StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

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.

Our client had very little IT infrastructure in play relating to servers. They had a single Windows 10 low-end workstation that was acting as the controller for their food production assembly line. They were tackling a huge expansion and needed a more robust controller as their current one would go down often. 

StarWind vSAN gave us a cost-effective option to leverage three Dell servers, with two in HA and a third acting as a replica in a separate building on their site. This way, it can tolerate two full server failures and still allow the assembly line controller to run.

The product gave us a cost-effective way to deploy a highly available server environment. This allowed our client to have their food assembly line controller always available, as it costs them a lot of money if it goes down for any more than a few minutes. 

With Hyper-V and StarWind, they can have a quick turnaround in case a server goes down. It also gave us an insight into StarWinds as an alternative for future clients of ours if their server capability requirements ever increase. It's a great tool to have knowledge of and to offer as an option if needed.

The core feature of the entire product is the most valuable aspect. There aren't any features that stand out that provide a lot of value. We just like the ability to have HA storage replicated in real time between two nodes - which is enough for us to be more than satisfied. We do not interface with this product very often, so I can't speak to any feature in particular that stands out as being exceptional and valuable. The value of the product is the services given at a great price which is what drew us to the StarWind Virtual SAN to begin with.

It is not very clear within the StarWind Management Console or the StarWind support documentation how to perform maintenance on a single node in a two-node HA cluster. We had to reach out to support to confirm the process to power cycle a single node, and even then, we had to go back and forth a few times with support to get a clear and concise answer to the question we had. It would be nice to have the option to put a single node in maintenance mode so we know we can safely perform updates and power down the server if required.

We've had the solution for six months in production.

The product is very stable.

I get the impression that this is better geared towards a smaller scale, for example, ad two or four-node cluster. Anything bigger, and it would make more sense to go with the big-name competitor. 

Technical support is Exceptional. They have very helpful and prompt responses.

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution.

The setup is straightforward with the help of the support engineers to fine-tune our deployment.

We had setup help from the vendor team. They were quite knowledgeable. That said, I do recall them doing a few things in a different way than described by their setup guide.

I have not researched ROI.

The cost and licensing are very competitive.

We did not evaluate other options.

We were previously using old conventional backup methods. Last year, our organization decided to move to some cloud base storage solution, and we moved to StarWind as our primary storage solution. 

StarWind Virtual SAN is the solution exactly we are looking for. It replicates the data between the hosts, giving us 30 TB of usable redundant storage. 

StarWind Virtual SAN is a flexible solution in terms of storage expansion. The big advantage we got from StarWind is the ability to meet compliance requirements to ensure we are fail-safe.

StarWind Virtual SAN is cost-effective, with high availability and good flexibility, and is a high-performance software-defined storage solution. 

StarWind features like high availability and cost-effectiveness improve the ability of our organization by reducing the cost of old storage methods. Additionally, StarWind Virtual SAN provides excellent performance. It delivers fast data access and efficient data transfers, which actually improves the application performance and user experience.

In our case, the cost and high availability are the two most important factors which we were looking for in a solution. StarWind Virtual SAN is a cloud-native solution, and cost and other factors are favorable to us. I would recommend this solution if a company has a tight budget and hardware limitations in its environment. Of course, users do need to consider other factors as well as every organization has its own preference for solutions.

There is always room for improvement, and user expectations never end.

The first and most important thing the solution needs is video tutorials. There should be more focus areas. To use the solution, users should not need to always create tickets to get support from the vendor. There should be publicly available tutorials on YouTube or other platforms that help the users to integrate this solution with other platforms, for example. 

Documentation improvement is the second area that needs focus. We require more detailed documentation. That will definitely help users to effectively utilize this solution. 

I have been using this solution for more than one year. 

We were a using conventional backup solution previously.

We have evaluated a few options previously. However, I can't recall the names. That process was handled a year ago.

We use the solution as a hyper-converged appliance for critical business applications for a 12+TB data set with high availability and proactive storage monitoring. 

We use a two-node HCA cluster running Starwind's vSAN on VMware with 40Gbps storage replication links and heartbeat channels. 

We have been through two sets of StarWind vSAN/HCA appliances over five or more years and migrated from all physical servers to two hyper-converged nodes and then from the two hyper-converged nodes to two new nodes when the old nodes had reached maximum service age. 

We have leveraged StarWind's team for assistance with setup and configuration on both sets of appliances and their support as needed.

StarWind's vSAN took us from an organization with no failover for our infrastructure to having a complete failover within four to five minutes. It also allows our IT staff to perform hardware and software maintenance on infrastructure during business hours, cutting our need for overtime and extended work hours. 

We no longer have to worry about hardware failure since either of our vSAN nodes can support our entire workload until the failed node can be repaired or replaced, then the data stores resynced, and high availability returned.

The ease of reaching the support team and their promptness for support is great. The install team has also been excellent, always performing a thorough job and never rushing thru the process. 

The simplicity of architecture since the nodes can be directly connected. There is no need for a storage network unless you exceed three nodes of storage this is a large cost saving for most organizations that do not have extremely large datasets.

StarWind's VCA also provides a great TCO for the provided features and costs versus other solutions.

I would love to see more vendor selection to be available for the HCA/vSAN appliances. All the appliances are currently Dell, and the additional cost savings could be found with Supermicro or Lenovo configurations. 

If StarWind's proactive support alerting could also have an email integration or work with a PSA system so we open alerts when StarWind has an event generated, it would be great. Right now, we operate off the alerts being sent to StarWind and their proactive service team is reaching out to us to work on remediation.

I've used the solution for over five years.

In our experience, it has been extremely stable. We have several clusters deployed and have never had any large issues with any of them.

The solution is very scalable. You can add nodes to increase computer and storage. You only need to add storage networking once you exceed three nodes.

Support is prompt and usually, they can meet via Zoom in just a few minutes from the creation of a support request/ticket.

Positive

Previously we have used other SAN solutions that did not provide the same level of redundancy or support.

The initial setup was very straightforward and well-documented. When purchasing a vSAN, the appliance setup is included with StarWind, and they can do most of the setup with you over a Zoom call.

We used a mix of in-house and vendor support. The vendor's level of expertise is excellent. I've never gotten off a call without a solid answer being provided.

Our ROI was achieved within 36 months of deployment. We ran our first vSAN cluster for 60+ months before replacing it with a new vSAN cluster.

The setup is the most cost-effective as a two or three-node cluster yet is still cost-effective in larger configurations.

We evaluated several solutions, including SCALE, Dell EMC, Dell MD Storage Arrays, HPE 3PAR, and others.

Starwind's vSAN software is available on their websites and you can set up a test environment to vet the product.

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 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.

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.