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.

I've used this mostly for lab testing with vSphere, where a SAN was not available. In that case, a vSAN was the best product for testing.

We didn't want to have to purchase a whole load of new hardware just to complete some testing for ESXi/vCenter/vSphere, et cetera. We had a fairly large server in terms of computing (CPU, RAM) and storage that wasn't being used, so we decided to use this to host nested ESXi hosts. 

We didn't want to purchase a SAN to complete the testing works, so we could deploy a Windows VM, pass the storage through and use StarWinds vSAN software instead.

It has allowed us to save a lot of time and money by letting us create a vSAN within a Windows VM on the environment it controls. 

There are 5 ESXi servers (all virtual, nested inside the host ESXi server, so six in total). We then have a single Windows VM deployed with storage passed through directly to it. This was then set up very quickly with some PowerShell scripts. This immediately made the storage available over ISCSI to ESXi and then allowed us to complete testing of failovers and DR, et cetera, without impacting anything live and also keeping costs down.

The ability to deploy this software in full for free is great. The fact that StarWind provides this product with pretty much full functionality for free if you're willing to invest your time into working through PowerShell is very helpful. You get a lot out of it. You can also make it highly available, again, all for free! 

The fact you can use the deploy to the same host it will also be managing is excellent, and also, the update process for the software is nice and easy. It's just next, next, next. I've had no issues. It also seems to not suffer from any obvious performance issues on the Windows VM. The resources I've given to it are low in terms of computing and it plods along without issue.

It would be good to have a little more access to control certain aspects within the UI. However, when you're using it for free and have the full functionality of the product available to you with scripts and other means, you can't complain. 

Right now, I don't think there is anything I would think to add for my use cases. It's mostly used in a lab environment, and it does the job for us perfectly. If I was to use it in full production, I would certainly look to purchase it rather than use the free one, mostly for the simplicity of using the UI for lots of tasks.

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

The stability is excellent so far. We've not had any issues and I've been using it for a couple of years.

So far, scalability is excellent for the paid version. 

I've not needed to speak to them for any support. That said, I've spoken to a customer service rep, and they are very nice.

Positive

I did not previously use a different solution. I was looking for some vSAN software for testing, and this fit the bill immediately.

The installation is very easy. It's just a typical next, next style. The configuration of the product afterward was a little more complex, however, StarWind provides you the tools, even for free, for setting it up (PowerShell scripts).

I implemented the product personally, in-house. 

I'm using a free edition at the moment. ROI does not apply.

I would start out by testing the product in the free edition. You get full functionality, and you can see how it will perform in your environment. If you're happy with it overall and want to use it in production, I would certainly pay for it for the UI aspects and the full support as well.

I tried to use things like FreeNAS/TrueNAS. However, it just wasn't quite right for my needs, whereas StarWinds vSAN worked as expected.

We provide managed web hosting services, including dedicated servers in physical or virtual configurations, for various customers, including small, medium, and large companies. We started hosting operations in 1995 and operated our own hosting infrastructure in data centers in North Carolina and Virginia, USA.

Our infrastructure included physical and virtual hosting environments based on VMware, which is where our StarWind Virtual SANs were deployed.

With our growing needs and customer requirements and demand, we added virtualization to our infrastructure, based on VMware. Storage requirements for the virtualized infrastructure also grew rapidly. We explored all available options, from hyper-converged solutions to the large "big name" solutions. Our infrastructure was too big for hyper-converged solutions. However, we were not ready for the major investments that a full-sized storage infrastructure would need. StarWind's offerings were a perfect fit for us, and remain so until today, almost ten years later.

Prior to StarWind, we were using "local storage" with each hypervisor, and this had many drawbacks, including size limitations, performance, technical management, and redundancy. 

With StarWind Virtual SAN, we could easily deploy and manage the storage solutions, add additional storage servers when needed, implement automated redundancy and failover, and scale storage allocations as and when needed, including adding high-performance SSD solutions alongside traditional hard disk solutions.

The Windows-based StarWind GUI is easy to use and understand and integrates seamlessly with VMware's vSphere portal as well.

While it is possible to implement disk encryption in StarWind using Windows Bitlocker, such a solution can be a little tricky to manage, for example, when servers are rebooted. Bitlocker solutions require a physical presence in the data center to enter the encryption string on the server's physical console.

Built-in "Data at Rest" encryption would be an important need, especially for customers with sensitive compliance requirements e.g. Government customers, healthcare customers, eCommerce customers, and many other compliance-sensitive application areas.

We have been using the StarWind Virtual SAN product since 2014.

StarWind Virtual SAN is very scalable, simply by adding additional Windows servers and installing the StarWind Virtual SAN software on it.

We did not previously use a different solution.

Compared to similar solutions from NetApp etc., our savings were likely in the tens of thousands of dollars over the years, and we did not need to pay for features that we do not need.

We were very happy and impressed with StarWind's products and the technical support from StarWind's support team. If and when we needed assistance, StarWind's tech support has been very responsive, thorough, and very helpful.

We found the licensing costs and pricing to be very affordable and manageable.

We looked at big-name solutions such as NetApp, Cisco, and others.

Our storage infrastructure had been operating flawlessly with great performance and reliability.

We purchased this product to manage storage between our two-node Hyper-V cluster. We're running a pair of Dell R740's with 16 core CPUs and RAID 6 storage arrays, all solid-state.  

We wanted this product to facilitate a hyper-converged environment while still maintaining two host redundancy. We're running about 25 virtual machines on this cluster, none of which are particularly storage IO intensive, yet we've still not seen any issues with performance when it comes to Starwind vSAN. We ended up on this option as it seemed to be simple, robust, and affordable.

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.  

Keeping things running is an obvious benefit, and we opted to purchase their higher-tier support (for a very minor price increase). Knowing we've got them to fall back on if we can't fix something ourselves is good for peace of mind. The notifications built into the software mean we aren't constantly checking for issues as this is a very critical piece of our infrastructure.

Starwind support was extremely helpful throughout the entire process, from the trial period to the actual production implementation. They responded to my emails quickly and did a walkthrough to validate the final production configuration to ensure there were no issues.  

The engineer that assisted me with the walkthrough was very knowledgeable, and not just on Starwind software. He had several recommendations about our Hyper-V cluster configuration, and he always made sure to explain why he was making those recommendations. 

Some of the documentation seems to be a bit older and refers to deprecated items. This wasn't a huge issue as the technician that walked me through the install was very knowledgeable and gave me a clear list of steps to take.

The only major issue we had was with the NIC drivers we were using on the link between the two hosts. For reference, we're using a direct connection between a 40 gig QSFP+ NIC in each of our hosts. The issue was that the iSCSI connection between the two hosts would drop after about ten minutes during a full sync of the two storage arrays. The support tech was able to quickly identify the drivers as the issue to get it resolved quickly and prior to our production deadline.

We've used the solution for two months.

It's been very stable for our usage. We've had no issues since implementation two months ago.

I hear it scales well, however, we've not used it beyond our own small scale.

Technical support was very good.

Positive

Previously, we were using Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct across a three-node environment. We switched due to the fact that we sold a portion of our company and downsized to two nodes. Storage Spaces Direct doesn't seem ideal for a two-node system.

The initial setup was a bit confusing based on the documentation, however, support was very knowledgeable and able to assist with any issues and questions I had.

I implemented it myself with assistance from Starwind support. It's not a complex process.

Pricing is very simple and a setup walkthrough is included in the price of the software. It's a perpetual license and you only pay to renew support, which was a reasonable price.

We considered storage spaces direct, however, didn't ever implement it on our new two-node cluster.

I really can't overstate how responsive their support was.

Our company's needs are simple, and I like redundancy, so I was looking for the least expensive way to achieve as close to full hardware redundancy as possible without breaking the bank. 

I learned about vSAN technology, and it made sense to me to just get two hosts with identical hardware, and configure their storage as shared, providing full hardware redundancy (on top of the already partially redundant aspects of the hosts themselves), then just get a decent SAN for off-site DR backup storage (we settled on Synology's Flashstation for that), and I'm really glad we did.

StarWind's solution provided me the peace of mind knowing I had full hardware redundancy with my new servers and local storage, and it was less expensive than the VMware native license/solution would have been. 

It has been rock solid from day one. I've engaged with their expert support multiple times for maintenance sessions, to upgrade their software, and once to migrate from their Windows Server-based appliance to their Linux version once it was ready. We have only ever had one issue during an upgrade that was quickly resolved by their engineer.

By far, the best features are the cost, implementation, and support. The VMWare equivalent license upgrade would have been quite a bit more than the StarWind solution, and the only additional hardware requirements were the dual 25GB fiber NICs needed for the storage Sync functionality. 

They also worked with our preferred reseller (PCM at the time) and had our two brand new Dell hosts shipped to them first for pre-configuration, which they then turned around and shipped to us pre-configured and ready to go.

Implementation, maintenance, and support were and have been virtually painless, however, I would definitely like to see quite a bit more on the monitoring side of things. 

I would really like to be able to see a lot more of what is going on under the hood metrics-wise. It would be great to be able to see at least a little bit more. Specifically, things like performance, bandwidth utilization of the synchronization connection, and how it impacts the overall performance of the hosts.

I've used the solution for three years.

It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it. There hasn't been one operational hiccup and only one issue which happened during a support session performing an upgrade, which was quickly resolved by the engineer.

Our needs are simple. Therefore, we only have ever used or needed two hosts. That said, it is nice to know that it can scale to clusters if we ever need to go that route, as unlikely as that seems right now. 

The few times I've ever engaged with technical support were for upgrades, and it was always pretty painless, with the one exception I mentioned before, where we had a problem with a host that ultimately required a hard reset. We're still not sure what happened to cause it to lock up, however, once it was back up everything was fine.

Positive

I had looked at other vSAN technology in the past, however, the cost was beyond our budget, especially after factoring in the cost of the support needed, since I am not a storage engineer.

The initial setup was easy. We simply had to unbox the servers, rack them, connect the cables, and turn them on. It was that simple.

The initial setup was handled in-house - meaning, yours truly. All I had to do after firing them up was add the hosts to my existing vCenter server, migrate all of the VMs over to the new Hosts/Storage, and, once done, shut down and remove the old hosts from vCenter.

ROI is hard to quantify since we've never used anything else. That said, at least without it there would have been many thousands of dollars just for the licensing costs and appropriate support would have been even more than that. StarWind provides comprehensive support on everything, as long as you buy the hardware through them too.

I'd advise users to do their due diligence, however, StarWind's technology works as advertised, at a much lower cost than the native VMware solution. Their licensing is simple and affordable, and their support is impeccable.

We considered VMware's native vSAN technology and may have gone with it if I hadn't found StarWind while searching for alternatives.

If you are looking at a simple, affordable vSAN technology, you can't go wrong with StarWind.

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.

We're using Starwind as a failover cluster for load balancing and increased availability.

We had no failover solution before, so if our standalone VMware server went down, we'd be out of operation until we restored from backup. Now we have a Hyper-V cluster with shared storage. We can lose one server and stay online. Failover happens smoothly, recovery and maintenance are less stressful, and we no longer need to worry about downtime. When we tested StarWind, we confirmed that the high availability performs as expected. That level of confidence helps me sleep better at night. 

We only had to purchase two new servers and no other storage or networking equipment. Virtual SAN runs on iSCSI, which is free and easy to configure. It's easy to manage from StarWind's GUI console, and it only required a few extra switch ports. StarWind has specialized in storage solutions for many years, and its track record reassures us that the solution will continue to exist and be supported in the future. I scheduled an interactive validation and tuning session before we went live. I found this to be very valuable, and it proved to us how much the company is committed to its product.

It would be helpful if StarWind provided more precise and detailed documentation explaining how to configure the solution in various scenarios, including the advantages and disadvantages of each. 

I'd also like a mechanism for notifying us when updates are available as well as a visual interface for iSCSI and physical storage. A mobile app for alerts and notifications would be helpful, too. We should still have access to security patches even if we don't pay for support. Lastly, StarWind should make it easier to perform an orderly shutdown of the entire environment in a power outage when everything is running on battery.

We've been using StarWind Virtual SAN for less than a year

We had an old standalone VMware server hosting several virtual machines that we wanted to replace with something highly available at a low cost. I researched and found StarWind Virtual SAN to be the best solution. We only had to purchase two new servers and no other storage or networking equipment. 

I'd recommend purchasing at least one year of support. It helps to have support on the initial configuration.

I rate StarWind Virtual SAN nine out of 10. 

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.