StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

We decided on StarWind's Virtual SAN product due to the fact that it was a simple way for us to use vendor hardware to achieve SAN functions. 

It allowed us to implement a robust solution without needing to buy dedicated SAN hardware for the remote site.  

We set up a 2 node cluster using Dell servers and Dell-provided hard drives and used Starwind to create several redundant disks across the two hosts. This solution allowed us to enable High Availability across the hosts using the shared storage without the need to purchase dedicated hardware.

The biggest benefit was that it allowed us to provide SAN services on a limited hardware budget.  

We built out a pair of matched servers with vendor-supplied hard drives and were able to provide a fully redundant storage array between the servers. VM hosts can now provide high availability failover if either host goes down. Not needing to spend a huge amount for a dedicated solution was a plus and the system is easily expandable if we need to make changes.  

Their support team has been excellent in helping us throughout the project process.

Support was great and provided presale support for our test environment before the purchase and after to help us configure the product before it went into production.  

They have also been great in following up on our project and helping with other implementation issues.  

Being able to use existing hardware was a big factor in our purchasing decision and helped this project fit the needs of our client's budget. Using existing hardware greatly reduced the project costs and overall complexity of the solution.

The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us.  

Starwind provides excellent pre-sale support and scheduled several meetings between our IT staff and their support team to review the configuration and answer questions. This helped immensely in deploying the software in our test environment and helped us to understand the product better. Support was always willing to help with any documentation that we were confused over and continued to follow up with us after the project went live.

I've used the solution for eight months.

The product appears to be very stable and robust.

The solution appears to be easily scalable and adjustable to fit future needs.

Vendor support has been very responsive and provided help with all issues we have encountered.

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution.

Setup can be complicated and the documentation is not always clear. Support from the vendor was needed in our test environment setup.

We used an in-house team with vendor support during the implementation. Support has been excellent and has followed up regularly with our team.

We did look at Dell and VMware SAN products as well. 

Our primary use case for StarWind Virtual SAN is to repurpose older servers with substantial disk capacity for use in a three-node vSphere cluster. This setup was for proof of concept (POC) environments for the first time and after to host production workloads.

It allows us to create scalable and cost-effective virtual storage solutions. The integration with vSphere ensures that we can efficiently manage and utilize these resources, enhancing our IT infrastructure while minimizing new hardware and licensing costs.

StarWind Virtual SAN has greatly benefited our organization by reducing hardware and licensing costs through repurposing older servers with significant disk capacity. It has enabled us to extend the lifespan of our existing hardware and align with sustainability goals, all while providing a cost-effective and scalable storage solution. Its seamless integration with vSphere has improved our storage management and operational efficiency in production environments.

It was our first two steps to a hyper-converged solution.

The most valuable features of StarWind Virtual SAN include its cost-effective repurposing of older hardware, seamless integration with vSphere, and high scalability. It enables us to extend the lifespan of existing servers, significantly cut down on licensing costs, and manage our storage environment efficiently. 

Additionally, its flexibility allows us to scale effortlessly by adding nodes (up to 32), which supports our growing storage needs and enhances the adaptability of our production environment.

Areas for improvement in StarWind Virtual SAN include simplifying the setup process, especially for users with limited vSphere expertise. Future releases could benefit from an enhanced configuration wizard to streamline deployment and more robust data migration. There is also a need to address the problem of CentOS's end of life. 

Additionally, incorporating a built-in backup solution would significantly enhance data protection. Improved features for managing and migrating data effectively would further strengthen the product.

I have been using the solution for three years now

The stability of StarWind Virtual SAN is robust. The solution performs reliably with minimal downtime, ensuring consistent operation in production environments. 

In case of the loss of a node, the reconstruction, depending on the amount of data to synchronize, is always made with no data or integrity loss.

However, the reliance on CentOS, introduces potential future stability risks. Despite this, the system has consistently delivered dependable performance and resilience, maintaining stability even under significant workloads.

The solution allows for easy expansion by adding nodes (up to 32), which supports growing storage demands and adapts well to increasing workloads. This flexibility ensures that as our storage needs evolve, we can scale the system efficiently without major reconfiguration or downtime. 

Overall, its scalability is a significant strength, making it a versatile choice for both current and future requirements.

I haven't experienced support since I used the free version. Anyway, I have found plenty of support from StarWind through their forum.

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution. 

It was complex to understand the mechanism of the hyperconverged solution put in place.

The ESXi consumes the virtual disk created by Starwind Vsan from the local disk.
The cabling was not that difficult since I didn't use any for data sync between nodes.

The most difficult part was the usage of PowerShell scripts to create the cluster because the free version doesn't provide a Gui.

The implementation was in-house, in a new data center.

The ROI was excellent because we reused old servers that already had capacity disks.

If you are comfortable with the solution and you feel that you don't need support, you can begin with the free licences for three nodes.

We did not evaluate other options.

Hyperconverged lab and testing environments fulfill several special requirements for use cases. We use it for demonstration environments and for virtualization and containerization. We have a rather smaller footprint, ranging from two to three nodes over the years. 

Mainly, we have an edge use case. Another use case is refurbishing and second lifecycle evaluation, specifically I/O and disaster recovery capabilities, which are important in these lab environments. 

Modernization could also be counted as a use case since modernizing data centers on small-scale or edge deployments is becoming increasingly important, even for smaller businesses.

For my organization, StarWind vSAN has been a first of firsts in hyper-converged storage and has been, first and foremost, a technology demonstrator that should disclose and present the advantages of modern data center constellations. 

Over the years, it has also functioned as a lab environment and customer demonstrator specifically for refurbishing old hardware and educational objects for our internal apprentices, effectively transforming our mindset towards modern data center infrastructure. It also served as a proof of concept for refurbishing and cost-reducing existing infrastructures.

I have found the overall ergonomy and manageability outstanding during normal functioning. Specifically, the console GUI's monitoring and configuring capabilities can be counted towards that. 

Even when not administrated via GUI, the comprehensive Powershell automation module remains, which comes with templates prepopulated for the most common automation tasks. 

Furthermore, the solution provides great performance for the price it is listed with and can even run properly without proper hardware, however, it is even more efficient and performs better when procuring proper hardware is possible.

My impression has been mostly positive. However, there have been some pitfalls. For example, it runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear. This consequently follows a long learning curve and can take some time until this can be done efficiently. 

The feature log-structured file system has been removed. While I have not used it, I know some colleagues who have reported some performance benefits under certain circumstances. 

Additionally, vSAN does not offer extended SAN features like inline deduplication, compression, or S3-compatible access, which is part of most modern SAN feature sets, also in hyper-converged scenarios.

I have been using several editions of the solution for more than five years.

The stability of this solution is vastly dependent on the hardware procured beforehand. Network hardware is especially important, and bad or glitchy hardware (like the Intel X700 or X800 series) can quickly break things. It runs—until it does not. Be sure to learn or consult about the disaster recovery process, especially if you decide on a witness strategy hosted in vSAN.

The software can be pretty scalable; however, after reaching more and more nodes, one may look at StarWind's hyperconverged appliance instead of going through the hassle of administrating separate systems.

They have only friendly and positive experiences, always a helping hand. Also, they are offering proactive support, which, from the experience of some of my colleagues, is an outstanding experience unusual to many professional service providers.

Neutral

We did not use a different solution beforehand.

The initial setup was very straightforward and easy, although one could deep dive into the specific protocol configuration options. Also, I would have liked it if some features or procedures would have been better documented at the time.

We implemented it through our in-house R&D team.

I will not publish accurate numbers. However, the modernization aspect in terms of lab infrastructure and testing/demonstration environments has an educational benefit, strengthening our consultancy, demonstrating capabilities and our mindset towards data center innovation.

I would highly advise new users to consult the StarWind technical team beforehand. 

Also, consider the paid version if you want the ease of management through the console GUI and not just use it for monitoring. 

You can also apply for a testing or NFR license if you want to test it. StarWind vSAN is, by list price, vastly more competitive than some comparable solutions. The setup may be straightforward, fast, and easy; however, it can break things down if not done properly. Before setup, be sure to procure proper hardware components that are not known to cause instabilities.

Due to budget constraints, Ceph has been evaluated as an alternative. We also took a look at Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and VMware vSAN.

Consider StarWind's proactive support. It improves the software's already high value and defuses the long learning curve of some processes! When clustering resources, deeply consider your witness strategy! Especially when you can not guarantee 100% stable hardware (e.g., through firmware issues), this can break things very quickly if you have a witness device in the same vSAN.

We needed redundancy in our "dark" environment. A failover cluster was the best solution for us. We have a complicated infrastructure consisting of various v-hosts and over 40 VMs in all kinds of operating systems. 

For continuity, it was necessary to update our VMs without any downtime. It's installed on two v-hosts with the most important machines. This way, we can continue operations without hick-ups. We chose StarWind as it's independent of the hardware used in our v-hosts. We did look at other solutions; however, in the end, StarWind VSAN was the best choice for us.

We needed a redundant solution for our environment, and it was sufficient to have a two-node cluster. 

The implementation went flawlessly with the help of StarWind support. However, technical knowledge is mandatory. Nevertheless, we had a quick installation. Since we had lots of different types of storage available, we were able to assign different types of storage depending on the type of usage for the virtual machines. 

We already had an unexpected outage of one of the nodes due to a memory problem, and thanks to StarWind vSAN, our operations continued as expected. It's an easy way to keep your failover cluster monitored.

StarWind vSAN is easy to use and has a very clear GUI. The most valuable in StarWind vSAN is the way it works seamlessly with the Microsoft fail-over cluster. 

We are working with a two-node setup that suits our needs perfectly. It just works without any technical know-how needed. 

The best part is the easy way it operates with a very clear GUI without any unnecessary items. 

It's also easy to add an extra node if necessary or connect if you've rebooted one of the nodes. Also, the speed of support is very valuable to us. If you have a problem or question, you'll get almost an immediate answer.

The product is as good as it promises. 

StarWind vSAN is updated on a regular basis, probably to keep up with Microsoft Windows or other operating systems. As far as I'm concerned, there should be some kind of active monitoring connected to StarWind vSAN, so you will be able to act when needed. 

In our dark environment, this is impossible as we don't have any mail server available in our infrastructure, which consists of a few v-hosts, redundant storage, and quite a few virtual machines, all running on Microsoft OS.

I've used the solution for three years.

We were previously using old conventional backup methods. Last year, our organization decided to move to some cloud base storage solution, and we moved to StarWind as our primary storage solution. 

StarWind Virtual SAN is the solution exactly we are looking for. It replicates the data between the hosts, giving us 30 TB of usable redundant storage. 

StarWind Virtual SAN is a flexible solution in terms of storage expansion. The big advantage we got from StarWind is the ability to meet compliance requirements to ensure we are fail-safe.

StarWind Virtual SAN is cost-effective, with high availability and good flexibility, and is a high-performance software-defined storage solution. 

StarWind features like high availability and cost-effectiveness improve the ability of our organization by reducing the cost of old storage methods. Additionally, StarWind Virtual SAN provides excellent performance. It delivers fast data access and efficient data transfers, which actually improves the application performance and user experience.

In our case, the cost and high availability are the two most important factors which we were looking for in a solution. StarWind Virtual SAN is a cloud-native solution, and cost and other factors are favorable to us. I would recommend this solution if a company has a tight budget and hardware limitations in its environment. Of course, users do need to consider other factors as well as every organization has its own preference for solutions.

There is always room for improvement, and user expectations never end.

The first and most important thing the solution needs is video tutorials. There should be more focus areas. To use the solution, users should not need to always create tickets to get support from the vendor. There should be publicly available tutorials on YouTube or other platforms that help the users to integrate this solution with other platforms, for example. 

Documentation improvement is the second area that needs focus. We require more detailed documentation. That will definitely help users to effectively utilize this solution. 

I have been using this solution for more than one year. 

We were a using conventional backup solution previously.

We have evaluated a few options previously. However, I can't recall the names. That process was handled a year ago.

We have a small private cloud for providing hosting to our clients. This allowed us to simplify our architecture in a way that previously required dedicated SAN hardware. 

The ability to migrate data and machines as we would with a central SAN is very helpful and has reduced our overall hardware costs, reduced our management costs, and provided additional uptime for our clients. 

We have two nodes currently with dedicated networking between them. This allows for quick migration and agile upgrades in the future. 

This has allowed us to spend less on hardware yet still have the same functionality of a full SAN. We will be able to provide additional uptime for our clients because of vSAN. 

Previously we were unable to migrate between nodes in our environment. This solution allows us to migrate virtual machines between nodes as if we had a dedicated $100,000 SAN in the mix without the additional cost and management of the SAN. 

We hope in the long run that we will be able to deploy this to our other nodes and save additional time and expense there. 

The ability to use two servers as a cluster instead of having to have a dedicated SAN environment to achieve the same results has been great. This has allowed us to spend less on hardware yet still have the same functionality of a full SAN. 

We will be able to provide additional uptime for our clients thanks to vSAN. 

Previously we were unable to migrate between nodes in our environment. This product now allows us to migrate virtual machines between nodes as if we had a dedicated $100,000 SAN in the mix without the additional cost and management of the SAN. 

We hope in the long run that we will be able to deploy this to our other nodes and save additional time and expense there.

We ran into an issue with alerts. The system uses email to send alerts, and we are a Microsoft 365 shop. They were not able to send them, thanks to the latest TLS updates at Microsoft. We were able to use a third-party SMTP relay in the meantime, however. 

Additionally, there was no way to send different levels of alerts, from informational to license to critical. This will require us to monitor each log generated as anyone could be critical coming across. They believe this will be incorporated into their next build and releases. 

I've been using the solution for one month.

We use the StarWind Virtual SAN software across two storage nodes to create redundancy for our cluster storage. 

Installed on two storage servers, StarWind's Virtual SAN handles the replication of our cluster storage between the two in separate server rooms across the site. 

We have five compute nodes connected to the storage nodes, which we run Hyper-V; the VMs are all located on the cluster storage nodes yet physically run on the compute nodes. 

The compute nodes are split in two, with two in one server room and three in another, with room to add more compute nodes if needed. 

Migration of VMs is seamless and improved from our previous solutions.

Our previous SAN solutions were outdated and had several issues due to age.

Looking for a change, we found that all the reviews and people we spoke to about StarWind said that the software just worked perfectly. All we really wanted was a system that once it was set up that just worked. And that's exactly what we have found to be the case in StarWind's Virtual SAN. It has been excellent; we monitor the replication health via the software and that's about it. There are no issues so far, and, like each review we've seen, we would highly recommend StarWind Virtual SAN.

StarWind's Virtual SAN handles the replication of our cluster storage
between the two storage nodes in separate server rooms across the site. 

We have five compute nodes connected to the storage nodes, which we run Hyper-V, and the VMs are all located on the cluster storage nodes. They, however, physically run on the compute nodes. The compute nodes are split into two with two in one server room and three in another. There is also room to add more compute nodes if needed.

Migration of VMs is seamless. It's improved from our previous solutions. The fact is that once it was set up, the replication works perfectly, and we haven't had any issues since installation.

The fact that we can expand our storage and add on to our compute nodes easily and how amazing the StarWind technical support team is really adding value to our purchase.

We don't really have any issues with this product. 

StarWind has a great technical support team that helps with the installation and has ironed out any issues we had early on. 

The price was perfect, as we didn't have to shell out for new SAN servers. We found that StarWind's Virtual SAN was a cheaper solution to install on two storage servers than buying a new dedicated SAN server.

Due to the fact our old SAN was no longer supported and out of warranty, finding that StarWind's technical support team is so incredibly helpful and knowledgeable has been amazing.

There are no negatives or improvements that we can think of at our current stage.

I've been using the solution for four months.

The software seems to be completely stable; we have had no issues with the software itself and if a compute or storage node has gone down, the redundancy has been great, we don't even know if there ever was an issue. 

With the way we are set up, we only need two storage nodes that we are licensed for, and we can expand the storage on those nodes and add it to our cluster storage with no additional cost. Compute nodes don't need to be licensed, so we can have as many as we'd like and attach them to our cluster storage.

Customer service and support were amazing. They offer quick responses and are  very helpful and knowledgeable. 

We had them look over our setup after the demo and got help with configuring the iSCSI connections to the storage nodes. We also had the same technician throughout, so he knew our system and setup.

Positive

We used NetApps SANtricity for the past 10+ years. The System was old, outdated, and out of warranty. Our support contract ended with them last year, so we needed a new solution with support and better software.

Most of the setup was easy for our environment; the only issue we had was with setting up iSCSI connections from the compute nodes to the storage nodes, however, the technical support team helped with this.

We went through a vendor and initially spoke directly with StarWind to do a demo and talk us through it.

The setup costs depend on how many nodes you need.

One of the main reasons we went with StarWind was the pricing. It was cheaper for us to use our existing servers and install the Virtual SAN software and upgrade to SSDs than buy a brand new SAN server from other providers. 

We trialed the StarWind Virtual SAN software for a few weeks and quickly decided on the product.

We looked at other solutions from HP, Barracuda, Netapp, and Azure HCI.

If you trial the software, you can upgrade from the trial to the full version without any disruption or reconfiguration. StarWind Technical support is outstanding. They were extremely helpful throughout the trial, setup, and during our transitioning period.

A customer wanted to build a test environment for his VMware. However, he was running out of financial resources. 

I suggested this product (vSAN in particular), and he was quite happy with its features. Later, he decided to convert his test environment into production using the same StarWind products, and to date, he is a happy customer. 

After this success story, I have referred many of my customers to use this product; no complaints so far. 

Happy customers mean good business, and the company is progressing well, so I'm enjoying the benefits as well. 

StarWind vSAN is easy to deploy and administer. It's a user-friendly solution. We are integrators and deployed vSAN from StarWind with multiple clients and all are happy with its performance. 

Creating the new server and deploying it to be used by hypervisors over ISCSI is good. It is very easy to configure. 

I'd prefer it if a remote console was provided. That way, the customer doesn't have to log in to a specific server where the product is running. That could be very beneficial. 

I've been using the solution for four years.

I have deployed this product at multiple locations (for clients) and have had no complaints so far. It is a fully stable product. 

The scalability is relatively easy to manage on StarWind. When having real hardware, it's a bit complex to scale, yet way easier with StarWind than with other options.  

Customer service is easily available by email. I have not tried by phone. However, it's my understanding that they would be of great help if I reached out that way too.  

Positive

I have worked with NetApp, Lenovo, EMC, and some other brands as well for storage with VMware and Hyper V. 

StarWind is easy to manage as compared to these and is a cheap solution with very similar features. 

The initial setup is straightforward. Any IT professional can handle it after some studying and training from Youtube. 

After reading the help material and watching some Youtube videos, I deployed this product myself. 

A happy customer is the best ROI. I have many happy customers using StarWind. 

It's quite easy to deploy this product. 

Any IT professional can read a few documents and watch some videos and maybe go to Youtube to learn about deployment and management. It's a very simple and user-friendly product.