StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

This solution provides us with high availability and failover with fault tolerance across two nodes. Implementing a highly available environment made way more sense to our company using StarWind’s Virtual SAN than other SAN or virtual SAN solutions we looked into over the past few months.

It allows me to configure high availability and failover clustering with some fault tolerance, at a cost point that doesn’t break the bank for a small business budget.

Doing failover testing, things have worked pretty flawlessly.

The support for two-node implementation was great.

I would like to see some additional, and possibly clearer, implementation videos with some slower and possibly more detailed descriptions of what the various steps of implementation are for someone who is unfamiliar with high availability and failover clustering in Windows.

I have been using StarWind Virtual SAN for two months.

This is a very stable solution.

Scalability is excellent.

The technical support team is very knowledgeable.

I did not use another solution prior to this one.

The initial setup was straightforward.

I was able to implement this configuration following a couple of online guides from StarWind and a couple of third-party articles. I also had the StarWind support team available to me if/when I had any issues.

We implement this solution in-house.

Within days, maybe weeks. How much is uptime worth?

There are two tiers of support and in my opinion, support is worth the cost.

I did not evaluate other products before choosing this one.

My advice for anybody who is considering this solution is to give it a try.

Implementing a UPS along with it is a good idea.

We use this solution for SAN storage. We have a two-node Microsoft Windows 2016 full SSD (SATA) configuration with RAM cache (500GB each node), and iSCSI to connect HA virtual clusters. Using Mellanox network technology with two 100Gbit switches in HA mode. Also, we have more than sixty MSSQL databases hosted.

Virtual SAN has improved stability, performance, and maintenance cost. This is a great solution for replacement "Hardware", both entry-level and some mid-storage. It allows you to use ANY consumer or enterprise HDDs and SSDs, and that's a really great thing!  

The Price/Performance ratio for this solution is outstanding!

You can use most of the modern hardware. You are not restricted to use "not compatible" disks by a vendor. It has great scalability and replication features to allow building really fault tolerant solutions in your IT environment. 

I would like to see full support for iSER. This time, technical support does not recommend using iSER on NICs except on an internal (StarWind Node-to-StarWind node) connections.

High availability for direct attached hardware drives (without virtual disk layer) could be useful to increase the performance of StarWind virtual storage cluster. 

This solution is very stable.

The scalability of this solution is great!

Our primary use case is for a distributed virtual SAN over two data centers. Virtual SAN uses three servers in two data centers.

Technically the change is enormous and the operational risk in case of disaster has been minimized. The monitoring is simple and the user interface is intuitive. The solution is stable and the upgrade was done without downtime. Now, the data is distributed on both data centers and data loss is not an option.

This solution has a very good user interface, with simple administration/management.

We find the support for NFS and iSCSI valuable. This solution is practically independent of hardware (if all of the technical prerequisites are met). It supports asynchronous replication, cloud storage, deduplication, and compression.

This product could be improved with the inclusion of new health check procedures. Operations performed in distributed file systems are complex and in case of network outage admins rarely know what is going on. Any kind of simple UI for admins is better than nothing. Something that would admins give fast, easily understandable information about status and rebuild status etc.

Technically, the solution works as described/expected.

This solution is very stable. The upgrade was done online with no downtime.

This solution can be expanded to a large environment when needed.

We were really positively impressed with the support and help they offered (purchased with the product - with no additional charges).

Their pre and post-sales support were partly the reasons that we choose this solution and overall I would rate their support as excellent.

Before we implemented StarWind Virtual SAN, we used scripts and backup software. This was more of a temporary solution than a proper solution for a production environment.

The initial setup is straightforward but we tested (evaluation) in a test environment.

Direct contact with the vendor (best option).

StarWind is best price/performance for SMB.

We evaluated other solutions including SimpliVity and VMware vSAN, but StarWind Virtual SAN was on top (best choice). This was not just because it fit our budget, but for their pre and after sales support.

We spent time evaluating this product and there is no doubt that the choice to implement this solution for production was the right one.

My advice is to call (contact) them and they will answer your questions to help you find a proper solution.

Our primary use case of this solution is the deployment of a highly-available Microsoft Hyper-V environment. Using the StarWind Virtual SAN product allowed us to deploy a Hyper-V cluster that provides uninterrupted failover between nodes that would have otherwise not been possible. Additionally, we have implemented the same redundancy on our dedicated file storage systems.

The Virtual SAN product has greatly improved the organization's infrastructure by allowing us to create a scalable, highly-available, and cost-effective storage system. It has integrated flawlessly into our Microsoft Hyper-V environment, which, among other limitations, previously required manual intervention to move virtual machines. Our file storage systems also benefited tremendously from the seamless failover we were able to deploy with StarWind.

The product's core feature of virtualizing our storage is by far the most valuable. The abstraction allows us to use commodity hardware, and upgrade/modify it on demand without impacting SLAs. It also provides a high degree of mobility, as the virtual SAN can be moved relatively painlessly between on-site devices and the cloud.

It's been a while since I checked the associated PowerShell module, but I would like to see an extensive set of cmdlets that could allow for easier automation as well as status management. 

No, the only bug that was encountered over the course of several years was due to our negligence in updating the software in a timely manner. Support engineers were very knowledgeable and able to pinpoint the issue quickly.

No, we can add additional nodes and hard drives at will without downtime. This is the beauty of virtualizing the storage.

Technical support has been fantastic on the very few occasions we've had to call them. The engineers aren't just well versed in the product, but also in Microsoft systems as well as storage/networking architecture.

Response times have been fast, and the support engineers follow-up consistently to make sure the issue is resolved.

Yes, we were using a non-clustered Hyper-V setup. The two main problems with that deployment that caused us to switch were:

• Single points of failure in both our virtualization and storage systems.
  The loss of one node in either system didn’t allow for seamless failover.
  

The initial setup was very straightforward and quick. The engineer used a remote session to quickly get the environment configured and provided insight into the architecture. 

Implementation was handled by an in-house team with help from the StarWind engineer.

Our ROI has been very impressive, as the only recurring costs have been the support contracts. As hard drives become cheaper and cheaper, expanding the capacity of our systems has been trivial.

As a nonprofit with a limited budget, we are very satisfied with the licensing model provided by StarWind. The initial setup was quick and mostly effortless. Additionally, the support has been superb on the few occasions we've had to reach out to them.

We were unable to evaluate other options because the dedicated SAN systems that provided the same level of redundancy were out of our price range.

The product is solid, simple to use, and well engineered. Very impressed and looking forward to future releases.

The use of the StarWind solution does not have to be just a strictly IT domain.
In my case, we needed to find and implement a solution that guaranteed the supervision of security systems in the scenario of a full disaster of our main center of supervision.
To achieve that, we needed to use technology that would give us fast and reliable data replication between two supervision centers and would not ruin our security department budget. On the other hand, the solution must be easy to administrate with the tools we had.

StarWind Virtual SAN was a bulls-eye. Now, we can transfer the full spectrum of information to remote infrastructure that allows us to ensure continuity, which means better security for the company. The StarWind Virtual SAN management console is intuitive and easy to use.

Since the implementation of StarWind Virtual SAN, we achieve fast and reliable data replication in the full spectrum. The main operations security center is backed up to maintain the continuity of security systems operations in case of loss of the main operations center.

The most valuable feature is the fast and reliable data replication between main and backup operations centers using a virtual environment.

Second: Good price :-) 

Third: The StarWind Virtual SAN management console is intuitive and easy to use in day to day administration.

It would be great if the Linux version of the management console offered the same features as Windows.

StarWind Virtual SAN meets all of the expectations in terms of stability for data replication and failover tests.

The scalability is very good.

Our experience is that we get a fast response from technical support.

No other solution was used for data replication.

The initial setup was straightforward.

Implementation was performed through a vendor team with a high level of experience.

This solution has a great price for the functionality.

No other options were evaluated.

In my case, in the day-to-day use, I don't see much area for improvement for StarWind Virtual SAN solution. It's fast, reliable, and almost meets all of my expectations.

We needed to consolidate our physical servers, so we went with the StarWind cluster to virtualize our servers.

We went down from eight discrete servers to two, so it's saving us money and electricity in cooling.

It's definitely saving us a bunch of time as far as server maintenance is concerned, because it's all virtualized. I would guess it saves us a good 20 to 30 hours a year, just in maintenance. 

We've also seen some performance gains over accessing the discrete servers, approximately five to ten percent faster access times to data. It has helped to maintain high-performance and data high-availability on minimalistic resources by doing load-balancing and resource-sharing seamlessly. The user never sees any downtime, any performance issues. It's just all done very well behind the scenes.

There's also a peace of mind aspect, knowing that we have failover now. Before, if a server went down, it could take days to get things back up and running, whereas now, if a VM fails, it's just minutes to get it back up and running.

One of the most valuable features is the way it sets up the virtual SAN, because we don't have to buy a separate appliance for storage. It uses the existing storage on the servers, which is definitely a cost savings for us.

The documentation could be a little more concise, but, for the most part, it just works.

It's a very stable platform. The only way you can really break it is if you do something that you shouldn't, like shut a server, shut one of the nodes down without moving your VMs to the other node first.

As far as scalability goes, especially with adding storage, it's dirt-simple. It's so easy to do. I'm very impressed with that aspect of it.

StarWind Proactive Support is fairly responsive. They definitely go above and beyond to address the issues, when there are issues. We had a minor crisis a few months back, and they spent hours on the phone with me over a weekend to get our servers back up and running. The quality of service is really good.

If I were to say anything - not so much critical - there is a language barrier to overcome, but that's a minor issue. It doesn't affect their knowledge, ability, or willingness to help. It's just sometimes a little difficult to communicate adequately.

We did not have a previous solution. We went with it for virtualization, and we chose StarWind because it was a software-only solution and we could use off-the-shelf hardware. Everybody else that I looked at was basically selling appliances. They were just outside of our budget.

The initial setup was a little complex, just to get the cluster configured, the iSCSI, etc. That was a little bit confusing because I had conflicting documentation.

Overall, our deployment took about three weeks. Our implementation strategy was to get the StarWind cluster built, working, and tested before virtualizing our servers, and then migrating them a couple at a time.

We set it up ourselves.

Their pricing seems pretty good, and their licensing structure is pretty straightforward.

We looked into Nutanix, as well as Red Hat's solution, but StarWind seemed to be the best setup for us, the best fit for our environment.

Definitely get a trial license. I'm pretty sure they still have a free version that you can download. Set it up in a sandbox and see if it makes sense for your environment. The great thing about it is it is all Microsoft-based, so if you're familiar with Hyper-V, then it's really pretty simple.

In terms of our users, it's pretty much just me managing it. It's running our production environment. Ideally, I'd like to add our third node this year so that I have extra available overhead so that we can be more proactive with maintenance, etc.

I would rate StarWind at eight out of ten. There's always room for improvement.

StarWind VSAN eliminates the NAS/SAN as a single point of failure. It's an affordable synchronous HA storage solution which allows us to use extremely fast direct-attached SSD storage in an HA environment. 

• We have deployed StarWind VSAN for several customers. 
• Super affordable HA solution for SMB private cloud infrastructure. StarWind VSAN is our go-to solution.

Support is outstanding, responsive, and goes above and beyond. They were able to help with some existing AD issues that would typically be out of scope.

I would like additional documentation regarding possible networking configurations with 10GbE switching.

Their support goes above and beyond with the integration of their software.

• It is a fairly straightforward product. 
• The support is great.
• It just works. 
• It meets all my criteria for success.