StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've used the solution for three months.

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The stability is rock solid.

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

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

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution. 

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

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

The cost is honestly negligible for us.

We looked at VMware vSAN.

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

We 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.

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.

The primary use case we had was covering with StarWind vSAN was to provide customers with a redundant solution that was able to guarantee flexibility. In terms of physical storage, we can aggregate in order to provide a redundant, replicated solution. At the same time, we were looking to keep the total cost of ownership as low as possible as the customer may have multiple venues to cover with the same schema of the system. 

With StarWind vSAN we were able to set a simple 2-node cluster leveraging the internal disks to create a replicated vSAN - eliminating any SPOF at a reasonable price.

StarWind, compared to other competitors in the market and in the same range of price, allows us to design system plans with the resilience of enterprise-grade storage, however, we are able to use smaller storage even at the consumer level. This makes us more competitive as the total price of the offered solution was comparable to a usual non-HA system yet with all the resilience features that StarWind is bringing with its product. This combination of low price with enterprise-grade HA features is key in the market.

There are tons of valuable features that StarWind vSAN brings to the table. It is very difficult to choose one to be raised as a role model.

The unique capability to create a vSAN on a 2-node cluster while all the other competitors will require users to have at least an external witness to set the Virtual SAN.

The service team is very collaborative and skilled and followed us from the implementation to the go-live of the system constantly.

The license price is one of the cheapest in the market.

The price is the key aspect (yet not at the expense of reliability and stability). It is not so easy to find an aspect where StarWind can improve their offering or any additional feature they can include for the price they ask. 

I know that StarWind can scale out easily, however, I wasn't in the position to test that. I would like an automated installation/configuration despite the fact that their service is very collaborative, a customer should be able to deploy the solution by themselves. 

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

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to test the scalability aspect.

As it was driven by StarWind reps, it was running very smoothly.

There's nothing to finger point on the StarWind team. They were great.

We also evaluated StorMagic, VMware vSAN, and Datacore.

We are an SMB IT consulting company with an infrastructure department. 

Before 2019, we had been deploying HP StoreVirtual VSA in order to deliver a typical 2-node hyper-converged cluster. Since the publishing of EOL/EOS for HP StoreVirtual we had been looking for a suitable replacement. 

We looked at and deployed various solutions - from StorMagic, Open-E, NetApp, and EMC. StarWind was the easiest to deploy. It was very inexpensive, offered the best support, and was hardware agnostic. After several deployments, this has been the best 2-node hyper-converged solution accepted by all engineers on my team.

StarWind Virtual SAN has given us the ability to bring a stable and functional 3rd party 2-node hyper-converged solution to our SMB clients. 

The typical roadblock with SMBs is the cost. It is very difficult to convince an SMB of the value of redundancy, highly-available hardware configurations, up-time, and quality vendor support until an emergency happens and solutions are needed ASAP. 

With StarWind, we are able to present best practices to SMBs and since the price point is attractive, we can more efficiently convince SMB clients to make the investment in best practices before a disaster happens.

The top-notch support before, during, and after deployments are better than any other vendor I have come across. There is very little wait and very little pain to get an engineer who is very knowledgeable about this product to assist us.

The fact that it is hardware agnostic gives us the capability to customize the solution according to the client's needs and budget.

We are in the middle of converting our own infrastructure to StarWind Virtual SAN since we are so satisfied with the ease and function of the environments where this product is deployed.

The only way I can see this product needing improvement is the consultation level of the StarWind sales and engineers. For example, the method of management of the StarWind environments that have been deployed has been a downloaded management console program. This downloaded program which needs to be installed on the network of the environment was the suggestion of the deployment engineers. 

I would like to see more consultation on a web UI management console.

Our first deployment was in 2019.

No deployments have ended badly. All are still running without issues. It is very stable.

The solution is hardware agnostic. Storage can be added if licensing is increased. It offers above-average scalability. 

Customer service is the best part of this product. The customer service and support I have received are unmatched by any other vendor.

Positive

We used HP StoreVirtual. The switch was needed as it came to its end-of-life and end-of-support.

The initial setup is very straightforward. Anything complex is done by the StarWind personnel.

Our implementation was a hybrid of vendor-team and in-house. The vendor team has a very high level of expertise.

The ROI is for our clients. There is less downtime, less troubleshooting, fewer issues, and fast speeds. 

The setup is simple and the cost is attractive.

We also evaluated Open-E, StorMagic, NetAPP, and EMC.

I'd advise users to initiate lots of communication with their support staff. Their responses are quick and sufficient.

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.

The MSP that I work for brought on a client who realized they needed help with IT after the acquisition of another company. In the space of a few weeks, that client nearly doubled in size, and the aged tech in use at each location previously wasn't going to cut it. 

While we originally quoted a traditional SAN deployment for the client, they were concerned about having a single storage unit with two very distant servers. They weren't interested in buying two SANs so that each location could host one. StarWind vSAN allowed us to keep their data synced between two sites without the extra hardware expenditure.

For my MSP, this successful deployment has earned us another happy customer and another potential future sales lead. The client has expressed no concerns about the deployment since implementation in the handful of times we've reached out to them since the project wrapped up.

Additionally, we have been able to use this deployment solution for the training of lower-level staff to get them familiar with the underlying generic concepts of SANs, both virtual and physical (or at least as much as we can for physical SANs using a virtual SAN as the lab environment).

Easily the core of this solution was the utilization of stretched clustering. As the client had acquired another company some distance away, they were concerned about having a single SAN in one location or the other. StarWind vSAN allowed us to keep a copy of the data local to each site without asking the client to pay for two SANs in addition to the two new servers they needed.

On the acquired end of the company, the reduction in hardware also meant that we were able to use their existing server room mounting hardware, as a new server and a new SAN would require a larger rack to be deployed as well.

The documentation listed on the StarWind website indicated that the search result for vSAN was for Windows Server 2016. It wasn't until we got into the article itself that we saw that Server 2019 and 2022 were also supported by the same document.

While my co-workers might not place as much emphasis on this next topic as I do, I did not see any indication that StarWinds vSAN is a usable solution with non-GUI instances of Hyper-V. While it might certainly be possible, the time restraints on the project meant that my plan to roll out hypervisors with as little overhead as possible (e.g., Windows Server Desktop features) had to be placed at a lower priority, and we were never able to look into this as an option.

The MSP I work for deployed StarWind vSAN to a client over the last month. They have been quite happy with it - and with us as a result.

The client has been happy so far, and we feel confident about this solution as an MSP.

Since the solution is built for small and medium businesses, its scalability is intentionally limited.

Our previous one-size-fits-all SAN mindset often priced us out of successful sales with smaller companies.

I'd advise future users to seriously consider the higher-level support packages. These can mean the difference between hours of downtime/angry bosses and a solution before you've even finished your coffee.

While each of my co-workers on this project researched their own solutions to this project, I only brought the idea of StarWind's vSAN to the table.