StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

We are a gold mining partnership in Malartic, Québec where we are working 24 hours a day and seven days a week. About 1500 people are on our sites, 900 user computers and 100 different virtual servers run to maintain the production area. Single point of failure, no real-time synchronization with our disaster recovery site, and we are unable to make updates and upgrades without any cuts on the production infrastructure.

We can have two sites with real-time synchronization and no more single point of failure. Moreover, we can make updates and upgrades during any hour without cuts on the production infrastructure. All working perfectly, and we are able to make updates and upgrades without any cut on our current production where we work 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Real-time synchronization to make sure we don't have a single point of failure because our company works seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and doesn't have the time to cut the production infrastructure.

Central management webpage should be a must-have. We have three different sites where we use VSAN, and a single webpage to manage everything is necessary. For example a website where I can add each cluster and manage everything in one place rather by each physical server.

StarWind is the highly redundant storage solution for our company-wide hardware agnostic Hyper-V environment.

StarWind VSAN allowed our small business to build a fault-tolerant storage architecture using SSDs and off-the-shelf chassis that is high-performing, high-functional, fault-tolerant, highly available, reliable, and easy to use. Best of all, we achieved all of this for a fraction of the cost of other solutions. For eight years now, StarWind has been extremely reliable and easy to use.

• Very simple to use
• Hardware agnostic
• Extremely reliable
• Feature rich
• Cost-effective!
• StarWind also has excellent support in the rare case you need them.

Encryption: I would love to see "at rest" data encryption as a new feature for organizations like mine looking for ways to simplify this mandated compliance issue.

We have not had a single major issue in eight years of using StarWind. Every release upgrade has been seamless and required no downtime. It has saved us from multiple hardware failures with no downtime. A truly redundant, reliable solution!

Very easy to scale. I am not aware of any limitations.

In eight years we have never needed support for an issue with the software. I have called a handful of times to have them confirm my understanding and review my configuration.  They have always been very helpful and thorough. A+.

No.

Very simple to use. Most of the UI is self-explanatory but StarWind's website has easy-to-follow documentation and recommendations, and their support staff is one of the most thorough and patient I have had the honor to work with in this industry. A+.

In-house with minimal StarWind support.

I have not seen any other storage solution that delivers the features that StarWind does for anywhere near the price. Licensing and support costs are very simple and straightforward.  

Dell EMC, Nimble, 3PAR.

Make the switch to StarWind! Your life will be much easier, and you will have extra budget to spend elsewhere!

This solution was implemented for a Hyper-V production build, where we used StarWind virtual SAN to create and build a redundant DataStor for our clusters. Once this was completed, management and troubleshooting were simple as the application is very user-friendly and highly flexible in terms of configurability. We have never encountered any issues with this product, as it is very reliable.

It has improved our organization in terms of its uptime as our main cluster has never been offline due to a SAN failure. This is a huge plus for us as we need our data available 24 /7. 

There are not many futures I can recall that would stand out to me the most, as the entire application functions as one working function.

It could have a dashboard so that you can check all servers' SAN health and performance.

I have been using this solution for approximately five years.

The solution is very stable.

very good

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution.

Technical support was more or less straightforward.

it was done in-house

We did evaluate VMware.

We use the solution mostly for the backup sections, VTL and Hyper-v physical tape drive pass-through.

I would definitely, recommend this product. I have been dealing with support for over three years and normally support is the biggest grievance we have in the IT industry. However, support is great, including after-sales support. Sales representatives were knowledgeable and very helpful whether you use the free or paid versions.

This is perfect for mainstream organizations. Even small businesses can use it. They cover legacy methods and all new methods in terms of hypervisors and backup methodologies. I work for an organization that has standalone hosts in rural areas in Africa where tape backup is still a thing. With the assistance of StarWind we were able to share a backup device on "Hyper-V" as Hyper-v does not support pass-through natively.

This is a fantastic software that is highly recommended for the virtualization of storage and for backup methodologies.

The VTL feature is useful as StarWind is the only organization that is suited to the business needs of companies that still run legacy EHR systems.

We have over 30 sites that utilize this technology, and it is very simple and easy to use. Installing the software and maintaining it is very simple. Support and after-sales support are amazing.

It has great free trials that allow end users to test a large variety of their products before deciding to buy the full product.

The team is very knowledgeable, helpful, and willing to see if they can cater to your business needs,

I would like them to release a GUI on the free version

They need to build an interface that will interact with the VTL with a media changer.

I would like to see more advanced free versions.

A suggestion box or feedback box would be a good start with the products.

We need the support of newer VTL technologies and older ones, from LTO4 all the way to LTO8, on one interface.

It would be helpful to have integration with a StarWind backup appliance instead of having a second software to manage the VTL files and operations.

They need to allow us to download older versions of the software and licenses.

I have been using the product for over three years now.

Our team was looking for a reliable and cost-effective solution for our VMware vSphere platform.

VMware vSAN wasn't an option due to cost and scalability issues.

Enabling storage high availability across multiple nodes was our top priority as we couldn't risk having any downtime in case a node was to fail.

We ideally wanted a dedicated set of tools to administrate and perform maintenance on our hyperconverged storage.

That solution had to be as platform agnostic as possible so that we could reuse it with another vendor.

The product provides a robust and cost-effective alternative compared to other available products.

StarWind Virtual SAN allows our team to aggregate our cluster storage in a scalable way without seeing an explosion in the licensing costs.

It let us decouple our hyperconverged storage from the actual virtualization plartorm.

As an agnostic software solution, StarWind Virtual SAN could be re-used in other projects across different teams with another virtualization vendor. That aspect was key to the success of our department as all teams were able to work together.

Data replication is useful as it enables storage high availability on the cluster.

The fact that the solution is vendor-agnostic allows it to be used with any virtualization vendor while remaining a powerful abstraction over storage.

There are easy-to-use tools for the administration and maintenance of hyper-converged storage.

StarWind Virtual SAN also let us fine-tune the desired level of replication across all nodes, allowing the administrator to specify a custom number of fault to tolerate across the cluster nodes.

StarWind Virtual SAN architecture is slightly complex and requires the team to carefully identify and study how the solution integrates with VMware vSphere.

Tooling is spread across web UI plus desktop clients which can sometimes be confusing as the team isn't always sure which tool to use during maintenance procedures.

Also one drawback, when compared to VMware vSAN, is that StarWind Virtual SAN requires a lot of network interfaces in order to provide the same data replication and node redundancy features.

I've used the solution for one year.

We have never encountered any bug or problem that would bring the cluster down.

We are very happy with scaling, especially regarding licensing.

Technical support is very responsive, helpful, and friendly.

Positive

We did not use a different solution previously.

The initial setup was a bit hard to do by ourselves as there are many moving pieces and tools to operate. However, support helped us a lot with setting everything up.

I'd advise users to consider the scalability of the project as licensing can become a problem with competitors' products.

We did ook at VMware vSAN.

We needed a reliable shared storage solution for our VMware vSphere Essentials solution so we could implement vMotion and High Availability features. We decided to utilise a vSAN solution to reduce costs after looking at the price of external storage solutions.

In our environment, we have a 3-server VMware vSphere Essentials Plus solution that consists of 16 x HDD and 8 x SDD on-server storage. The solution is attached to 1GB network for production but we also have 10GB network connections available for direct-connectivity between servers.

The StarWind vSAN solution was implemented as a hyper-converged solution meaning that everything runs on the VMware vSphere solution. 

The StarWind vSAN solution was implemented according to our project plan with minimal outages to existing workloads. We have had no issues with the solution and it works very well with minimal administrative effort.

Recently, we had a memory failure that caused one of our VMware servers to crash. Due to the shared storage provided by the StarWind vSAN, all virtual machines on the failed server were able to failover to another server. Our helpdesk didn't receive any user complaints during the time that this happened. Once we resolved the issue, the shared storage resynched itself automatically.

We now have the ability to run critical workloads on the VMware infrastructure and have already proceeded to migrate active directory and SAP Business One workloads onto this platform.

We have found the solution surprisingly simple to use. The management console allows us to monitor the solution and we have configured email alerts to alert us about critical issues. These alerts have been proven to work in an actual failure scenario, for example, when we had a memory issue with one of our servers that caused the entire server to crash. The management console also allows us to monitor the solution performance and provides us with access to system logs.

The level of support provided by StarWind both during pre-sales and post-implementation has been excellent. The solution validation session with StarWind engineers was one of the best we have experienced and the vendor has also demonstrated a willingness to create a long-term relationship.

The solution is also quite flexible. As an example, other vSAN solutions that we looked at had more stringent requirements regarding mixed HDD/SSD storage which wouldn't have worked in our environment.

The main thing I would like to see improved is the level of documentation. I had some initial difficulties understanding the solution which could have been solved via additional documentation aimed at newcomers to their solution. Although the solution does admittedly have many moving parts, I found that internal knowledge transfer to my peers was not that difficult. Hence I'm convinced that better documentation would have helped.

I would also like to see a better system implemented for obtaining updates for solution components. The system at the moment works on a request/response model.

We've been using this solution since the start of this year (2021).

The solution has proven to be reliable with the need for minimal administrative effort. During an actual failure with memory on one of our servers, everything worked exactly as planned. We didn't even receive any issues/complaints from users via our helpdesk.

During the solution validation session with the vendor, we spoke about benchmarking the product. After performing the recommended tests, we were satisfied that the solution would meet our performance needs (both in terms of storage and networking).

We haven't had any issues with the solution so have had no need to request service/technical support. However, our experience during our project makes us believe we are in good hands if we ever need anything in the future.

We did not use a different solution. We initially implemented our VMware vSphere Essentials solution using direct storage and didn't have access to features such as vMotion and high availability. The StarWind vSAN solution allowed us to implement shared storage and pave the way to migrate critical workloads onto the VMware infrastructure.

We complicated the initial setup process a bit because we wanted to perform the design, implementation, and migration ourselves. This led to some difficulties in terms of initially understanding the solution. StarWind helped to fill in the gaps and our implementation and migration went completely to plan with little need for downtime. We were able to implement the solution on two servers while keeping our workloads running on the third server. We then migrated the workloads and built the remaining server.

We wanted to perform the design, implementation, and migration of the solution ourselves. We asked for help where needed during the design stage and found the vendor was very knowledgeable and could quickly answer all of our questions. We performed the implementation ourselves and then conducted a solution validation session with the vendor. During this session, the vendor validated that everything was configured according to their best practices and also performed some advanced tuning. We also had an open-ended discussion about how to operate the system. This solution validation session was one of the best I have ever experienced.

The level of support from the vendor throughout the entire project has been excellent and they have been more than willing to develop a long-term relationship. 

We were price-sensitive and wanted to minimize expenditure on additional hardware. The ability to utilize vMotion and High Availability features in our VMware infrastructure has already repaid the cost of the solution.

We found the StarWind vSAN solution was cost-effective compared to alternatives. You should talk to the vendor (or a good partner) about your needs because there are some differences in price based on your environment. We also recommend purchasing support.

In our case, we purchased StarWind vSAN for vSphere Essentials Edition which included 1 year of standard annual support and maintenance.

We initially looked at several external shared storage solutions and found them to be cost-prohibitive. We then evaluated vSAN solutions from HPE (this was discontinued) and the native solution from VMware. The native solution from VMware had fewer moving parts than the StarWind vSAN solution, but was more expensive and didn't provide the required level of flexibility that we needed regarding mixed HDD/SDD storage.

We strongly recommend that you develop a good relationship with the vendor (or a good partner). In our experience, they played a key role in the success of the solution.

We are using VSAN in our cloud environment to provide CSVs to the Hyper-V Group. We are using a converged environment, so we have two commodity class servers configured as a high availability StarWind cluster and then we have many Hyper-V compute nodes that access the CSVs from the StarWind cluster.

We can use Veeam to back up and replicate the virtual machine files from the CSV/cluster.

We use SPF + 10 GbE modules off the shelf and 10 GbE switches off the shelf. We were able to create a redundant network infrastructure to support our SAN network.

Creating a high availability cluster required the configuration of the cluster on our hardware and the shared space to access the files has improved my organization.

Using the StarWind VSAN solution allowed us to reduce costs by using equipment that we already owned.

StarWind has allowed us to virtualize our environment without the huge expense of a dedicated SAN, putting cluster technology and its benefits within our reach. Server downtime was a constant threat to our operation before StarWind but has never been a problem since.

Updates to server hardware are now painless and done during working hours with zero stress. We had a RAID failure a few months back, and nobody in the building even noticed and there was no after-hours time used for repair.

The ability to use off the shelf hardware (servers, RAID cards, SSDs, etc.) is also invaluable in terms of cost and flexibility.

The configuration is so much simpler, with fewer points of failure to worry about. Integration with Microsoft clustering has been perfect, allowing us to leverage our investment in MS server licensing to the fullest

The product can be improved:

• There is no good way to see how all networks are distributed on the console. Besides, once they are created and highlighted, everything seems to be going well.
• If we stay with Virtual SAN instead of managed devices, it would be nice to have more automated tools to manage iSCSI connections in Windows, which can be a bit confusing at first.
  
• We would like the documentation to be more complete. Most items are covered, but if you don't know something, you may need to contact their support.
  

We are using VSAN in our company for about one year.

The solution is very stable. We have tested storage network outages with failure of one or two nodes. The solution is able to stay online or repair itself with ease

The scalability of this solution is impressive. We're very happy to use it.

The experience of work with clients/technical support is very positive. Everything is fast and available.

The initial setup wasn't difficult.

We have implemented through a group of suppliers. Their level of experience is quite high.

Will soon pay off by reducing downtime and maintenance costs.

Make sure that you understand what all of the pieces do and don't make the assumption that you can drop support once setup is complete.

We immediately chose Starwind because our system administrator had experience with this product in the past.

This product is definitely worth the investment.

We're using it in our DR site for replicating virtual machines from a primary site. We needed a solution that took up less rack space, so we went with something that converged infrastructure. It's providing storage for our virtual platform.

It provides some fault-tolerance redundancy. Originally, we just had a single point of failure for storage. By having StarWind with a two-node device, we're able to replicate storage and then we can do updates, maintenance, and repairs, without having to bring down our entire storage platform.

It definitely saves us time. We are able to do a lot of our maintenance during production hours, rather than having to schedule after hours. We are able to do maintenance by bringing down one node at a time, rather than having to schedule a complete shutdown, and it's easier to schedule with Dell EMC or whoever else to make sure that they're available for any support during that process. By having StarWind, we're able to minimize maintenance impact and coordinating different support to be available around those timeframes.

It's helped maintain high-availability. Having a second unit replicating is providing us with the availability that we need to make sure our virtual machines have the storage connected they need to be operational.

We just use it for the storage replication. We haven't really utilized any of the other StarWind functionality in it.

It would be helpful to have a little more insight into what kind of performance the VSAN cluster is utilizing; something that would be more proactive on our side, versus their ProActive Support.

It has been rock-stable. No issues.

The scalability is there. We just have a two-node, so everything is connected together, not through a switch. I'm assuming that with the help of StarWind the scalability would be limitless.

We don't have any immediate plans to expand. If we did need to, it would be more of a compute expansion, so we would use the existing storage and use additional compute clusters.

We don't use the ProActive Support. We have the Standard level. It's very good. We haven't had any issues with it. They're very responsive and knowledgeable.

The only issues we had were during the implementation. We haven't had to reach out for any post-installation help.

We were using a single Dell EMC storage device. There was no software solution. We were looking to build out a DR site. We wanted to avoid having a single point of failure, like we did at our main location. If everything went well during our DR site rollout, we would configure a similar setup in our corporate location.

Surprisingly, the setup was straightforward. We were up and running with the VSAN within a few hours. Then we started doing some production virtual machines. We didn't really run into any issues with the VSAN part of it. The Windows updates caused an issue that we worked through. Support was very helpful with that.

It was a new deployment. There really wasn't any type of timeframe where we had to meet critical deadlines. We did have a plan to get our DR site up and running, and VSAN definitely made it a lot easier for us to do that.

The deployment required two of our IT staff and one person from StarWind.

It was just our internal IT and StarWind Support.

It has definitely made things a lot easier to deploy. Our biggest issue was not being tied to a hardware vendor, so if we decide to switch from EMC Dell to HPE or Supermicro, we can continue to use the StarWind solution across the different hardware brands. That's especially important with drive prices changing. We're able to use commodity drives instead of hardware-branded drives. That's an area where there have been some cost savings.

Also, the ability to be hardware agnostic means we're able to shop across vendors for better pricing.

It's priced fairly. It was definitely cheaper than the competition. The licensing terms are straightforward and reasonable.

We looked into Tegile and Tintri, about two years prior. We've also looked at some Dell EMC solutions. We were able to go with any hardware vendor we wanted to and the reviews for the software solution showed that it was highly recommended.

Utilize the StarWind installation team to get you up and running. They do everything from start to finish and even make sure that your production workload is running sufficiently.

We haven't used the Log-structured Write Cache feature or the NVMe over Fabrics target. Right now, our solution is all solid-state disk.

In terms of maintenance, a lot of it is scripted or managed automatically. It just takes one person to periodically check in to see if it's performing well and if there are any errors. That person is a systems administrator.

I would give StarWind VSAN a nine out of ten. They have good support. It's reasonably priced. It gives you the ability to scale. It offers good storage availability.