What advice do you have for others considering StarWind Virtual SAN?

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

I would advise that you implement the Linux-based Controller Virtual Machine (CVM) during your evaluation phase, since the expected performance metrics are better, as compared to Windows-based executable. As per StarWind software documentation, the Linux-based CVM offers a a wide range of features, better performance, and stability, including reduced CPU usage and lower I/O latency.

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.

Establish a good relationship with the vendor's support team. They can provide valuable assistance during setup, troubleshooting, and ongoing maintenance. Keep the software up to date with the latest patches and updates to benefit from security enhancements and performance improvements. Consider your organization's future growth and ensure the solution can scale accordingly. This avoids potential disruptions due to increased demands. Implement a robust backup and disaster recovery strategy alongside your virtual SAN solution to safeguard critical data. Stay informed about industry trends and emerging technologies to ensure your infrastructure remains competitive and efficient. Invest in training for your IT team to maximize the value of the solution and facilitate knowledge transfer. Continuously monitor the performance of your virtual SAN to identify and address any issues promptly.

My overall experience with StarWind has been very positive. It is a very simple solution. It is not tied to any hypervisor or hardware configuration. Their support people are excellent and offer assistance in setting up the solution in your environment. While there is a bit more setup than some other products, all you really need is a basic understanding of storage and networking.

We have a hypervisor environment and it works best with that. If your organization is running any other environment for infrastructure, you need to ensure all features are up and running before implementing them in production.

I highly recommend the solution. It saves a lot of stress, hassle, and time.

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

StarWind is an excellent solution with top-tier support.

It's a pretty reliable, cost-effective storage solution for virtual environments.

Try out all of the other solutions as well; there might be a solution offered by StarWind that might suit your organization's needs.

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.

This is a very user-friendly product that works well overall.

Do not hesitate to use their technical support - even if it is just to review your configuration for their best practices.

Before you deliver this to an end client, make absolutely sure that you provide adequate documentation about how to start up and shut down the system. That part can be a little bit tricky and requires you to do things in the proper order.

Our storage infrastructure had been operating flawlessly with great performance and reliability.

I cannot say enough good things about the support this company gives; more companies need to model this.

I'd advise others to use their support; it really is great.

Overall, I really enjoy this product. It's easy to use and support is fantastic.

I'd advise new users to not hesitate and just go ahead with it.

I'd advise others to use the free license to test it. The doc is also public. This is the way.

Give it a shot. They may not be the biggest, however, they're able to play in the field.

The solution offers great ROI.

I'd advise users to initiate lots of communication with their support staff. Their responses are quick and sufficient.

I rate StarWind Virtual SAN nine out of 10.

StarWind VSAN is a winning horse: better price than competitors, better performance, IO speed written guarantee, backup integrated in the solution, unbeatable technical service, 

What else do you wish?

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.

In summary, I think it's the best solution I could buy to achieve my goals.

Other than automated alerting, there is no real product feature that I feel would be useful to us. We have had no issues with the software as is. There are no gaps that we have had to fill in with other solutions or challenges that have caused us to redesign or change our intended implementations. I have installed a few updates from the initial installation and found that process to be quite easy and successful each time as well. I look forward to seeing how they may innovate in the future and bring benefits we have not considered.

As of this time, I really do not have a wishlist of features beyond perhaps some automated notifications of any changes, sync issues, etc. That being said, we have not had any operating issues come up that I would have really needed automated alerts for, so this would just be a wish list item. From what we have implemented, we are not finding any lacking features or issues with our configuration that we would like to see improved. If this changes over time, I would certainly update my opinion, but for what was advertised, we feel like this is a pretty stable product that is meeting its goals.

Overall, StarWinds vSAN is a cost-saving storage option with top-notch support.

The StarWind VSAN product is very well developed in many areas.

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.

After we purchased the software, we were able to contact support right away. I would suggest you take advantage of this, as they are quick to respond and got my software up and running literally within minutes.

I have not been using the product for long enough to objectively name the features that should be added in the next release or would not suit me in the current release. The functions that I needed to work on do not cause any complaints from me.

Mainly that the costs would be less expensive.

By letting the support team do it next time, as based on their knowledge we have the correct configurations.

This product is definitely worth the investment.

Product updates are not that frequent (two-three times per year). Also, it concerns me that back-end OS (we are using StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere and it's built on top of CentOS 7) is not updated every time the update is coming out. For example, our installation is more than half a year un-updated, and there are many updates available for CentOS. StarWind support does not recommend installing them independently.

Everything works. I am completely satisfied with the reliability and speed.

StarWind vSAN is a great solution to create a redundant two-node-only Hyper-V cluster, both for domain or workgroup scenarios. You should be totally sure to avoid "split brain" in a two-node clustering with a redundant heartbeat, but without any external witness/arbitrator it is not against the solution`s concept.

This is an optimal product for large fault-tolerant solutions.

StarWind has been an excellent solution for our virtual storage needs. There are features like remote replication that we don't currently use but could provide excellent disaster recovery for a remote site.

My advice for anybody who is considering this solution is to give it a try. Implementing a UPS along with it is a good idea.

Overall, the Starwind software, support, and implementation was great. I would highly recommend it.

We're satisfied with the features available.

For now, StarWind has satisfied my needs, as my requirement was to create a failover environment for the servers, also allowing the system to run with less administration.

I recommend this solution because it gives me flexibility and expandability. It works like a charm without any problem or concern.

I think the software is very good. At the moment, I have not encountered problems that I could not solve.

So far, the software is doing everything we need.

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.

Technical support is the thing that completes a good product. If the software is good but you can also count on fast and accurate resolutions then you have got everything you need.

Their support team is terrific. I have only had to reach out to them on a couple of occasions. They responded quickly and helped me to get things resolved right away.

Unless you need a lot of special third-party integration with other systems, it is a great low-cost solution that gives you whatever level of performance you decide, based on your hardware.

We spent time evaluating this product and there is no doubt that the choice to implement this solution for production was the right one. My advice is to call (contact) them and they will answer your questions to help you find a proper solution.

I have been very impressed with the StarWind application, referring to every parameter. Reliability, cost, and support.

As we now can rely on this company, we recommend that others make the same decision. We would like to add that everyone in our organization has felt the impact of the changes in the services we use and provide. We also appreciate the long term cooperation that has lasted for years, with a consistent level of service. This allows our company to plan further ahead, as experience has shown that every solution the company provides us is and will remain, satisfying.

A thorough analysis and testing of existing offerings in the network storage market has shown that StarWind Virtual SAN is the perfect network storage solution. It provides the necessary fault tolerance and continuance of business processes. StarWind Virtual SAN is a very easy-to-use solution that can be quickly and easily deployed and configured without intimate and specific knowledge in the virtualization sphere. Moreover, the manufacturer's website has detailed documentation that helps to resolve issues. In cases when the documentation is not enough, qualified online support specialists are always ready to help. In the test environment, the product has shown excellent results and currently is implemented in a production environment.

Overall, this is a good product for good money.

In my opinion, StarWind is a great solution for businesses with limited infrastructure budgets.

Support is very good.

No.

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.

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.

Definitely get a trial license. I'm pretty sure they still have a free version that you can download. Set it up in a sandbox and see if it makes sense for your environment. The great thing about it is it is all Microsoft-based, so if you're familiar with Hyper-V, then it's really pretty simple. In terms of our users, it's pretty much just me managing it. It's running our production environment. Ideally, I'd like to add our third node this year so that I have extra available overhead so that we can be more proactive with maintenance, etc. I would rate StarWind at eight out of ten. There's always room for improvement.

Go for it. Just set it up and follow the instructions. Start with the free version. Make a test bed and play around with it. Then, see how you like it and how it works. because it works. There is nothing hard about it. Once you get it working and understand how the system is implemented in your data center, then everything else is dotting i's and crossing t's. You can get the official licensing for the support or any larger array sizes that you may need. You can allocate and tell it to transfer things as you normally would, as it is a very impressive system. It is probably one of the things that I have been happiest about in my environment. The Log-structured Write Cache feature works works transparently, so I haven't really noticed it. I assume it helps with application resiliency and performance since it is working. NVMe over Fabrics would definitely be incredibly fast. It is something that I don't have the architecture to even consider here, but it does sound very cool and fast. I have worked with NVMe drives and SSD systems, and the interface is much wider and faster than your typical, older systems, like SATA and SAS, which were meant for mechanical systems. It would be very impressive, and I would like to get a chance to work with something like that to see its performance. I was not even aware that there was a way to integrate the solution with server OS native management tools, like vCenter. We are using the vCenter appliance, which is Linux based. It doesn't seem to integrate things too well into it, even though it is the recommended way that they have us doing it. If there is some plugin, or something for it to directly integrate, I would be totally up for that.

The pricing is based on the amount of storage, so you should evaluate how much storage you're going to need for your license. I believe there's an unlimited tier which is also very reasonable. In our organization, it's the backing data-store for the entire company, which is about 85 users. Programmers and management people make up our studio. For deployment and maintenance, it's just me with the support team at StarWind. We don't have plans to increase usage. We're a small studio and we're not going to get bigger. I give StarWind a ten out of ten. They have great support, a great product, it's simple and easy to use, and has a great price.

We have plans to increase the usage in the future. As we need data processing capability, we will add more nodes. As we need more storage, we will obviously upgrade the storage licenses. We will need more storage before we need more nodes because we are only using a fraction of our total processing power at this point, but we are slowly starting to fill up on disk space. The time frame for upgrading our disk space will probably be in six to eight months. We run everything from accounting, databases, email VMs, SQL Servers, etc. on it, anything that someone would expect on an enterprise environment. We are in the process of installing OS native management tools now. It should make things easier. The Admin Center looks like a good tool. Follow their recommendations on hardware configurations. The faster you can put in the components, the better the experience will be. I always recommend everybody do their own research. If you do your research, you will find out that cost-wise StarWind will be more competitive. In terms of form and function, from personal experience, their converged storage system works very well and is extremely reliable. What is most important to a lot of consumers is how good the support is behind the product. While you can research it, you never know until you spend your money. Experientially, their support is some of the best I've ever worked with, even though they are based outside of the US. You're not dealing with Indian accents. They speak very clear English, and there are not the communication issues that you have with non-Western countries.

We are not using the Log-structured Write Cache feature nor are we using NVMe. We have not integrated this solution with server OS native management tools. We are just interested in business continuity. If the server blows up, we will still be in business. It does what we want, and we are happy with it. As of now, since it does exactly what we want it to do, so I do not see where we would need to use features that we are currently not using. We were sold on the fact that we could use our existing infrastructure, and it syncs data if we lose one server. StarWind Virtual SAN might not be for everybody. We had the underlining technology, so it worked for us. Give it a try. You can't go wrong, because one of the things they told us is that if you no longer use it, StarWind would credit us a certain amount against a different solution that they had. It was a win-win for us.

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

Thanks support for the quick help: I think you never sleep!

I think StarWind is a serious contendender. Especially if you don't have the right VMware licenses. But even then - I'm running a 3 node cluster and don't need a separate "witness" box. If you're an SMB and doing VMware you need to consider StarWind as your SAN solution.

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

The product is solid, simple to use, and well engineered. Very impressed and looking forward to future releases.

Make sure that you understand your performance requirements clearly. Learn how to measure your performance needs in your existing environment BEFORE you shop, so that you can be sure that you are looking at the right solution. In all of the planning that goes into making the correct decision on these types of products, understanding performance (and not just making assumptions) is the most neglected part. There is no quicker way to over or under build your solution than to not have real performance numbers for planning.