StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

We use StarWind Virtual SAN to create a failover cluster and high availability servers for our products.

The best features are the software's ease of setup and the excellent technical support. My company relies heavily on technical support from experts to maintain reliability, as our crew is not very IT savvy. StarWind Virtual SAN helps us keep customer satisfaction and provides the solutions we need without having to hire many IT specialists.

First, I need to explain what motivated me to use VSAN. 

Some time ago, I developed a work environment with KVM Proxmox by creating a cluster made up of four servers: two HP and two Dell, along with two servers running Proxmox Backup Server, both interconnected to ensure redundancy for the backups of all virtual machines. 

Now that I’ve described a bit of my environment, the main use I have given to this tool is in the creation of HA (High Availability) servers to provide better performance to the services running on my Proxmox cluster.

Since I started using VSAN to create high availability servers in my Proxmox environment, even referring to the free version, the services we provide in the company have achieved a high percentage of effectiveness over the year, significantly reducing downtime due to hardware issues with any server in the cluster. 

This has led to a remarkable improvement in the services we offer, and since this is a company that provides security in various areas, the difference between before and after is huge. 

For this reason, I have submitted a request to the company management to acquire the Pro version of the product, as I have not found any negative comments about its use so far.

The primary use case is to provide a virtual storage for our data and virtual machines. Not having a budget for a physical SAN, we use what we have to get the best of what we have, this is primary reason for using this VSAN.

I don't have to stay late at night. Prior to using this VSAN, if anything happened to a server, everything went down. We couldn't do anything, and that was a nightmare. There was even a time where all the data on the server got wiped. People were unable to work for half a day.

We did have a backup. We had to go to a third party to get a hard drive, have it shipped, and upload the data back into the server, then foster continuum. It happened like that twice before they said, “Enough is enough, what are our options?” 

We had the option of a physical server, but the cost would have been $25,000 or $30,000. So, we had two servers that were underutilized, and they were good servers, old but well-maintained. Therefore, we sat with the IT company, where I'm employed, and they said, "You can either go with a physical server or a VSAN, Virtual SAN." We were like, “Okay, tell us about the VSAN.”

They mentioned, “You have two servers, buy more hard drive, RAM, and CPU." Those are things we could easily do. “Then, you will have the VSAN mirror one to the other, and whatever you have in one will other copy to the other.” For instance, if we lose a physical server, CPU, etc., it provides peace of mind, is cost effective, and we are able to use our existing infrastructure. 

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 use it for data redundancy and failover.

Instead of having to maintain two completely separate systems:

1. The cluster where all the data processing is happening.
2. Maintaining the SAN clustering.

Now, we can do everything in one location, because the storage and processing are all happening on the same cluster. It has reduced our overall maintenance and overhead by having to only maintain physical boxes for one cluster instead of having to manage physical boxes for two clusters. 

It also has reduced the amount of switching, network connections, etc., because the converged StarWind Virtual SAN allows us to connect high-speed network interfaces between different boxes instead of having to connect SANs via the network, then connect those two clusters together.

StarWind is more cost effective because it is converged storage. Instead of having to pay for a full-blown SAN, as we did in the past, and having to maintain that SAN as a separate cluster, we now can use local storage on each individual node. So, it reduces the cost and overhead drastically.

NVMe is sort of the future, because it's so fast. In our next round, we will use NVMe drives exclusively for our main storage. Then, we will probably use two and a half inch SSDs for our nearline. 

We had a need for some high speed I/O in our data center to run some specific high demand virtual machines. We currently have an older SAN unit, but it's slow, since it uses mechanical drives. Therefore, we decided to obtain a bunch of Intel SSDs and attach them directly to the two virtualized hosts, then I used StarWind virtual machines as the controllers to tie them together into a VSAN. After that, I moved the VMs over. Once everything was hooked up and talking to each other, it works fine.

It is more of a perceptual thing with the users. The system that we moved onto it is our ERP system, which handles everything. It handles our orders, workflow, and shop work orders. It was by far the slowest, clunkiest system that we have here. When we put it together the StarWind Virtual SAN, and we moved it onto the flash drives, everything seemed to run a lot faster. I went from a drive system that peaked out at 2000 IOPS to a system that could now do over 200,000 IOPS. It was absolutely a night and day difference. Everything is just snappier. When you open windows, they instantly pop up. It is not sitting there, twiddling its thumbs, waiting for stuff to come up, which is huge. It seems user systems and interfaces have gotten so slow over the last 10 to 15 years. When things happen fast and snappy, it is a huge bonus in the user's eyes.

The software just works. That is what I like about good IT software. I rarely, if ever, have to go into the StarWind servers. I go in every couple weeks just to check if there are any Windows updates for it. However, for the most part, it is all hands off. It just works. It just does its job. I don't have to mess with it. I don't have to monkey with it or do anything. I am going into our backup system more often than I am our VSAN controllers. I have to go into the email on Office 365 to change things around (or figure out why somebody lost emails) more often than I have to worry about StarWind. 

In the IT world, anything you can just let run is amazing.

The product is being utilized within an airgap lab environment, which means it is isolated from external networks and internet connectivity for security reasons. The virtual Storage Area Network (SAN) is integrated into the system alongside Hyper-V, a virtualization platform developed by Microsoft. 

This configuration allows for efficient storage management and virtualization capabilities within the isolated environment of the lab. The virtual SAN helps in providing centralized storage resources that can be dynamically allocated to virtual machines running on the Hyper-V infrastructure, enhancing the overall performance and flexibility of the system. 

By combining these technologies, users can optimize their lab environment for testing, development, or research purposes without compromising security or network integrity.

This innovative product has significantly enhanced speed, security, and organization. With its advanced features and capabilities, users can experience improved efficiency and productivity. 

The optimization of speed ensures rapid performance, allowing tasks to be completed more quickly and effectively. Additionally, the enhanced security measures provide peace of mind and safeguard sensitive information from potential threats. 

Furthermore, the organization features streamlined processes and ensures easy access to important data, ultimately contributing to a more seamless and structured workflow. 

This product has proven to be a valuable asset in enhancing overall operations and effectiveness.

Our use case is for an oil and gas site with 200 ATEX cameras and 30 administrative buildings that have 400 indoor and outdoor cameras. All of the cameras are connected to a VLAN switch in each area. 

All of the switches are connected to the core switch in the data center through a fibre network between buildings. 

We add all cameras to management servers and they are divided to recording servers. There are 30 cameras for each recording server. 

We create a Microsoft failover cluster to achieve redundancy between management servers.

Another use case is to create a storage pool (4TB) to store SQL DB to achieve database stability and make it reachable to each server.

It provides shared storage to multiple hypervisor hosts. Times have changed, however. StarWind Virtual SAN is the “software replaces hardware” for SAN. We have access control and CCTV systems up and running using Microsoft clustering and shared storage

From time to time we face some issues with the storage unit and the whole cluster goes down. We replaced the storage with virtual SAN on both the nodes of each system using StarWind and now the system is more stable and has failover redundancy.