StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

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.

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 StarWind vSAN has been to reinforce networks for our clients in a two-node Hyper V setup by utilizing the Hyperconverged configuration. This enables us to create a failover cluster for a cheaper cost than purchasing a physical SAN (plus adds more redundancy as you technically get two vSANs as each host becomes a vSAN). The Failover Cluster then allows us to live-migrate Virtual Machines when required, for example, for maintenance, or in the event that we suffer hardware failure on one of the hosts.

It enables us to provide more solution options for our clients, with the reassurance that, when implemented, they will be efficient and stable. Unfortunately, due to the cost of it and the size of our clients, we find that we can't always use it. However, it's an option that we know is always available and one that we'd leap to recommend if the scenario can fit it. Personally, it's something I'd always want to implement, as, without it, most clients with two Hyper V hosts can only replicate virtual machines and not live migrate. 

The extra redundancy in a two-node hyper-converged setup has been the most valuable feature. If we wanted this with an actual SAN, we'd need to purchase not only one but two SANs and enable replication between the two. With StarWind, you get the vSAN replicated between the two hosts out of the box. The vSAN also offers fine-tuning options for the replication between these hosts. For example, if there was a host failure and we were to run off one for a period of time, once the secondary host is recovered, it will need to resync with the one that stayed up so that the data is up to date. You can choose whether to prioritize the replication speed or performance of the virtual machines. 

For me, the product could be improved by it being made cheaper. We can't use this as an option for some of our smaller clients. Being able to replicate RAM between the hosts would be a nice feature so that VMs could be live-migrated fully in the event of a full host failure. Currently, the vSAN offers the ability to live-migrate the virtual machine as the VHD is on shared storage, however, if the virtual machine were to be rebooted, it would lose the running configuration (e.g. memory, etc). If this could also be live-migrated, that would be gold. 

I've used the solution for two years.

We didn't have another solution previously. This was our first vSAN experience.

I tend to deal with the technical side more and stay away from the pricing.

I can't recall seeing anything else that caught my eye.

Overall, I really enjoy this product. It's easy to use and support is fantastic.

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.

As traditional storage is too expensive, our clients are looking for a more affordable solution. If you compare StarWind to EqualLogic EMC or NetApp, it's a cheaper option.

Updating the software can be a bit tricky. You have to go down scripts to put it in maintenance mode, etc. It takes a while to update. From my experience, I think that's a thing that they need to improve on.

Every time I put it in maintenance mode, all of the replications stop. If they could fix this, it would be a great product.

We've been using StarWind Virtual SAN since June 2020.

Scalability-wise, it's hard to say because I haven't really added anything. 

Most of the information was quite clear on their website. The knowledge base is quite sufficient with all the info required. For this reason, I haven't had to contact technical support.

It's quite easy to install. Also, the configuration and documentation guide from their site was quite good.

We don't need maintenance. We do it ourselves. As I said, it's pretty straightforward —  standard, to install. It's not complex.

I think the cost of this solution is quite fair.

Make sure to consider the requirements of your environment. If you're in a high-performance-driven environment, I don't think this is the right solution. In this case, I would go with a traditional storage solution because you'll get better performance out of a physical one. For me, it's just a cheaper solution that doesn't require indigenous apps, etc.

I would not go for enterprise deployment. I'll go with the traditional one. Make sure your requirements fit with what you want to buy.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight.

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.