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 hardware is located in one of the largest data centers in the country, where we have high availability services for our company. Our internal systems include VPN, hosting services like website, email, database, DNS, FTP/SFTP, and SMB/CIFS.

Replication is between two servers with SAS and SSD storage, based on Dell servers. Network connectivity is 40GE for data synchronization and1GE for the heartbeat, directly connected.

We are using WMware vSphere as a hypervisor. This solution is highly scalable and cost effective.

This solution improves many areas in our company including performance, data availability, and data security.

StarWind VSAN allows us to build high availability and real-time replication, even between two servers. It offers multiple scaling and replication capabilities and includes health and performance monitoring tools. For this reason, we can build highly available services for our company, which are currently essential for the organization's activities.

Our current implementation allows us to maintain the company's production continuity and to maintain constant access to data processed by the company.

The most valuable features are high availability and real-time replication between two servers. StarWind VSAN immediately copies all data to the second server over the 10GE/40GE network to ensure instant failover. Multiple connections can be made for the heartbeat. 

The StarWind Management Console is available only for Microsoft Windows/Windows Server, and should also be available for Linux and macOS, as it would reduce implementation costs.

We have been using StarWind Virtual SAN for one year.

This product is very stable.

The scalability of StarWind Virtual SAN is very good.

StarWind support is amazing. They are helpful and respond very quickly.

Support is available via teleconference, as well as online. They not only assist with the selection of the appropriate solution but also, help with testing and production implementation.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was done via teleconference, which made it very simple.

The vendor team assisted us with deployment using teleconference technology. They have a high level of knowledge and skill.

The StarWind VSAN business model is very cost-effective.

We evaluated VMware vSAN and StorMagic.

The StarWind VSAN product is very well developed in many areas.

In our company, we started searching for a cost-effective SDS solution to include in our portfolio since there aren't many reliable and affordable alternatives around. 

For testing, we've set up a small VMware environment with a couple of VMs and connected to StarWind VSAN through Fibre Channel. This is a common environment for most of our customers, who tend to be SMBs, and their environments go from one to six hosts and one block/file storage, on average. 

However, the most frequent pain point is managing and delivering storage for different applications while maintaining reliability and performance. That’s where StarWind comes into play.

We have come to the conclusion that it fits nicely in small/medium environments that, despite their size, still need a swift and reliable storage delivery while being affordable. 

In smaller markets, like the one we operate in, there’s not much money hanging around to spend on software, especially when SMBs have budget constraints and must choose between keeping IT staff or improving the infrastructure. That said, spending $100k+ on VMware vSAN is madness. 

StarWind VSAN offers an interesting alternative that is both enterprise-level and cost-effective without compromising companies' budgets. Having a free version is also a nice, welcoming sign of commitment.

Being hardware agnostic is a must and definitely scored points for us. Despite our portfolio being a little selective, it was nice to see that our hardware options were also supported and there would be no surprises in the future.

The simple (a little dated, yet easy-to-use) GUI was another good thing. We’re in 2024, and most SMBs can’t afford IT-specialized teams, so they rely on service providers like ourselves to keep things running. 

VMware/Hyper-V compatibility has got us all covered since our customer base all runs on one of those two players. However, after three months of testing, we still haven't tested replication features. We'll do it soon.

The GUI deserves a little love. It is simple and works fine. However, the overall design is a little bit dated. 

Updating the documentation would be welcome, too, since there are docs that point to Windows Server 2016 as the latest version, and the vSphere guide comprises 6.5, while we’re currently on 8. 

Being ZFS-based, it would benefit so much to have deduplication and encryption. Immutability would also be a nice addition as it is a hot topic on data protection, and the solutions that offer it are either too convoluted or too expensive.

I've used the solution for three months.

Our organization was using physical storage platforms where we were facing slowness issues, and the cost of a conventional platform was high. 

We heard about the solution from one of our partners, and we got a demo of the product. 

The core features of the product resolved our issues, like high availability and integration of the solution with the virtual platforms. 

The StarWind Virtual SAN solution is cheap compared to conventional physical storage platforms. StarWind Virtual SAN is a good product when it comes to virtualization.

StarWind Virtual SAN helps us to improve our organization as most of our infrastructure is on the virtualization platform. 

StarWind Virtual SAN helped us in the integration with the virtualization platforms. By using common X86 servers instead of pricey proprietary hardware, StarWind Virtual SAN lowers the cost of storage infrastructure.

It is straightforward to configure, monitor, and administer the storage infrastructure with StarWind Virtual SAN's intuitive administration interface.

When their data storage requirements increase, enterprises may quickly enhance storage capacity with the help of StarWind Virtual SAN without having to pay additional fees for specialized storage gear.

There are different features that helped our organization as compared to conventional storage platforms. These include:

Scalability. Without the need for any downtime, enterprises can simply grow their storage infrastructure using StarWind Virtual SAN by adding new servers or disks to the current infrastructure.

Flexibility. A variety of deployment options, including hyper-converged infrastructure, two-node cluster configurations, and conventional SAN designs, are supported by StarWind Virtual SAN.

Performance. The usage of RAM and SSD caching, as well as the capability to offload storage traffic from the network using RDMA technology, allow StarWind Virtual SAN to operate at a high-performance level.

Cost-effectiveness. By using common X86 servers instead of pricey proprietary hardware, StarWind Virtual SAN lowers the cost of storage infrastructure.

Usefulness. StarWind Virtual SAN offers a straightforward and user-friendly administration interface that makes it simple to set up, keep track of, and administer the storage infrastructure.

The interface of the management console of the StarWind Virtual SAN is complex, and it's difficult for the novice user to interact with the management having less knowledge or training in the product. 

The troubleshooting guide of the product is also for the technical resources. 

The product needs to improve its features in terms of customer support and the management interface. The improvements in the management interface for the product help the user to work with the storage node having less knowledge or interaction with the product.

I have been using the StarWind Virtual SAN solution for the last six months.

Previously, we were using a conventional storage platform, which was costly and not supporting many features. Now, we are using StarWind Virtual SAN, which is more reliable and has many features. 

It works by mirroring data between servers, creating a fault-tolerant storage infrastructure. StarWind Virtual SAN is a cost-effective solution as it uses commodity hardware, such as off-the-shelf servers and disks. This reduces the cost of storage hardware and maintenance. 

We are very satisfied with this product so far.

StarWind Virtual SAN provides a HA feature which actually immediately copies data to the second node over the network and ensures instant failover for our critical applications. 

StarWind Virtual SAN is a software-defined storage solution that helps organizations to reduce costs, improve performance, and increase availability. It works by mirroring data between servers, creating a fault-tolerant storage infrastructure.

StarWind Virtual SAN can improve an organization's storage infrastructure by providing high availability, scalability, cost-effectiveness, performance, and ease of use.

The HA feature is the most valuable to us. Moreover, support services are very satisfactory.  

StarWind Virtual SAN provides high-performance storage by leveraging the resources of multiple servers. 

This improves application performance and reduces latency. 

StarWind Virtual SAN provides the ability to scale out storage infrastructure as our needs grow. By adding more servers, we can increase storage capacity. StarWind Virtual SAN ensures that data is always available by replicating it between multiple servers. This means that if one server fails, data can still be accessed from another server. 

The documentation of StarWind Virtual SAN could be improved to provide more detailed and comprehensive information about the product's features, functionalities, and best practices. 

StarWind Virtual SAN could benefit from better integration with other tools and technologies, such as backup and disaster recovery solutions.  

StarWind Virtual SAN could benefit from better integration with other tools and technologies, such as backup and disaster recovery solutions. 

These are some areas where the product or service could potentially be improved

I've used the solution for one year.

We were using traditional physical storage for our environment, and it was costly for us. On top of that, the performance was not satisfactory. We started using the StarWind vSAN for virtual storage. 

It is cost-effective and has amazing features. The capacity to scale assets to address changing issues and upgrade execution contrasted with conventional capacity arrangements and therefore is another positive aspect when utilizing StarWind Virtual SAN. 

Utilizing the StarWind Virtual SAN gave us a more steady and adaptable arrangement. I noticed a persistent upgrade in the functionalities of the StarWind Virtual SAN, so its development is great.

We were facing issues with high availability and the integration of virtualization platforms then we started using StarWind vSAN to help us improve the high availability and the integration with the virtualization platform. 

StarWind Virtual SAN permitted me to have extraordinary adaptability in making an exceptionally basic framework, where I could gather total independence over vSAN, yet connect it so that it was fit for working with the VMware Hypervisor. That way, I had a more powerful and dependable framework.

The high availability features helped with storage availability 24/7.

Integration with virtualization platforms helped us to resolve many issues we were facing while using the physical storage.

StarWind Virtual SAN is great for a financially savvy arrangement if you're utilizing Hyper-V or VMware. 

Thanks to a simple execution, you can save your expenses and convey the product with your inner sources with the help of a merchant.

The onboarding is effortless. Setting up and designing the Virtual SAN is clear, with an easy-to-use interface that makes it simple to oversee and screen the capacity climate.

We have an elite execution. StarWind Virtual SAN can convey quick, dependable capacity for virtual machines. Its abiluty to use nearby capacity as a component of a profoundly accessible capacity group assists with guaranteeing superior execution.

The platform needs to improve user management and the web console. 

Improved help for more up-to-date advancements would be ideal. As fresher innovations and guidelines arise, it tends to be provoking programming suppliers to keep up. 

While StarWind Virtual SAN, by and large, works effectively to support the most recent advancements, there might be a few regions where it lingers behind the opposition. Further developing help for fresher advances could assist the product with remaining cutthroat and pertinent.

Upgraded investigating capacities are needed. While the product incorporates a scope of symptomatic and investigating devices, there might be a few regions where it very well may be gotten to the next level. For instance, giving more nitty gritty mistake messages or better direction on the most proficient method to determine issues could be useful for clients.

I have been using the StarWind vSAN solution for the last six months and I found this product exceptional and amazing for virtual storage.

We are currently running a Microsoft environment. The Virtualisation stack is currently hosted through Microsoft Hyper-V. We are using local storage and hosting our storage via Starwind Virtual SAN for our production systems.  

Currently, we are only running a two-node cluster to serve our Hyper-V storage. Both nodes are directly connected. This little two-node cluster currently supports all of our offices across the country.  

Our business has a heavy reliance on the systems and systems uptime of 24/7 is required.

Starwind has significantly improved our performance in comparison to our previous environment. Our uptime and our internal SLAs are great. Over the years, it has not failed us once. 

Their support has been amazing and is always there for us when needed. We have worked with various support members over the years and every single one of them knows the product without needing to escalate. Being Hardware agnostic has also helped us a lot to maintain our systems and update to new hardware without worrying about the usual compatibility issues.

Starwind is very easy to configure and even easier to provision.  

Even better is how simple it is to maintain and patch without any downtime.  

Over the years we have updated both the operating system and the hardware on several of our nodes without any downtime incurred.  

The cache features that are available have significantly improved our performance.  

The ability for us to manage all of our nodes from the same console makes systems administration very easy.  

Tasks such as adding, removing, and expanding volumes are very easy.

Starwind Virtual SAN has fulfilled all of our requirements. There is not anything additional we require. The product does everything we need and more.  

If there was one thing we could request, it would be the ability to shrink volumes. For example, we want to be able to decrease in the size of the volume. We understand this is not a limitation in the product as it can potentially cause more problems by leaving things behind. Also, even though we cannot decrease the volume at this time, it is easily addressed by creating a new volume with the appropriate size and migrating data over to it.

We have been using Starwind since 2015.

The solution is very stable. We have not had a single outage or drop due to Starwind.  Software has never crashed or not performed as specified.  Our uptime is only disrupted by server maintenance and scheduled periods.

The product is very scalable as you can add as many nodes as you require along with additional hardware.

In over 20 years of working in the IT industry, I have never encountered better support than I have with the team at Starwind. 

We previously used Microsoft Storage Spaces.

It was as if we didn't need to do anything. Starwind was there from the start to help us provision.

We handled the initial setup all in-house.

I would strongly advise companies to engage with Starwind very early in the design process as they can help with finding the appropriate path. The pricing model is very simple.

We evaluated HP SAN, Nutanix, and Dell Storage.

We are running Dell PowerEdge Series as Hyper-V hosts with StarWind providing a virtual SAN infrastructure to allow for CSVs and data replication between the hosts without having to add dedicated storage hardware.

This serves to allow us to have a fault tolerance of suffering not just a drive loss (RAID Configurations on each server allow for that) but it also allows for the loss of an entire server since we are running N+1.

The servers are directly connected to one another using 10GB NICs, allowing for fast connectivity and support for direct wiring. This meant that we did not have to invest in a dedicated 10GB SAN switch, either.

Prior to the implementation of this solution, our servers were all standalone Hyper-V Hosts. VMs resided on a host and were unable to live migrate or sustain connectivity when a host had a reboot or maintenance item.

StarWind vSAN has allowed us to leverage our server infrastructure more completely without the need to add more hardware.

The failover ability has proven useful already in maintaining connectivity to VMs during a power event that impacted one host. VMs failed over immediately and the data replication brought the downed host back to fully synced status quickly after reboot. 

The ability to utilize my onboard disk from the Hypervisor hosts, not requiring the purchase of dedicated SAN hardware, SAN switching, etc., is a real cost value.

The replication of data between the hosts that StarWind does also allows us to create redundancy since we are able to operate at an N+1 configuration. This feature allows for much greater fault tolerance than we have had before.

I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues.

It has been a few months since we implemented StarWind Virtual SAN.

The support team, from implementation to general operating questions, has been an incredible value add and well worth our support contract already.

Not at this employer,  but my experience previously does include HP, Dell, EMC, and Nimble hardware-based SAN units.

The initial setup was straightforward. StarWind provided good documentation and access to engineers to help guide the process at each step.

StarWind provided guided installation with an engineer. He was quite well prepared and great to work with on the project.

The support contract is well worth it. The price for it was very reasonable and their team has been very engaged whenever we reach out.

I did preliminary pricing on HP, Dell & Nimble, but the costs associated with hardware were going to present a challenge to our school at this point.

As of this time, I really do not have a wishlist of features beyond perhaps some automated notifications of any changes, sync issues, etc. That being said, we have not had any operating issues come up that I would have really needed automated alerts for, so this would just be a wish list item.

From what we have implemented, we are not finding any lacking features or issues with our configuration that we would like to see improved. If this changes over time, I would certainly update my opinion, but for what was advertised, we feel like this is a pretty stable product that is meeting its goals.