StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

I used their Virtual SAN software to add new SANs to my VMware environment. I began working for a company that had a Virtual Environment already in place and there was no documentation regarding the configuration of the system. The storage was not managed correctly and I had to find a way to make space with what hardware I had at the time.

The storage space in the VMware environment I walked into was mismanaged and we needed immediate access to more storage. There was a Dell PowerVault that had plenty of space, and this software enabled me to make the most of my storage.

Given that I could not purchase new equipment I had to find a way to make this PowerVault become the storage without disrupting things. StarWind Virtual San allowed me to achieve this quickly.

The most valuable feature is the ability to make new SANs on the fly. When we need additional storage but want to keep the size of the SANs manageable, the StarWind Virtual SAN has allowed me to do everything needed. There are times when we still need storage to be controlled and the software allows me to make the needed changes. It can be done right from their application and then pushed directly over to the hosts.

The only thing that I have any difficulty with is that in order to perform upgrades, it is required that the SANs be detached from the Hosts before that can happen.

In my industry, having one hundred percent uptime means that I must either migrate everything off of the existing SANs so I can perform the upgrade, or shut everything down, detach the SANs and then reconnect them after the upgrade is complete.

At this point, while I am running an older version and the features still work within the latest versions of VMware, I won't see it as being a problem until I add more storage to allow for the proper migration and upgrade to happen.

I have never had any downtime. This software has managed the SAN connection to my VMs perfectly for the last four years.

This software has done everything I need. It saved me a lot of time when I was given an extremely short time to add additional space to my Virtual Environment.

I have only needed to reach out to the support team a couple of times since this software was implemented. They responded within a couple of hours and everything was figured out quickly. 

There were no previous solutions in place. The setup of the VM Environment was mismanaged initially. This software helped me regain control of the management of storage quickly. 

Straightforward setup and the configuration was no problem.

We implemented this solution in-house. 

I saw an immediate ROI as I had storage that was not being utilized. Instead of having to spend $10K-$20K to add new storage to the existing environment, wait on the hardware to arrive, and then configure it directly as a new LUN, I was able to use this solution. I purchased the software, installed it on the system that I had with excess space, and created a few new SANs the same day the request was being made with an urgent time frame.  

The timeline to get the storage was extremely limited so I didn't have time to do evaluation testing.

Their support team is terrific. I have only had to reach out to them on a couple of occasions. They responded quickly and helped me to get things resolved right away. 

We have a four-host VMware environment with over one hundred and forty virtual servers that runs everything on our network except for backups and video storage. We are using Dell R730xd servers filled with a combination of hard drives and SSDs, as well as some PCIe storage for high-performance VMs.

We were able to create a much faster SAN with much more storage while saving a lot of money. It cost less to build an entire new SAN based on StarWind than to upgrade our old SAN. Now, when we want to expand, we can add storage in any way we want. This allows us to find the best prices without being tied to proprietary hardware.

The most valuable feature is the fact that the nodes are Active/Active, and allow us to do upgrades on any node without any downtime. This solution runs on standard hardware and allows us to use servers and storage that we already have, as well as non-proprietary hardware that doesn't cost a fortune.

The ability to manage the SAN with vSphere would be nice. It would also be of benefit to have more vSAN-like features, like not having to worry about creating multiple volumes. It would be nice if we could designate pools, or tiers, for storage of different speeds, and then assign rules to new VMs that would automatically place them into the proper pool.

We have found the software itself to be highly stable. It just works.

This solution seems highly scalable, with the only limitations being management after a certain point.

I had some issues, early on, that ended up being hardware issues on my end. The StarWind support people were more than willing to help me out with them, and this including jumping on remote sessions to figure things out whenever I needed help.

We used Compellent (bought by Dell). When we bought it, they discounted it heavily to be competitive, and it was at the low end of what they offered. When we needed to expand it, the costs to do so seemed outrageous.

This initial setup is extremely straightforward. You install the software and then create volumes, which then show up on an iSCSI scan. Nothing complex about it.

We performed the implementation in-house.

We were able to build an entirely new SAN with much greater performance and more capacity for less than the cost of just upgrading our previous SAN, so the ROI was immediate.

The licensing is pretty simple, and the costs are straightforward. Once you buy the license, you are free to build your own hardware solution based on your needs.

We looked at EMC and HP, but both were also much more expensive than a system we could build ourselves based on the StarWind software.

Unless you need a lot of special third-party integration with other systems, it is a great low-cost solution that gives you whatever level of performance you decide, based on your hardware.

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!

We are using a two-node StarWind VSAN cluster on a Dell 720xds. The StarWind VSAN helps us to better leverage the computing power of our ESXi hosts and helped solve the problem of expanding local storage.

StarWind allowed us to deploy highly available shared storage within our budget. Other solutions were far too costly.

The HA clustering and the ability to run on our own equipment have been the most valuable.

I would like to see more monitoring and alert tools. StarWind offers a management console to configure the and monitor the servers, setting up SMTP alerts would be a plus.

We evaluated other options and this one was the most cost-effective.

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 is to create vSAN for a small business environment and to manage it without using a physical SAN.

The managed service helps us to monitor our critical infrastructure.

The most valuable feature is the managed service, which has been an important part of monitoring our critical infrastructure.

I'd like for it to be more user-friendly in the future.

I have never felt that StarWind underperformed or was difficult to manage. The core technology just works. I am very happy that I am part of StarWind.

The team at StarWind are professional and very skilled in a variety of disciplines. The most impressive factor of the StarWind team is its quick response. They are very cooperative.

The setup and configuration for this solution is very easy and user-friendly.

Training provided by them was up to the mark. The documentation provided by them helps us to understand the functioning of the product more precisely.

I have been very impressed with the StarWind application, referring to every parameter. Reliability, cost, and support.

StarWind VSAN is used as shared storage for our Hyper-V cluster. We have two nodes, HDDs in RAID 10. HPE ProLiant servers, Windows Server 2016.

Thanks to StarWind VSAN, we were able to move to a cluster from stand-alone hypervisors with DAS (Direct attached storage). Before VSAN, hypervisor configuration changes and updates resulted in VM outages. Now, downtime is dramatically reduced.

The ability to use existing hardware, with no need to purchase hardware appliances is the most valuable feature. 

The cluster configuration is time-consuming and tedious. StarWind's guide for a two-node cluster can be found at (https://www.starwindsoftware.com/resource-library/starwind-virtual-san-hyperconverged-2-node-scenario-with-hyper-v-server-2016) and it is a long document to work through. I am not sure if it is possible to make the confiugration process more streamlined on generic hardware. This only affects the cluster configuration, not it's production use. I am very satisfied with the StarWind features so far and not interested in additional ones.

The technical support is very good.

StarWind is our first hyper-converged solution.

The licensing is straightforward, with free and trial versions available. 

Use the trial version before buying. Contact StarWind support in case of questions or issues. The support is very good.

Before choosing this solution we evaluated HPE SimpliVity, Scale Computing, and Dell EMC.

In my opinion, StarWind is a great solution for businesses with limited infrastructure budgets.

Our primary use case is data storage. It has helped us to make better strategical decisions, work safely and quickly.

This solution has improved our organization, as it gave us a data storage service that we could rely on and a very sensitive and responsive support service. We are now able to plan better for the future, knowing that support is available.

The access to our data is quicker and cheaper than it used to be in a traditional storage system. It is quite inspiring when you receive quality, speed, and a good relationship with the people in the company.

The most valuable features for our company, Cloud4Y, in this system are:

1. Convenience of work
2. Working speed
3. Usage of SATA for a large volume
4. PCIe Flash
5. A 40 GB Ethernet

In all areas, the product could be made faster.

If any additional features appear, we would appreciate having the service inform us.

We are quite satisfied with the things we have already received, but we
also would be glad to see other inspiring features from a new generation.

We are satisfied by the level of service we got almost six years ago and continue to receive. We were surprised to see a really user-friendly level of communication and a very high level of technical expertise in their specialists.

We are impressed with the working capacity and speed of answers from the support service, as well as their help to install the software we needed. The responses from the support division, and the fact they take into account all our needs and wishes have really inspired us.

Previously, we relied on our own resources. We wanted to work on this with the professionals, so we chose this solution.

The implementation and precise solution were good and fast. We had cooperation from the vendor, and the support was good.

We evaluated other options prior to this, but we didn't like them.

As we now can rely on this company, we recommend that others make the same decision. We would like to add that everyone in our organization has felt the impact of the changes in the services we use and provide.

We also appreciate the long term cooperation that has lasted for years, with a consistent level of service. This allows our company to plan further ahead, as experience has shown that every solution the company provides us is and will remain, satisfying.