StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

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.

The primary use case is backup storage for our VM servers. 

Our day-to-day servers are all on StarWind and our backups went from nightly to every minute. That improves disaster recovery time from hours to minutes.

In addition, it has helped us to maintain high performance and data high availability on minimalistic resources. We haven't bought any hardware, it was all stuff we already had. We just reconfigured it and got new features. In terms of costs, it has reduced what we would have had to pay. We have saved approximately 80 percent. We would have had to buy a $100,000 server. Instead, we ended up with a $20,000 server and a little bit of software.

I like the asynchronous replication and failover features. They are what I'm primarily using it for. The asynchronous replication is helpful because our servers are backed up continuously throughout the day. If anything goes wrong we just fail over immediately. That is a very nice feature to have.

In addition, we have it integrated with vCenter which makes the failover automatic. It's basically set-it-and-forget-it.

I'm sure it needs bug fixes, and there are new features coming down the pipe, but it works great.

It's been completely stable for us. There were some bugs initially which slowed us down, but those were related to VMware and not StarWind.

You can resize things on the fly as needed, add more storage as needed. Since it's all on Windows, you can expand the disk as much as needed and as quickly as possible.

Their support has been excellent. They will walk you through every step of the way and help you with anything you need. They're great.

We were using direct-attached for the primary servers and FreeNAS for the backups. We switched for the real-time replication and the failover.

The initial setup was straightforward but it was also complex. There were a bunch of steps, but it was all very well documented and very well laid out. You follow steps and you end up with a working system at the end.

It took me a couple weeks, but that was because I had other things going on and a rather complex system. But if you just wanted the basics, you could probably get it set up in a couple of hours.

As part of my implementation strategy, I first set it up on three-way replication servers and after that was done, put it into production.

The pricing is excellent. It will run on anything. You don't have to buy a $100,000 server, with hardware you don't need. You just pay for the license and you're good to go.

We didn't evaluate any other vendors. In our price range, this was the only vendor.

The pricing is based on the amount of storage, so you should evaluate how much storage you're going to need for your license. I believe there's an unlimited tier which is also very reasonable.

In our organization, it's the backing data-store for the entire company, which is about 85 users. Programmers and management people make up our studio. For deployment and maintenance, it's just me with the support team at StarWind.

We don't have plans to increase usage. We're a small studio and we're not going to get bigger.

I give StarWind a ten out of ten. They have great support, a great product, it's simple and easy to use, and has a great price.

We use it for data redundancy and failover.

Instead of having to maintain two completely separate systems:

1. The cluster where all the data processing is happening.
2. Maintaining the SAN clustering.

Now, we can do everything in one location, because the storage and processing are all happening on the same cluster. It has reduced our overall maintenance and overhead by having to only maintain physical boxes for one cluster instead of having to manage physical boxes for two clusters. 

It also has reduced the amount of switching, network connections, etc., because the converged StarWind Virtual SAN allows us to connect high-speed network interfaces between different boxes instead of having to connect SANs via the network, then connect those two clusters together.

StarWind is more cost effective because it is converged storage. Instead of having to pay for a full-blown SAN, as we did in the past, and having to maintain that SAN as a separate cluster, we now can use local storage on each individual node. So, it reduces the cost and overhead drastically.

NVMe is sort of the future, because it's so fast. In our next round, we will use NVMe drives exclusively for our main storage. Then, we will probably use two and a half inch SSDs for our nearline. 

The most valuable feature is the ability to lose a node and not have my systems go down.

If there are domain controllers inside the cluster, there needs to be some sort of logic allowing them to boot independently so all the rest of the domain clients can gain the authority they need to come online. We made that mistake at first. We have since moved one of our domain controllers out of the cluster, so everything can obtain whatever authentication it needs on the initial boot. Ultimately, Microsoft says they support it, but we would like to see all of our domain controllers running within the cluster, too. We don't want to have additional hardware just to run domain controllers.

The stability is excellent. I have had a couple of stability problems, but they weren't related to StarWind. They were related to some power problems that we had in the data center. Once we had those sorted out, everything has been smooth as glass. I did follow their advice in getting network interface cards, and we put in some very fast 40GB network cards. This has helped us a bit because everything happens very quickly, and StarWind support even helped me on the management interface to team the 10GB connections. So, the stability has been phenomenal.

Scalability has been very easy, so far. We have had to resize some of the drives. The most complex thing which we have had to deal with was that one of the servers needed more than two terabytes of space, and it was an MBR formatted drive. I found some tools that allowed me to convert from MBR to GPT without having to reformat the drive or lose data. Then, we were able to expand that, too. Those are normal Windows management tasks, but we were able to do them within the StarWind environment without having to use anything besides one third-party tool for the GPT conversion. That part of the scalability has been excellent because we can just allocate disk space wherever we need it. 

Overall, we have about 200 users. For simultaneous users, who are on all the time during business hours, it is probably closer to 60 or 70.

When I've had a problem, I have had someone respond almost immediately. If not picking up the phone and helping me right then and there, it's within approximately 30 minutes. They have been able to help me with every single type of problem that I have had. They have also helped me with entirely different stuff in the server environment, which has helped me tremendously. I pay for that extra support, and I'll upgrade it each time because it's so helpful.

I recently ran into a problem where all my user profile disks were full, and it was not clear to me how to enlarge that user profile disk. Their support person, Artem, just jumped in with me, and within ten minutes, he'd provided me everything I needed for the PowerShell commands. He enlarged the ones that he could. For the ones that were in use, he showed me how to do it. So, when they were no longer in use, I went ahead and enlarged them. Then, I mounted each of them and expanded them to use the space. If I hadn't had him, I'd have had three users who were down today since this just happened yesterday. 

Today, all three of them are fully functional. If I hadn't have had that quick response and willingness to help, it would have created some headaches. Instead, their support works really well. I'm very pleased with the StarWind technical support. It is excellent. I have the Premium support. I have never worked with a company who is as responsive and helpful with everything I run into.

Knowing that I can call the technical support and get a senior level technician if I need it any time is a huge thing. Because if I have to wait until business hours to get a consultant, I have to make an arrangement in the schedule with them, and if it's after hours, you will lose 24 to 36 hours in there. With Starwind, I can get help almost immediately, so its a no-brainer.

I would do the ProActive, except that I have a contract that does not allow me to have third-party monitoring installed on any of our servers. 

The Premium support (or Pro support), which is what I have, is worth every dollar. The ProActive support has the same people running it, so I am sure it is good, too. Unfortunately, I can't take advantage of it because of the contractual obligations that I have.

Our SDS software before StarWind was a SAN. It wasn't converged storage. It was a full-blown, normal SAN configuration.

We switched to StarWind because we were upgrading everything all at one. We ran into budget constraints which would make building a new SAN almost impractical, if not impossible, to fit it into the budget. Secondarily, the SAN required a lot of maintenance, and we were looking for a less expensive solution. We also wanted something that would not require so much technician time.

Previously, we had two full-time people taking care of the SAN, cluster, etc. Now, we only have one. So, StarWind cut our technical labor force in half (cutting this cost in half), and we didn't lay anybody off. We were able to nicely redeploy resources.

The initial setup is mildly complex to fairly complex.

For our implementation strategy, we virtualized some of the physical servers, and we already had several virtualized machines. Therefore, as soon as the StarWind environment was set up, I just imported the virtual machines, bringing them up and online. We did a few network configuration tasks to make sure everything worked, then we were good to go.

It only takes me to maintain it once it is up and running. I have a backup person who handles stuff if I go on vacation (or whatever), but it only takes one person to maintain everything.

The StarWind support team goes through it and does the installation with you. It was super easy for me. I learned a lot in the process, but they set it up. The deployment took three hours from beginning to end with just the StarWind support and me.

This solution has helped maintain high performance and data high availability on minimalistic resources. Even though we got rid of our SAN, we are still getting higher performance for significantly less outlay, dollar-wise.

It is more efficient on the management side. 

The Log-structured Write Cache (LWC) feature speeds things up for us. Our performance is better than it was on the SAN. However, I don't know if it's directly related to the LWC or whether there is lower latency between the onboard storage and what was the SAN. I'm sure that it helps performance, but I wouldn't know a metric to measure it, specifically.

With the support that I receive from StarWind, it has saved me at least two full-blown, paid Microsoft tickets. For each of Microsoft ticket, we pay about $600 USD a piece for it. While this is not a big cost, it eliminated a headache for us. In addition, we saved on technical consultant costs.

For pricing, you have two things that come into it: 

1. The cost of the hardware.
2. The software licensing pricing. 

When we did all the analysis for StarWind, it was approximately 20 percent less than any of the other solutions that we looked at. This wasn't our only criteria, as you don't want to buy the cheapest thing, then find out you have a problem. Also, StarWind isn't the cheapest solution out there, but it is certainly cost-effective relative to the major players. I haven't seen any difference in quality overall. StarWind works as well as any of the major players would have for us.

The scalability limitation for us is its licensing. At some point in the fairly near future, we will probably have to upgrade our license so we can store eight terabytes instead of four. We are currently at four terabytes, but we're starting to knock on the door of that capacity. Going forward, we will probably pay for a license upgrade, then we can add more capacity. We just haven't done it yet.

We looked at StarWind Virtual SAN vs VMware vSAN and StarWind Virtual SAN vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct.

With converged storage, we studied a lot of solutions and went into them all. We looked at Microsoft's solution for converged storage along with some of the other ones. StarWind had better pricing and deployment strategy. It also didn't have as many hardware requirements, which allowed us to spend some extra money on things that we really wanted, like 40GB network cards.

We read everything we could find when evaluating the solution. When you are doing something this critical with so many users who will be working on it all the time, you can't afford to tinker with it. We not only went and read all the reviews on StarWind, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, and VMware vSAN, but we put them in some trials and tested everything on our test network. StarWind was the one that we ultimately decided would fulfill our requirements. Happily, it has lived up to our expectations.

Of course, the support was a huge bonus. You don't know that until after you have put your money in, but once we had purchased it, we found out how good the support was all the way around.

We have plans to increase the usage in the future. As we need data processing capability, we will add more nodes. As we need more storage, we will obviously upgrade the storage licenses. We will need more storage before we need more nodes because we are only using a fraction of our total processing power at this point, but we are slowly starting to fill up on disk space. The time frame for upgrading our disk space will probably be in six to eight months.

We run everything from accounting, databases, email VMs, SQL Servers, etc. on it, anything that someone would expect on an enterprise environment.

We are in the process of installing OS native management tools now. It should make things easier. The Admin Center looks like a good tool.

Follow their recommendations on hardware configurations. The faster you can put in the components, the better the experience will be.

I always recommend everybody do their own research. If you do your research, you will find out that cost-wise StarWind will be more competitive. In terms of form and function, from personal experience, their converged storage system works very well and is extremely reliable. What is most important to a lot of consumers is how good the support is behind the product. While you can research it, you never know until you spend your money. Experientially, their support is some of the best I've ever worked with, even though they are based outside of the US. You're not dealing with Indian accents. They speak very clear English, and there are not the communication issues that you have with non-Western countries.

StarWind is the highly redundant storage solution for our company-wide hardware agnostic Hyper-V environment.

StarWind VSAN allowed our small business to build a fault-tolerant storage architecture using SSDs and off-the-shelf chassis that is high-performing, high-functional, fault-tolerant, highly available, reliable, and easy to use. Best of all, we achieved all of this for a fraction of the cost of other solutions. For eight years now, StarWind has been extremely reliable and easy to use.

• Very simple to use
• Hardware agnostic
• Extremely reliable
• Feature rich
• Cost-effective!
• StarWind also has excellent support in the rare case you need them.

Encryption: I would love to see "at rest" data encryption as a new feature for organizations like mine looking for ways to simplify this mandated compliance issue.

We have not had a single major issue in eight years of using StarWind. Every release upgrade has been seamless and required no downtime. It has saved us from multiple hardware failures with no downtime. A truly redundant, reliable solution!

Very easy to scale. I am not aware of any limitations.

In eight years we have never needed support for an issue with the software. I have called a handful of times to have them confirm my understanding and review my configuration.  They have always been very helpful and thorough. A+.

No.

Very simple to use. Most of the UI is self-explanatory but StarWind's website has easy-to-follow documentation and recommendations, and their support staff is one of the most thorough and patient I have had the honor to work with in this industry. A+.

In-house with minimal StarWind support.

I have not seen any other storage solution that delivers the features that StarWind does for anywhere near the price. Licensing and support costs are very simple and straightforward.  

Dell EMC, Nimble, 3PAR.

Make the switch to StarWind! Your life will be much easier, and you will have extra budget to spend elsewhere!

We had decentralized storage, inefficient storage and computer utilization, non-utilization of VMware vSphere advanced features like HA, FT, vMotion which require shared storage like StarWind.

StarWind VSAN provided us an efficient performance with HA. We tried other solutions as well and found StarWind’s VSAN easy to install and manage. The unlimited capacity license is also a very good feature.

• StarWind’s VSAN applications for VMware
• Easy to install and manage
• The unlimited capacity license is also a very good feature.

• A detailed performance monitoring of the storage system.
• A tool/wizard which analyzes the installed system and its configuration and gives a recommendation for improvement.

• I've used StarWind VSAN for replicating vSphere datastores and in Microsoft SQL and file systems clusters. 

• I used one in mission-critical systems like a call center, SQL, SharePoint, etc.

My company data is essential to us, and we never lost data, so building the HA storage was our absolute priority. 

For the last six years, StarWind VSAN protected our transactions of more than 100 billions of dollars.

• Stability
• Performance
• Security
• Easy to solve problems
• Vendor support always is ready to help :) 

• Linux version for vSphere could incorporate deduplication. 
• Also, the documentation for configuring alerts in vSphere is not simple.

It's stable as a rock.

Performance is very good but the bottleneck is the network. It is good to have 10gb links. 

Very good. I've got standard support but the reaction time is always 1-2 hours. 

I used StarWind and VMware vSAN, but StarWind is 10x cheaper and gives us a solution independent from the hypervisor. This is more secure.

The initial setup is easy, but after buying, support can help you with the installation and optimization.

I implemented through my team, but support helped me optimize the iSCSI paths.

StarWind has the best price.

The version for vSphere is very cheap, and anyone interested should buy a three-node version for the test environment.

No.

Thanks support for the quick help: I think you never sleep!

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. 

I use StarWind Virtual SAN software to change our old HPE Fibre Channel storage into an iSCSI solution for our development environment.

We have an old HPE Fibre Channel SAN that we wanted to reutilize for a development environment. However, we didn't want to spend too much on fiber infrastructure or replace the controller with iSCSI, since this would cost thousands of dollars. 

StarWind Virtual SAN software solves our problems. The software is easy to setup and manage, and the support is excellent.

I like the simple management interface:

• It is easy to setup.
• It has good support feature.                                                   

• It would be great if it provided thin provisioned virtual disks.
• It should reclaim white spaces after big files are deleted.

I have not faced any issues with stability.

Not applicable.

We are happy with the price.