we have two nodes, or two servers where all the storage is replicated to each other. For two nodes, it cost us $10,000, and we spend $2,000 a year on support. If you want higher tier support, that will cost a little more.

To any who are considering this solution, I'd say that I've been really impressed with it so far. I think it's pretty great, actually. It does exactly what we need it to do, and it does it well, so I would recommend it. Plus, the support has been very good.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of ten.

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

We have been running Starwind Virtual SAN in a production environment since 2009 with VMware.

We run all types of software on top of Starwind (Different types of databases, factory software, security software, ERP, etc.).

We don't have performance issues with the software in fact it responds more than enough to our needs.

Since we are a mid-size company; Starwind is perfect for us.

Not everything is great, in the very first editions (a long time ago) there were some annoying issues with the software however, naturally, it evolved.

For us, in the last six or seven years, the uptime has been 100%. It has proven to be a great choice for us and of great value for money.

There are no future plans in changing to a different solution.

We have had Starwind in our infrastructure for about 13 years. It's easy to manage and understand. You can learn it very fast.

For those that aren't familiar with it, they can do a trial try and I am sure users will be surprised at how well it works. It has been a great investment!

Our Datacenter is based on VMware vCenter and initially, after some testing with other vendors and VMware vSAN itself, Starwind, in our case, was a better solution. We prefer to have the storage layer separated from the hypervisor kernel.

We have also products in our Datacenter like VxRail, however, in an honest storage level, in comparison, Starwind has an easier interface.

It's quite easy to manage. Good storage hardware is a must in our case, however, you can also run it in a software solution despite not being recommended in some cases.

Like many solutions today, Starwind should focus a bit on the alarmists of the product.

NVME Target for windows is taking a bit to become available!

There are so many potential alarmistic features and protocols that should be incorporated into the software.

Security on the ISCSI protocol could be improved by adding features like OS-type control access, especially for the data center environment.

I have seen 13 years of evolution in the product. Previously, it was short in features. Many customers' requests have been done. I do hope the solution continues to evolve in this way. 

I've used the solution for more than 13 years.

The solution offers good value for money.

Licensing needs to consider future needs.

We also looked at Microsoft and Dell.

The solution is very stable.

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.