StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

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.

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.

StarWind vSAN is set up on our two host VMware ESXi systems. Each system is running a Linux VM for the vSAN storage and a Windows Server 2022 VM that runs the StarWind vSAN management software. 

The two hosts are connected on a dedicated 25GB backbone with a 1GB management network and a 1GB heartbeat network. ISCSI is run on a separate 25GB connection between the two hosts.

There have been zero issues with stability or downtime in the past three months. One of the servers experienced a random system crash and the vSAN was not affected and there was no downtime with the VMs running on the vSAN storage solution.

It was relatively easy to set up and the support was great. After purchasing the license, it was relatively simple to follow the StarWind documentation on their website.

It has allowed us to set up vSAN with ESXi without spending extra on an ESXi license or needing to buy a third host. This saved us thousands on initial setup costs and hundreds in licensing yearly.

An issue with one of the hosts caused the server to crash, however, our services and VMs running on the vSAN storage were not impacted. The storage implementation experienced zero downtime and behaved exactly how we wanted it to. 

vSAN implementation is straightforward and easy to setup. 

The support has been amazing and quick to reply. They also reached out and made sure that everything was setup correctly. Support quickly answered any questions we had and setup a screen share meeting to validate our install and give optimization tips. 

After the initial meeting, they reached out a few weeks afterward to double-check that their recommendations were implemented properly.

Their support did not try and upset anything and were very helpful and knowledgeable about their product.

Documentation could be a little more clear on what the most recent version of the documentation is. 

I had issues locating the documentation that applied to my version of StarWind vSAN. However, it was easy to follow and set up once I did locate the correct documentation.

It would also be helpful to provide the software download links with the documentation. I had to find the vSAN Linux VM and the vSAN management software in separate locations and with separate download links. It wasn't initially clear that the Linux VMs and vSAN management software needed to be installed. 

I've used the solution for three months.

It seems to work fine on our two host systems. It seems like it would easily be able to expand to a larger system. 

Customer service and support replied quickly and ensured everything was implemented correctly. They checked in and ensured we implemented all their recommendations so that we would have the best experience. 

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution.

It was easy to set up once we found the documentation.

We deployed it ourselves in-house.

The solution allowed us to have a high availability system without having to purchase additional hardware or support licensing.

If you email StarWind, they might give a discount on the licensing compared to what they list online. 

We looked at VMware vSAN.

When support reaches out, they're not trying to sell anything. They just want to ensure everything is set up correctly and you have a good experience! 

We are using StarWind as a two-node Hyper-V Cluster in order to have a highly available virtual environment. The two servers are interconnected with 25GB network cards. 

We then have our VMs installed on Hyper-V using the shared storage. Virtual machines will then instantly fail over to the other node in the event of a server hardware failure. StarWind keeps both of the disks mirrored to ensure no data loss. This has worked with no issues over the last year on many clusters that we have set up using StarWind. 

StarWind has been straightforward to configure. As a company, we have been able to install many StarWind clusters with no extra hardware required, meaning less hardware to maintain. The software is also cost-effective vs purchasing dedicated hardware SANS. 

We now have a defined config that is easy to replicate and works well with no downtime or maintenance required. 

StarWind support has been great in helping resolve other issues not caused by their software.

Shared storage between two devices is great. It was done seamlessly. StarWind has been straightforward to configure and installs StarWind organize a time and configures the software using their best practices. As a company, we have been able to install many StarWind clusters with no extra hardware required, meaning less hardware to maintain. The software is also cost-effective vs purchasing dedicated hardware SANS.

StarWind support has been great in helping resolve other issues not caused by their software.

A central management console may be nice to see all nodes.

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

This has been very stable over the last 12 months.

We did not previously use a different solution.

Licensing used to be good. However, the pricing may have gone up in recent months. 

We did look at other hardware solutions.

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 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.

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 use the solution to create a highly available server cluster. 

I currently have two physical servers running 25 virtual machines in a highly available cluster. StarWind Virtual SAN enables this without any extra hardware and any kind of hardware vendor locking. 

We use the vSAN product to run a production cluster but also a secondary cluster that houses low-level and testing servers. StarWind vSAN is used to cluster everything together into a solid hyper-converged structure that requires less hardware, less energy, and far less maintenance.

I have been able to do more with less hardware. StarWind vSAN allows us to create a hyper-converged server cluster on a friendly budget without being locked into a specific hardware vendor. 

The product, server, and support are top tier. Their proactive support is on top of every little anomaly in the vSAN. The product is fairly simple to get running and operates with little overhead. 

It makes setting up a high available environment easy and very manageable. Everyone from sales to support are very engaged and proud of the product.

The most valuable aspects are the support and the high availability.

They offer top-tier support. The support staff is knowledgeable and very willing to help. The proactive support option is unlike any support I've ever dealt with. If anything gets out of sorts, the team is on top of it with an email.

Achieving a highly available environment can be hard to execute and lead to a hardware vendor lockin. StarWind is hardware agnostic and supports as few as two hosts to create a fully functional, hyper-converged, highly available server cluster at a fraction of the cost of other vendors.

A good area of improvement would be at the level at which StarWind vSAN is managed. Currently, the StarWind management console is a bit clunky to navigate and isn't the most user intuitive interface. It gets the job done, however, following guides and documentation is highly advised to make sure things are being set up correctly. 

Another area of improvement would be the ability to manage your entire setup using StarWind software. Hyper-V, for example, still needs to be managed using a manager and failover cluster. Combining these into the StarWind product would be a game changer.

I've used the solution for five years.

The solution is very stable. It's been running for five years with nearly no problems in the software itself.

You can start with just two nodes and scale from there. It's very helpful.

The technical support is A+.

Positive

We did not use a different solution previously.

The initial setup is straightforward. The support helps with the initial setup. I had to rebuild a cluster once and support also assisted with that process.

We handled the setup in-house with the manufacturer.

The product offers a very straightforward cost model versus its competitors.

We did also evaluate VMware, Nutanix, and Scale.

We decided on StarWind's Virtual SAN product due to the fact that it was a simple way for us to use vendor hardware to achieve SAN functions. 

It allowed us to implement a robust solution without needing to buy dedicated SAN hardware for the remote site.  

We set up a 2 node cluster using Dell servers and Dell-provided hard drives and used Starwind to create several redundant disks across the two hosts. This solution allowed us to enable High Availability across the hosts using the shared storage without the need to purchase dedicated hardware.

The biggest benefit was that it allowed us to provide SAN services on a limited hardware budget.  

We built out a pair of matched servers with vendor-supplied hard drives and were able to provide a fully redundant storage array between the servers. VM hosts can now provide high availability failover if either host goes down. Not needing to spend a huge amount for a dedicated solution was a plus and the system is easily expandable if we need to make changes.  

Their support team has been excellent in helping us throughout the project process.

Support was great and provided presale support for our test environment before the purchase and after to help us configure the product before it went into production.  

They have also been great in following up on our project and helping with other implementation issues.  

Being able to use existing hardware was a big factor in our purchasing decision and helped this project fit the needs of our client's budget. Using existing hardware greatly reduced the project costs and overall complexity of the solution.

The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us.  

Starwind provides excellent pre-sale support and scheduled several meetings between our IT staff and their support team to review the configuration and answer questions. This helped immensely in deploying the software in our test environment and helped us to understand the product better. Support was always willing to help with any documentation that we were confused over and continued to follow up with us after the project went live.

I've used the solution for eight months.

The product appears to be very stable and robust.

The solution appears to be easily scalable and adjustable to fit future needs.

Vendor support has been very responsive and provided help with all issues we have encountered.

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution.

Setup can be complicated and the documentation is not always clear. Support from the vendor was needed in our test environment setup.

We used an in-house team with vendor support during the implementation. Support has been excellent and has followed up regularly with our team.

We did look at Dell and VMware SAN products as well.