StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

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.

I've used StarWind Virtual SAN software in two different solutions for several years. Both were highly critical production environments requiring 100% uptime and fast performance. In both solutions, this platform satisfied those requirements.

The software is easy to configure. The more resources you throw at it, especially network throughput, the better it will perform. I'm using SSDs behind it and I am still very happy with the performance.

The StarWind tech support is extremely helpful, especially during the initial setup. They make sure to be part of the install and configuration so that your experience is positive and productive. 

It is difficult to control all of the hardware components. I went through a couple of different NICs before I found the one that would work with my hardware and server OS, and yield the necessary throughput for the StarWind portion.

As traditional storage is too expensive, our clients are looking for a more affordable solution. If you compare StarWind to EqualLogic EMC or NetApp, it's a cheaper option.

Updating the software can be a bit tricky. You have to go down scripts to put it in maintenance mode, etc. It takes a while to update. From my experience, I think that's a thing that they need to improve on.

Every time I put it in maintenance mode, all of the replications stop. If they could fix this, it would be a great product.

We've been using StarWind Virtual SAN since June 2020.

Scalability-wise, it's hard to say because I haven't really added anything. 

Most of the information was quite clear on their website. The knowledge base is quite sufficient with all the info required. For this reason, I haven't had to contact technical support.

It's quite easy to install. Also, the configuration and documentation guide from their site was quite good.

We don't need maintenance. We do it ourselves. As I said, it's pretty straightforward —  standard, to install. It's not complex.

I think the cost of this solution is quite fair.

Make sure to consider the requirements of your environment. If you're in a high-performance-driven environment, I don't think this is the right solution. In this case, I would go with a traditional storage solution because you'll get better performance out of a physical one. For me, it's just a cheaper solution that doesn't require indigenous apps, etc.

I would not go for enterprise deployment. I'll go with the traditional one. Make sure your requirements fit with what you want to buy.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight.

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.

Replicated, high availability storage for VMware vSphere cluster of VMware ESX 2-nodes in an HA cluster for Virtual SAN storage, only this software can do a 2-node cluster.

It provides cost-friendly replacements for VMware vSAN or the dedicated storage solution that I am using it for to build shared, replicated storage for my VMware vSphere.

You can build cheap, reliable, replicated virtual machines clusters using simple servers with an all flash disk or SAS/SATA hybrid tiered by performance storage.

• I would like to replace Windows nodes to Linux. As of today, Linux nodes are ready for production. 
• Ability to to test the virtual storage are network area and storage speed from StarWind Management Console.
• Ability to check network card settings (such as MTU), VMware settings, and other settings needed for work under StarWind best practices. I would like to have something like a StarWind Best Practices Analyzer.

The setup is fast.

The setup cost is very low. The pricing is great.

We evaluated VMware vSAN and HPE StoreVirtual VSA.

I'm running StarWind VSAN in an Hypercoverged virtualization cluster. The capability of running the software on top of a general windows os gives me the ability to create a fully redundant SAN solution on almost every virtualization platform. I'm using the software to provide core infrastructure services like AD, DNS, DHCP to my users. Every service is automatically fully redudant thanks to VSAN and in the event one host goes down VMs will be automatically restarted on a second node with a little downtime.

The product improves my company's data redundancy by avoiding storage vendor locking and improves the performance and availability of our Customer's Services. We don't need at all of the expensive storage appliances like EMC or HP by using standard x86 servers to provide the same level of data security. We could then lower the prices of hardware support contracts by simply using StarWind VSAN on top servers like Dell PowerEdge or HP ProLiant. The ability to sync data on two servers gives users a perfect disaster recovery plan at almost no cost.

• The ability to run the software virtually on every virtualization platform and the ability to eliminate all storage vendor locking are the most valuable features. 
• The capability of creating a hot copy of my data on another piece of hardware and continually sync it. 
• The ability to increase the performance of reads and writes thanks to data caching and load balancing on the two hardware nodes. 
• The capability to implement an asynchronous replication on the third node outside my main data center in order to create a disaster recovery solution.

Management tools could be improved, sometimes the usage seems to be slowed down and confusing. A native web interface could also be an option. I love to see in the future port of the software on a general Linux distribution like RedHat or Ubuntu in order to avoid windows license costs. I would also like to see features like erasure coding implemented. On the VSAN software, I would like to see some improvements in the storage pools (eliminate the usage of the file as a data container and use the raw partition).

I've been using the product for two years.

The solution provided me the ability to share storage between three physical VMware hosts in my environment. Hence, I have HA for my VMs to move across hosts once they are stored on the vSAN using VMotion. Moreover, I am able to utilize the storage I already have on servers and save the expense of purchasing a new storage appliance.

It has allowed me to effectively and confidently manage the maintenance of hosts where I can power off a host and have its VMs migrate to another one.

Also, in having the same storage shared between hosts I can have at least one host storing all of the VMs for my cluster.

The most valuable features of this solution are as follows:

• Consolidated storage among all three hosts
• Synchronization of data between hosts
• Using VMware VMotion
• Incorporating HA in VMware
• Management tools available to manage box
• Email alerts if there are any problems with managed storage
• Excellent support

The product can include a more simple way of synchronization after a forced shutdown as the current process has a few more steps to check that hosts have synchronized and this can be automated.

The service support should have in its basic plan a chat support 24x7 in addition to email.

Support for this solution is excellent.

We use VMware ESXi and needed a SAN replacement. Our old SAN is an HPE StoreVirtual VSA, but we are running out of space and it's getting old, so our support will be ending soon.

We will use the storage for our main cluster including OS and data drives. 

This has helped us gain a resilient and robust SAN for much less than anything else we could find. It also allows us to add storage without any license penalty. We will move from using six servers to three. We will also be able to stop using several stand-alone iSCSI devices. 

The best thing about the StarWind SAN is the HA we setup. We can lose a site or even two of our three, and we would lose no data and have no outage.

In testing, we found some features in the Linux appliance were missing. So, for full functionality, you will want to use the Windows version. Server-side snapshots are one thing the Linux appliance can't do yet. I hope the feature is added in the next update release.

Adding storage after its all setup is a little difficult.

So far, I have seen a service fail on one system during our test phase. Synchronization stopped and I had to start the service again. This was during a power outage but the server never went down. It has never happened again. 

The way we have this setup, scaling is difficult. We use three systems that are all synchronized and using MIMO iSCSI. Adding storage means adding it to all three, rather than just tossing another server at it. You can architect it differently, which would make scaling easier.

Technical support is great. They are very responsive, they always reply quickly, and seem very knowledgeable.

We used an HPE StoreVirtual VSA. Its support is ending and a replacement was going to cost too much for us.

The setup was easy, but afterward, support walked us through a bunch of settings that I would have missed.

The setup was all done by local IT staff with a final remote check with support, where they changed many advanced settings. 

It all cost about twenty-five percent less than the other solutions we looked at.

The basic setup is very easy and the cost is reasonable for support. 

We looked at Nimble, HPE VSA, and Tegile storage.

If you're at all interested then build a few systems using old hardware, or just spin up a few VMs. You get ninety percent of the features for free so there is no cost to try it out. The free version is great to use for labs or test environments.