StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

I'm running StarWind VSAN in an Hypercoverged virtualization cluster. The capability of running the software on top of a general windows os gives me the ability to create a fully redundant SAN solution on almost every virtualization platform. I'm using the software to provide core infrastructure services like AD, DNS, DHCP to my users. Every service is automatically fully redudant thanks to VSAN and in the event one host goes down VMs will be automatically restarted on a second node with a little downtime.

The product improves my company's data redundancy by avoiding storage vendor locking and improves the performance and availability of our Customer's Services. We don't need at all of the expensive storage appliances like EMC or HP by using standard x86 servers to provide the same level of data security. We could then lower the prices of hardware support contracts by simply using StarWind VSAN on top servers like Dell PowerEdge or HP ProLiant. The ability to sync data on two servers gives users a perfect disaster recovery plan at almost no cost.

• The ability to run the software virtually on every virtualization platform and the ability to eliminate all storage vendor locking are the most valuable features. 
• The capability of creating a hot copy of my data on another piece of hardware and continually sync it. 
• The ability to increase the performance of reads and writes thanks to data caching and load balancing on the two hardware nodes. 
• The capability to implement an asynchronous replication on the third node outside my main data center in order to create a disaster recovery solution.

Management tools could be improved, sometimes the usage seems to be slowed down and confusing. A native web interface could also be an option. I love to see in the future port of the software on a general Linux distribution like RedHat or Ubuntu in order to avoid windows license costs. I would also like to see features like erasure coding implemented. On the VSAN software, I would like to see some improvements in the storage pools (eliminate the usage of the file as a data container and use the raw partition).

I've been using the product for two years.

We are using VSAN in our private cloud environment to provide highly redundant CSVs to a Hyper-V Cluster. We are using a converged environment so we have two commodity grade servers setup as a highly available StarWind cluster, then we have numerous Hyper-V compute nodes which access CSVs from the StarWind cluster. 

We are able to use Veeam to backup and replicate the VM files from the CSV/cluster.

We use off the shelf 10 GbE SPF+ modules and off the shelf 10 GbE switches.  With MPIO, we were able to create a redundant network infrastructure to support our SAN network. 

We were previously using Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, but that product was unreliable and practically unsupported by Microsoft. We were able to leverage our previous hardware capital investment and converted our infrastructure to use StarWind VSAN. The migration process was simple, and afterwards, we had a highly reliable SAN system. 

We've always wanted to deploy a software-defined storage system, as proprietary SANs do not meet our requirements. They are expensive and very inflexible. StarWind has been excellent.

The highly available feature between two nodes works without any issues. We have practiced DR scenarios and our CSV/cluster has always stayed online. The software has the ability to "elect" a master after a failure of one or two nodes, then it will resync after that without issue.

The management interface on the software is very simple. It is insanely simple compared to most SANs. The interface is also powerful when used to complete tasks that an IT administrator needs to complete.

The ability to use off the shelf hardware (servers, RAID cards, SSDs, etc.) is also invaluable in terms of cost and flexibility. 

A duplication feature inside of a CSV would be very useful. I'm sure there are a lot of duplicated blocks on a CSV that have 75 VMs of Windows Server.

StarWind relies on the underlying OS to manage the "SAN files" whether that would be a RAID volume, software RAID (such as LVM), etc. It would be useful if StarWind could incorporate the actual physical drive management inside of the solution, similar to Storage Spaces Direct.

A web interface for management and StarWind SNMP MIBs would also be very useful.  

One year.

The solution is very stable.  We have tested storage network outages with failure of one or two nodes. The solution is able to stay online or repair itself with ease. 

The storage is as salable as your underlying storage. If you are using hardware RAID cards, then you are somewhat limited for expansion, etc. It is still much better than proprietary SANs. 

Support has been very good. I regularly schedule off hours support sessions and their team has never complained. 

We previously used Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct but had numerous reliability issues with the solution. It was definitely not ready for a production environment. 

Setup was somewhat complex, but StarWind works with you the entire way and handles nearly all of the setup. 

We worked directly with StarWind. The experience was excellent. 

Less than one year. 

The premium support from StarWinds is a must have. The ability to have access to a storage engineer 24/7 is a must for a production environment. 

We had thought about proprietary SANs, but those didn't fit our requirements for cost and flexibility. 

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.

We needed to deploy the new infrastructure in our new data center as soon as possible. As a reliable, fault-tolerant storage, we chose StarWind solution. I took two old Supermicro servers and installed them in RAID controllers and SSD drives, then installed Windows Server 2012 R2 with the Hyper-V role. Then, I made StarWind the two-node iSCSI target. The servers were connected to the VMware cluster via the iSCSI 10 GbE interfaces. The storage showed very good speed results with SQL databases, file servers, and MS Exchange, which completely satisfied us.

This solution made it possible to deploy a new infrastructure in the shortest amount of time, at a low cost without purchasing expensive hardware storage, and use unused servers. As a result, we got a reliable fault-tolerant storage with good performance and placed virtual machines that are important for business on it. This solution has been working for several months without a single failure. 

It has a nice, simple control panel. You can clearly see the state and health of storage along with the synchronization. 

StarWind installs on the Windows Server host where I can monitor RAID using various software already installed in my organization. 

• Easy to install and configure.  
• A lot of documentation, video instructions, and excellent technical support. 
• The ability to install on almost any type of equipment, including legacy. 
• Fast delivery compared to hardware storage facilities, which have a delivery time of four to six weeks.
  

I would like to see all the network adapters in the console with their assigned roles as sync, Heartbeat, and iSCSI, then their link speeds and real-time loading.

In the next release, they could make some graphs of the real-time loading, speed of storage, and interfaces. Of course, these can be viewed in other places. But, in the event of a malfunction or troubleshooting, this would be convenient.

Three months.

For three months, there has not been a single failure. Testing was performed and restarting one server did not affect the performance of the storage and important virtual machines.

I didn't have that task.

They are very friendly and have quick support.

No, I haven't used such solutions before.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I installed everything myself. Later, the technical support connected with me and to the servers to inspect the installation.

This is the best priced solution for an SMB.

This is a very good solution for small businesses.

We also considered the option of VMware vSAN, but it is very expensive.

Everything works. I am completely satisfied with the reliability and speed.

We have a fault-tolerant infrastructure, consisting of two storage nodes hosting the VM's storage and two Hyper-V nodes.

It has given the company an almost zero possibility of downtime.

The most valuable features are:

1. Easy implementation
   
2. Great Support
3. It doesn’t break the bank

New versions of this solution should be tested more thoroughly before the release, as we had a few problems with one version due to a bug.

I have been using StarWind Virtual SAN for four years.

Our company, an IT integrator in Ukraine, conducted a pilot deployment of five two-node Hyper-V failover clusters with CSV build with VSAN for Microsoft Hyper-V. Each cluster consisted of only two hardware nodes with redundant 10Gb/s direct DAC links (no switch) and 1Gb/s uplinks. After four months of testing, we have no doubt in using this exact solution in our customer’s production environment.

We are going to deploy three similar installations this year. Also, we are planning to test the new VSAN for VMware vSphere.

Being able to create reliable virtual environments with less hardware and no need to pay for expensive enterprise or datacenter grade software. This expends our portfolio with a solution for those customers with low budgets and a lack of highly qualified administrators.  

The most valuable features are:

• Clear licensing model;
  
• Rich PowerShell integration for scripting and testing;
  
• No need for RAID controller-level mirroring and BBU. Thus we significantly increase effective storage space and speed;
• Great synchronous replication speed in addition to RAM volume cache;
• Reliable failover solution with MPIO which requires just two servers running Windows Server 2019, Standard edition.

If we could get more within its price, it would be useful to:

• Be able to collect operational logs with external dedicated syslog or SNMP servers;
• Be able to encrypt separate LUNs/iSCSI targets with a key stored on external KMS/KMIP servers;
• Being able to run StarWind vSAN on top of any free UNIX operating system to build a resilient iSCSI/FTP/SMB storage system would be useful.

I have been using StarWind Virtual SAN for four months.

Previously, we had to use Storage Spaces Direct or VMware vSAN for similar projects. Those two are worth mentioning, but they are more expensive and have a larger administrative footprint.  

Fast and simple installation using GUI with all required manuals, video guides, and a great support team explaining every step of a process. There is no need for highly qualified professionals.

The cost, including OPEX, is lower compared to other solutions.

StarWind vSAN is a great solution to create a redundant two-node-only Hyper-V cluster, both for domain or workgroup scenarios.

You should be totally sure to avoid "split brain" in a two-node clustering with a redundant heartbeat, but without any external witness/arbitrator it is not against the solution`s concept.

We have set up a dual StarWind SAN with a fault-tolerant volume for our critical virtual servers in addition to some non-fault-tolerant volumes for less critical virtual servers in both our corporate HQ and one of our large divisions. The corporate site is using Hyper-V and the other division using VMware ESX. Between the two sites we have 15+ physical servers with over 150 VMs running.

Our corporate site uses Dell servers w/SAS drives for the two StarWind nodes and the division site built two white box type servers using NAS-specific SATA drives. Both solutions have been outstanding.

The StarWind SAN solution has provided numerous benefits to our organization. First of all, the fault-tolerant volume has saved us twice from hardware failures maintaining the volume without any loss of service or data. In addition, having a centralized SAN has provided outstanding flexibility to our virtual infrastructure. Setup and management of the system are very easy and customer support has always been very responsive and thorough. Management of the StarWind system is mostly non-existent because once it is set up, it just runs.

The fault-tolerant volume has been wonderful and provides peace of mind. We have experienced multiple hardware failures at one site and the fault-tolerant volume worked exactly as expected with zero downtime. I really appreciate how easy it is to use the software and set up a fault-tolerant volume.

If there was one feature I would like to see it would be a built-in subsystem for managing UPS backups shutdown procedures providing a way to initiate VM shutdown on all host servers, shut down the host servers, then put the fault-tolerant mirroring in standby, and finally shut down the StarWind SANs. 

We have been using StarWind Virtual SAN for more than six years.

Stability has been rock solid. The only failures we have experienced have been in hardware, and the fault-tolerant volume worked exactly as expected.

Scalability is great.

Customer service has always been excellent. 

We previously used Openfiler then moved to Open-E, and finally Starwind. I would highly recommend StarWind and have in many cases, including for our corporate HQ when we were acquired.

Setup was easy and support is always helpful with any questions or even to walk you through the setup if you are a novice. 

We implemented using our in-house IT.

Before we purchased StarWind, we evaluated several software solutions and a couple of hardware solutions. In the case of the software solutions, StarWind was the clear winner in performance and ease of use. In comparison to the hardware solutions, it was a lot more economical.

We fully evaluated Open-E and StarWind. StarWind was both easier to set up and manage, and it also outperformed Open-E.

StarWind has been an excellent solution for our virtual storage needs. There are features like remote replication that we don't currently use but could provide excellent disaster recovery for a remote site.

I started using this product when I had challenges with failover as one of the requirements for my client. I had to deploy the failover environment but the challenge was mirroring of the servers.

Now that I have implemented StarWind, everything is running perfectly.

The product I had bought for the client mirrors from one server to another. This means that an application installed on server A can still be accessed on server B. In my case, I had an access control system installed in one server but mirrored on the other server.

The most valuable features are easy installation, the appearance of the dashboard, the software runs as a native hypervisor component or in VM, and it does not require any deep storage and network administration or UNIX management skills.

A typical system administrator with minimal experience in Hyper-V, VMware, or Windows can do VSAN configuration and maintain VSAN operations.

This solution should be more self-sufficient, running without creating domains or failover clusters.

I have been using StarWind Virtual SAN for three months

The system is very stable.

Performance is uncompromised by the minimalistic hardware footprint, as well as the reduced deployment and management costs. StarWind VSAN brings to the table server-side flash and memory caches, log-structuring, and an absolutely minimalistic I/O path. The resulting performance is unmatched by either typical virtual appliances or physical shared storage.

I did not use another solution prior to this one.

The initial setup was easy and step-by-step, following the manuals.

Licensing is easy and the whole package is cost-effective.

I was directly recommended by the manufacturer.

For now, StarWind has satisfied my needs, as my requirement was to create a failover environment for the servers, also allowing the system to run with less administration.