StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

StarWind VSAN software was easily deployed on the commodity hardware and integrated into the existing IT infrastructure.

We have used in HyperConvergence and Citrix XenServer installations without any problem.

With our customized hardware, we have very good IOPS and throughput.

This solution has allowed the company to create an HA virtual server environment satisfying budget restrictions and reliability requirements. VM live migration was ensured by StarWind VSAN as well, thanks to building a failover cluster.

The price of StarWind VSAN was another tidbit.

On top of all of this, the StarWind Support Team did everything to ensure that the IT infrastructure was up and running as quickly as possible.

High Availability is the best feature of product. You have redundancy of storage systems at a competitive price. All other storage solutions are very expensive and without redundancy and if you have it the price is very high.

Additionally, the feature of asynchronous replication, both for on-site and off-site systems is very competitive. Also the support of LSFS file system is very good.

Maybe in the future, the replication will be supported in more cloud providers.

I don't think there are features that this product doesn't have it. It has all of the things that a system engineer will want.

I have been using this solution for two years.

This solution has excellent stability.

The scalability is excellent.

In one problem that I with the performance, they gave me a solution very quickly using a remote session.

Before our StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) deployment, we had NetApp, IBM DS Series, and HP StorageWorks MSA1000 storage systems.

They have low performance and no replication (is very expensive).

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward.

We implemented this solution in-house.

The ROI for this solution is very good.

This solution has competitive prices and the implementation is very easy.

We did not evaluate other options. We have only classic storage and filers.

I recommend this solution because it gives me flexibility and expandability.

It works like a charm without any problem or concern.

We were looking for a Microsoft Windows 2016 Hyper-V clustered solution that didn't require an external SAN network. Something that could utilize the local storage on each server, and also allowed us to configure the storage as we required it. We had looked at Storage Spaces Direct, but it was too restrictive in terms of configuration.

We are operational 24/7, every day of the year, so prior to having a clustered system, our users were faced with downtime anytime we applied patches or upgrades to the system.   With the StarWind VSAN software and Hyper-V Guest Cluster, we are able to create an environment where we can perform system updates without any downtime to the users.

We are not a very large organization and have a limited budget available for infrastructure.  

The most valuable feature for us is having the ability to configure our local storage using a limited number of disks and using the StarWind VSAN software to keep the cluster nodes in perfect sync.

The system performs as expected, but we're always looking for performance improvements regarding the best utilization of NVMe disks.

We have not experienced any failures or problems with the software.

It handles our environment very well and I don't see any reason why it wouldn't handle a much larger environment.

Their software support team had been very helpful in the initial setup of the system and also helped to reconfigure the system after we lost one node in the cluster.

Overall, their support has been excellent. They will stick with you until your issues are resolved!

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

Their technical support team was available to install the software both during the demo phase and when we installed the licensed version. It would have been complex for us, as it was our first cluster experience, but their support team made it look easy.

We evaluated Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, but it was too restrictive in terms of configuration.

So far, the software is doing everything we need.

We had to build a highly available Hyper-V cluster.

As I work for a charitable organization, the most important part is keeping costs as low as possible. I have looked into a few solutions and none was as easy to deploy because it allows us to use hardware that we already have and not invest a lot of money. 

Building a High Availability cluster required that we set up a cluster on our hardware and shared space for file access. Using the StarWind VSAN solution allowed us to reduce the cost by using hardware that we already owned. Instead of managing two server boxes, the SAN device, and SAN backup, we have everything included in two servers with shared disk space.

The most important feature is the ability to experience the loss of one node or one storage device, and not lose the entire cluster. This is great if you think about data redundancy and failover. It gives you time to rebuild node that is offline and keep your business running. Time is money!

Scalability is a great feature because if you need more space and more redundancy then can easily add another node!

We would like to see the documentation more fully developed. Most subjects are covered but if you do not know something then you may need to contact their support.

Since the initial setup, I've had no problems with the software. I am constantly checking new versions and what updates it includes. Update one node, then another, and you can forget about it again. To be honest, if you install the current version and it works then you can forget about it right away. This solution just works. I have had no problems at all for the whole time that I've used it.

Scalability is great and easy. You need more space to deploy another node, which gives you more fast storage. Redundancy will also improve.

Customer service is very helpful and polite. They will help you with pricing and to find the proper license that suits your needs.

I have used technical support once for a general question. I received a reponse fast and it was very technical, covering all of the questioned subjects.

I have never used different solutions.

Initial set up was easy and straight forward. Read all of the how-tos and FAQs. Having basic knowledge about the subject will allow you to go through the setup process hassle-free.

I installed everything myself.

I would suggest that you download the free version, deploy in your lab, and play with it. If you like it then you will definitely like the more advanced, full paid version.

I have read about different solutions, especially VMware vSAN. In comparing these two, it is easy to choose StarWind for a company the size of mind, with needs that StarWind can easily cover.

I have done some research on that subject and everything directed me to StarWind VSAN. Now, I can clearly state that I do not regret my decision.

Technical support is the thing that completes a good product. If the software is good but you can also count on fast and accurate resolutions then you have got everything you need.

This tool allows my team to be able to deploy NAS solutions in real-time, virtually, so that we can test those solutions quickly and easily before they are needed to be deployed in the real world.  

The user interface for this application is amazing. It's very easy to learn from the beginning and it has a great introductory period that allows you to get used to everything that the software has to offer. 

I can also say that another big advantage of this application is the amazing customer support that they offer. They are able to answer your questions very quickly, and they are always available at the most important times.

The solution has a great hypervisor storage platform. This saves the costs of having to deploy a physical environment to test. It also allows my team to work from anywhere at any time, which is important in the current times when remote work is vital to the proper workflow at our company.

Having large support for filesystems is important to our organization, as we sometimes use proprietary filesystems like WekaFS for some of the tasks, especially in the era of Exascale computing. Having support for additional features like importing filesystems and being able to do some testing with them is important. Besides not being able to use any filesystem, I do not have any additional cons. 

I've used the solution for one year.

Our primary use case for this product is to obtain high availability for our file servers under the control of the Microsoft Windows 2008 operating system.

We have a ready-made solution for a small cost. This has helped to improve the reliability of service and operation in all departments, without having to stop in case of emergency situations.

The most valuable feature is the ability to offer high availability service without purchasing external storage systems. It is quick, easy, and simple. This is a good, economical solution compared to data storage systems. We saved a lot of money. The system will increase the level of backup, adding an additional copy of the data for the same money.

It would help us if the vendor continues to release software updates for earlier versions of the Windows operating systems. For example, Windows Server 2008 R2. We are sitting on earlier Microsoft products while there is support. This is because of the need for new hardware when switching to new software.

The stability is very good. We have not observed failure in seven years of use.

Scaling this solution is easy and simple.

Support has standard procedures and rules. It was provided at a good level.

We did not use a different solution previously. We switched from a system that did not offer high availability.

The initial setup was simple.

The installation was completed by our in-house team.

Our return of investment on this product is 100%.

My advice is to use all the features of the service, including software updates and technical support.

We did not evaluate other products because this option was the only one available at our cost point.

Overall, this is a good product for good money.

Before, we used a cluster of two Windows servers with shared storage system on a single SAN. One of them was a working clustered SQL server with database mirroring. Every part of the system was redundant except for SAN.

It was almost satisfying.

Every cluster server system we know needs shared storage system. The cluster could be fully redundant, but this redundancy is worth nothing without a redundant storage system.

We had a single SAN system. As a single system, SAN was not redundant. But we needed a redundant storage system. We always were afraid that once upon a time our SAN will stop to work.

We, of course, had backups, but it was not enough.

What we needed was the system with no data loss in case of issues and with no interruption (or only several seconds of interruption) in data processing.

We were looking for a relatively simple and not very expensive solution.

Why have we selected StarWind among other storage solutions? Actually, I don’t know why. Simply, I was looking for a solution using Google. StarWind was the first system I found that gave me hope. When I did some tests with StarWind, I stopped looking for anything more.

Now we have a redundant storage system, so our cluster system is fully redundant. We now have two clusters of two nodes Windows Hyper-V servers with StarWind VSAN working as hosts.

• It was really very easy to implement, but without support, I couldn't optimize the system, and StarWind gave me technical support on a very good level.
• A good price is also considerable.

I would like to have an easy way of automatic notification about issues, even when I'm away. The system has the possibility to send e-mails, but only in an internal mail system. Simply there is no possiblity the e-mail sender to log on smtp server. Several years ago some smtp server didn't require user to log on. But now it's impossible to send e-mail without login on. So if I had my own company internal e-mail server I could use it. Otherwise not. It's not enough for me.

OK.

It's OK.

Support is on a high level.

I've used SAN hardware before with no redundancy.

It was easy. But to achieve optimal performance, I needed support.

In-house.

No idea.

No idea.

I didn't. StarWind was the first solution I found, and after the first tests, I stopped looking at other solutions.

No.

We needed a SAN to support our environment comprised at the time of two Hyper-V 2012 Clusters. We're now migrating to Hyper-V 2019 and we had no issues with the migration from the storage. We use SATA NL and SSD to give our VMs different performance tiers.

Update: We finished the migration and moved all storage iSCSI comms to Mellanox. We have had 0 issues with Starwind. 

StarWind allowed us to deploy SSD storage with very high availabilty at a good price at a time where all other vendors were pushing huge premiums on SSDs. We were also able to deploy different storage tiers with no issues, which was very important to our solution.

Using our own choice of HW allowed us to price our service to answer our customers' needs.

The high availability made sure we never had downtime from it.

Having twin nodes has made maintenance and upgrades easy.

Support has always been great with issues and planning.

Performance when in storage-separate configuration needs to be improved.

The virtualization layers and not having the storage on the same node as compute take a lot of the IOPS we could have on an HCI scenario, but we grew out of it.

We have been using this solution since 2015.

The solution itself is simple and having two separate hosts gives it great availability. There is no single point of failure apart from the software itself and while we had some issues we never lost both nodes.

We only came close when Microsoft introduced a bug that crashed our hosts if they had pending iSCSI connections, and you have those if a node is not synced.

No issues.

They solved our problems, validated our configurations and roadmap, and suggested improvements.

Prior to this solution, we used HPE MSA. We wanted easier tiering, better performance, and not to have everything on one "box".

The initial setup was simple. We chose our HW, validated with support, and had them help configure them.

It's easy to understand and to deploy.

We evaluated solutions by HPE, EMC, and NetApp.

We're satisfied with the features available.