StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

We are a gold mining partnership in Malartic, Québec where we are working 24 hours a day and seven days a week. About 1500 people are on our sites, 900 user computers and 100 different virtual servers run to maintain the production area. Single point of failure, no real-time synchronization with our disaster recovery site, and we are unable to make updates and upgrades without any cuts on the production infrastructure.

We can have two sites with real-time synchronization and no more single point of failure. Moreover, we can make updates and upgrades during any hour without cuts on the production infrastructure. All working perfectly, and we are able to make updates and upgrades without any cut on our current production where we work 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Real-time synchronization to make sure we don't have a single point of failure because our company works seven days a week, 24 hours a day, and doesn't have the time to cut the production infrastructure.

Central management webpage should be a must-have. We have three different sites where we use VSAN, and a single webpage to manage everything is necessary. For example a website where I can add each cluster and manage everything in one place rather by each physical server.

Started with a trial and then moved to the paid version. I have a 3 node cluster, (20) 1TB spinning drives, RAID 0, (3) 800 GB SSD drives, RAID 5 and 18GB RAM cache per node. Using 10G Infiniband for the iSCSI & SYNC network loops. This is to support local disks of VMware Horizon View full clone desktops.

• Very fast (replaced EMC SAN). Ultra reliable. I had many, many problems with one of the hosts (ended up being a motherboard) and I never lost a thing. Once you get used to it, it is fairly easy to manage, and the tech support is stellar.

• I would love to give it more RAM. Even marginal increases in RAM yield dramatic results. No more boot storms.

• Because of the way VMware has shuffled license "classes" over the years we got ripped off not getting the native VMware vSAN. It seems that maybe for our use case StarWind VSAN is even better and compared to re-negotiating VMware licenses cheaper.

Performance, reliability, I love the management console (once I got used to it). It works and it works well. Maybe not exactly a feature but tech support is beyond great. It is fantastic. The techs are supportive, understanding and really care about your implementation. I feel they really want to see you succeed. I'm so pleased with the tech support that I consider it better than any feature.

• The documentation is sub-par. The pre-sales documentation and information is sub-par.
• StarWind is not cheap. It is not hard to set up but not a cakewalk either. Having tech support set you up is certainly a good value. I would say the performance cost ratio is great, if not fantastic. Be sure to plan well and ask lots of questions.

• Next release needs to include complete documentation. Even if it's download only or even optional.

As I mentioned earlier in my review - one of my nodes had a sick motherboard. it would reboot for no good reason and the most inopportune times. With StarWind HA enabled it wouldn't miss a beat. VM's vMotioned across, storage was stable and when the host came back everything was always OK. Not the ideal way to test stability but it passed the test nonetheless.

I am planning on adding another node to the cluster in the coming weeks. It will be compute only and we will be adding (2) Infiniband switches to support that additional host. Note: only need a switch on the iSCSI side. The sync side will not be involved.

Seems that 2 node to 3 node is relatively easy. And 3 nodes or less and you don't need a 10G switch for your fabric. Gives you some options. Beyond that I'm not real sure.

Tech support is fantastic. As I mentioned I consider StarWind tech support one of the main features. And if the poo poo hits the fan they will back you up and get you going quickly.  I did have issues with quotations from customer support. But we worked it out in the end.  

We used a conventional hardware SAN. EMC VNXe. It was end of life and I even tried replacing it - EMC could not make it work right. It kept dropping connections. I kept running the old VNXe and discovered StarWind VSAN. Glad I did.

It was complex and had many steps and procedures but if you don't start with the FREE version they walk you through each step and procedure. I did it the hard way of course. 

I am the team. I did it in house. Then when we moved over to the paid version tech support helped me correct anything that was missing or wrong. 

I don't know.

Be very clear in what you want. I was misquoted what I needed and ended up having to go back to the boss two times. And was running crippled while doing that. It was not pretty. Make sure they know what you have and what you want. Especially sizes. --This really only applies if you do the FREE method first.  

I thought about another SAN but just didn't want to go down that road. The cost to upgrade my VMware licenses to get vSAN from them just didn't seem worth it. 

I think StarWind is a serious contendender. Especially if you don't have the right VMware licenses. But even then - I'm running a 3 node cluster and don't need a separate "witness" box. If you're an SMB and doing VMware you need to consider StarWind as your SAN solution. 

We're using it in our DR site for replicating virtual machines from a primary site. We needed a solution that took up less rack space, so we went with something that converged infrastructure. It's providing storage for our virtual platform.

It provides some fault-tolerance redundancy. Originally, we just had a single point of failure for storage. By having StarWind with a two-node device, we're able to replicate storage and then we can do updates, maintenance, and repairs, without having to bring down our entire storage platform.

It definitely saves us time. We are able to do a lot of our maintenance during production hours, rather than having to schedule after hours. We are able to do maintenance by bringing down one node at a time, rather than having to schedule a complete shutdown, and it's easier to schedule with Dell EMC or whoever else to make sure that they're available for any support during that process. By having StarWind, we're able to minimize maintenance impact and coordinating different support to be available around those timeframes.

It's helped maintain high-availability. Having a second unit replicating is providing us with the availability that we need to make sure our virtual machines have the storage connected they need to be operational.

We just use it for the storage replication. We haven't really utilized any of the other StarWind functionality in it.

It would be helpful to have a little more insight into what kind of performance the VSAN cluster is utilizing; something that would be more proactive on our side, versus their ProActive Support.

It has been rock-stable. No issues.

The scalability is there. We just have a two-node, so everything is connected together, not through a switch. I'm assuming that with the help of StarWind the scalability would be limitless.

We don't have any immediate plans to expand. If we did need to, it would be more of a compute expansion, so we would use the existing storage and use additional compute clusters.

We don't use the ProActive Support. We have the Standard level. It's very good. We haven't had any issues with it. They're very responsive and knowledgeable.

The only issues we had were during the implementation. We haven't had to reach out for any post-installation help.

We were using a single Dell EMC storage device. There was no software solution. We were looking to build out a DR site. We wanted to avoid having a single point of failure, like we did at our main location. If everything went well during our DR site rollout, we would configure a similar setup in our corporate location.

Surprisingly, the setup was straightforward. We were up and running with the VSAN within a few hours. Then we started doing some production virtual machines. We didn't really run into any issues with the VSAN part of it. The Windows updates caused an issue that we worked through. Support was very helpful with that.

It was a new deployment. There really wasn't any type of timeframe where we had to meet critical deadlines. We did have a plan to get our DR site up and running, and VSAN definitely made it a lot easier for us to do that.

The deployment required two of our IT staff and one person from StarWind.

It was just our internal IT and StarWind Support.

It has definitely made things a lot easier to deploy. Our biggest issue was not being tied to a hardware vendor, so if we decide to switch from EMC Dell to HPE or Supermicro, we can continue to use the StarWind solution across the different hardware brands. That's especially important with drive prices changing. We're able to use commodity drives instead of hardware-branded drives. That's an area where there have been some cost savings.

Also, the ability to be hardware agnostic means we're able to shop across vendors for better pricing.

It's priced fairly. It was definitely cheaper than the competition. The licensing terms are straightforward and reasonable.

We looked into Tegile and Tintri, about two years prior. We've also looked at some Dell EMC solutions. We were able to go with any hardware vendor we wanted to and the reviews for the software solution showed that it was highly recommended.

Utilize the StarWind installation team to get you up and running. They do everything from start to finish and even make sure that your production workload is running sufficiently.

We haven't used the Log-structured Write Cache feature or the NVMe over Fabrics target. Right now, our solution is all solid-state disk.

In terms of maintenance, a lot of it is scripted or managed automatically. It just takes one person to periodically check in to see if it's performing well and if there are any errors. That person is a systems administrator.

I would give StarWind VSAN a nine out of ten. They have good support. It's reasonably priced. It gives you the ability to scale. It offers good storage availability.

We have two StarWind VSAN nodes installed in a small company. We're mirroring these nodes where all services are installed.

StarWind Virtual SAN has made it easy to work with backups and save server data by mirroring two servers.

We found the most valuable features to be: 

• Easy installation,
• Easy to work with,
• Very good support.

• We would like the price to be lower. 
• In the next releases, we would like a new improved interface. 

We use StarWind for multiple 2-node hyperconverged Hyper-V Windows clusters in our datacenter environment.

It gave us a new template for upgrading aging infrastructure sans expensive enterprise storage hardware.

Ease of installation, configuration, and management. It literally took us less than two hours to have a fully functional 2-node cluster.

There is a limit on HA storage for standard and professional versions which is too low to be very useful for any but the smallest of SMBs or startups. Most SMBs we work with have more than 50TB of data, so the 4TB and 8TB limits are nothing more than a sales gimmick. The enterprise-level supports unlimited HA storage but starts competing with Windows Server (S2D) at the price point. The hardware requirement for S2D, however, puts the Windows HCI out of reach for most SMBs.

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.

We had a need for some high speed I/O in our data center to run some specific high demand virtual machines. We currently have an older SAN unit, but it's slow, since it uses mechanical drives. Therefore, we decided to obtain a bunch of Intel SSDs and attach them directly to the two virtualized hosts, then I used StarWind virtual machines as the controllers to tie them together into a VSAN. After that, I moved the VMs over. Once everything was hooked up and talking to each other, it works fine.

It is more of a perceptual thing with the users. The system that we moved onto it is our ERP system, which handles everything. It handles our orders, workflow, and shop work orders. It was by far the slowest, clunkiest system that we have here. When we put it together the StarWind Virtual SAN, and we moved it onto the flash drives, everything seemed to run a lot faster. I went from a drive system that peaked out at 2000 IOPS to a system that could now do over 200,000 IOPS. It was absolutely a night and day difference. Everything is just snappier. When you open windows, they instantly pop up. It is not sitting there, twiddling its thumbs, waiting for stuff to come up, which is huge. It seems user systems and interfaces have gotten so slow over the last 10 to 15 years. When things happen fast and snappy, it is a huge bonus in the user's eyes.

The software just works. That is what I like about good IT software. I rarely, if ever, have to go into the StarWind servers. I go in every couple weeks just to check if there are any Windows updates for it. However, for the most part, it is all hands off. It just works. It just does its job. I don't have to mess with it. I don't have to monkey with it or do anything. I am going into our backup system more often than I am our VSAN controllers. I have to go into the email on Office 365 to change things around (or figure out why somebody lost emails) more often than I have to worry about StarWind. 

In the IT world, anything you can just let run is amazing.

• The control panel is nice. It gives you a lot of good feedback as to the status and health of the VSAN. 
• The synchronization is very nice. 
• I like its flexibility. It is more flexible than most VSAN solutions that I have seen. For example, you can run it across two hosts. You don't need a third host observing it.

For improvement, I would like to see how the software determines which networks to use for which purpose. It seems like the naming terminology changes a bit from here to there. When I access the console on the computer, where is it going in through:

• The computer's connections?
• The heartbeat connection?
• The iSCSI connection?

It is a little odd as far as making sure those networks are isolated just for their function.

On the console, there is no good way to see how all the networks are allocated. Other than that, once they are set up and allocated, everything seems to run nicely. I just don't want, e.g., my heartbeat network bleeding into other things, like the iSCSI.

For this market, in general, it would be nice if I could go to a website where they had all the pricing listed comparatively, then maybe I could shop around.

It just works. I don't even know if there is a new version of it out there. I haven't checked if there's a new version, though I should probably upgrade it. Now, that I have the system sort of pulled apart, I am in the middle of upgrading everything. I moved our ERP system back on to our old SANs for a while. Now, the whole StarWind array is cleared off to be pulled apart and have new drives put in, I should probably look at whether it is all at the latest version.

It has good scalability. You can add in almost anything that you want. The only oddball thing is with the three-tiered licensing. If you are looking to do anything highly scalable, such as replace your SAN, which is what we are doing now, you might as well go straight for the enterprise version. Just save yourself the headache of anything else. However, if you have a small project, and only need a couple VMs on some high speed stuff, you can use the free version or standard version. The standard version has the support, which if you are in corporate IT, it would be foolish not to get it.

The times that I have called the StarWind ProActive Support, they were immediate and right there. I have had no issues with their support. When I call them, I am talking with somebody in very little time, and the people that I have talked to have all been incredibly knowledgeable. They knew exactly what was going on.

The only issue that I had was, at one point, we had a power failure which took out our main power system. The battery system powering our whole data center and the main switch (or something) blew out, so the whole thing wasn't delivering any power, even though we had it coming out from the wall. It took down all our hosts, just dirty, with everything running. When we brought everything back up, we had a hard time getting the VSAN to reinitialize properly. So, I gave the support a call. They went through it, and we found because it went down like that, we had to step everything and ensure the first one comes up, then the second one, then sit and synchronize them. Afterwards, we sent things out for it to rescan the array, then once it got up and running, everything was fine again. However, that was the only time that I was on the phone's screaming, "Help!"

This is our first VSAN solution.

It was a little bit complex with VMware, because it seems like they are a little more used to Windows Hyper-V.

The initial setup didn't take long. The only hang up was I didn't have some of the networking in place. I had to get a pair of ten gigabit network cards to run between the two servers for iSCSI links and the synchronization (the heartbeat). Once I got those in place and plugged together, then it was pretty quick and easy. 

Once the solution was up and running, it was pretty good. There were some extra scripts that we had to run on our end. 

I do all the maintenance myself. Now that it is deployed, maintenance is approximately once every two weeks. It is not even StarWind, it is checking on the Windows machine that it's running on. 

Recently, we have been in the middle of a project to completely retire our mechanical SAN and replace all those drives, each of which are about a quarter terabyte. We want to replace them all with four terabyte drives (SSDs), then move everything to a giant StarWind Virtual SAN controlling it.

I did the deployment mostly myself. However, with the purchase, I was able to receive some help. Therefore, I brought StarWind in just to check things over, ensuring everything was good. That is when we tweaked the scripts a bit, so if the servers were to reboot, it would tell the machines to rescan for the iSCSI connection once it came up.

As for implementation strategy, I had always kept StarWind in the back of my head in case I had a need to use it. When we had a need, I decided to make the suggestion. I went onto Spiceworks, where I knew some people there from StarWind. While I don't know if they are full representatives, they definitely spoke highly of it. So, I hit them up, saying, "I'm looking to do this. Is this thing possible?" 

One of the guys from Spiceworks put me in contact with a StarWind sales rep. When I described my project to them, he said, "Yes, it's easily done. All you have to do is this and that." He pointed me to some documents on their network to read through, and it was simple from that point. It's like, "I could do that, and I could probably do this all myself."

I got the free version at first. Then, I got the thing up and running, for the most part, without any help, aside from the reboot scripts. 

I tested it on a couple like dummy VMs, checking what happens if I reboot a machine. Everything worked beautifully. It was totally transparent. I never lost my network connection nor storage. So, I saw it was a win. Later on, I got the actual licensing, and this is when the guy came in to check over my installation, etc. Everything worked at that point and has been running ever since. That is when I moved the ERP system over on one weekend and have never really looked back.

This solution helped maintain high performance and data high availability on minimalistic resources. For example, with our ERP system, we went from an old spinning rust array to a all-flash array. Because StarWind allows that and for it to be a VSAN for high availability, if I lose a host, the ERP system will still continue to run. If I have to put a host into maintenance mode, and move all of its processing to the another, I can do that because it is transparent. StarWind doesn't care. When I get the host powered back up, the array resynchronizes, and everything runs as normal. So, it works, as far as high availability. Like any other good system, it is transparent. Behind the scenes, it does what it's supposed to do.

I was so impressed by what I saw, because at first, you set it up for free. I set it up for free to see how it worked, because I was losing nothing but time. After I set it up, and everything worked, I was like, "Okay, I don't need anything else for this. Let's get the licensing and go."

The pricing is more than reasonable.

The licensing is a bit weird. If you license the standard version of StarWind, it allows you four terabytes. Then, they have a pro version, but with the pro version, the only difference is it doubles the terabytes to eight. However, that is just one drive size upwards in an array. You are first going from two terabyte drives to four terabyte drives, then you will soon be going to eight terabyte drives and upwards, for SSDs which are coming out.

Therefore, it is weird that they have the middle tier in there, their pro tier. Then, they have their enterprise, which is unlimited. I can see their licensing better structured if their lower tier either had less drive space or the middle tier had more, by maybe a factor of four rather than doubling it. 

From a sales and marketing point of view, the difference between going from pro to unlimited is unclear. It seems like, "Why not just go unlimited? Why even have the middle tier there?"

I did explore VMware's native VSAN solution. However, its biggest limitation is it requires three nodes. We have two very heavy duty host servers and getting a third one would have been costly. Each server is roughly around $25,000 USD. Therefore, getting a third one, so we could run a VSAN using VMware, was a bit prohibitive. This is why I went to StarWind in the first place.

Go for it. Just set it up and follow the instructions. Start with the free version. Make a test bed and play around with it. Then, see how you like it and how it works. because it works. There is nothing hard about it. Once you get it working and understand how the system is implemented in your data center, then everything else is dotting i's and crossing t's. You can get the official licensing for the support or any larger array sizes that you may need. You can allocate and tell it to transfer things as you normally would, as it is a very impressive system. It is probably one of the things that I have been happiest about in my environment.

The Log-structured Write Cache feature works works transparently, so I haven't really noticed it. I assume it helps with application resiliency and performance since it is working.

NVMe over Fabrics would definitely be incredibly fast. It is something that I don't have the architecture to even consider here, but it does sound very cool and fast. I have worked with NVMe drives and SSD systems, and the interface is much wider and faster than your typical, older systems, like SATA and SAS, which were meant for mechanical systems. It would be very impressive, and I would like to get a chance to work with something like that to see its performance.

I was not even aware that there was a way to integrate the solution with server OS native management tools, like vCenter. We are using the vCenter appliance, which is Linux based. It doesn't seem to integrate things too well into it, even though it is the recommended way that they have us doing it. If there is some plugin, or something for it to directly integrate, I would be totally up for that.

The primary use case is to provide a virtual storage for our data and virtual machines. Not having a budget for a physical SAN, we use what we have to get the best of what we have, this is primary reason for using this VSAN.

I don't have to stay late at night. Prior to using this VSAN, if anything happened to a server, everything went down. We couldn't do anything, and that was a nightmare. There was even a time where all the data on the server got wiped. People were unable to work for half a day.

We did have a backup. We had to go to a third party to get a hard drive, have it shipped, and upload the data back into the server, then foster continuum. It happened like that twice before they said, “Enough is enough, what are our options?” 

We had the option of a physical server, but the cost would have been $25,000 or $30,000. So, we had two servers that were underutilized, and they were good servers, old but well-maintained. Therefore, we sat with the IT company, where I'm employed, and they said, "You can either go with a physical server or a VSAN, Virtual SAN." We were like, “Okay, tell us about the VSAN.”

They mentioned, “You have two servers, buy more hard drive, RAM, and CPU." Those are things we could easily do. “Then, you will have the VSAN mirror one to the other, and whatever you have in one will other copy to the other.” For instance, if we lose a physical server, CPU, etc., it provides peace of mind, is cost effective, and we are able to use our existing infrastructure. 

The most attractive feature is, as a Virtual SAN, the data on one is copied to the data on the second. We have two in tandem. So, the data on one is the same as the data on the second one. If we need to do maintenance on the server, it doesn't necessarily have to be after hours, or recommended after hours. If I need to do something in an emergency, I can stop the sync and know that one server has all the information, do what I need to do, and sync them back.

Once we resolve the syncing issues, a first sync of about 4TB of data was done in under 30 minutes. The ability to have the office run and do emergency backup repairs without the company being down was a feature that I liked about this VSAN.

Initially, when we first started, the sync was horrible. It would take about 13 hours. However, they have since then improved on it. It also depends on the pipe. We had a small pipe back then. So, we would do things at around 8:00 AM, then by 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning (the next day), everything would be back on. Once we upgraded the pipe between them, within half an hour, it was synced.

StarWind made us understand that we had a small pipe and our drives were not SSD, but SATA. All these things contributed because they have tons of clients. Thus, if we were the only ones having this issue, then we had the issue.

Once we made the changes, we saw amazing improvement on the way it synced. Instead of 13 hours, it took five to ten minutes for it to complete. For improvement, there should be simpler, user-friendly training about how the system works. I have dabbled in it, but if I need to do anything I'd rather pick up the phone, call them, and say, "This is what I need to do," and they're more than happy to help. While they do have help documentation, there is a relatively steep learning curve.

You need to take into consideration the amount of data that you are syncing as it will come into play: The amount of data that needs to sync between the two devices and the amount of data that the pipe has to read right. 

With data verification, I would like to know how does the solution perform validation of data being synced between two VSANs. If data is corrupt, how does it determine that I'm not going to sync something because it's corrupt? How does any software determine that the data is bad. Then, how does it fix it? Because if we get corrupted on one server, we don't want to transfer it to the other server.

The product is stable. If we receive error messages, it is usually regarding the underlying technology since we are using servers which are 11-years-old.

If I am concerned about upgrading on my older system, I can schedule time with the support team and they will do the upgrade for me.

The solution is really scalable. They have various models. We told them the maximum data that we have and found the right one for us. We can grow, as it expands. It is not a one size fits all.

We have 41 people who can access data which resides on the VSAN.

I like the ProActive support. All the guys that I have spoken or dealt with are professionals. I find this very important. There hasn't been anything like, “Hold on, let me check with my colleague.” They know exactly what they were doing and are consistent. If guy A connects to my computer, he does step one, two, three, and four. There hasn't been any poking around where they shouldn't. 

Being able to call someone who is knowledgeable about the situation and circumstance is important. They also followed up to say, “Have you resolved the issue? Is everything okay?”

The ProActive Support gives me peace of mind because I am a one man shop, but with the technical support behind me, I feel like more than just one person. We spent two to three hours, depending on what we have to do, always on the phone, and they do not push to end the call. It feels like they are assigned to me until the end of whatever we are doing, which is important to me.

Since the beginning that is how the support has been. That is why we stayed with them. It's not that expensive. I have nothing but good things to say about them. All their work is documented. I receive an email afterwards documenting all the steps that they did.

We did not have a solution before StarWind. A consultant recommended this solution. We were also looking into physical solutions, not virtual.

I didn't build the system for us; I manage it. We had someone else do the build. If you spoke to him, he would tell you the build was easy. Give him the instructions, then he just created it. 

The deployment took two and a half to four hours. We did the deployment in the evening, and it was fully operational before we left. The deployment was done by a single person who did the connectivity and configurations, though there were some things that I had to do to build the virtual machine.

I am the only person needed to maintain, though I occasionally contact StarWind ProActive support, when needed. It is a low maintenance solution. It is as good as your infrastructure. Like every road, the foundation of the road determines the asphalt you put on it. If you have a good foundation (SSD drives), then it works well. The issues that we had were based on server error messages, because sometimes when people were downloading stuff, they'd say, "It is too slow." However, once we built a bigger pipe, we could see the change.

In hindsight, the Virtual SAN was meant to be a stop-gap solution. Make sure what happened before, if a server dies, we have business continuity. That was the goal. It so happened that the business continuity and stop-gap became a lasting solution which we continue to use because it works well.

There was a third-party consultant, who fine tuned it, but our guy created it after downloading the software. He has done it multiple times. If you were to ask him, he would tell you, "It's a walk in the park."

Our experience with the third-party consultant was excellent. The guy who I dealt with is a system admin. He is the one who informed us about the solution. He had deployed it for another client and thought it was just the right size for us, so he recommended it. 

There was an implementation strategy. We had all the data in a hard drive. After a crash, we had all the data in a backup drive. Once it was restored, we configured it on one server, then we transferred the data from that server to the VSAN occupied part of the hard drive array. After that, we built the other one on the other server, then the sync started. It was a phased in implementation.

You need to ensure that you have the right technical resource to implement the solution. Our guy was knowledgeable and a teacher. He imparted knowledge telling you why he was doing what he was doing and consulted you before doing it. He had a plan and submitted a proposal, which we looked at it. It showed what he needed and how it was going to take to get done. Therefore, the technical resource is very important.

This solution has helped us maintain high performance and data high availability on minimalistic resources. We have saved about 80 percent (versus purchasing a physical SAN) and peace of mind, which is important.

The pricing is fine for the work that it does. I have had no issues. When we bought it three to four years ago for what we needed, it was literally cheaper than the alternative which was ten times the amount and took up physical space. 

The license is reusable. We can always rebuild it and apply the license. Then, boom, we get new servers, apply the license, and we're back up and running.

We are not using the Log-structured Write Cache feature nor are we using NVMe.

We have not integrated this solution with server OS native management tools. We are just interested in business continuity. If the server blows up, we will still be in business. It does what we want, and we are happy with it.

As of now, since it does exactly what we want it to do, so I do not see where we would need to use features that we are currently not using. We were sold on the fact that we could use our existing infrastructure, and it syncs data if we lose one server. 

StarWind Virtual SAN might not be for everybody. We had the underlining technology, so it worked for us. Give it a try. You can't go wrong, because one of the things they told us is that if you no longer use it, StarWind would credit us a certain amount against a different solution that they had. It was a win-win for us.