StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

Started with a trial and then moved to the paid version. I have a 3 node cluster, (20) 1TB spinning drives, RAID 0, (3) 800 GB SSD drives, RAID 5 and 18GB RAM cache per node. Using 10G Infiniband for the iSCSI & SYNC network loops. This is to support local disks of VMware Horizon View full clone desktops.

• Very fast (replaced EMC SAN). Ultra reliable. I had many, many problems with one of the hosts (ended up being a motherboard) and I never lost a thing. Once you get used to it, it is fairly easy to manage, and the tech support is stellar.

• I would love to give it more RAM. Even marginal increases in RAM yield dramatic results. No more boot storms.

• Because of the way VMware has shuffled license "classes" over the years we got ripped off not getting the native VMware vSAN. It seems that maybe for our use case StarWind VSAN is even better and compared to re-negotiating VMware licenses cheaper.

Performance, reliability, I love the management console (once I got used to it). It works and it works well. Maybe not exactly a feature but tech support is beyond great. It is fantastic. The techs are supportive, understanding and really care about your implementation. I feel they really want to see you succeed. I'm so pleased with the tech support that I consider it better than any feature.

• The documentation is sub-par. The pre-sales documentation and information is sub-par.
• StarWind is not cheap. It is not hard to set up but not a cakewalk either. Having tech support set you up is certainly a good value. I would say the performance cost ratio is great, if not fantastic. Be sure to plan well and ask lots of questions.

• Next release needs to include complete documentation. Even if it's download only or even optional.

As I mentioned earlier in my review - one of my nodes had a sick motherboard. it would reboot for no good reason and the most inopportune times. With StarWind HA enabled it wouldn't miss a beat. VM's vMotioned across, storage was stable and when the host came back everything was always OK. Not the ideal way to test stability but it passed the test nonetheless.

I am planning on adding another node to the cluster in the coming weeks. It will be compute only and we will be adding (2) Infiniband switches to support that additional host. Note: only need a switch on the iSCSI side. The sync side will not be involved.

Seems that 2 node to 3 node is relatively easy. And 3 nodes or less and you don't need a 10G switch for your fabric. Gives you some options. Beyond that I'm not real sure.

Tech support is fantastic. As I mentioned I consider StarWind tech support one of the main features. And if the poo poo hits the fan they will back you up and get you going quickly.  I did have issues with quotations from customer support. But we worked it out in the end.  

We used a conventional hardware SAN. EMC VNXe. It was end of life and I even tried replacing it - EMC could not make it work right. It kept dropping connections. I kept running the old VNXe and discovered StarWind VSAN. Glad I did.

It was complex and had many steps and procedures but if you don't start with the FREE version they walk you through each step and procedure. I did it the hard way of course. 

I am the team. I did it in house. Then when we moved over to the paid version tech support helped me correct anything that was missing or wrong. 

I don't know.

Be very clear in what you want. I was misquoted what I needed and ended up having to go back to the boss two times. And was running crippled while doing that. It was not pretty. Make sure they know what you have and what you want. Especially sizes. --This really only applies if you do the FREE method first.  

I thought about another SAN but just didn't want to go down that road. The cost to upgrade my VMware licenses to get vSAN from them just didn't seem worth it. 

I think StarWind is a serious contendender. Especially if you don't have the right VMware licenses. But even then - I'm running a 3 node cluster and don't need a separate "witness" box. If you're an SMB and doing VMware you need to consider StarWind as your SAN solution. 

StarWind was the perfect solution that I was looking for: a true, two-node virtual SAN solution.

We're too small for three physical hypervisors, however, we still have two and want high availability. Native vSAN for the hypervisor we use requires two nodes plus a witness, or three, and we just couldn't do that.

In a search for an alternative, I found StarWind. They offer a true two-node setup with agent VMs on each host and two high-bandwidth links to each other, and that's it!

We're a visiting nurse association and rely on redundant hypervisors to keep our patient software up and running around the clock.

It has cut costs that we would've spent on network links and SAN appliance(s), allowing us to just include drives with our hosts and run a Virtual SAN.

Not only that, but the addition of two 10GB links now means that our hypervisor can live-migrate virtual machines very fast between hosts, and data is also synced between StarWind RAID arrays quickly too.

All this combines into a very efficient, fast, and reliable Virtual SAN solution that blazes past our previous physical SAN infrastructure.

The accessibility is great. It's very easy to resize disks and they show up in VMware almost instantly. It's pretty darn fast at syncing and I appreciate how friendly it is to SMBs.

Pricing is also very fair and their support is top-notch. I had some trouble setting it up. That said, it didn't take long at all to get in touch with support reps and they were knowledgeable on the product, not just an agent reading a script.

PROS include:
• Relatively easy to use
• True two-node vSAN
• Redundancy
• Stability (no issues in the years thus far of using it)
• Friendly pricing for SMBs and great support
• Great solution for SMB environments overall

The only thing I could suggest to improve is the documentation. The initial setup got a little confusing at a few points with differences between the VMware version in documentation vs the latest, etc.

CONS include:
• Documentation for initial setup can be a bit ambiguous at times, yet support helps you get through it; you're good once you're up and running.
• It's not native and not a bad thing. Just keep in mind it's a third-party solution so it won't be as "drop-in" as a native solution offered by your hypervisor.

I've used the solution for about 11 months.

So far. I have had no issues or lapses in performance/stability.

The solution is scalable. It is very easy to add more virtual disks.

Customer support is very good! The support rep knew what they were talking about and quickly got back to me with an answer.

Positive

Before we had a physical SAN, maybe the HP MSA P2300 (I may have gotten the model number wrong).

It was just too expensive and demanding of physical links/resources to go with another MSA, so we decided to try a Virtual SAN.

The initial setup was both straightforward and complex. It wasn't too hard, however, there were some little parts in the documentation where I got stuck without much help other than calling for a support agent, which solved my issue and cleared up the confusion.

The implementation was done in-house.

Pricing is pretty fair and includes one year of support (as of purchase in August 2022).

The license is based on how many hosts you have and how much in TB you need the vSAN to accommodate.

We looked at our native Hypervisor's vSAN product, however, it required three nodes (or two with one witness node) and just wasn't feasible for our setup as an SMB.

We use StarWind as redundant, reliable, and fast storage for our two-node cluster in a Hyperconverged Environment. The cluster is a cost-effective way to create a reliable and scalable environment by utilizing all the available hardware while keeping complexity to a minimum. 

StarWind serves as storage for our Hyper-V appliance, ranging from databases to fileservers, which are all critical for the company. The storage has a size of around 70 Terabytes, and all traffic is routed through a redundant switch stack of two units. 

StarWind's task is to provide a reliable, fast, and redundant storage solution for our virtual machines while keeping cost and complexity as low as possible. At the same time, it managed challenges in a two-node environment, such as the feared split-brain scenario. 

With an uptime of 384 days, StarWind has improved overall server reliability. Our downtime over the year went from two reboots a week for maintenance to zero (in combination with the cluster). 

Another improvement is the L1 and L2 cache, which boosts the overall performance of all VMs.

The overall biggest impact on the company, and especially the IT department, is the reduced time investment in maintaining the platform. StarWind has been a "set-up and forget" solution over the past year and already paid itself in the hours it has saved compared to the previous solution.

Three features were extremely important for us as a result of using StarWind since its setup:

Reliability and Maintainability. StarWind has been extremely reliable until now without any software-related downtime. Update-related reboots of the nodes were handled without any issues by StarWind and its Fast-Sync technology, which synchronizes data in the background without the need for a full sync.

Performance. Utilizing StarWind with its L1 and L2 Cache helped us boost a variety of file sizes, ranging from databases to renderings. Additionally, StarWind has a market-leading performance in throughput. Benchmarks in our environment showed a transfer of over 750 MB/s from a Windows Fileserver VM to a client device through a 10Gbit connection.

Community. The StarWind Customer Support was excellent, and it helped us clear any remaining questions regarding the setup. In our case, it was the setup of the SSD cache. A StarWind Technician offered us a personal support session with many follow-ups. 

While we had little to no issues in setting up StarWind and received excellent support from the StarWind technicians, we would have appreciated a clearer guideline for a setup with the free version of StarWind Management Console or, in other words - for the setup with the PowerShell.

Another thing we found out afterward is that StarWind offers several free software solutions to benefit the performance of server infrastructures. One of them is StarWind iSCSI Accelerator/Load Balancer. We would like to ask StarWind to give a more thorough implementation guideline for such free solutions during the setup of storage infrastructure.

I've used the solution since May 2021.

StarWind has been pretty much active for the past year without one error or failure. Server maintenance during office hours and the synchronization afterward have never been an issue. No corruption of the storage, no VM crash, nor split brain has occurred in our two-node setup up until now. The heartbeat interfaces are very reliable and show an error through the Management Console when they are down.

One of the main reasons we bought StarWind was the scalability of the storage. We plan the storage in our Hyperconverged Infrastructure through the addition of storage arrays. Since we have bought the unlimited storage package from StarWind, we are confident that this task will not be an issue.

The customer support was excellent. We initially opened a post on the official StarWind Support page and received a response from a StarWind technician within two hours. By the end of the week, we had a private support session with him where he solved our issue and checked our config for any weaknesses. Overall great experience, and of the reasons we will be staying with StarWind.

Positive

We did not use another storage solution like StarWind. Rather, we used an array of NAS Servers, which served a combined iSCSI storage. This approach is more professional and in line with the industry.

The initial setup was relatively straightforward. The manual was up to date and with images. The only complaint I have is that the guideline is mostly tailored to the paid version of the StarWind Management Console, and for the free version, you need to use the PowerShell templates. The manual should address them more.

We implemented mainly in-house with the exception of the support of a technician, as mentioned in the next field.

While I can not give an exact number, compared to our old setup and the maintenance we put in, the ROI should be over 100%.

Through StarWind, in combination with HCI, we managed to reduce our overall hardware costs by about 50% through the avoidance of additional servers and software licensing. My recommendation is to utilize the community when setting up StarWind, which is a very good and strong point that speaks to StarWind and is also one of the main reasons we will stay with them.

Yes, we evaluated StorMagic before deciding on StarWind.

When setting up StarWind, it is fine to experiment with the config file; however, do back them up incrementally. Take your time in setting up a redundant infrastructure and meet hardware requirements (such as redundancy for Sync and Heartbeat Interfaces). Having solid ground to set up StarWind helped us to have a headache-free solution in the end. But that should be self-explanatory.

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! 

Our organization is currently running StarWind Virtual SAN across two storage nodes for our Cluster Storage environment as the StarWind Virtual SAN is designed to provide high availability for mission-critical workloads. 

We do like the reliability and performance of StarWind software. The product allows us to achieve high availability and reduce downtime since Day One of deployment. Since we have limited IT resources, the service simplifies maintenance, downtime, and administration.

We like their high availability. It reduces the downtime for our entire organization's environment. If one of the servers fails, the virtual machines can seamlessly fail over to another server, minimizing downtime. Currently, we rarely have unnecessary reboots during the year. 

Another improvement is StarWind's cost savings. As we are a non-profit organization, cost-effectiveness is always important. StarWind VSAN leverages existing server hardware, potentially reducing the cost associated with purchasing specialized storage hardware.

StarWind's GUI is simple and works best with a hypervisor environment, especially for a non-profit organization that has limited IT resources. The service simplifies the maintenance and administration time. 

StarWind's service technicians are professional, knowledgeable, and very responsive. Since we are currently using StarWind Premium ProActive services the service responses from the support team are always in a timely manner and never let us and the system down. We are really happy with their technical service.

It is hard to find adequate technical documentation on their support website. However, they have a fantastic technical forum and Premium ProActive email support services. We can find a lot of solutions from geek technical peers from their forums. If we cannot find an adequate solution from the forum, we can also send our request to the StarWind support team. The tech support has provided us with optimal solutions and even released the new builds to us to help fix issues we found in a timely manner.

I've used the solution for four years.

We rarely reboot and have minimal, if any, downtime throughout the year.

StarWind vSAN can easily scale by adding more servers to the cluster. This makes it extremely suitable for growing organizations like ours.

Service technicians are professional, knowledgeable, and very responsive.

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

We handled with the vendor team and I'd rate their assistance four out of five in terms of overall helpfulness. 

The ROI is not bad.

The Premium ProActive service price is a little high, yet worth the price.  

We did not evaluate other options.

We use StarWind to synchronize storage between nodes of our hyper-converged Hyper-V cluster. We then publish the storage to each cluster member via iSCSI.

We run the cluster on a 10GB network (though when we first implemented
it in our testing environment, we were on 1GB and it still worked fine),
with two physical servers. 

The synchronization between nodes is fully synchronous, meaning that if the mirror NICs aren't at least as fast as the front-end NICs (and preferably much faster), it could cause access bottlenecks. We haven't faced that problem though.

We needed to implement a cluster so we could offer VM hosting as a service to our customers. We have implemented clusters for some of our clients and used much more expensive vSAN options there. We were leery about using such a lower-cost alternative, but the other SAN options proved far too expensive for our very modest budget.

We tested with a free version of StarWind (which allows no GUI administration but otherwise is fully-featured), and it was stable enough for our use for about a year for testing and for the client that wanted to be a guinea pig (for an important but not mission-critical system; suitable for testing with). But when we were ready to roll the program out more broadly, we decided that in case of a problem, dealing with the lack of GUI would be an issue. Upgrading to the full GUI-capable version was only a matter of a few clicks, and it did fit into our budget.

We use StarWind as a basic SAN with multi-node synchronization and push the storage out to the cluster nodes via iSCSI. For those basic uses, it's simple to set up and manage, and it seems to do a fine job.

When we were using the free version, adjustments to the storage volumes were difficult and finicky, because we had to use Powershell commands which are unfortunately not documented nearly as well as they should be. However, the GUI administration is easy, at least for the basic administration needs we've had so far.

StarWind doesn't really have any performance reporting, especially compared with other vSAN products we've used, which has spoiled us.

The management console is very simple -- reflecting the limited feature set that StarWind provides. I'm concerned that if sync breaks or we face another kind of major issue and have to fix something, it might be hard to track down the source of the problem. I would very much like to see greater granularity in reporting of active iSCSI channels, for example.

That said, we haven't had any problems yet; that says something in itself.

I've used the solution for just under two years.

We've used other solutions with some of our clients, and while we like them better, they're also an order of magnitude more expensive and didn't fit our budget.

If you know your way around a cluster, setup is easy. Pricing is straightforward, which made this choice a no-brainer.

We did not evaluate other options as the other options were prohibitively expensive.

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.

HCI was set up to host our ERP web apps, domain controller, and phone system.  We are using this in production, staging, and development with around 40 virtual machines. We are using Linux and Windows with VMware as the ESXi host. 

Our main use of StarWind HCI is creating a super-smooth virtualized server setup. It blends tech magic, merging storage, networking, and more into one. We were always running into the issues of needing to add more storage and having to pull down our servers, notify customers of the downtime, etc., however, not anymore.

The solution offers failover protection and the ability to expand storage and nodes with no downtime.  Our customers who use our web apps benefit from nearly zero downtime due to hardware failure, hardware replacement, or upgrades. 

Now we are looking at replicating a similar cluster setup for our firewall, switches, and ISP so we can get nearly 0.00% downtime which I know is not possible, however, with the new HCI setup, it is possible to at least almost get there. 

Their support is by far the best enterprise-level support I have come across.

The failover protection and the ability to expand storage and nodes with no downtime are by far the best physical features we have benefited from. Once we requested help from sales, it was a very easy decision compared to VMware where you get lost among the mess of products and low-trained phone techs.

Their web UI is very basic and that is how it should be. The magic is what their HCI setup does behind the scenes for redundancy and the ability to expand storage without ever having to go offline since another node picks up the storage.

Our company was hoping for deduplication and encryption across HCI. That is currently not supported. They used to have it and was removed. Hopefully, both of these features will be coming in upcoming releases.  

A built-in DR that can be stretched with high latency would be very helpful as well. We were able to purchase VMware 8 for our hosts. It would be nice if they developed their own ESXi OS to compete with VMware as the other options out there are not great. VMware does what it needs, however, their support is not great.

I've been using the solution for one week.

We've had no downtime so far.

You can scale as much as your company will need.

Technical support is good. Somebody is always available 24/7.

Positive

I did not use a different solution.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

We used StarWind in-house support as they do most of the setup before they send it to you.

We've witnessed downtime within two years.

I'd advise new users to have sales walk them through all the options and also ask them about purchasing the hardware for you.

I previously evaluated VMware.