What is your primary use case for StarWind Virtual SAN?

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.

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.

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.

We have been using StarWind in conjunction with Veeam as our backup solution, and the results have been exceptional. StarWind’s seamless integration with Veeam has allowed us to enhance our data protection strategy, providing robust and reliable backups. The performance and stability of StarWind have significantly reduced our downtime, ensuring that our critical data is always protected and easily recoverable. The ease of setup and configuration, along with the comprehensive support from the Starwind team, has made the process straightforward and stress-free. Starwind’s flexible and scalable architecture perfectly complements Veeam’s advanced backup features, giving us a powerful and efficient backup infrastructure. The combination of these two solutions has greatly improved our data management and recovery capabilities, making it an indispensable part of our IT operations. We highly recommend StarWind for anyone looking to optimize their backup strategy, especially when paired with Veeam.

The product is being utilized within an airgap lab environment, which means it is isolated from external networks and internet connectivity for security reasons. The virtual Storage Area Network (SAN) is integrated into the system alongside Hyper-V, a virtualization platform developed by Microsoft. This configuration allows for efficient storage management and virtualization capabilities within the isolated environment of the lab. The virtual SAN helps in providing centralized storage resources that can be dynamically allocated to virtual machines running on the Hyper-V infrastructure, enhancing the overall performance and flexibility of the system. By combining these technologies, users can optimize their lab environment for testing, development, or research purposes without compromising security or network integrity.

We have utilized StarWind Virtual SAN (vSAN) as an iSCSI server alternative in a Hyper-V based installation. We ran a 30-day trial license in a lab environment. The StarWind vSAN solution was used as a software-defined iSCI storage solution for an imminent SQL Server cluster installation. This allowed us for a fairly quick integration solution for our SQL Server cluster shared disk requirements, without the need to invest in a high-cost Storage Area Network (SAN) solution. It is a good practice to use storage performance evaluation tools, such as Microsoft DiskSPD, to evaluate IOPS metrics and perform stress testing in a lab environment with synthetic transactions for your prospective application. In our case, we conducted synthetic transactions for stress testing to prepare for a SQL server failover cluster installation.

Our use case is for an oil and gas site with 200 ATEX cameras and 30 administrative buildings that have 400 indoor and outdoor cameras. All of the cameras are connected to a VLAN switch in each area. All of the switches are connected to the core switch in the data center through a fibre network between buildings. We add all cameras to management servers and they are divided to recording servers. There are 30 cameras for each recording server. We create a Microsoft failover cluster to achieve redundancy between management servers. Another use case is to create a storage pool (4TB) to store SQL DB to achieve database stability and make it reachable to each server.

We built a two-server Hyper-V failover cluster. We build typical servers like we normally would with NVME drives and plenty of storage. This software works hand in hand with Microsoft hyper-v failover manager for a seamless setup that has not given us any issues since implementation. Live failovers are tested every week, and the customer does not even notice when the failovers are tested. The performance was exceptional, and everything worked as expected. We went ahead and got the three-year 24/7 support contract since it's a critical customer. While the price is a bit steep, this process and product have given us a lot of peace of mind that the servers will continue running even if one of the physical hosts goes down.

In our company, we started searching for a cost-effective SDS solution to include in our portfolio since there aren't many reliable and affordable alternatives around. For testing, we've set up a small VMware environment with a couple of VMs and connected to StarWind VSAN through Fibre Channel. This is a common environment for most of our customers, who tend to be SMBs, and their environments go from one to six hosts and one block/file storage, on average. However, the most frequent pain point is managing and delivering storage for different applications while maintaining reliability and performance. That’s where StarWind comes into play.

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.

In my company, we employ a sophisticated infrastructure comprised of three distinct hypervisors and a dedicated storage server featuring vSAN technology. This intricate setup serves as the backbone for delivering a diverse range of services to our clients, encompassing web hosting plans, secure and efficient file sharing, compute power, and bespoke storage solutions. Leveraging the flexibility of multiple hypervisors allows us to scale our services to meet the unique requirements of our clients, ensuring optimal performance and resource allocation. It also acts as the centralized storage for my home environment as well. Within my home setup, this robust virtualized storage solution plays a role in supporting various functionalities, including the storage and retrieval of data from surveillance cameras. It also provides a seamless and efficient solution for personal storage requirements, showcasing the versatility and scalability of my virtual SAN configuration.

Our organization is currently running StarWind Virtual SAN across two storage nodes for our Cluster Storage environment as the StarWind Virtual SAN is designed to provide high availability for mission-critical workloads. We do like the reliability and performance of StarWind software. The product allows us to achieve high availability and reduce downtime since Day One of deployment. Since we have limited IT resources, the service simplifies maintenance, downtime, and administration.

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.

Our organization purchased a hyper-converged platform from StarWind, which significantly increased our RAM, processors, and flash-based storage, strengthening our processing and storage capacities with a Virtual SAN. It also made it possible for us to use VMware vMotion. This is essential in our manufacturing plant since it enables us to move a virtual machine across hosts without halting operations. Since the solution was put in place, I haven't had to make any software-related changes, and a few power outages we've had have not caused any hiccups.

We were looking to migrate to hyper-converged architecture with an affordable, scalable solution. StarWind is a fantastic hyper-converged solution for SMBs. The price point and pricing options allow for SMB deployment of a plug-and-play, scalable solution that won't break the bank. Compared to other options in the HCA space, StarWind stands out. Their monitoring and support are built into the solution and allow for a production-ready environment that doesn't take many resources to manage or deploy. If you run a Hyper-V environment, their single-pane monitoring command platform will greatly assist the management of the environment.

I am doing a change from physical to virtual servers and my goal is to change all the servers. There are a total of nine, and at this moment I have three servers that I have migrated. They now work better than the physical ones. I am also doing backup copies of these virtual servers in case I have problems with any server, since in this area, we have problems with electricity and I already lost a physical server from that. That’s why I decided to make a new network of virtual servers with copies and clones of these servers and so far, it has worked very well.

We use StarWind to synchronize storage between nodes of our hyper-converged Hyper-V cluster. We then publish the storage to each cluster member via iSCSI. We run the cluster on a 10GB network (though when we first implemented it in our testing environment, we were on 1GB and it still worked fine), with two physical servers. The synchronization between nodes is fully synchronous, meaning that if the mirror NICs aren't at least as fast as the front-end NICs (and preferably much faster), it could cause access bottlenecks. We haven't faced that problem though.

Our organization was facing issues with storage. The main challenge was the secure backup and its restoration. StarWind Virtual SAN helps us get rid of storage issues within the organization. The best part is StarWind Virtual SAN supports a hypervisor environment and our organization was also using the same platform for infrastructure which makes it easier for us to deploy and implement. It also has built-in multifactor authentication which makes it compliant with our local regulations for the banking sector.

StarWind Virtual SAN is a good solution. It helps our organization to fulfill the need for backup and restoration. Our organization was implementing a business continuity plan in which there was a need for regulatory compliance. We wanted to implement a solution to do scheduled backup and its restoration when needed. The process of implementing the solution was pretty simple, and it is readily available for use as well. As compared to other solutions, we found that it was easily integrated with our current solutions and could easily be deployed.

We have a pair of StarWind hypervisor servers that share the internal storage using Starwind's Virtual SAN, eliminating the need for a separate, physical SAN. The primary purpose of this deployment is to provide highly available hypervisors to run file servers, domain controllers, critical servers, and DNS servers.

We use the solution as a hyper-converged appliance for critical business applications for a 12+TB data set with high availability and proactive storage monitoring. We use a two-node HCA cluster running Starwind's vSAN on VMware with 40Gbps storage replication links and heartbeat channels. We have been through two sets of StarWind vSAN/HCA appliances over five or more years and migrated from all physical servers to two hyper-converged nodes and then from the two hyper-converged nodes to two new nodes when the old nodes had reached maximum service age. We have leveraged StarWind's team for assistance with setup and configuration on both sets of appliances and their support as needed.

Previously, we were using a conventional storage platform, which was costly and not supporting many features. Now, we are using StarWind Virtual SAN, which is more reliable and has many features. It works by mirroring data between servers, creating a fault-tolerant storage infrastructure. StarWind Virtual SAN is a cost-effective solution as it uses commodity hardware, such as off-the-shelf servers and disks. This reduces the cost of storage hardware and maintenance. We are very satisfied with this product so far.

We used StarWind's Virtual SAN to create a cluster of hypervisors and databases that utilize iSCSI to access the SAN. StarWind's Virtual SAN allowed us to implement a virtual server environment that lets us scale our applications quicker and easier compared to the bare metal environment we had before. The database is also centralized, which makes it more fault tolerant than using a single-node database. We are able to leverage the HA capabilities that StarWind offers in the event there is an issue with one of the SAN nodes.

We were using traditional physical storage for our environment, and it was costly for us. On top of that, the performance was not satisfactory. We started using the StarWind vSAN for virtual storage. It is cost-effective and has amazing features. The capacity to scale assets to address changing issues and upgrade execution contrasted with conventional capacity arrangements and therefore is another positive aspect when utilizing StarWind Virtual SAN. Utilizing the StarWind Virtual SAN gave us a more steady and adaptable arrangement. I noticed a persistent upgrade in the functionalities of the StarWind Virtual SAN, so its development is great.

We use StarWind Virtual SAN to create a reliable, scalable, and cost-effective solution for storage requirements. We used it to store data in a VMware environment. We have a small setup of servers where we use Starwind Virtual SAN as our primary storage solution to store critical data and applications. We have a 30 TB usable storage where StarWind Virtual SAN provides us with reliable, fast, scalable, and cost-effective features to store and manage critical data and apps. It's a scalable storage solution, and in the future, if our requirements expand, we can scale out our storage requirements pretty easily.

I write this from a value-added reseller (VAR) point of view. StarWind Virtual SAN provides us with a number of benefits: StarWind Virtual SAN is a cost-effective solution, as it does not require additional licensing costs. This can help VARs to offer competitive pricing to their customers. StarWind Virtual SAN is a highly flexible solution, as it can be deployed on physical servers or on top of virtual machines running on hypervisors such as VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. This allows VARs to offer a solution that can be tailored to the specific needs of their customers.

The solution is being used to simulate physical SAN scenarios in a ESXi environment as a platform to demo various solutions to clients. StarWind SAN is an amazingly versatile product that eliminates the need to acquire an expensive physical SAN. In addition to ESXi, StarWind VLAN can also be deployed in other various platforms such as Hyper-V, Citrix Xen, and Linus KVM. StarWind vSAN allows us to start with a two-node resilient system that can be scaled up, down, or out. Even the free version of the product is very feature-rich.

In our environment, we are using a full-scale Hyper-V cluster and individual VMware hypervisors. StarWind provides highly scalable, highly accessible storage to all servers within the environment. Virtual machines requiring high availability are stored using the StarWind software virtual storage area network. The StarWind software itself is stored on a virtual machine on two nodes within our Hyper-V cluster. At present, we only have the two-node solution and would like to upgrade in the near future to provide even more redundancy/data durability.

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.

This is a new product for us, and right now, we are using it in our lab environment, using one HP Z640 workstation and 2xE2267 processor with 64 GB of RAM. We have installed StarWind vSan to support our VMware vCenter v7.0.3 infrastructure with 2x2TB HDD. We're also using the same ISCSI service for our Veeam and Commvault backup infrastructure. During our tests, we did not notice any problem with the product. It was a reliable, simple solution to add more storage on the go and allowed for flexibility. We are truly thinking of using this product in our production.

We have used vSAN as an SDS storage solution with fiber channel JBOD chassis as hardware and integrated the SAN with HyperV to supply storage to VMs. The setup was required to expand our storage capabilities, and when looking for solutions, we wanted an SDS system for easier management of new disks and disk failures. Our system, therefore, consists of many disks with varying quality, which for us is the true benefit of vSAN since we now can trust different levels of degraded disks and still stay certain that we will not lose data.

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.

The solution can be used for configuration and management as well as a backup repository. I have used it for Veeam Backup and Replication and VMware NFS Datastore and it has really worked well. One point to highlight is how easy it is to configure and manage. You don't really need to be an expert. However, it is important to know the storage concepts. Simply by following the intuitive interface, you can configure your devices. Following a tutorial, you get the basic administration you require.

We have two StarWind vSAN clusters (two nodes each) in two data centers on Dell PowerEdge servers. We're expanding to three-node clusters soon. Our IT footprint and budget are relatively small, so StarWind vSAN was an appealing alternative to VMware vSAN. At the initial time of purchase, and even to this day, for our use case, StarWind vSAN is a more mature product. Since we began using the product, we have tripled the number of VMs (RHEL, Ubuntu Server, & Windows Server) and added significant storage. Growth has been easy. The vSAN runs as stable as you would hope, where it is generally never a factor when troubleshooting an outage or planning for growth.

I purchased a StarWind Hyper-Converged Appliance from StarWind in order to fulfill a multitude of needs for my end client. Chief among them was that the system would be a rather small installation. Compared to a traditional configuration using three Servers and a SAN, the StarWind HCA allowed me to provide the user with two Server boxes that could handle their redundancy requirements in a fraction of the space and with a significant cost reduction. The installation called for using a VMware vSphere that would house about a dozen VMs with redundancy for every component involved in the system. The reduced size of this installation also made it possible to install the HCA alongside the existing servers so that they could be removed at the client's leisure when they were comfortable with the new installation.

We provide managed web hosting services, including dedicated servers in physical or virtual configurations, for various customers, including small, medium, and large companies. We started hosting operations in 1995 and operated our own hosting infrastructure in data centers in North Carolina and Virginia, USA. Our infrastructure included physical and virtual hosting environments based on VMware, which is where our StarWind Virtual SANs were deployed.

StarWind is used as our primary physical server with nine VMs. This serves different locations around the US. One application is shared using RDS where as before it was being shared using individual pcs for each remote user. This caused major issues with data integrity. Also with the two-node environment, not only are we benefitting from the redundancy, we are able to load balance between the servers. This allowed us to bring our hosted ERP environment in house. The price was right. It is very hard to beat this system!

I was hoping to implement a High Availability and redundant system without sacrificing performance or my budget. Looking at various HCI and vSAN solutions, the cost was a bit prohibitive. I really wanted my cake and to eat it to; however, VMware's vSAN offering and looking at a few HCI solutions (vXRails, Nutanix, etc.) just did not fit my budget. That is when I read a review on StarWind free vSAN, which got me interested, but I knew I wanted (and needed) support. We set up a three-node cluster on new, identical servers with VMware's vSphere and added StarWind's vSAN product to expand our capabilities. Our servers started out with 8 HDDs, and after production, we added 4 SSDs which StarWind assisted in getting online in the vSAN.

The primary purpose of the storage area network is to provide an active-active replicated SAN for Virtual infrastructure and file storage. This has replaced an active-passive infrastructure that relied on a competitive storage solution but was too old and inflexible to meet the company's growing needs. The active-active nature of the plan needed a reliable storage solution that could deliver over a large distance as such additional infrastructure was also needed. The outstanding support helped us achieve this goal.

Our primary use case for StarWind vSAN has been to reinforce networks for our clients in a two-node Hyper V setup by utilizing the Hyperconverged configuration. This enables us to create a failover cluster for a cheaper cost than purchasing a physical SAN (plus adds more redundancy as you technically get two vSANs as each host becomes a vSAN). The Failover Cluster then allows us to live-migrate Virtual Machines when required, for example, for maintenance, or in the event that we suffer hardware failure on one of the hosts.

We found StarWind when trying to look for a hybrid storage space that could handle various physical hardware as well as virtual operating systems. Upon first contacting the company, the sales and technical demo were superb compared to other products and they clearly explained and showed us a live demo of our potential environment. The whole purchase process was swift and followed up by calls and emails from their team. Compared to other products that we looked at, the cost-saving was so great that choosing StarWind was a no-brainer. When I need something urgently and very technical, I get the answer back that I want. I don't have to battle through with a first liner that tells me to "turn it off and on again".

We use the solution for HA storage for HVs. We are an SMB that can't be bothered paying tens of thousands of dollars just to get a proper HA storage for a two node failover cluster. Therefore StarWind's vSAN was financially attractive from the start. The reviews you can find all over the web incentivised us to research this solution deeper (e.g. just check all the great posts vom Kooler on Stackoverflow), leading to us actually implementing it. We were coming from an S2D implementation which already gave us a ridiculous amount of headaches (bugs, performance stalls, "we know what's best for you" automatisms) in addition to being slow and annoying to administrate/debug while also having the most annoying documentation ever to be created by mankind. These solutions rush out some code and ship it and never fix anything (but break it every few weeks with patches). The initial tests were easily implementable (without begging some sales folks for a POC, due to a free version being available) as well as proper documentation that you actually like to read due to it having been typed by a tech (and that also isn't behind a pay/registration wall). As close to perfect as the documentation is, do read the blog posts to the two-node HA setup as well. Some minute details were only found in those. There are no showstoppers, and not many things in general, just a few hints here and there. The install itself is easy as pie. The config file is properly documented (you can do most things via GUI, just some things are set in the main config file). Do help yourself to the iSCSI Powershell commands (Windows defaults from MS) when implementing. It is way more attractive than clicking via GUI. (New-IscsiTargetPortal, Connect-IscsiTarget etc.) Some things must be done via GUI though, since iSCSI has been implemented way back and "making scripting available" wasn't that widespread for developers back then. This being a Microsoft topic, not StarWind though. They would have had to make their very own iSCSI implementation otherwise. For testing, you should use a proper tool like docs.microsoft.com since "Windows copy from within the VM running on the test setup" can be flakey. Not as in "the results aren't valid real world performance if you check with the Windows copy within a VM" but rather "non-scientific" since you can't extract much data from that process aside from size/time. There is a visual bug with a specific part of iSCSI. It's Microsoft's fault, and, as usual, has never been fixed in over 15 years. Just don't panic if you experience it. www.dell.com social.technet.microso...

We used Starwind to provide HA ISCSI storage to a Hyper-V Cluster for VM Storage. This was mounted through MPIO on Windows for both nodes, using data locality for high levels of speed and performance. The devices are connected via fiber over a 10-mile line, over an isolated subnet. This has been great, as we've been able to shut down an entire site and have the machines not notice any difference. This was done over our existing network, using an isolated VLAN to have traffic be in its own area with no other issues.

After deploying a HA SQL Failover Cluster, we started to notice performance issues due to our storage, which was an off-the-shelf NAS. I had already heard about StarWind and its VSAN software from previous blogs. A VSAN solution seems like an ideal solution as we already had the hardware, minus the disks required. We already had two Dell R540's with six available bays in each server. After reviewing their documentation, the setup process was simple enough to follow and so I decided to run a little test environment.

The primary use case we had was covering with StarWind vSAN was to provide customers with a redundant solution that was able to guarantee flexibility. In terms of physical storage, we can aggregate in order to provide a redundant, replicated solution. At the same time, we were looking to keep the total cost of ownership as low as possible as the customer may have multiple venues to cover with the same schema of the system. With StarWind vSAN we were able to set a simple 2-node cluster leveraging the internal disks to create a replicated vSAN - eliminating any SPOF at a reasonable price.

We use the StarWind Virtual SAN in a HA stack. We then use readily available HPE servers (DL380DL - 26 disk) to be the hardware. This allows us to have reliable hardware with reliable software and no downtime. It also drives costs down to almost nothing compared to hardware-based SAN devices. Year after year costs are also down with not needing to keep hardware warranties up, due to parts being available easily. Overall, we have saved many thousands of dollars by going this way. We see no difference in IOPS or any other performance metrics. We have also tested the high availability a few times (once on purpose and a few not). It seems to work flawlessly.

We are an SMB IT consulting company with an infrastructure department. Before 2019, we had been deploying HP StoreVirtual VSA in order to deliver a typical 2-node hyper-converged cluster. Since the publishing of EOL/EOS for HP StoreVirtual we had been looking for a suitable replacement. We looked at and deployed various solutions - from StorMagic, Open-E, NetApp, and EMC. StarWind was the easiest to deploy. It was very inexpensive, offered the best support, and was hardware agnostic. After several deployments, this has been the best 2-node hyper-converged solution accepted by all engineers on my team.

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.

We're using Starwind as a failover cluster for load balancing and increased availability.

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.

We needed a reliable shared storage solution for our VMware vSphere Essentials solution so we could implement vMotion and High Availability features. We decided to utilise a vSAN solution to reduce costs after looking at the price of external storage solutions. In our environment, we have a 3-server VMware vSphere Essentials Plus solution that consists of 16 x HDD and 8 x SDD on-server storage. The solution is attached to 1GB network for production but we also have 10GB network connections available for direct-connectivity between servers. The StarWind vSAN solution was implemented as a hyper-converged solution meaning that everything runs on the VMware vSphere solution.

We have two servers in an HA configuration. The two servers having an identical configuration. On each server we have: two disks in RAID 1 (for the operating system), two arrays of four disks in RAID 5 (for virtual servers that require high data transfer speed), one array of six SAS disks in RAID 6 (for virtual servers containing a lot of data), and two arrays of six SAS disks in RAID 10 (for medium servers in terms of data volume and speed required). On the network side, SAN servers are connected to HOSTs via a 10 GB ethernet connection and between them for HB and SYNC via 1GB connections.

There are 2 server clusters with a software-defined SAN. They are Hyper-V Windows 2016 clusters and have been working fine for several years. We are using both NVME and SSD disks with both are working fine with good levels of performance. We provide a SaaS solution hosted in external datacenters in one cluster and the other hosts our internal servers. Starwind replaced a Dell SAN that had failed. The SaaS solution runs on an Oracle database which has had excellent price-performance using Linux in Hyper-V VM.

We built an HCI Hyper-V two-node cluster without SAN or S2D at our main site. It is used to run 25 virtual machines that host operating systems and applications including Windows 2016/2019, Debian, SQL, and PostgreSQL. It provides business continuity to my organization. We also implemented a "Windows 2019 Guest Cluster" inside a Hyper-V Cluster without any problem.

We are using this to replicate the onboard disks from our Hyper-V Hosts (Dell T640 Servers) for both replication/data protection, but most importantly, to function as shared storage enabling us to have a functional Hyper-V cluster with failover through the shared storage without needing to purchase oversized and pricey dedicated SAN hardware. This solution enables us to make better cost-effective use of our existing hardware and leverage the current infrastructure at a higher level than we could before.

We are running Dell PowerEdge Series as Hyper-V hosts with StarWind providing a virtual SAN infrastructure to allow for CSVs and data replication between the hosts without having to add dedicated storage hardware. This serves to allow us to have a fault tolerance of suffering not just a drive loss (RAID Configurations on each server allow for that) but it also allows for the loss of an entire server since we are running N+1. The servers are directly connected to one another using 10GB NICs, allowing for fast connectivity and support for direct wiring. This meant that we did not have to invest in a dedicated 10GB SAN switch, either.

StarWind Virtual SAN has been a welcomed addition to my network.

Our hardware is located in one of the largest data centers in the country, where we have high availability services for our company. Our internal systems include VPN, hosting services like website, email, database, DNS, FTP/SFTP, and SMB/CIFS. Replication is between two servers with SAS and SSD storage, based on Dell servers. Network connectivity is 40GE for data synchronization and1GE for the heartbeat, directly connected. We are using WMware vSphere as a hypervisor. This solution is highly scalable and cost effective.

Our use case is to provide a vSAN for Microsoft Windows Server failover clusters. We are a web hosting company that prefers to purchase smaller discrete servers rather than larger and expensive integrated with SAN solutions. However, we still want to provide a high-availability environment for even our small web applications. We use StarWind vSAN to accomplish this goal without having to use the extremely tightly validated server hardware and networking options required by Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct.

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.

We have a failover Hyper-V cluster and a stand-alone Veeam server. We back up our VMs via Veeam. We wanted to get our backups 3-2-1 compliant with a backup to disk backup, a second backup to another medium that was a virtual tape in our case, and backups to the cloud. We had a second physical server with tons of storage, so we installed StarWind. We were able to create a VTL and have tons of virtual tapes. We utilized iSCSI and were able to get Veeam to use this VTL as a destination for tape backups In addition to Veeam being able to back up to tape now, we were also able to get the StarWind software to connect with our preferred storage vendor, Wasabi. Now, we back up to disk, back up to tape, and then ship those tapes offsite automatically to Wasabi. The StarWind software was easy and quick to implement/setup and now our backup process is fully automated.

We were looking for a way to utilize local storage for our Hyper-V cluster to prevent having to purchase a new SAN solution. I discovered this unique software and deployed it. It works well for sharing local storage in a Hyper-V cluster. Our existing, older SAN was too slow for this particular implementation. VSAN solved this problem successfully.

Our primary use case is hyper-convergence and storage virtualization. Our configuration has eleven servers installed. Three of these are SQL servers, five are installed as application servers, and on the remaining servers, various small services are hosted. These include web servers, RDP servers, and so on. StarWind vSAN for Hyper-V consolidated the last three servers into a failover cluster for load balancing and increased availability. This made it possible to transfer the specified services to virtual machines.

We decided to migrate our infrastructure from Terago Cloud to a Tier III datacenter. It was primordial for our company to have redundancy at every level. It was not an easy sell to make that move and I needed to prove to management that we could have a very secure environment. I needed to have a software that could create a fail over between my hosts that would work well with VMWare 7.0. After researching several company we made the decision to go with Starwind. Of course, once we had everything in place, we made a test failover. It failed. I went back to Starwind and this was fix within one phone call. Missing configuration. The following test was successful.

We use this product in our VMWare vSphere environment. We use vSphere 7 Enterprise Plus and have a four host system. All four hosts have matching solid-state storage in a raid 10 array. We have two pairs acting as sync pairs so that one host in each pair can fail before we lose access to the VMs on those hosts. They are connected via 40GB redundant links for both iSCSI and sync. We have really tried to focus on both speed and redundancy and feel that this setup was the best way to accomplish that goal.

We have Microsoft Hyper-V. StarWind is configured as a two-node cluster with a Windows environment. It is crucial for the Virtual Machines that give us the resiliency of Exchange, 4TB File Servers, Networking Services, Quickbooks Server, Terminal Servers, Virtualized Spam Protection, Active Directory Services, and a few others. We needed something that allows for better resiliency than the old way of doing things. We have seen other choices out there but this seemed to be the best one, given our budget and the hardware we wanted to use.

Our primary use case is for physical to virtual environment migration, requiring a VSAN storage for a data center we had an old BLC 460 gen 6 blades with physical storage attached. If we had any issues with the hardware or operating system the downtime for production would be for hours, so we created a virtual data center with VMware vSphere and added 3 20TB storage on each host then created 3-node StarWind scenario being shared on all 3 hosts, and creating virtual machines on 3 hosts and now running on StarWind storage.

Highly available HyperV cluster. Our environment includes 2 Hyper-V hosts with onboard storage running about 20 virtual machines. StarWind allowed for a redundant cluster to be configured without any extra storage and easily create an HA cluster. StarWind Virtual San functions as the primary drivers for all of our storage needs in the highly available cluster. It is used almost daily to allow for live migration of machines and failover in the event of maintenance or physical host hardware problems.

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.

We are using VSAN in our cloud environment to provide CSVs to the Hyper-V Group. We are using a converged environment, so we have two commodity class servers configured as a high availability StarWind cluster and then we have many Hyper-V compute nodes that access the CSVs from the StarWind cluster. We can use Veeam to back up and replicate the virtual machine files from the CSV/cluster. We use SPF + 10 GbE modules off the shelf and 10 GbE switches off the shelf. We were able to create a redundant network infrastructure to support our SAN network.

StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere provides redundant and highly available storage for our VMware vSphere environment. We have two Supermicro 2029BT-DNC0R servers with VMware ESXi 6.7 and one StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere virtual machine on each. Local SSD-s are directly attached to StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere virtual machine and software RAID is used to make storage from them. For StarWind synchronization, we are using Mellanox ConnectX-4 adapters and directly attached cable between nodes.

We are using VSAN in our private cloud environment to provide highly redundant CSVs to a Hyper-V Cluster. We are using a converged environment so we have two commodity grade servers setup as a highly available StarWind cluster, then we have numerous Hyper-V compute nodes which access CSVs from the StarWind cluster. We are able to use Veeam to backup and replicate the VM files from the CSV/cluster. We use off the shelf 10 GbE SPF+ modules and off the shelf 10 GbE switches. With MPIO, we were able to create a redundant network infrastructure to support our SAN network.

We needed to deploy the new infrastructure in our new data center as soon as possible. As a reliable, fault-tolerant storage, we chose StarWind solution. I took two old Supermicro servers and installed them in RAID controllers and SSD drives, then installed Windows Server 2012 R2 with the Hyper-V role. Then, I made StarWind the two-node iSCSI target. The servers were connected to the VMware cluster via the iSCSI 10 GbE interfaces. The storage showed very good speed results with SQL databases, file servers, and MS Exchange, which completely satisfied us.

StarWind Virtual SAN, along with two Fujitsu Primergy servers, forms the backbone of our hyper-converged solution. This storage, network, and compute solution is used for our Hyper-V cluster. From this cluster, we run all of our virtual servers, which in turn run our business-critical infrastructure. This includes domain controllers, file servers, database servers, application servers, and everything to support it.

We have a fault-tolerant infrastructure, consisting of two storage nodes hosting the VM's storage and two Hyper-V nodes.

Our company, an IT integrator in Ukraine, conducted a pilot deployment of five two-node Hyper-V failover clusters with CSV build with VSAN for Microsoft Hyper-V. Each cluster consisted of only two hardware nodes with redundant 10Gb/s direct DAC links (no switch) and 1Gb/s uplinks. After four months of testing, we have no doubt in using this exact solution in our customer’s production environment. We are going to deploy three similar installations this year. Also, we are planning to test the new VSAN for VMware vSphere.

We have been using VMware vSphere as a fail-safe storage solution in a virtualization environment since 2009. Scaling options were initially two nodes. In industrial operation, there were solutions from three nodes. The storage is deployed on a 1Gb-10Gb ethernet network and HP servers with SAS and SSD drives. To increase performance, caching technologies based on RAID controller functions were used, and later StarWind L2 Cache functionality was used. In 2020, it is planned to deploy storage that is based on new technologies: Intel Optane memory (DCPMM storage), VMware Vsphere Enterprise Plus 6.7, and 25Gb networks. We hope that this solution will be able to provide maximum performance using StarWind VSAN for Vsphere.

We have set up a dual StarWind SAN with a fault-tolerant volume for our critical virtual servers in addition to some non-fault-tolerant volumes for less critical virtual servers in both our corporate HQ and one of our large divisions. The corporate site is using Hyper-V and the other division using VMware ESX. Between the two sites we have 15+ physical servers with over 150 VMs running. Our corporate site uses Dell servers w/SAS drives for the two StarWind nodes and the division site built two white box type servers using NAS-specific SATA drives. Both solutions have been outstanding.

This solution provides us with high availability and failover with fault tolerance across two nodes. Implementing a highly available environment made way more sense to our company using StarWind’s Virtual SAN than other SAN or virtual SAN solutions we looked into over the past few months.

We tried StarWind because the other solutions we tried were not doing enough, and the performance of this solution was very good. The price is cheaper than other solutions. The physical server was very useful to set up a designer virtual server.

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.

I started using this product when I had challenges with failover as one of the requirements for my client. I had to deploy the failover environment but the challenge was mirroring of the servers. Now that I have implemented StarWind, everything is running perfectly.

StarWind VSAN software was easily deployed on the commodity hardware and integrated into the existing IT infrastructure. We have used in HyperConvergence and Citrix XenServer installations without any problem. With our customized hardware, we have very good IOPS and throughput.

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.

We use this solution for a High-Availability cluster for Hyper-V on two nodes. We are running on Windows Server 2016.

We were looking for a Microsoft Windows 2016 Hyper-V clustered solution that didn't require an external SAN network. Something that could utilize the local storage on each server, and also allowed us to configure the storage as we required it. We had looked at Storage Spaces Direct, but it was too restrictive in terms of configuration.

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.

We had to build a highly available Hyper-V cluster. As I work for a charitable organization, the most important part is keeping costs as low as possible. I have looked into a few solutions and none was as easy to deploy because it allows us to use hardware that we already have and not invest a lot of money.

I used their Virtual SAN software to add new SANs to my VMware environment. I began working for a company that had a Virtual Environment already in place and there was no documentation regarding the configuration of the system. The storage was not managed correctly and I had to find a way to make space with what hardware I had at the time.

We use 2-Node software-defined storage clusters with iSCSI access to 30 TB in HA-targets, and 140 TB in flat targets. Our environment includes eight vSphere hosts and more than one hundred Windows VMs (file servers, MS SQL servers, Oracle Database servers, MS Exchange servers, etc.) are connected to StarWind's iSCSI targets.

We have a four-host VMware environment with over one hundred and forty virtual servers that runs everything on our network except for backups and video storage. We are using Dell R730xd servers filled with a combination of hard drives and SSDs, as well as some PCIe storage for high-performance VMs.

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.

We are using a two-node StarWind VSAN cluster on a Dell 720xds. The StarWind VSAN helps us to better leverage the computing power of our ESXi hosts and helped solve the problem of expanding local storage.

Our primary use case is for a distributed virtual SAN over two data centers. Virtual SAN uses three servers in two data centers.

Our primary use case is to create vSAN for a small business environment and to manage it without using a physical SAN.

Our primary use case is data storage. It has helped us to make better strategical decisions, work safely and quickly.

Our primary use case is as a virtual storage area network for server clusters and file storage in a production environment for our company.

Our primary use case for this product is to obtain high availability for our file servers under the control of the Microsoft Windows 2008 operating system.

StarWind VSAN is used as shared storage for our Hyper-V cluster. We have two nodes, HDDs in RAID 10. HPE ProLiant servers, Windows Server 2016.

StarWind is cost effective. There's no need to purchase additional hardware as shared storage. They have great technical support.

Before, we used a cluster of two Windows servers with shared storage system on a single SAN. One of them was a working clustered SQL server with database mirroring. Every part of the system was redundant except for SAN. It was almost satisfying. Every cluster server system we know needs shared storage system. The cluster could be fully redundant, but this redundancy is worth nothing without a redundant storage system. We had a single SAN system. As a single system, SAN was not redundant. But we needed a redundant storage system. We always were afraid that once upon a time our SAN will stop to work. We, of course, had backups, but it was not enough. What we needed was the system with no data loss in case of issues and with no interruption (or only several seconds of interruption) in data processing. We were looking for a relatively simple and not very expensive solution. Why have we selected StarWind among other storage solutions? Actually, I don’t know why. Simply, I was looking for a solution using Google. StarWind was the first system I found that gave me hope. When I did some tests with StarWind, I stopped looking for anything more.

We are a gold mining partnership in Malartic, Québec where we are working 24 hours a day and seven days a week. About 1500 people are on our sites, 900 user computers and 100 different virtual servers run to maintain the production area. Single point of failure, no real-time synchronization with our disaster recovery site, and we are unable to make updates and upgrades without any cuts on the production infrastructure.

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.

In our organization, we use this software for the first year. It is used to work with backup data storage. Still, it never lets us down, and we never lost our data.

We're using it in our DR site for replicating virtual machines from a primary site. We needed a solution that took up less rack space, so we went with something that converged infrastructure. It's providing storage for our virtual platform.

We have two StarWind VSAN nodes installed in a small company. We're mirroring these nodes where all services are installed.

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

We needed to consolidate our physical servers, so we went with the StarWind cluster to virtualize our servers.

We had a need for some high speed I/O in our data center to run some specific high demand virtual machines. We currently have an older SAN unit, but it's slow, since it uses mechanical drives. Therefore, we decided to obtain a bunch of Intel SSDs and attach them directly to the two virtualized hosts, then I used StarWind virtual machines as the controllers to tie them together into a VSAN. After that, I moved the VMs over. Once everything was hooked up and talking to each other, it works fine.

The primary use case is backup storage for our VM servers.

The primary use case is to provide a virtual storage for our data and virtual machines. Not having a budget for a physical SAN, we use what we have to get the best of what we have, this is primary reason for using this VSAN.

We use it for data redundancy and failover.

StarWind is the highly redundant storage solution for our company-wide hardware agnostic Hyper-V environment.

We had decentralized storage, inefficient storage and computer utilization, non-utilization of VMware vSphere advanced features like HA, FT, vMotion which require shared storage like StarWind.

* I've used StarWind VSAN for replicating vSphere datastores and in Microsoft SQL and file systems clusters. * I used one in mission-critical systems like a call center, SQL, SharePoint, etc.

Started with a trial and then moved to the paid version. I have a 3 node cluster, (20) 1TB spinning drives, RAID 0, (3) 800 GB SSD drives, RAID 5 and 18GB RAM cache per node. Using 10G Infiniband for the iSCSI & SYNC network loops. This is to support local disks of VMware Horizon View full clone desktops.

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.

I use StarWind Virtual SAN software to change our old HPE Fibre Channel storage into an iSCSI solution for our development environment.

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.

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

StarWind is used as the primary storage for three VMware hosts. It is running as a two node cluster for HA.

Our primary use case of this solution is the deployment of a highly-available Microsoft Hyper-V environment. Using the StarWind Virtual SAN product allowed us to deploy a Hyper-V cluster that provides uninterrupted failover between nodes that would have otherwise not been possible. Additionally, we have implemented the same redundancy on our dedicated file storage systems.

We use StarWind vSAN software storage solutions to run two hypervisors in an HA clustered environment.

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.

We use StarWind for storage on our Hyper-V cluster. We started with their free offering in a test environment and found the performance and stability so attractive that we built a three node cluster using Dell 720s and ten gigabit copper ethernet. It has now been running continuously for four years with essentially zero downtime. As it approaches end-of-life we will be migrating to their managed appliances.