StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

Will definitely recommend this product and have been dealing with support for over three years. Normally, the biggest grievance we have in the IT industry is support and support is great. Sales representatives were knowledgeable and very helpful whether you use the free or paid version. 

This is perfect for mainstream organizations. Even small businesses can cover legacy methods and all new methods in terms of hypervisors and backup methodologies. 

I work for an organization that has standalone hosts in rural areas in Africa where tape backup is still a thing. With the assistance of StarWind, we were able to share a backup device on Hyper-V as Hyper-V does not support pass-through natively. It is a fantastic software that I highly recommended for the virtualization of storage and backup methodologies.

It is more appropriate for businesses that use Hyper-V and direct attached storage arrays. This solution works well with VMware as well as with smaller systems, although it is a bit of a waste using it when you have a strong SAN. 

It works very well in clustering smaller arrays to create a bigger array for storage platforms. It is the perfect software for interfacing Hyper-V components with other hosts sharing resources.

The StarWind products have enabled our organization to modernize stations where larger and more expensive equipment was not an option. 

I work for an organization that has standalone hosts in rural areas in Africa where tape backup is still used. With the assistance of StarWind, we were able to share a backup device on Hyper-V which did not support pass-through natively.

The ability to use older native technology integrated with 21st-century AI is what allows these applications to be above their competitors.

From vSAN all the way to their VTL pass-through technology, it is compatible with multiple platforms and is truly a universal application with great potential.

The most disappointing side of the application is the free edition. There used to be GUI attached. That has recently changed to only CLI management of the application. That might be a bit off-putting to customers as they would like to use and play with the application without the limitation of what the free license offers. 

Another downside is there is no way of downloading the older versions online. It would be great to have a content library to get the older versions.

I have been using StarWind for about three years.

I have not used a different solution. During my search, StarWind was the first site that I visited.

Do not waste any time on the free product; it's better to get a license. Use sales to evaluate and explore and you will be ready to implement a solid product.

For storage, I have explored Open NAS (Linux) and Windows NFS 3.0.

Try out all of the other solutions as well; there might be a solution offered by StarWind that might suit your organization's needs.

I started using StarWind to maximize the return on hardware infrastructure.

We had multiple slow disks and required multiple HyperV servers to run simultaneously with business-grade speed. After some time and research was connected with StarWind vSAN and then set up the vSAN environment and was really surprised to see how fast the "average" hardware was performing inside the virtual environment. We met the target, and we also had more resources than previously thought as the performance was so good.

I found that StarWind vSAN provided an excellent return on investment and had a performance that blew my socks off. 

We increased the load within the storage we already had as StarWind was able to more than double the speed throughput on IOs by leveraging memory as a cache for read/write operations.

Now we also had a way of leveraging our really old hardware to create fast storage for a testing environment. Also, it is really useful to access large cheap storage for lab environment testing.

If you test the average speed on SATA hard disks, you'll note an average of anywhere around 80-160MB/s - not really great for multiple HyperV Virtual Machines. Just as I thought I couldn't possibly get them to go faster, I found StarWind vSAN and decided to give it a go; after some testing and tuning with how the memory cache works, I was amazed and how far I could push the HDD, memory, and CPU whilst running virtual machines. 

It is truly amazing that the PC's memory was turned into a storage cache and leveraged storage input/output at that speed. 

We went from "no way DB applications would have good performance" to "Wow! We can now actually have a DB running and have some VMs running at the same time."

Given the requirements we had in our office, we needed StarWind vSAN to be able to re-purpose average hardware for use in multiple virtual machine scenarios without having to outlay more CAPEX on hardware. We also needed good technical support and a robust, reliable option with predictable outcomes. 

Fantastically, StarWind offered all that and more. It is rare in our industry to find something that takes efficiency to the Nth degree, and I am all about efficiency and saving people time and money. This is a great product.

I've used the solution for two years. 

The solution is very stable.

It is scalable.

The product offers great service and support.

Positive

It was easy to set up and the support is good.

It has great ROI. We were able to maximize the use of old and new equipment.

We use the StarWind Virtual SAN software across two storage nodes to create redundancy for our cluster storage. 

Installed on two storage servers, StarWind's Virtual SAN handles the replication of our cluster storage between the two in separate server rooms across the site. 

We have five compute nodes connected to the storage nodes, which we run Hyper-V; the VMs are all located on the cluster storage nodes yet physically run on the compute nodes. 

The compute nodes are split in two, with two in one server room and three in another, with room to add more compute nodes if needed. 

Migration of VMs is seamless and improved from our previous solutions.

Our previous SAN solutions were outdated and had several issues due to age.

Looking for a change, we found that all the reviews and people we spoke to about StarWind said that the software just worked perfectly. All we really wanted was a system that once it was set up that just worked. And that's exactly what we have found to be the case in StarWind's Virtual SAN. It has been excellent; we monitor the replication health via the software and that's about it. There are no issues so far, and, like each review we've seen, we would highly recommend StarWind Virtual SAN.

StarWind's Virtual SAN handles the replication of our cluster storage
between the two storage nodes in separate server rooms across the site. 

We have five compute nodes connected to the storage nodes, which we run Hyper-V, and the VMs are all located on the cluster storage nodes. They, however, physically run on the compute nodes. The compute nodes are split into two with two in one server room and three in another. There is also room to add more compute nodes if needed.

Migration of VMs is seamless. It's improved from our previous solutions. The fact is that once it was set up, the replication works perfectly, and we haven't had any issues since installation.

The fact that we can expand our storage and add on to our compute nodes easily and how amazing the StarWind technical support team is really adding value to our purchase.

We don't really have any issues with this product. 

StarWind has a great technical support team that helps with the installation and has ironed out any issues we had early on. 

The price was perfect, as we didn't have to shell out for new SAN servers. We found that StarWind's Virtual SAN was a cheaper solution to install on two storage servers than buying a new dedicated SAN server.

Due to the fact our old SAN was no longer supported and out of warranty, finding that StarWind's technical support team is so incredibly helpful and knowledgeable has been amazing.

There are no negatives or improvements that we can think of at our current stage.

I've been using the solution for four months.

The software seems to be completely stable; we have had no issues with the software itself and if a compute or storage node has gone down, the redundancy has been great, we don't even know if there ever was an issue. 

With the way we are set up, we only need two storage nodes that we are licensed for, and we can expand the storage on those nodes and add it to our cluster storage with no additional cost. Compute nodes don't need to be licensed, so we can have as many as we'd like and attach them to our cluster storage.

Customer service and support were amazing. They offer quick responses and are  very helpful and knowledgeable. 

We had them look over our setup after the demo and got help with configuring the iSCSI connections to the storage nodes. We also had the same technician throughout, so he knew our system and setup.

Positive

We used NetApps SANtricity for the past 10+ years. The System was old, outdated, and out of warranty. Our support contract ended with them last year, so we needed a new solution with support and better software.

Most of the setup was easy for our environment; the only issue we had was with setting up iSCSI connections from the compute nodes to the storage nodes, however, the technical support team helped with this.

We went through a vendor and initially spoke directly with StarWind to do a demo and talk us through it.

The setup costs depend on how many nodes you need.

One of the main reasons we went with StarWind was the pricing. It was cheaper for us to use our existing servers and install the Virtual SAN software and upgrade to SSDs than buy a brand new SAN server from other providers. 

We trialed the StarWind Virtual SAN software for a few weeks and quickly decided on the product.

We looked at other solutions from HP, Barracuda, Netapp, and Azure HCI.

If you trial the software, you can upgrade from the trial to the full version without any disruption or reconfiguration. StarWind Technical support is outstanding. They were extremely helpful throughout the trial, setup, and during our transitioning period.

We have used vSAN as an SDS storage solution with fiber channel JBOD chassis as hardware and integrated the SAN with HyperV to supply storage to VMs. 

The setup was required to expand our storage capabilities, and when looking for solutions, we wanted an SDS system for easier management of new disks and disk failures. 

Our system, therefore, consists of many disks with varying quality, which for us is the true benefit of vSAN since we now can trust different levels of degraded disks and still stay certain that we will not lose data.

We have been able to use more on-prem hardware to reduce cost and also use old disks that we do not trust enough for ordinary RAID or usage.

The storage system has been a great expansion of our capabilities to store large amounts of data since we previously relied on cloud storage which became exponentially more expensive as we expanded our data collection and our pipelines which required more virtual machines and hence more storage. 

With the web GUI available, it also became easier to monitor disk health instead of always logging in to the respective storage servers and checking status, which sometimes only was available during boot in raid controllers.

For us, the SAN solution needed to integrate well with HyperV since that is what we currently use - although we are planning to add an ESXi hypervisor which made vSAN optimal (since it is hypervisor-agnostic and we can select whatever hypervisor we want in the future without the need to redo our storage system).

Furthermore, we have a lot of fiber channel disks lying around, which we had no good use of. Therefore vSAN was great since we could easily integrate these into our storage system and also distribute block storage via fiber channel to the hypervisors and other storage-requiring servers.

The setup and documentation for the installation with the free version could definitely be improved. It took some time to get it up and running; however, when running, it worked well. 

The setup is done in PowerShell and requires quite some knowledge about how to navigate windows through Powershell. Fortunately, there were scripts available to help out. That said, the documentation was not that thorough in helping me understand the scripts. This is definitely room for improvement since it would be nice to quickly get up a demo of the SAN running to evaluate if it works as one expects, which it did in our case.

I've used the solution for two months.

The scalability is great. It integrates with all hypervisors, and disks can easily be added.

It was far from the easiest implementation; however, we got it working.

We implemented the solution in-house.

We looked into TrueNAS and Windows storage spaces.

A customer wanted to build a test environment for his VMware. However, he was running out of financial resources. 

I suggested this product (vSAN in particular), and he was quite happy with its features. Later, he decided to convert his test environment into production using the same StarWind products, and to date, he is a happy customer. 

After this success story, I have referred many of my customers to use this product; no complaints so far. 

Happy customers mean good business, and the company is progressing well, so I'm enjoying the benefits as well. 

StarWind vSAN is easy to deploy and administer. It's a user-friendly solution. We are integrators and deployed vSAN from StarWind with multiple clients and all are happy with its performance. 

Creating the new server and deploying it to be used by hypervisors over ISCSI is good. It is very easy to configure. 

I'd prefer it if a remote console was provided. That way, the customer doesn't have to log in to a specific server where the product is running. That could be very beneficial. 

I've been using the solution for four years.

I have deployed this product at multiple locations (for clients) and have had no complaints so far. It is a fully stable product. 

The scalability is relatively easy to manage on StarWind. When having real hardware, it's a bit complex to scale, yet way easier with StarWind than with other options.  

Customer service is easily available by email. I have not tried by phone. However, it's my understanding that they would be of great help if I reached out that way too.  

Positive

I have worked with NetApp, Lenovo, EMC, and some other brands as well for storage with VMware and Hyper V. 

StarWind is easy to manage as compared to these and is a cheap solution with very similar features. 

The initial setup is straightforward. Any IT professional can handle it after some studying and training from Youtube. 

After reading the help material and watching some Youtube videos, I deployed this product myself. 

A happy customer is the best ROI. I have many happy customers using StarWind. 

It's quite easy to deploy this product. 

Any IT professional can read a few documents and watch some videos and maybe go to Youtube to learn about deployment and management. It's a very simple and user-friendly product. 

I purchased a StarWind Hyper-Converged Appliance from StarWind in order to fulfill a multitude of needs for my end client. Chief among them was that the system would be a rather small installation. 

Compared to a traditional configuration using three Servers and a SAN, the StarWind HCA allowed me to provide the user with two Server boxes that could handle their redundancy requirements in a fraction of the space and with a significant cost reduction. 

The installation called for using a VMware vSphere that would house about a dozen VMs with redundancy for every component involved in the system. The reduced size of this installation also made it possible to install the HCA alongside the existing servers so that they could be removed at the client's leisure when they were comfortable with the new installation.

StarWind Virtual SAN, and specifically its implementation in their StarWind Hyper-Converged Appliance, gave us a competitive advantage in the bidding process. This is specifically true for smaller installations where the economies of scale of having a centralized SAN and compute-only boxes don't have a chance to kick in. 

In addition to the StarWind solution allowing you to save on the hardware by only requiring two boxes containing all components, it allows us to avoid the unfortunately expensive solution provided by VMware for their own virtual SAN solution.

The StarWind Virtual SAN provides a clever and unique solution to the Computing Split Brain problem. A split brain occurs when two machines in a redundancy scenario have lost their connection to each other yet have maintained connection to the clients. This causes both devices to think they are running as the master, and their configurations will drift apart from each other, making reintegration all but impossible. Instead of using a third client as a witness, they have solved this problem by creating a secondary heartbeat signal to be carried on an independent hardware NIC, thus solving the problem.

The only current drawback that I see for the configuration as it stands is that it can be a little complicated to configure compared to other, more traditional solutions. 

If it were up to me, I would focus on streamlining a vSphere appliance for configuring the virtual storage machines. 

I would also like them to invest time in reducing the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure. Currently, it requires you to jump in and out of virtual environments placing storage components on or offline, and all steps must be done in their proper order, or you can create an issue. It seems to me that this could be integrated into an add-on for vSphere that could handle the details of the startup/shutdown procedure more gracefully and with less manual intervention.

We've used the solution for about two years.

I did not experience any stability issues

This solution has the ability to scale into very large systems. However, it really shines in the small to mid-size range.

Customer service gets back to you promptly and is highly knowledgeable.

Positive

In most instances, I have used a regular vSphere running a SAN and multiple compute hosts. I haven't precisely switched. I'd say that you need to provide the right solution for the end client, and in smaller installs, specifically, the efficiency gains in space and cost of the StarWind Virtual SAN can be hard to beat.

The initial setup for the StarWind Hyper-Converged Architecture I purchased was largely done either by StarWind or with their assistance. If I had to do the whole thing myself, it would have taken me quite some time based on the complexity. They do have good documentation and videos, so it would not have been an insurmountable task.

We mainly did an in-house implementation.

I didn't calculate ROI. I can only state that it was about 30% cheaper for the end client than the alternative.

Do your comparison shopping, and if you are working on a small system trying to ensure redundancy, that will almost certainly bring you back to StarWind.

For the application, I compared it to a regular vSphere SAN. However, I did not compare it to other Hyper-Converged solutions. At the time, it was pretty clear that they had a long track record and a good reputation which aided in deciding on them as a solution.

Before you deliver this to an end client, make absolutely sure that you provide adequate documentation about how to start up and shut down the system. That part can be a little bit tricky and requires you to do things in the proper order.

We were looking to replace three to four physical hosts running 10-12 virtual servers with one solution requiring less maintenance and full high availability. 

We could have developed our own stack. That said, this was so turnkey and useful that it made the most sense. We now have two physical hosts with more power and high availability than all the previous servers combined. 

Support has an incredibly fast response to requests such as size increase of the SAN and installation software updates whenever we need them. 

This was a great implementation for a small to mid-size business. It allowed us to take advantage of all the Hyper-V features and live migrations without the expense of dedicated SANs. 

We can perform maintenance on either host during the day, and the users don't even notice a difference in performance. 

We survived a couple of facility power outages. However, due to the redundancy of the entire host, the HCA failed over quickly and accurately with no downtime. Support also helps us improve our infrastructure with the best practices of other organizations. 

There is immediate redundancy and HA without a huge amount of configuration - which is ideal. Their support was even better - with proactive monitoring and efficient setup and configuration changes. 

We recently upgraded the physical hosts and maxed out the memory and hard drive space, and their support team walked us through the upgrade every step of the way. There were no issues. Even with an older HCA we have plenty of room for future growth. 

We also can install security patches with no problems during the day instead of after-hours. 

Some of the new hyper-converged tools seem basic as a single pane of glass dashboard. However, they are constantly looking at improvements and updates. 

The actual interface is somewhat cryptic, so we wouldn't know what configuration changes to make. That is kind of the point. We have their full support, and we don't have to staff a Level 5 engineer to make large configuration changes. 

I would like to see more user-friendly dashboards in future versions. That said, they continue to release updates, so I'm sure that's on the roadmap. 

I've used the solution for three to five years.

We use the solution for HA storage for HVs.

We are an SMB that can't be bothered paying tens of thousands of dollars just to get a proper HA storage for a two node failover cluster. Therefore StarWind's vSAN was financially attractive from the start.

The reviews you can find all over the web incentivised us to research this solution deeper (e.g. just check all the great posts vom Kooler on Stackoverflow), leading to us actually implementing it.

We were coming from an S2D implementation which already gave us a ridiculous amount of headaches (bugs, performance stalls, "we know what's best for you" automatisms) in addition to being slow and annoying to administrate/debug while also having the most annoying documentation ever to be created by mankind. These solutions rush out some code and ship it and never fix anything (but break it every few weeks with patches).

The initial tests were easily implementable (without begging some sales folks for a POC, due to a free version being available) as well as proper documentation that you actually like to read due to it having been typed by a tech (and that also isn't behind a pay/registration wall).

As close to perfect as the documentation is, do read the blog posts to the two-node HA setup as well. Some minute details were only found in those.
There are no showstoppers, and not many things in general, just a few hints here and there.

The install itself is easy as pie. The config file is properly documented (you can do most things via GUI, just some things are set in the main config file).

Do help yourself to the iSCSI Powershell commands (Windows defaults from MS) when implementing. It is way more attractive than clicking via GUI.
(New-IscsiTargetPortal, Connect-IscsiTarget etc.)

Some things must be done via GUI though, since iSCSI has been implemented way back and "making scripting available" wasn't that widespread for developers back then. This being a Microsoft topic, not StarWind though. They would have had to make their very own iSCSI implementation otherwise.

For testing, you should use a proper tool like https://docs.microsoft.com/en-...
since "Windows copy from within the VM running on the test setup" can be flakey.
Not as in "the results aren't valid real world performance if you check with the Windows copy within a VM" but rather "non-scientific" since you can't extract much data from that process aside from size/time.

There is a visual bug with a specific part of iSCSI. It's Microsoft's fault, and, as usual, has never been fixed in over 15 years. Just don't panic if you experience it.
https://www.dell.com/support/k...
https://social.technet.microso...

Price-wise this is very attractive. The support is great (little that we needed due to the good docs) and I would expect you to reach a very good performance just like we did.

The next-best solution from my research back then - that you would actually want to use, so no S2D or anything - would have started at 7X or 8X the price. Since StarWind's solution has served us very well over the last two years already, I would recommend it.

To respond to the "how it has improved our organization," in a nutshell: it has provided very stable and performant storage-level HA which allows for live failover of VMs (as long as the compute doesn't die as well).

We like the ability to be installed and used on the same host, so we get the max performance possible.

It is easy to set up and maintain, resulting in a happy admin and low TCO/good ROI.

It offers good performance and stability and also makes for a happy admin.

It provides HA for our failover cluster storage where anything can go wrong up until compute, the thing still chugs along like nothing ever happened.

The upgrades are also very easy to implement. It's basically "click click click" once everything has been shut down and you're back up really quickly.

Feature-wise we are only waiting for the release of a "planned disaster" feature that would allow us to patch a hypervisor node without having to take the full storage offline.

ATM (20220609) is still necessary, since taking a node offline without properly activating the maintenance mode on the vSAN would trigger a full sync of the vSAN nodes.

This is fine and a good thing since it ensures data integrity. However, there is something in the making that would ensure integrity without a full sync after a node goes down, which, as stated above, one could "abuse" to patch (and boot = take down) the hypervisors during business hours 😁

Other than that, the thing is rock stable and chugging along without issues.
We are an SMB so we "only" have around 50 VMs on our FO cluster, which is a medium load for SSDs.

If you plan to go more to the "max" side of performance use, do proper testing!

I've used the solution for two years.

It's rock-stable.

So far, we only had visual issues in a specific place due to Microsoft being a PITA and never fixing any bugs they bring in (this one being over 15 years old).

It scales very easily.

Depending on your setup, their actual SAN might be a better fit for you, however, that's for your very specific case to decide.

We really only had contacted the support for the final checkup after setting it up ourselves, so that they could verify everything is running as it is supposed to.

That was great, so our experience has been great overall.

Positive

We previously used Microsoft S2D. It had bad documentation, offered bad performance, and had bad GUI and bad CLI.

The setup is very easy, and they offer very nice documentation and blog posts.

We did the implementation all in-house, self-taught by their great docs.

Since our HVs already run with Windows DC we had S2D included in the cost.

However, the operational costs were high. I'd easily say the invested time over a year with S2D would be $20-30K while StarWind's vSAN now took like $500-750 (yes, less than $1K!) over two years. 😎

Even if you add the license cost (which is cheap even with our 3-year premium support package) it is a no-brainer.

There is the "invisible" cost of you reading the docs, however, that comes with every solution. At least with StarWind, you have tech-to-tech documentation that you can actually use.

The pricing is very fair!

We looked into VMware and others. They usually had a way higher cost or worse performance or worse GUI/documentation, or all of those things together.

I'd advise others to use the free license to test it. The doc is also public. This is the way.