StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

We have two Windows Servers (2019), and two locations, and needed Virtual SAN so that we can use disks that are installed on each server. With StarWind Virtual SAN, we created multiple SAN disks that helped us create a real-time failover cluster replication service for data and SQL. 

Installation of Virtual SAN from StarWind was very easy, with a pre-ready directory full of PowerShell scripts that you can easily edit to suit your needs and just run them. That way, you create an environment that fits your needs and is something that you can edit very easily or delete.

We have been searching for a Virtual SAN for a long time. When we found the Virtual SAN from StarWind, our problems were fixed. The easy PowerShell scripts are ready to edit and run for everyone. We are using it for GEO Failover Cluster and have now been using it for a few months with no problem. We also have real-time replication that is working great. We've had no errors. The startup when using Windows is working with no problem with StarWind, so we connect very easily.

The solution offers easy one-click PowerShell scripts that are ready to run. It comes with a bunch of free PowerShell scripts that you can edit and run, and also you can create your own with help of PowerShell.

Not so many Virtual SANs work great with a failover cluster as StarWind does; it has no lag, is working great, has no errors, and we can log it easily.

It has minimum hardware usage, which means a lot to us.

The deployment of StarWind Virtual SAN is very easy; they have online manuals that can help you and guide you with your installation.

We are really looking forward to the release of more PowerShell scripts that are easy to use and can be edited by rookies. 

Their support is really fast and reliable. You can get it via email or the there's forum community where you already find a lot of questions/answers to your problems and the community will help and guide you through the problems that you have.

We tried to find a con, however, it's really hard. The product just works. If I had to find something, then it would be the GUI. For someone entering the IT sector with little knowledge of storage, iSCSI, and virtual disks, they might not find the GUI immediately obvious.

I've used the solution for a few months now.

The stability is great.

The scalability is great.

They offer great support.

Positive

The initial setup is easy.

We handled the setup via an in-house IT team.

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.

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.

StarWind Virtual SAN improved my hyper-v deployment by making it highly available. It was easy to roll out and it is easy to manage. It has greatly improved virtual machine reliability and accessibility. Deployment of StarWind Virtual SAN has helped reduce the stress of not having a cluster that would allow for virtual machine failover if a host has a hardware problem. It is reassuring to know that all virtual machines are in a safer environment versus running on standalone hosts with no shared storage.

Highly available storage is the most valuable feature. The entire rollout is hyper-converged and requires no extra storage further than the hosts in which Hyper-V is running. Another feature that has been great is the support from StarWind in general. We have their proactive support package on the main cluster that employs Starwind Virtual SAN. The StarWind support team is right on top of all monitoring activities. If I am maintaining a physical host and it has been down for too long, I will get a notice from StarWind to confirm a problem or inform them that maintenance is being performed. They are top-notch.

Management of VSAN itself could be improved. A Web UI for management would be great rather than an application installation. StarWind is testing a command center virtual appliance that I have installed in my environment. It is very much a step in the right direction to make StarWind Virtual SAN management easier and even Hyper-V as a whole. Something Hyper-V has lacked for years is a good Web UI to manage a host or cluster. StarWind has taken upon themselves to help with this as well as manage the Virtual SAN in a single pane of glass.

Five Years

Very stable. I've had little to no problem since rolling it out.

It should be easy to add a host to a cluster once VSAN is installed.

Excellent! 10/10

No. We used standalone hosts.

Setup is a bit complex but StarWind has great documentation to get setup and a great support team to assist in setup.

Implementation has been done using StarWind support and with an in-house team as we have 2 separate clusters both using StarWind Virtual SAN

12-24 months.

Evaluate your solutions. This is a great solution for those user Hyper-V and ready to hyper-converge.

Maxta, Nutanix, VMware, KVM.

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

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 able to scale our storage much easier and cheaper than we would with traditional SAN or NAS systems. 

The cost justification is very easy since the overall cost is literally support for the software. We do not keep any sort of hardware support since we can just buy hardware as needed from anywhere. This means that you have to have some knowledge of hardware if you are picking it out - or their support is more than willing to help. I like this as it allows me to pick out how resilient I want my system to be and how much I want it to cost.

The ability to use off-the-shelf standard servers to increase storage space is great. For example, we use Gen 9 DL380 servers with 26 bays. This allows us to migrate to newer hardware at any time without having to buy new shelves or head units of expensive SAN solutions (or even worse, have multiple SAN support contracts going at once in order to swing data between them). This also makes it so we can easily keep older data without immense cost to our organization. 

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

We just need more integration with Veeam. Overall, I like the fire and forget model, so really there isn't an immense amount of things that I would request. 

Possibly some reporting via SMTP of some metrics would be nice to have. That said, quite honestly I get that from enough systems already and end up ignoring most of them. 

If this was something I was logged into every day then maybe I would request more features. Then again, I would be more concerned with its quality (we shouldn't need to log in daily). I'm not really sure what more to ask for.

We have been using the solution for around six years.

Been using the solution for six years and have not had it fail.

I have scaled quite large. It scales well.

Technical support seems responsive. We've only used them a few times.

Positive

We had three different systems (Dell PowerVault, HPE Lefthand, Lenovo NAS) and they were expensive to keep and more expensive to expand.

The setup takes about five minutes.

I implemented the solution myself. 

The ROI is almost immediate.

I'd advise new users to just do some homework on what they need. Pick out hardware that can support it and get a license. The setup would be about 5 minutes.

Yes, we looked at Dell PowerVault, HPE Lefthand, and Lenovo NAS.

The solution offers great ROI.

I use the solution for running vSphere for a highly tech-driven SMB. We are running a 2-node vSAN for running ~40 VMs servicing mostly internal users. We are running VMs/apps that are either compute-intensive, storage-intensive, or memory-intensive.  

We have limited staff and staff time for managing infrastructure so it was important for us to find a solution that works well and doesn't require a lot of daily human interaction.  We like rock-solid solutions that just work. StarWind vSAN provides us with exactly this.

StarWind vSAN has provided us with improved performance (since the storage is Direct Attached and therefore faster than a SAN). It has reduced single points of failure (the compute and storage are fully duplicated) and reduced maintenance since we no longer have to manage a separate SAN or storage networking. Furthermore, our hardware is simplified taking up less room in our rack and requires far less wiring.

On another note, StarWind vSAN has improved our organization by providing us with third-party proactive support to help us diagnose issues quickly - especially when we don't notice them right away.

The solution offers fully redundant computation and storage.  

We are now more tolerant of hardware failures without vastly reduced performance or increase human workload.  

We are very sensitive to making sure our infrastructure is reliable, bulletproof, and resilient to issues. StarWind vSAN helps with this since we now have two identical nodes with compute and storage that can both independently serve our needs without and a drastic reduction in available services or reduction in performance.  

On top of that, having the ability to scale horizontally if needed is a huge plus for future growth.

Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer. Some of the documents are not the best at describing how the StarWind vSAN system is designed or implemented, and although unimportant (as "long as it works") it is still nice to read the nitty-gritty details.  

Some of the documentation is a bit rough in spelling or sentence structure. I would imagine this is due to translation and non-English as the primary language. These are not deal breakers since the support staff is very helpful.

I've used the solution for less than 6 months.

We switched products due to an expiring warranty as well as the need for a general hardware refresh. We were also looking for newer and better; we wanted to improve resiliency, improve server/application performance, reduce rack space utilization and wiring, and just get an all-around new solution since the IT market has changed quite a bit since our previous refresh (about 6 years prior).  Ultimately, the new StarWind solution reduces our single points of failure and improves our system performance.

The cost structure for us was on par with just a general server plus a SAN purchase, however, we would not have received the pre-configured software, the reduced single points of failure, the reduced wiring complexity, or the proactive support.  

We looked at VMware vSAN and a generic server plus SAN solution.

I would highly recommend StarWind vSAN for pretty much any SMB infrastructure project.  The reduced single points of failure, increased performance, and reliable support is great.

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.

StarWind vSAN has translated to a huge improvement in speed and high availability compared to our old iSCSI shared storage solution. Previously, we had a network-attached storage device with tiered arrays. Part of it was a standard spinning disk and the other was solid-state drives.

With this new solid-state local storage, we have massively improved our user experience.

The sync functionality is amazing as well, compared to our old replication system, in that it happens in realtime as data is written so that high availability is as fast as possible.

Speed and high availability have been the most valuable for us. Again, I would say the speed for our users has been extremely valuable. I wouldn't say it was terrible before but you know it's fast when normal, non-tech-savvy users are asking if we upgraded something because some local database app feels faster today!

From a business continuity standpoint, I love how it has improved our failover processes in vSphere. Having the data replicate in real time between host pairs has almost completely automated the process. 

I think the setup could be streamlined a bit. I was already familiar with iSCSI and setting up shared storage, but the abstraction process of getting from configuring the raid array on the local host machine, and making sure all the correct values are set to get the best performance, was a bit finicky.

Then, you had to prepare the appliances on each host and again make sure your VMDKs are properly formatted and then mounted correctly so they can be shared as iSCSI disks. It just felt like a lot of opportunities for a user to make big mistakes that would affect the end performance.

I was very impressed with the tech who walked me through the whole process, as I'm just not sure I would have gotten there on my own. 

We have been using StarWind Virtual SAN for five months.

I did not use another solution prior to this one.

I think the bang for the buck is much better with StarWind Virtual SAN.

I evaluated VMware vSAN.

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.

This StarWind solution has enabled us to be more resilient, once it was set up and tested.

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

Before StarWind, we were dealing with an archaic way of synchronizing Virtual machines and data between non-clustered physical hosts and it was very frustrating. Now, things are less hands-on and easier to manage and navigate the virtual environment, including maintenance while other users keep working.

We found that robust communications between clusters and synchronization were key and most valuable to us due to the amount of data we were synchronizing.

The expertise from their technicians is very helpful even in the middle of the night, with the right support plan of course. The technical documentation, the follow-up and the details noted on a per-call basis was amazing. We really appreciate that kind of commitment to our success and stability that the StarWind software brings to our business.

Built-in Notification would really help and as I understand, their new release has this now.  

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

Also, it would be helpful if the software had a few more guides and links/videos on how-to's.

An "Update available" notification within the software would also be helpful and a guided wizard to do the upgrade properly would also be nice and efficient.

A better visual of the SAN storage/actual storage and how it is used would be good, especially when it comes to where the files are located on the disk. 

We have been using StarWind Virtual SAN for the last two years.

Stability seems great and we have not had any problems with the software.

Seems very scalable, although we chose to have a two-node cluster.

This area has been the best for us, especially being new to this technology. The support team was amazing with follow-up and they are super patient.

I have not used another solution for the same purpose. This was what I picked based on my research.

Initially, I didn't quite understand the framework and what exact hardware was needed so I had to do some learning. However, once all was in place it went pretty smoothly.

We did our deployment in-house, with help from StarWind.

Return on investment for us, I would say maybe breaking even. As I said, I wish the costs were better balanced.

The cost seems a bit steep, and I wish it was less expensive.

I have looked at Nutanix and VMware.

Mainly that the costs would be less expensive.