StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

StarWind VSAN is used as shared storage for our Hyper-V cluster. We have two nodes, HDDs in RAID 10. HPE ProLiant servers, Windows Server 2016.

Thanks to StarWind VSAN, we were able to move to a cluster from stand-alone hypervisors with DAS (Direct attached storage). Before VSAN, hypervisor configuration changes and updates resulted in VM outages. Now, downtime is dramatically reduced.

The ability to use existing hardware, with no need to purchase hardware appliances is the most valuable feature. 

The cluster configuration is time-consuming and tedious. StarWind's guide for a two-node cluster can be found at (https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/starwind-virtual-san-hyperconverged-2-node-scenario-with-hyper-v-server-2016) and it is a long document to work through. I am not sure if it is possible to make the confiugration process more streamlined on generic hardware. This only affects the cluster configuration, not it's production use. I am very satisfied with the StarWind features so far and not interested in additional ones.

The technical support is very good.

StarWind is our first hyper-converged solution.

The licensing is straightforward, with free and trial versions available. 

Use the trial version before buying. Contact StarWind support in case of questions or issues. The support is very good.

Before choosing this solution we evaluated HPE SimpliVity, Scale Computing, and Dell EMC.

In my opinion, StarWind is a great solution for businesses with limited infrastructure budgets.

We use StarWind for storage on our Hyper-V cluster. We started with their free offering in a test environment and found the performance and stability so attractive that we built a three node cluster using Dell 720s and ten gigabit copper ethernet. It has now been running continuously for four years with essentially zero downtime. As it approaches end-of-life we will be migrating to their managed appliances.

We were originally in a legacy environment of stand-alone servers. StarWind has allowed us to virtualize our environment without the huge expense of a dedicated SAN (the typical choice in the past), putting cluster technology and its benefits within our reach. Server downtime was a constant threat to our operation before StarWind, but has never been a problem since.

Without question, the support. StarWind has been a valuable technology partner for us from the beginning. On the rare occasion when we have had a problem, or have simply needed to do an upgrade, they have provided first-rate support. Anyone who has dealt with common off-shore support understands the frustration in dealing with incompetent and difficult to communicate with support staff. This is not so with StarWind, as their support staff is comprised of true experts who can also communicate clearly. For highly technical products this is essential.  The best part about their tech support though, is that you probably won't need it much!

On the technical side, the performance has been excellent.  I have never found a reason to regret not going with a traditional SAN. The configuration is so much simpler, with fewer points of failure to worry about. Integration with Microsoft clustering has been perfect, allowing us to leverage our investment in MS server licensing to the fullest. Updates to server hardware are now painless and done during working hours with zero stress. We had a RAID failure a few months back, and nobody in the building even noticed and there was no after hours time used for repair. It's the best!

Very few aspects of this solution need improvement. Sometimes documentation on their site can be out of date, and it is always good to check with support to make sure that whatever you are looking at is current. The good news here is that this is very easy to accomplish. If we stay with the Virtual SAN instead of the managed appliances it would be great to have more automated tooling around managing the iSCSI connections in Windows, which can be a bit confusing at first.

Zero. It runs like a rock.

The current non-managed solution is limited to 3 nodes.

Their customer service at every level, both in terms of our account and technical support is very good. Everything has always been timely and first-rate. I have learned many things about not just StarWind but also Microsoft clustering, iSCSI, and even Hyper-V from Starwind support staff. They are true geek pros!

Before StarWind we were still in a non-virtualized environment of standalone servers with disparate hardware.

These are complex products to set up by nature. StarWind's excellent support makes it easy, but we were able to get our test setup running in just a few hours by reading documents and their forum.

We implemented with our in-house team and StarWind support only. Their expertise not just with their own product but with Microsoft clustering and Hyper-V was amazing. We didn't need any other support to get the job done.

It has paid for itself many times over in reduced downtime and maintenance costs.

Make sure that you understand what all of the pieces do and don't make the assumption that you can drop support once setup is complete.

Yes, we looked at Nutanix and several traditional dedicated SANs.

Make sure that you understand your performance requirements clearly. Learn how to measure your performance needs in your existing environment BEFORE you shop, so that you can be sure that you are looking at the right solution. In all of the planning that goes into making the correct decision on these types of products, understanding performance (and not just making assumptions) is the most neglected part. There is no quicker way to over or under build your solution than to not have real performance numbers for planning.

Hyperconverged lab and testing environments fulfill several special requirements for use cases. We use it for demonstration environments and for virtualization and containerization. We have a rather smaller footprint, ranging from two to three nodes over the years. 

Mainly, we have an edge use case. Another use case is refurbishing and second lifecycle evaluation, specifically I/O and disaster recovery capabilities, which are important in these lab environments. 

Modernization could also be counted as a use case since modernizing data centers on small-scale or edge deployments is becoming increasingly important, even for smaller businesses.

For my organization, StarWind vSAN has been a first of firsts in hyper-converged storage and has been, first and foremost, a technology demonstrator that should disclose and present the advantages of modern data center constellations. 

Over the years, it has also functioned as a lab environment and customer demonstrator specifically for refurbishing old hardware and educational objects for our internal apprentices, effectively transforming our mindset towards modern data center infrastructure. It also served as a proof of concept for refurbishing and cost-reducing existing infrastructures.

I have found the overall ergonomy and manageability outstanding during normal functioning. Specifically, the console GUI's monitoring and configuring capabilities can be counted towards that. 

Even when not administrated via GUI, the comprehensive Powershell automation module remains, which comes with templates prepopulated for the most common automation tasks. 

Furthermore, the solution provides great performance for the price it is listed with and can even run properly without proper hardware, however, it is even more efficient and performs better when procuring proper hardware is possible.

My impression has been mostly positive. However, there have been some pitfalls. For example, it runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear. This consequently follows a long learning curve and can take some time until this can be done efficiently. 

The feature log-structured file system has been removed. While I have not used it, I know some colleagues who have reported some performance benefits under certain circumstances. 

Additionally, vSAN does not offer extended SAN features like inline deduplication, compression, or S3-compatible access, which is part of most modern SAN feature sets, also in hyper-converged scenarios.

I have been using several editions of the solution for more than five years.

The stability of this solution is vastly dependent on the hardware procured beforehand. Network hardware is especially important, and bad or glitchy hardware (like the Intel X700 or X800 series) can quickly break things. It runs—until it does not. Be sure to learn or consult about the disaster recovery process, especially if you decide on a witness strategy hosted in vSAN.

The software can be pretty scalable; however, after reaching more and more nodes, one may look at StarWind's hyperconverged appliance instead of going through the hassle of administrating separate systems.

They have only friendly and positive experiences, always a helping hand. Also, they are offering proactive support, which, from the experience of some of my colleagues, is an outstanding experience unusual to many professional service providers.

Neutral

We did not use a different solution beforehand.

The initial setup was very straightforward and easy, although one could deep dive into the specific protocol configuration options. Also, I would have liked it if some features or procedures would have been better documented at the time.

We implemented it through our in-house R&D team.

I will not publish accurate numbers. However, the modernization aspect in terms of lab infrastructure and testing/demonstration environments has an educational benefit, strengthening our consultancy, demonstrating capabilities and our mindset towards data center innovation.

I would highly advise new users to consult the StarWind technical team beforehand. 

Also, consider the paid version if you want the ease of management through the console GUI and not just use it for monitoring. 

You can also apply for a testing or NFR license if you want to test it. StarWind vSAN is, by list price, vastly more competitive than some comparable solutions. The setup may be straightforward, fast, and easy; however, it can break things down if not done properly. Before setup, be sure to procure proper hardware components that are not known to cause instabilities.

Due to budget constraints, Ceph has been evaluated as an alternative. We also took a look at Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and VMware vSAN.

Consider StarWind's proactive support. It improves the software's already high value and defuses the long learning curve of some processes! When clustering resources, deeply consider your witness strategy! Especially when you can not guarantee 100% stable hardware (e.g., through firmware issues), this can break things very quickly if you have a witness device in the same vSAN.

This solution was implemented for a Hyper-V production build, where we used StarWind virtual SAN to create and build a redundant DataStor for our clusters. Once this was completed, management and troubleshooting were simple as the application is very user-friendly and highly flexible in terms of configurability. We have never encountered any issues with this product, as it is very reliable.

It has improved our organization in terms of its uptime as our main cluster has never been offline due to a SAN failure. This is a huge plus for us as we need our data available 24 /7. 

There are not many futures I can recall that would stand out to me the most, as the entire application functions as one working function.

It could have a dashboard so that you can check all servers' SAN health and performance.

I have been using this solution for approximately five years.

The solution is very stable.

very good

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution.

Technical support was more or less straightforward.

it was done in-house

We did evaluate VMware.

We use the solution mostly for the backup sections, VTL and Hyper-v physical tape drive pass-through.

I would definitely, recommend this product. I have been dealing with support for over three years and normally support is the biggest grievance we have in the IT industry. However, support is great, including after-sales support. Sales representatives were knowledgeable and very helpful whether you use the free or paid versions.

This is perfect for mainstream organizations. Even small businesses can use it. They 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.

This is a fantastic software that is highly recommended for the virtualization of storage and for backup methodologies.

The VTL feature is useful as StarWind is the only organization that is suited to the business needs of companies that still run legacy EHR systems.

We have over 30 sites that utilize this technology, and it is very simple and easy to use. Installing the software and maintaining it is very simple. Support and after-sales support are amazing.

It has great free trials that allow end users to test a large variety of their products before deciding to buy the full product.

The team is very knowledgeable, helpful, and willing to see if they can cater to your business needs,

I would like them to release a GUI on the free version

They need to build an interface that will interact with the VTL with a media changer.

I would like to see more advanced free versions.

A suggestion box or feedback box would be a good start with the products.

We need the support of newer VTL technologies and older ones, from LTO4 all the way to LTO8, on one interface.

It would be helpful to have integration with a StarWind backup appliance instead of having a second software to manage the VTL files and operations.

They need to allow us to download older versions of the software and licenses.

I have been using the product for over three years now.

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. 

We needed a reliable shared storage solution for our VMware vSphere Essentials solution so we could implement vMotion and High Availability features. We decided to utilise a vSAN solution to reduce costs after looking at the price of external storage solutions.

In our environment, we have a 3-server VMware vSphere Essentials Plus solution that consists of 16 x HDD and 8 x SDD on-server storage. The solution is attached to 1GB network for production but we also have 10GB network connections available for direct-connectivity between servers.

The StarWind vSAN solution was implemented as a hyper-converged solution meaning that everything runs on the VMware vSphere solution. 

The StarWind vSAN solution was implemented according to our project plan with minimal outages to existing workloads. We have had no issues with the solution and it works very well with minimal administrative effort.

Recently, we had a memory failure that caused one of our VMware servers to crash. Due to the shared storage provided by the StarWind vSAN, all virtual machines on the failed server were able to failover to another server. Our helpdesk didn't receive any user complaints during the time that this happened. Once we resolved the issue, the shared storage resynched itself automatically.

We now have the ability to run critical workloads on the VMware infrastructure and have already proceeded to migrate active directory and SAP Business One workloads onto this platform.

We have found the solution surprisingly simple to use. The management console allows us to monitor the solution and we have configured email alerts to alert us about critical issues. These alerts have been proven to work in an actual failure scenario, for example, when we had a memory issue with one of our servers that caused the entire server to crash. The management console also allows us to monitor the solution performance and provides us with access to system logs.

The level of support provided by StarWind both during pre-sales and post-implementation has been excellent. The solution validation session with StarWind engineers was one of the best we have experienced and the vendor has also demonstrated a willingness to create a long-term relationship.

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.

The main thing I would like to see improved is the level of documentation. I had some initial difficulties understanding the solution which could have been solved via additional documentation aimed at newcomers to their solution. Although the solution does admittedly have many moving parts, I found that internal knowledge transfer to my peers was not that difficult. Hence I'm convinced that better documentation would have helped.

I would also like to see a better system implemented for obtaining updates for solution components. The system at the moment works on a request/response model.

We've been using this solution since the start of this year (2021).

The solution has proven to be reliable with the need for minimal administrative effort. During an actual failure with memory on one of our servers, everything worked exactly as planned. We didn't even receive any issues/complaints from users via our helpdesk.

During the solution validation session with the vendor, we spoke about benchmarking the product. After performing the recommended tests, we were satisfied that the solution would meet our performance needs (both in terms of storage and networking).

We haven't had any issues with the solution so have had no need to request service/technical support. However, our experience during our project makes us believe we are in good hands if we ever need anything in the future.

We did not use a different solution. We initially implemented our VMware vSphere Essentials solution using direct storage and didn't have access to features such as vMotion and high availability. The StarWind vSAN solution allowed us to implement shared storage and pave the way to migrate critical workloads onto the VMware infrastructure.

We complicated the initial setup process a bit because we wanted to perform the design, implementation, and migration ourselves. This led to some difficulties in terms of initially understanding the solution. StarWind helped to fill in the gaps and our implementation and migration went completely to plan with little need for downtime. We were able to implement the solution on two servers while keeping our workloads running on the third server. We then migrated the workloads and built the remaining server.

We wanted to perform the design, implementation, and migration of the solution ourselves. We asked for help where needed during the design stage and found the vendor was very knowledgeable and could quickly answer all of our questions. We performed the implementation ourselves and then conducted a solution validation session with the vendor. During this session, the vendor validated that everything was configured according to their best practices and also performed some advanced tuning. We also had an open-ended discussion about how to operate the system. This solution validation session was one of the best I have ever experienced.

The level of support from the vendor throughout the entire project has been excellent and they have been more than willing to develop a long-term relationship. 

We were price-sensitive and wanted to minimize expenditure on additional hardware. The ability to utilize vMotion and High Availability features in our VMware infrastructure has already repaid the cost of the solution.

We found the StarWind vSAN solution was cost-effective compared to alternatives. You should talk to the vendor (or a good partner) about your needs because there are some differences in price based on your environment. We also recommend purchasing support.

In our case, we purchased StarWind vSAN for vSphere Essentials Edition which included 1 year of standard annual support and maintenance.

We initially looked at several external shared storage solutions and found them to be cost-prohibitive. We then evaluated vSAN solutions from HPE (this was discontinued) and the native solution from VMware. The native solution from VMware had fewer moving parts than the StarWind vSAN solution, but was more expensive and didn't provide the required level of flexibility that we needed regarding mixed HDD/SDD storage.

We strongly recommend that you develop a good relationship with the vendor (or a good partner). In our experience, they played a key role in the success of the solution.