StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

StarWind vSAN is used to provide highly available storage for a VMware environment within a large factory complex. The storage solution needed to be hardware independent and capable of being moved to no Dell hardware when or if required. The customer had already decided upon and purchased a specific Dell hardware solution, prior to deciding that they would like the features and benefits of high availability storage and or the benefit of a hyper-converged infrastructure.

The StarWindvSAN solution stretches over two Dell VRX Blade chassis and provides synchronous replication of data for us.

StarWind Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements, specifically around Dell VRX blade was the most valuable feature of StarWind vSAN. It is a pleasant change to encounter a company who are willing to be flexible over an implementation utilizing their product and varying slightly from their normal design specifications. They also helped us qualify the product against the customer's constantly changing requirements.

The solution allows for highly available stretched vSAN technology, independent of hardware vendors was the primary selling point of this platform. We have had a scenario where one of the server rooms, in this case, the primary where all of the virtual machines run, fail. The virtual machines are key to the management of a production facility that employs hundreds of staff on a rostered basis. In the event that the underlying infrastructure is no longer able to serve data the hourly cost and loss to the company in exceptionally large.

The ability to continue to be back up and running within minutes definitely saved the company hundreds of pounds.

As a company grows the ability to be able to deep dive into the minutiae of system performance becomes very important. Being able to see at a glance which systems are consuming IOPS/shares is very important indeed. 

The gathering of monthly consumption and performance reports for future dissemination to concerned parties is also very important. Unfortunately, StarWinds vSAN doesn't offer this functionality, however, it is something that would be greatly welcomed should they choose to develop it.

I've used the solution for two years.

We have had no issues regarding the stability or availability of StarWind vSAN. As such, my views are it is a good and reliable product.

It would be apparent that the solution will scale quite well. However, our actual capacity requirements for the implementation we performed are very small. As such we are unlikely to require future scalability.

We had one incident for which we required the help of their support. Our questions and queries were answered within an hour of their being raised. Overall, we have been very pleased with the response.

Positive

For this specific scenario, the customer hasn't considered the benefits of using this technology and it had not been a requirement.

The initial configuration was very simple. We utilized StarWind's expertise and recommendations when implementing the solution.

StarWind, the vendor, was involved directly with the implementation. This was accommodated remotely.

We have not measured ROI.

I'd advise users to go with StarWinds's design recommendations and utilize their technical support. It will help you get the best out of the product.

No other options were considered. This as hardware had already been purchased.

Our initial requirement was to have instant failover to another node in the cluster. Starwind Virtual SAN (vSAN) allowed us to meet the organizational requirements. It is installed on two of my Production servers for use in a Hyper-V cluster for a few years. 

Our initial requirement was to have instant failover to another node in the cluster. Starwind Virtual SAN (vSAN) allowed us to meet the organizational requirements. It is installed on two of my Production servers for use in a Hyper-V cluster for a few years. 

Starwind support was excellent in setting up all the connections between the servers and doing the configuration. Performance has been excellent with no issues. 

I don't even notice it's there. Since installing and initial configuration, I have not needed to engage with support.

The instant failover, with vSAN copying data to the second node, allowed for the continuous availability of our applications. By far, the best features are implementation and support. 

From our research into other options, an equivalent installation would have been quite a bit more than the StarWind solution. We did have to invest in another server and improve the connections between the nodes. This implementation now far exceeds our previous setup, which, in hindsight, was convoluted. 

So far, for our use case, I haven't noticed issues with the product. 

The few times I've ever engaged with technical support were during the initial phase of the implementation. However, I would absolutely like to see a lot more on the monitoring side. The information currently does not give any performance of the VSAN. 

I would also like to see the activities occurring on the nodes, bandwidth, replication and synchronization. Diagnostics information or alerts on the state of systems could also be implemented to give more visibility. 

I've used the solution for over two years.

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.

StarWind, compared to other competitors in the market and in the same range of price, allows us to design system plans with the resilience of enterprise-grade storage, however, we are able to use smaller storage even at the consumer level. This makes us more competitive as the total price of the offered solution was comparable to a usual non-HA system yet with all the resilience features that StarWind is bringing with its product. This combination of low price with enterprise-grade HA features is key in the market.

There are tons of valuable features that StarWind vSAN brings to the table. It is very difficult to choose one to be raised as a role model.

The unique capability to create a vSAN on a 2-node cluster while all the other competitors will require users to have at least an external witness to set the Virtual SAN.

The service team is very collaborative and skilled and followed us from the implementation to the go-live of the system constantly.

The license price is one of the cheapest in the market.

The price is the key aspect (yet not at the expense of reliability and stability). It is not so easy to find an aspect where StarWind can improve their offering or any additional feature they can include for the price they ask. 

I know that StarWind can scale out easily, however, I wasn't in the position to test that. I would like an automated installation/configuration despite the fact that their service is very collaborative, a customer should be able to deploy the solution by themselves. 

I've used the solution for more than one year.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to test the scalability aspect.

As it was driven by StarWind reps, it was running very smoothly.

There's nothing to finger point on the StarWind team. They were great.

We also evaluated StorMagic, VMware vSAN, and Datacore.

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.

StarWind Virtual SAN has given us the ability to bring a stable and functional 3rd party 2-node hyper-converged solution to our SMB clients. 

The typical roadblock with SMBs is the cost. It is very difficult to convince an SMB of the value of redundancy, highly-available hardware configurations, up-time, and quality vendor support until an emergency happens and solutions are needed ASAP. 

With StarWind, we are able to present best practices to SMBs and since the price point is attractive, we can more efficiently convince SMB clients to make the investment in best practices before a disaster happens.

The top-notch support before, during, and after deployments are better than any other vendor I have come across. There is very little wait and very little pain to get an engineer who is very knowledgeable about this product to assist us.

The fact that it is hardware agnostic gives us the capability to customize the solution according to the client's needs and budget.

We are in the middle of converting our own infrastructure to StarWind Virtual SAN since we are so satisfied with the ease and function of the environments where this product is deployed.

The only way I can see this product needing improvement is the consultation level of the StarWind sales and engineers. For example, the method of management of the StarWind environments that have been deployed has been a downloaded management console program. This downloaded program which needs to be installed on the network of the environment was the suggestion of the deployment engineers. 

I would like to see more consultation on a web UI management console.

Our first deployment was in 2019.

No deployments have ended badly. All are still running without issues. It is very stable.

The solution is hardware agnostic. Storage can be added if licensing is increased. It offers above-average scalability. 

Customer service is the best part of this product. The customer service and support I have received are unmatched by any other vendor.

Positive

We used HP StoreVirtual. The switch was needed as it came to its end-of-life and end-of-support.

The initial setup is very straightforward. Anything complex is done by the StarWind personnel.

Our implementation was a hybrid of vendor-team and in-house. The vendor team has a very high level of expertise.

The ROI is for our clients. There is less downtime, less troubleshooting, fewer issues, and fast speeds. 

The setup is simple and the cost is attractive.

We also evaluated Open-E, StorMagic, NetAPP, and EMC.

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

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.

The biggest benefit was that it allowed us to provide SAN services on a limited hardware budget.  

We built out a pair of matched servers with vendor-supplied hard drives and were able to provide a fully redundant storage array between the servers. VM hosts can now provide high availability failover if either host goes down. Not needing to spend a huge amount for a dedicated solution was a plus and the system is easily expandable if we need to make changes.  

Their support team has been excellent in helping us throughout the project process.

Support was great and provided presale support for our test environment before the purchase and after to help us configure the product before it went into production.  

They have also been great in following up on our project and helping with other implementation issues.  

Being able to use existing hardware was a big factor in our purchasing decision and helped this project fit the needs of our client's budget. Using existing hardware greatly reduced the project costs and overall complexity of the solution.

The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us.  

Starwind provides excellent pre-sale support and scheduled several meetings between our IT staff and their support team to review the configuration and answer questions. This helped immensely in deploying the software in our test environment and helped us to understand the product better. Support was always willing to help with any documentation that we were confused over and continued to follow up with us after the project went live.

I've used the solution for eight months.

The product appears to be very stable and robust.

The solution appears to be easily scalable and adjustable to fit future needs.

Vendor support has been very responsive and provided help with all issues we have encountered.

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution.

Setup can be complicated and the documentation is not always clear. Support from the vendor was needed in our test environment setup.

We used an in-house team with vendor support during the implementation. Support has been excellent and has followed up regularly with our team.

We did look at Dell and VMware SAN products as well. 

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.

Until the installation of StarWind, we only use physical servers. After installing, I migrated all physical servers as virtual servers and added other new servers. We currently have approximately 30 virtual servers on only three hosts and the two SAN servers. Thus, we get significant savings from the necessary hardware. In addition, we have much more flexibility in allocating available resources. 

Having a configuration of two servers in HA, we can perform maintenance and upgrade operations without having to interrupt the operation of production servers.

From my point of view, the main advantages of this solution are the drastic reduction of the number of physical servers required and the reduction of acquisition costs for servers. 

In addition, there is less electricity consumption for servers and for their cooling and the possibility of dynamic and fast allocation of storage resources where needed. This simplifies the backup and restore process. The product has the ability to take snapshots on production servers before any major upgrade so that if problems occur you can quickly return to the previous configuration.

It would help if the manufacturer provided clearer and more detailed documentation, with explanations of how the application can be installed in various HA configurations. They should include advantages and disadvantages for each proposed configuration. Currently, you can only find information on this on the manufacturer's website, but it does not contain very detailed information regarding each proposed configuration.

It might help to add the functionality to automatically send an email to a predefined address when errors occur in the application.

We have been using StarWind Virtual SAN for more than 10 years and, in that time, without encountering major operating problems.

It is extremely stable. Currently, it is not necessary to intervene or restart the SA servers for years at a time.

It is easy to expand the storage space. The only limitation is the space that the license allows you to use in the HA configuration.

The support provided is very prompt.

Previously, I only used physical servers.

Initially, the implementation of this solution seems complex, however, once you understand how the application is designed, it becomes relatively simple.

Before deciding on the solution offered by StarWind, we also analyzed HPE LeftHand SAN Solutions, however, this was significantly more expensive.

We are using Starwind as a virtual SAN Solution for our Microsoft Hyper-V Cluster environment. We have multiple clusters in a couple of different locations over the country. 

We wanted a robust HA environment that could run all of our servers on one node without the need for a third witness and without multiple other SAN appliances that need to be managed by a small IT team. We want to make a HA solution with a KIS (Keep it Simple) approach and Starwind has managed to accomplish this for a reasonable price.

We were previously using HP Storevirtual which was very hard to configure and support and the performance was very bad, plus updating was horrible.

We wanted a simple robust easy-to-manage HA software and have been using a Starwind Virtual SAN (vSAN) at two production locations with a Hyper-V Cluster for almost five years now. It has given us very good performance and hasn't had any issues in the past few years.

Starwind support is excellent. They are very fast and have very good knowledge of Starwind and Hyper-V Cluster software.

What we like best about it is that it is the only true two-node Hyper-V cluster solution that's available. On both production locations, we have a two-node setup over two different server rooms.

Our main goal was that we wanted to have all VM servers available on one cluster host in case of a disaster in one of our server rooms.

Microsoft SSD (Storage Space Direct) always needs a third witness (SMB or Cloud), however, in our two-node solution, this is not ideal. Directly connected fiber connections between the nodes make everything fast and make the chance of a cluster split-brain fault less likely.

Pros include:
- Starwind Support will install and configure the software;
- Starwind will do the updates for you, and this all without any downtime of hosts/VMs
- It's the only a two-node cluster scenario available
- It is compatible with the latest Windows Server versions

I don't think there is much change needed with Starwind vSAN. The product works very well as it is. I haven't got any new features that I would like to add. 

If it's possible to make a driver/solution that does not make use of the iSCSI targets of Windows, that would be great. I don't know if that's possible, however, it could make the configuration a little easier.

The support is excellent and all the people I've contacted have good knowledge of the product. There is nothing to change there. 

I've have 10 years of experience with the product, and seven years of using it at my current company. We still like this software in 2024