StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

One of the biggest hydroelectric power plants in the world asked us to prepare a project using HA Virtualization for environmental weather monitoring. In this project, we used three hosts virtualized by VMWare ESXI+VCenter (Essential Plus License). However, one of the prerequisites was that it should be able to integrate with other preexisting virtualized systems that were deployed by other suppliers and use other hypervisors like HyperV or Proxmox. That is where StarWind Virtual SAN comes in. It is really flexible and reliable. We were able to assemble this pilot project using it, and it is in testing, so far, without failures or any malfunctions. It is really an excellent solution.

The flexibility of StarWind Virtual San allowed us to create a system that is integrated into pre-existing solutions and is also independent of VMware itself, making it more reliable and robust.  

It made the system much easier to operate, maintain and manage inside the data center alongside many other systems. It is very easy to migrate the entire virtual system to other hosts or other data centers safely. 

It is really a good solution when you need to be flexible and, at the same time, reliable in a critical system.

First of all, the flexibility and reliability are great. 

The ability to be managed by PowerShell scripts made the management of the system really easy and efficient. We're able to do remote operations or even some operations different from the standard ones (allowed by the GUI).

It also runs under a Windows OS, so it is able to be installed in any virtualized system, independent from the Hypervisor itself.

The available GUI is excellent for monitoring and operating the system in an easy and direct way. It also makes it very easy to deploy and configure. 

It has good documentation, and I did not need technical support once during the entire deployment.

It should be improved in the way it detects the right filesystem image after a complete shutdown of the system or in the case of disaster recovery. I would also recommend an easier way to back up/restore and export the filesystem images.

Another feature that I would like to see implemented is a configurable email alert and report system. While it can be managed using Powershell, it would not be hard at all to configure reports using PowerShell scripts, it would be nice to have some additional features in the GUI.

I've used the solution for about two years.

It is really stable and reliable. It perfectly fits our solution with an active-active failover solution.

The free version is limited, so it is not so scalable. If you need more scalability, you have different license options from the paid versions and the cost is totally worth it.

I did not need any service and support as it is really well documented.

We also used VMware VSAN and Nutanix. The StarWind Virtual SAN seems to be more flexible and easier to manage in the case we were developing.

The initial setup took about ten days. This included the studying of the documentation, setup, testing, and commissioning. It is well-documented and really easy to operate.

We handled the initial setup in-house.

The Star Wind Virtual SAN has a free/trial version that can be used for study and is suitable for simple solutions. The pricing for the paid versions is really worth it. When you need flexibility and reliability with good technical support, you are paying for what you get. 

We also evaluated VMware vSAN.

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.

The primary use case is for on-premise synchronous replication of high-availability fileservers. If the primary node fails in our virtualization environment, thanks to simultaneous replication, the backup is immediately available. StarWind keeps both of the disks mirrored.

We are using StarWind as a virtual SAN Solution for our Microsoft Hyper-V Cluster environment. We were looking for a simple-to-use, reliable and cost-effective solution. For our purposes, we also tested Veeam and VMware vSAN. StarWind suits us better.  

StarWind Virtual SAN improved our disaster recovery strategy and made it much more secure. The software is cost-effective when it comes to licensing and maintenance. We don't need any extra hardware just install it on our existing virtual machines

The config, which was initially prepared in cooperation with StarWind technical support, is easy to replicate for purposes of maintenance (the user didn't notice anything in performance during the maintenance).

The main benefit is that StarWind is almost maintenance-free.

It's a reliable software, which you set up once, and doesn't need much maintenance. 

Thanks to detailed technical documentation, it is easy to set up. The technical support team from StarWind is experienced and collaborative. 

We did the implementation by ourselves without any third party (StarWind's technical support team checked the configuration made by our administrators), which is cost-saving. Also, our technical team can provide effective first-level support (which you don't often need as it's a reliable product).

We don't find any parts in need of improvement. We don't use all functionalities which StarWind offers. Maybe we could find a cheaper solution, however, when it comes to the above-mentioned pros at the end of the day it's good value for money.

For every issue we had during the implementation or during the period of usage, StarWind Virtual SAN's technical support helped us to find an effective solution.

If I have to find any area of improvement, there is only one thing - other vendors such as VMware vSAN have a bigger community of users, so it is easier to find more pre-sale or post-sale information from users. 

We've used StarWind Virtual SAN for more than three years.

We did not previously use a different solution.

We took into consideration VMware vSAN or Veeam. However, we chose StarWind Virtual SAN.

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.

From my point of view, we offer this product and it is installed, tested, and configured on our client hardware, often located in the public and private sectors in the UK. 

StarWind is known for its good technical support and customer service. This helps us to offer a solution that is supported by a reliable vendor, which in turn improves customer satisfaction and ensures sticky and repeat business for future activities. 

StarWind Virtual SAN fills a gap for our clients who can't justify the expensive hardware from Nutanix, HPE etc. Virtual SAN offers an opportunity to repurpose hardware or use non-badged hardware for a very high-end storage solution. This directly benefits my company and me since we are able to cater to this gap in the market.   

StarWind Virtual SAN supports both block and file storage protocols, which provides me with more options to choose from when placing Virtual SAN for a given role and client based on my customers' specific use cases and requirements. 

Data compression, deduplication, and snapshots help optimize storage utilization and protect data. 

This helps me to offer a solution that can help our customers to improve storage utilization and protect data at an affordable price, cutting out expensive enterprise-grade hardware.

Geolocation could be better, for example, for site mirroring for DR purposes. I would like a future release to explore the possibility of secure, reliable site replication. 

Disaster recovery site mirroring would provide several benefits, including business continuity. A disaster recovery site can be used to restore critical systems and operations in the event of a disaster, ensuring that the business can continue functioning.

The deduplication feature could also be more robust. That said, I am comparing it to the features of an HPE Nimble, which is a really unfair comparison given the cost difference.

I've used the solution for two to three years.

The software is very stable, and I have personally never witnessed downtime if the hardware use exceeds the minimum requirements.

The solution is not too scalable to geo-site redundancy. This could be a future feature.

Support is timely, knowledgeable, and has good availability with lots of different contact options including phone, email, web, etc.

Positive

We used to use VMware vSAN.

The guides and support are very detailed. There is a large community that also runs this in their home labs. They are giving lots of community feedback, ideas, and solutions to problems you may encounter.

I am speaking from a vendor point of view.

I would advise users to contact StarWind directly since we have always found they support pre and post-sales and are amazingly knowledgeable.  

We looked into various hardware and software offerings from Nutanix, NetApp, and HPE. StarWind fills the void when the budget does not allow for the expensive hardware, and we have older systems we can repurpose.

Will definitely recommend this product and have been dealing with support for over three years. Normally, the biggest grievance we have in the IT industry is support and support is great. Sales representatives were knowledgeable and very helpful whether you use the free or paid version. 

This is perfect for mainstream organizations. Even small businesses can cover legacy methods and all new methods in terms of hypervisors and backup methodologies. 

I work for an organization that has standalone hosts in rural areas in Africa where tape backup is still a thing. With the assistance of StarWind, we were able to share a backup device on Hyper-V as Hyper-V does not support pass-through natively. It is a fantastic software that I highly recommended for the virtualization of storage and backup methodologies.

It is more appropriate for businesses that use Hyper-V and direct attached storage arrays. This solution works well with VMware as well as with smaller systems, although it is a bit of a waste using it when you have a strong SAN. 

It works very well in clustering smaller arrays to create a bigger array for storage platforms. It is the perfect software for interfacing Hyper-V components with other hosts sharing resources.

The StarWind products have enabled our organization to modernize stations where larger and more expensive equipment was not an option. 

I work for an organization that has standalone hosts in rural areas in Africa where tape backup is still used. With the assistance of StarWind, we were able to share a backup device on Hyper-V which did not support pass-through natively.

The ability to use older native technology integrated with 21st-century AI is what allows these applications to be above their competitors.

From vSAN all the way to their VTL pass-through technology, it is compatible with multiple platforms and is truly a universal application with great potential.

The most disappointing side of the application is the free edition. There used to be GUI attached. That has recently changed to only CLI management of the application. That might be a bit off-putting to customers as they would like to use and play with the application without the limitation of what the free license offers. 

Another downside is there is no way of downloading the older versions online. It would be great to have a content library to get the older versions.

I have been using StarWind for about three years.

I have not used a different solution. During my search, StarWind was the first site that I visited.

Do not waste any time on the free product; it's better to get a license. Use sales to evaluate and explore and you will be ready to implement a solid product.

For storage, I have explored Open NAS (Linux) and Windows NFS 3.0.

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

I started using StarWind to maximize the return on hardware infrastructure.

We had multiple slow disks and required multiple HyperV servers to run simultaneously with business-grade speed. After some time and research was connected with StarWind vSAN and then set up the vSAN environment and was really surprised to see how fast the "average" hardware was performing inside the virtual environment. We met the target, and we also had more resources than previously thought as the performance was so good.

I found that StarWind vSAN provided an excellent return on investment and had a performance that blew my socks off. 

We increased the load within the storage we already had as StarWind was able to more than double the speed throughput on IOs by leveraging memory as a cache for read/write operations.

Now we also had a way of leveraging our really old hardware to create fast storage for a testing environment. Also, it is really useful to access large cheap storage for lab environment testing.

If you test the average speed on SATA hard disks, you'll note an average of anywhere around 80-160MB/s - not really great for multiple HyperV Virtual Machines. Just as I thought I couldn't possibly get them to go faster, I found StarWind vSAN and decided to give it a go; after some testing and tuning with how the memory cache works, I was amazed and how far I could push the HDD, memory, and CPU whilst running virtual machines. 

It is truly amazing that the PC's memory was turned into a storage cache and leveraged storage input/output at that speed. 

We went from "no way DB applications would have good performance" to "Wow! We can now actually have a DB running and have some VMs running at the same time."

Given the requirements we had in our office, we needed StarWind vSAN to be able to re-purpose average hardware for use in multiple virtual machine scenarios without having to outlay more CAPEX on hardware. We also needed good technical support and a robust, reliable option with predictable outcomes. 

Fantastically, StarWind offered all that and more. It is rare in our industry to find something that takes efficiency to the Nth degree, and I am all about efficiency and saving people time and money. This is a great product.

I've used the solution for two years. 

The solution is very stable.

It is scalable.

The product offers great service and support.

Positive

It was easy to set up and the support is good.

It has great ROI. We were able to maximize the use of old and new equipment.

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.

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.

We have been able to use more on-prem hardware to reduce cost and also use old disks that we do not trust enough for ordinary RAID or usage.

The storage system has been a great expansion of our capabilities to store large amounts of data since we previously relied on cloud storage which became exponentially more expensive as we expanded our data collection and our pipelines which required more virtual machines and hence more storage. 

With the web GUI available, it also became easier to monitor disk health instead of always logging in to the respective storage servers and checking status, which sometimes only was available during boot in raid controllers.

For us, the SAN solution needed to integrate well with HyperV since that is what we currently use - although we are planning to add an ESXi hypervisor which made vSAN optimal (since it is hypervisor-agnostic and we can select whatever hypervisor we want in the future without the need to redo our storage system).

Furthermore, we have a lot of fiber channel disks lying around, which we had no good use of. Therefore vSAN was great since we could easily integrate these into our storage system and also distribute block storage via fiber channel to the hypervisors and other storage-requiring servers.

The setup and documentation for the installation with the free version could definitely be improved. It took some time to get it up and running; however, when running, it worked well. 

The setup is done in PowerShell and requires quite some knowledge about how to navigate windows through Powershell. Fortunately, there were scripts available to help out. That said, the documentation was not that thorough in helping me understand the scripts. This is definitely room for improvement since it would be nice to quickly get up a demo of the SAN running to evaluate if it works as one expects, which it did in our case.

I've used the solution for two months.

The scalability is great. It integrates with all hypervisors, and disks can easily be added.

It was far from the easiest implementation; however, we got it working.

We implemented the solution in-house.

We looked into TrueNAS and Windows storage spaces.