StarWind Virtual SAN pros and cons

The solution is also quite flexible. As an example, other vSAN solutions that we looked at had more stringent requirements regarding mixed HDD/SSD storage which wouldn't have worked in our environment.

It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it.

A great feature is that I basically set it and forget it, as everything is automatic.

The fact that I can now count on a true failover solution is what is most appealing.

This software lets us maintain storage redundancy across both of our Hyper-V hosts, so if one goes down the environment fails over to the other and we have minimal to no downtime.

Training is also easy as it is just one system to learn.

Recovery and maintenance are now less stressful and most importantly, it allows our users to keep working.

PowerShell library is pretty good feature as I created with APC PowerChute a script to put volumes on maintenance mode then turning off the StarWind nodes together with the VM and Hosts when UPS reaches 15 percent, this way after a blackout or electrical problems when turning servers on again, there is no issues for syncing or data loss due to energy interrupts.

The top-notch support before, during, and after deployments are better than any other vendor I have come across.

The iSCSI protocol is quite simple to configure.

The main thing I would like to see improved is the level of documentation.

I would definitely like to see quite a bit more on the monitoring side of things.

The console is something that I feel could be improved. There is nothing technically wrong with it, but it can be jazzed up and/or made to be a little more intuitive.

I would like to see different levels of support offered.

Some of the documentation seems to be a bit older and refers to deprecated items.

We just need more integration with Veeam.

A mobile app to sync up for overview and status would really be helpful.

Android app for monitoring and receiving push notifications as alarms or monitoring I/O from any mobile device could be a good feature and nice to have as we are not always on our desk.

The only way I can see this product needing improvement is the consultation level of the StarWind sales and engineers.

It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers.