StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

StarWind VSAN eliminates the NAS/SAN as a single point of failure. It's an affordable synchronous HA storage solution which allows us to use extremely fast direct-attached SSD storage in an HA environment. 

• We have deployed StarWind VSAN for several customers. 
• Super affordable HA solution for SMB private cloud infrastructure. StarWind VSAN is our go-to solution.

Support is outstanding, responsive, and goes above and beyond. They were able to help with some existing AD issues that would typically be out of scope.

I would like additional documentation regarding possible networking configurations with 10GbE switching.

Their support goes above and beyond with the integration of their software.

• It is a fairly straightforward product. 
• The support is great.
• It just works. 
• It meets all my criteria for success. 

We needed a SAN to support our environment comprised at the time of two Hyper-V 2012 Clusters. We're now migrating to Hyper-V 2019 and we had no issues with the migration from the storage. We use SATA NL and SSD to give our VMs different performance tiers.

Update: We finished the migration and moved all storage iSCSI comms to Mellanox. We have had 0 issues with Starwind. 

StarWind allowed us to deploy SSD storage with very high availabilty at a good price at a time where all other vendors were pushing huge premiums on SSDs. We were also able to deploy different storage tiers with no issues, which was very important to our solution.

Using our own choice of HW allowed us to price our service to answer our customers' needs.

The high availability made sure we never had downtime from it.

Having twin nodes has made maintenance and upgrades easy.

Support has always been great with issues and planning.

Performance when in storage-separate configuration needs to be improved.

The virtualization layers and not having the storage on the same node as compute take a lot of the IOPS we could have on an HCI scenario, but we grew out of it.

We have been using this solution since 2015.

The solution itself is simple and having two separate hosts gives it great availability. There is no single point of failure apart from the software itself and while we had some issues we never lost both nodes.

We only came close when Microsoft introduced a bug that crashed our hosts if they had pending iSCSI connections, and you have those if a node is not synced.

No issues.

They solved our problems, validated our configurations and roadmap, and suggested improvements.

Prior to this solution, we used HPE MSA. We wanted easier tiering, better performance, and not to have everything on one "box".

The initial setup was simple. We chose our HW, validated with support, and had them help configure them.

It's easy to understand and to deploy.

We evaluated solutions by HPE, EMC, and NetApp.

We're satisfied with the features available.

The use of the StarWind solution does not have to be just a strictly IT domain.
In my case, we needed to find and implement a solution that guaranteed the supervision of security systems in the scenario of a full disaster of our main center of supervision.
To achieve that, we needed to use technology that would give us fast and reliable data replication between two supervision centers and would not ruin our security department budget. On the other hand, the solution must be easy to administrate with the tools we had.

StarWind Virtual SAN was a bulls-eye. Now, we can transfer the full spectrum of information to remote infrastructure that allows us to ensure continuity, which means better security for the company. The StarWind Virtual SAN management console is intuitive and easy to use.

Since the implementation of StarWind Virtual SAN, we achieve fast and reliable data replication in the full spectrum. The main operations security center is backed up to maintain the continuity of security systems operations in case of loss of the main operations center.

The most valuable feature is the fast and reliable data replication between main and backup operations centers using a virtual environment.

Second: Good price :-) 

Third: The StarWind Virtual SAN management console is intuitive and easy to use in day to day administration.

It would be great if the Linux version of the management console offered the same features as Windows.

StarWind Virtual SAN meets all of the expectations in terms of stability for data replication and failover tests.

The scalability is very good.

Our experience is that we get a fast response from technical support.

No other solution was used for data replication.

The initial setup was straightforward.

Implementation was performed through a vendor team with a high level of experience.

This solution has a great price for the functionality.

No other options were evaluated.

In my case, in the day-to-day use, I don't see much area for improvement for StarWind Virtual SAN solution. It's fast, reliable, and almost meets all of my expectations.

We use StarWind for multiple 2-node hyperconverged Hyper-V Windows clusters in our datacenter environment.

It gave us a new template for upgrading aging infrastructure sans expensive enterprise storage hardware.

Ease of installation, configuration, and management. It literally took us less than two hours to have a fully functional 2-node cluster.

There is a limit on HA storage for standard and professional versions which is too low to be very useful for any but the smallest of SMBs or startups. Most SMBs we work with have more than 50TB of data, so the 4TB and 8TB limits are nothing more than a sales gimmick. The enterprise-level supports unlimited HA storage but starts competing with Windows Server (S2D) at the price point. The hardware requirement for S2D, however, puts the Windows HCI out of reach for most SMBs.

This tool allows my team to be able to deploy NAS solutions in real-time, virtually, so that we can test those solutions quickly and easily before they are needed to be deployed in the real world.  

The user interface for this application is amazing. It's very easy to learn from the beginning and it has a great introductory period that allows you to get used to everything that the software has to offer. 

I can also say that another big advantage of this application is the amazing customer support that they offer. They are able to answer your questions very quickly, and they are always available at the most important times.

The solution has a great hypervisor storage platform. This saves the costs of having to deploy a physical environment to test. It also allows my team to work from anywhere at any time, which is important in the current times when remote work is vital to the proper workflow at our company.

Having large support for filesystems is important to our organization, as we sometimes use proprietary filesystems like WekaFS for some of the tasks, especially in the era of Exascale computing. Having support for additional features like importing filesystems and being able to do some testing with them is important. Besides not being able to use any filesystem, I do not have any additional cons. 

I've used the solution for one year.

We use this solution for SAN storage. We have a two-node Microsoft Windows 2016 full SSD (SATA) configuration with RAM cache (500GB each node), and iSCSI to connect HA virtual clusters. Using Mellanox network technology with two 100Gbit switches in HA mode. Also, we have more than sixty MSSQL databases hosted.

Virtual SAN has improved stability, performance, and maintenance cost. This is a great solution for replacement "Hardware", both entry-level and some mid-storage. It allows you to use ANY consumer or enterprise HDDs and SSDs, and that's a really great thing!  

The Price/Performance ratio for this solution is outstanding!

You can use most of the modern hardware. You are not restricted to use "not compatible" disks by a vendor. It has great scalability and replication features to allow building really fault tolerant solutions in your IT environment. 

I would like to see full support for iSER. This time, technical support does not recommend using iSER on NICs except on an internal (StarWind Node-to-StarWind node) connections.

High availability for direct attached hardware drives (without virtual disk layer) could be useful to increase the performance of StarWind virtual storage cluster. 

This solution is very stable.

The scalability of this solution is great!

To give us the ability to install a cluster environment, increasing reliability for our plant infrastructure.

This product allowed gave us the ability to implement a cluster environment which allowed us to implement a stable infrastructure for our plants.

The best feature of the StarWind Virtual San product is its ease of installation and integration within a current infrastructure.

One area that could be improved is the reconnection of the attached drives upon a reboot. Rarely, the shared drive will not connect automatically.