StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

My main use case for StarWind Virtual SAN is that I have implemented and managed several instances of StarWind, but the common feature amongst all of them is that their environments are a single site.

The best feature that stands out the most in StarWind Virtual SAN is the storage virtualization, and also how it facilitates failover capabilities for Windows Failover Clustering. That is basically what is advertised for StarWind Virtual SAN, and it delivers on it with excellence.

StarWind's storage virtualization and failover capabilities have made a difference for my clusters through uptime improvements, with zero downtime specific to server host maintenance or even maintenance of the StarWind software itself.

Ease of administration is another big plus in my operations because we don't have to look for specialized skill sets to manage a StarWind VSAN environment, and their StarWind's technical support capabilities are very good. They're very responsive and very competent. So even in the instances where my technical team does not have the ability to manage or troubleshoot or resolve an issue, StarWind's technical team supports and resolves on our behalf very quickly.

StarWind Virtual SAN has positively impacted my organization by saving money in skill set development, and certainly minimal downtime across all of our installations, where they maintain almost zero downtime in their 24/7 operations. This is true for the past 10 years.

We use StarWind Virtual SAN to create a failover cluster and high availability servers for our products.

The best features are the software's ease of setup and the excellent technical support. My company relies heavily on technical support from experts to maintain reliability, as our crew is not very IT savvy. StarWind Virtual SAN helps us keep customer satisfaction and provides the solutions we need without having to hire many IT specialists.

First, I need to explain what motivated me to use VSAN. 

Some time ago, I developed a work environment with KVM Proxmox by creating a cluster made up of four servers: two HP and two Dell, along with two servers running Proxmox Backup Server, both interconnected to ensure redundancy for the backups of all virtual machines. 

Now that I’ve described a bit of my environment, the main use I have given to this tool is in the creation of HA (High Availability) servers to provide better performance to the services running on my Proxmox cluster.

Since I started using VSAN to create high availability servers in my Proxmox environment, even referring to the free version, the services we provide in the company have achieved a high percentage of effectiveness over the year, significantly reducing downtime due to hardware issues with any server in the cluster. 

This has led to a remarkable improvement in the services we offer, and since this is a company that provides security in various areas, the difference between before and after is huge. 

For this reason, I have submitted a request to the company management to acquire the Pro version of the product, as I have not found any negative comments about its use so far.

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.

This innovative product has significantly enhanced speed, security, and organization. With its advanced features and capabilities, users can experience improved efficiency and productivity. 

The optimization of speed ensures rapid performance, allowing tasks to be completed more quickly and effectively. Additionally, the enhanced security measures provide peace of mind and safeguard sensitive information from potential threats. 

Furthermore, the organization features streamlined processes and ensures easy access to important data, ultimately contributing to a more seamless and structured workflow. 

This product has proven to be a valuable asset in enhancing overall operations and effectiveness.

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.

Moving us to high availability storage has made our websites and applications more reliable. It also has allowed us to perform updates on storage and application servers without having downtime. Previously, to do any of those things was a pain as we would have to shut services down to perform any updates, whether security or features.

When compared to other providers, StarWind provided a great product at a reasonable price. Cost is also very important to a non-profit.

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.

StarWind Virtual SAN was the most optimal choice, both from a financial point of view and in terms of compatibility. It is an excellent choice for use together with Microsoft Hyper-V. Other options would have been the use of Microsoft Server Datacenter licenses on the two nodes and the use of Storage Replica and Storage Space Direct as a storage solution or VMware vSAN, both of which would have cost considerably more without bringing anything extra from the point of view of functionality or reliability, compared to Starwind Virtual SAN.

I have a two-node high-availability setup. The first goal is to use it as a hyper-visor for critical servers to be hosted locally. If this use case works well over time, I may use the Virtual SAN as a storage cluster for multiple servers to connect to.

Two servers used for Hyper-V hosting, with high-speed NVME underlying storage, are being used for high-availability hosting and storage. No additional hardware is required beyond a high-speed network connection between the two (25gbps fiber optic in our case).

The storage/hosting cluster is currently being used for test servers. We have hosted some of our test SQL servers on the devices to ensure seamless failover and good IO performance.

Once it moves out of testing, we will host critical servers on these devices and will be able to quickly transfer servers between hosts to allow for host server maintenance without VM downtime. It will also provide instant failovers in case of hardware failures, reducing downtime that would otherwise occur while a VM is being restored from a backup or the host server is fixed.

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.

It has cut costs that we would've spent on network links and SAN appliance(s), allowing us to just include drives with our hosts and run a Virtual SAN.

Not only that, but the addition of two 10GB links now means that our hypervisor can live-migrate virtual machines very fast between hosts, and data is also synced between StarWind RAID arrays quickly too.

All this combines into a very efficient, fast, and reliable Virtual SAN solution that blazes past our previous physical SAN infrastructure.