StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

We exclusively use StarWind vSAN for our virtualization data stores. We have:

VMware: 50 physical hosts, 500 virtual machines
Hyper-V: 10 physical hosts, 100 virtual machines
Internal SAN: 250 users, 50 shares
Disaster Recovery: off-site replication

We currently have 75 data stores across 24 servers.

Primary Performance Cluster:
Eight 72 SSD chassis and a 512 GB RAM cache
A-A-A (three-way high-availability) across servers

Primary Storage Cluster:
Four 36 HDD chassis and a 512 GB RAM cache
A-A-A (three-way high-availability) across servers

StarWind vSAN has allowed us to grow rapidly while still providing flexibility and reliability. We have not had a complete outage since migrating in 2012. I cannot recommend them enough.

We have completely rebuilt and upgraded our storage infrastructure five times. We could migrate data seamlessly in our live environment without downtime.

We primarily use Supermicro hardware for our storage servers, although not exclusively.

Having a solution that is flexible enough to synchronize between many different hardware vendors is extremely valuable.

The three-way high availability (A-A-A) is very useful.

I have never found another product that can provide this redundancy and performance.

We have a complex and demanding environment that requires the ability to scale out while in production. We have utilized StarWind to achieve those needs.

We were the victim of a ransomware attack that was devastating. StarWind ensured we were completely unaffected and it preserved our virtualization environment. Our SAN was completely encrypted, but with off-site asynchronous replication, we were able to restore all our files quickly.

There is no IPv6 support. That is our only issue at this time.

The support team is exceptional, and we have always been able to overcome any of the technical issues we have had. I cannot recommend them enough!

Our wish list includes:

• A Linux install package for vSAN (not just a VM)
• Central management that supports all of the StarWind services and can provide a network operations level dashboard with customizable alerts (possibly with a mobile app companion with push notifications)
• IPv6 support
  

I've used the solution since 2012.

Scalability is one of the things we absolutely love about StarWind. We have scaled from two servers providing 20 TB to 24 servers providing 2 PB.

I have talked to all levels of support over the years, including the developers. They have an amazing product and an exceptional support team.

Positive

We did use something else and originally switched as no other solution at the time had real high availability. Most products just offered fail-over options.

The initial setup was fairly straightforward.

We have evolved into a much more complex environment over time.

We handled the setup in-house.

We have been using StarWind since 2012. Our ROI was seen within the first six months.

Users should know that licensing can be reallocated as you retire old servers. I recommend always buying unlimited licenses as needed unless you think you can utilize their data center license.

We looked into:

• Open-E
• HPE
  
• VMware
• Microsoft

I'd advise others to download their evaluation and test it in multiple scenarios. You will fall in love with their product!

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.

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.

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. However, they've improved the documentation greatly since I got started in 2022 (writing now as of 2025.02.19)

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.

Since 2022

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 the service to provide two-node hyper-converged storage to our application servers. 

We previously did not have any type of high-availability storage, and as you can guess, it was a mess. Getting high-availability storage was one of our first priorities when a new IT team was formed. 

Through talking with other customers, this is a great solution for us. In the more than six years of use now, we have not had any issues and support has always been great. They have helped us make config changes and do updates without any downtime.

Moving us to high availability storage has made our websites and applications more reliable. It also has allowed us to perform updates on storage and application servers without having downtime. Previously, to do any of those things was a pain as we would have to shut services down to perform any updates, whether security or features.

When compared to other providers, StarWind provided a great product at a reasonable price. Cost is also very important to a non-profit.

Having high-availability storage has made our lives easier. Having a two-node cluster without dealing with split-brain saves us the extra costs in hardware and maintenance. This is especially important to us since we are a non-profit. 

Having support is also very valuable to us as we are a small team. We have had very few vendors that we never had frustrations with their support and StarWind is definitely one of them. As for reliability, we have never had a single problem.

Since our needs are simple in comparison to large corporations, when it comes to needs, we often just need the basic plans. Therefore, we cannot speak much into what we want to see improvements in due to our simple needs but also because we rarely touch it. We mostly touch it just to do updates. 

As for the financial aspect of this, there is not much need for improvement either as they are much cheaper than the alternatives. We have found this product to suit our needs. 

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

Never had an issue with stability.

We have never had issues with scaling and we run applications and databases using the storage solution.

Their support did most of the work when it came to the setup.

We needed a solution that provided highly available storage via ISCSI, replicating to multiple physical sites synchronously. We needed it to be easy to use, easy to manage, and cost-effective. Ideally, there would be no vendor lock-in or special hardware needing to be purchased. 

We found StarWind, and this 100% solved our problem. We've used StarWind on a pair of nodes populated with a large amount of flash disks. They then are running on dedicated switches for ISCSI back to our Hyper-V hypervisors, as well as utilizing a dedicated sync link for replication across our metro wan. With this, we're able to have real-time replication of our data between multiple sites.

The ease of management of StarWind, compared to other vendors, has made it a top winner for us. Not only is it possible for junior sysadmins to understand it - it's also reliable. It's backed up by time-tested systems, such as MPIO, ZFS, and ISCSI. 

There's no vendor black magic in a StarWind Box. It's just a box that works. By adding the synchronous repped storage, our system is able to keep real-time data in sync for our virtual machines without having to look into application clustering.

The highly available setup and synchronous replication without the need for a quorum node is huge for us. We wanted storage that would sync the replication between two sites as fast as possible. By utilizing StarWind, we were able to set this up quickly, using dedicated connections, and not have to worry about it. 

It works as well as can be expected. In addition, the ability to choose our own hardware and our own vendors for this was hugely beneficial, as we had pre-existing relationships with vendors we wanted to maintain.

The company is going through a changeover in its current product lineup. This has led to looking stuff up via search engines, hitting both the new and old content, which makes answering questions on your own difficult. I also would have preferred it if I had been able to get pricing before contacting them. 

For additional features, I'd love to see native export of metrics (via Prometheus or something of that nature) to allow us to get more metrics available on our existing dashboard software. I'd also like to see a more robust API for controls.

I've used the solution for 12 months.

The stability has been rock solid. We're running it on a KVM hypervisor and have had no issues in the slightest.

Scalability met our needs; however, it would not perform as well if you added more nodes, as you're increasing your replication delta.

Customer service and support have been great for the little time that we've had to talk to them. They are out of Eastern Europe and are obviously on a virtual phone. This can lead to some audio issues, however, nothing stops it.

Positive

Historically, I had used HPE Lefthand for sync rep storage. While it did the job, it was definitely older technology and has been unsettled.

The setup is extremely straightforward. The software is delivered via a template, so rolling it out is like any other VM. Also, the software includes setup support directly with an engineer who is more than willing to answer questions.

We did a combo of both in-house and vendor. We deployed the VM and then had the vendor assist us. I'd rank them a ten out of ten for knowing how their system works and offering various hypervisors access storage.

Our ROI has been difficult to calculate as this was a required purchase.

The cost of this is less than you expect. Since they're selling a software stack, you do need to consider your own hardware costs.

We have gone through the gamut of technologies and examined Linbit, Ceph, non-clustered ZFS, cluster ZFS, HPE Nimble, Pure, and more.

We had several aging servers that needed to be replaced, including a server from 2008 and one that was an old Microsoft Small Business Server from 2011. 

When we ended up needing to replace everything when they had all reached end of life, we had some hard choices to make. We could have replaced all of those old bulky servers with a new pile of power-hungry and massive machines, or replace them all and virtualize everything and put them on two single-unit rack-mounted servers. We ended up going with StarWind Virtual SAN, and have never looked back.

Want to talk about speed, performance, and reliability? We literally went from having four or five very large and powerful boxes to the two sister servers that were provided by StarWind, and we set them up to have much better performance. Even more importantly, we found support that is world-class. I have never worked with such an impressive and well-balanced crew as the techs that I have had the pleasure of working with over these years. They are absolutely mind-blowing in every aspect that I've had them help me out with, from preinstallation to rollout to maintenance. 

We are running Hyper-V on twin servers in failover, and being able to manage servers from anywhere I need to, virtually, has been a game changer. 

The most valuable feature has been their support and willingness to help me with issues that, frankly, were not their responsibility. Every time I've called or emailed them, they have jumped in anyway and helped me find success in figuring out the issues I was having. They even kept the ticket open until I asked them to close it, which is nice.

Every solution has plusses and minuses, and for someone like me, who has very little experience spending my time in CLI, I appreciate a good GUI. This is the one place I would love to see the experience of StarWind improved. I wish there were more of an explanation or set of instructions that could point me in the right direction when I wanted to increase the size of one of our VMs. I did end up being able to shut the machine down and increase the size of its virtual HDD, however, in the end, I missed the mark and allocated too much space - and in a production environment, that space comes at a premium. I'd love to see more clarification for us folks who are smart enough to do some damage yet not smart enough to use CLI. 

We have had our StarWind Virtual SAN for almost five years now.

Our StarWind Servers have only ever "gone down" when I have been applying an update to the server's software. They have been rock solid and have better than six nines on their stability.

So far, we've been able to add storage and new servers year after year and have never run into an issue.  

Their customer service and support have been world-class. There is no other company I've ever worked with that had the level of support and dedication that I've been able to experience with StarWind.

Positive

We did not have a "solution" like this before. We previously had a hodgepodge of parts, servers, and service providers, which is nothing compared to what we have now.

The setup was amazing. The hardware arrived, we plugged it in, and StarWind connected to them and was off to the races getting our servers converted and up and running within a week. I've never seen anything similar since then.

We used a combination of in-house IT/IS and StarWind support to get these set up and running. In the end, we were all happy with the speed and technical expertise that went into our setup and the dedicated technicians who stuck with us throughout the entire setup and implementation.

The ROI is impossible to know. That said, in terms of reliability and performance, it has paid for itself within the first two years of ownership in electrical costs. They have, in the five years we've had them, paid for themselves in that aspect of cost alone. There is not even a comparison in terms of cost per watt and performance that we have observed.

The solution has given us the best results that I have ever seen in any environment.

We did eliminate several other solutions. That said, it has been too long to remember which ones. I remember worrying that StarWind's performance was going to be one of those too-good-to-be-true situations. It wasn't. The hype lived up to the performance and reliability.

If you are on the fence about them, jump off and land on their side where you never have to look back.

The StarWind vSAN product is not used directly by me. We use it in the organization via one of our clients. It is used as a shared storage solution for a Hyper-V converged project with two nodes. The project consists of a cluster with two Hyper-V nodes in which several virtual machines are running. 

The hardware is quite common. The disks used on the two virtual hosts are normal 7000 SATA disks. Only the synchronization interests are 10GB. Otherwise, there's nothing special; they are usual servers with Xeon processors from the 2018 generation.

StarWind Virtual SAN was the most optimal choice, both from a financial point of view and in terms of compatibility. It is an excellent choice for use together with Microsoft Hyper-V. Other options would have been the use of Microsoft Server Datacenter licenses on the two nodes and the use of Storage Replica and Storage Space Direct as a storage solution or VMware vSAN, both of which would have cost considerably more without bringing anything extra from the point of view of functionality or reliability, compared to Starwind Virtual SAN.

Although StarWind Virtual SAN free is fully functional and can be used in production, the support that comes with the license is priceless, the expertise of the StarWind support specialists is worth all the money. 

Also, the administration console, which is only available for the paid version, is extremely useful, being very intuitive and easy to use. The information displayed in the console is excellently structured, so that the complete solution can be seen in a single screen, which is very useful in monitoring and diagnosing the system.

While using StarWind Virtual SAN so far, I have not found anything missing. It is true that we are using it in a very strict project in which we were looking for a solution that would satisfy a strict set of requirements, and StarWind Virtual SAN explicitly fulfilled that set of requirements, we were not looking for a solution with many options. That's why I can't say if improvements are necessary. The options used in our project have everything we need and they have managed in excellent time regardless of the citations that have appeared so far.

We have been using this solution for over five years.

It is very reliable. In the five-plus years since we have had it in production, it has coped brilliantly with all the events that have occurred.

It is extremely scalable. The free version is limited to three nodes. However, the licensed version has an unlimited number of nodes.

The support was excellent. I was assisted well and all the steps were explained to me, including how it should be set up and why, making the initial implementation of the project easy.

Positive

We opted from the beginning to do the project with StarWind Virtual SAN.

The initial setup was quite intuitive. That said, I had full support from StarWind at the beginning of the project implementation.

The solution was implemented in-house.

Choose StarWind Virtual SAN, it is the most flexible, reliable and cheap solution.

I evaluated Window Server Datacenter licenses for Storage Space and B2B, and another attempt with VMware vSAN. Both did not fit very well and were also considerably more expensive.

You can use the free evaluation version to see if it is what you need.