StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

HCI was set up to host our ERP web apps, domain controller, and phone system.  We are using this in production, staging, and development with around 40 virtual machines. We are using Linux and Windows with VMware as the ESXi host. 

Our main use of StarWind HCI is creating a super-smooth virtualized server setup. It blends tech magic, merging storage, networking, and more into one. We were always running into the issues of needing to add more storage and having to pull down our servers, notify customers of the downtime, etc., however, not anymore.

The solution offers failover protection and the ability to expand storage and nodes with no downtime.  Our customers who use our web apps benefit from nearly zero downtime due to hardware failure, hardware replacement, or upgrades. 

Now we are looking at replicating a similar cluster setup for our firewall, switches, and ISP so we can get nearly 0.00% downtime which I know is not possible, however, with the new HCI setup, it is possible to at least almost get there. 

Their support is by far the best enterprise-level support I have come across.

The failover protection and the ability to expand storage and nodes with no downtime are by far the best physical features we have benefited from. Once we requested help from sales, it was a very easy decision compared to VMware where you get lost among the mess of products and low-trained phone techs.

Their web UI is very basic and that is how it should be. The magic is what their HCI setup does behind the scenes for redundancy and the ability to expand storage without ever having to go offline since another node picks up the storage.

Our company was hoping for deduplication and encryption across HCI. That is currently not supported. They used to have it and was removed. Hopefully, both of these features will be coming in upcoming releases.  

A built-in DR that can be stretched with high latency would be very helpful as well. We were able to purchase VMware 8 for our hosts. It would be nice if they developed their own ESXi OS to compete with VMware as the other options out there are not great. VMware does what it needs, however, their support is not great.

I've been using the solution for one week.

We've had no downtime so far.

You can scale as much as your company will need.

Technical support is good. Somebody is always available 24/7.

I did not use a different solution.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

We used StarWind in-house support as they do most of the setup before they send it to you.

We've witnessed downtime within two years.

I'd advise new users to have sales walk them through all the options and also ask them about purchasing the hardware for you.

I previously evaluated VMware.

StarWind Virtual SAN is a good solution. It helps our organization to fulfill the need for backup and restoration. 

Our organization was implementing a business continuity plan in which there was a need for regulatory compliance. We wanted to implement a solution to do scheduled backup and its restoration when needed. The process of implementing the solution was pretty simple, and it is readily available for use as well. 

As compared to other solutions, we found that it was easily integrated with our current solutions and could easily be deployed. 

We use the solution to improve compliance and risk management for our infrastructure. We also wanted to use it to create internal/operational efficiencies. 

We compared it with other solutions and have found we are able to drive revenue growth from this solution. It is keeping up with our needs and requirements. We found this solution offers good cost management. We also get the desired results of our RPO and RTO. During different operational issues, the backup restoration time of solutions is good. It's easy to use and is feasible in our virtualization environment. 

The performance of StarWind Virtual SAN is fast and effective. Reporting templates and customization have a very intense impact on senior management. 

The backup is readily available for use, and the restoration process is easy. It pulls out maximum IOPS from your existing raw storage with no crazy expensive hardware required. 

Licensing is flexible and transparent without any pitfalls or feature paywalls. 

Its HA deployment model is very easy with zero fault tolerance; we can operate HCI clusters through a unified StarWind web UI.

The management console of StarWind Virtual SAN is pretty complex. Most team members in our organization are new or have less experience with these kinds of complex solutions. It would be better to have a more user-friendly Web UI so that users with even the bare minimum amount of knowledge can also handle the product. 

In my country, it does not have a strong local support partner. If we have any issues or require support, we mostly contact the principal. It would be ideal if Starwind had a strong local partner with solid technical skills. That way, it would be very easy for us to handle any operational issues. 

I've used the solution for two years.

I'd rate stability eight out of ten. 

I'd rate scalability eight out of ten.

I did not use any other solution.

It was easy to set up and not that difficult. I'd rate the solution six out of ten. 

We implemented the solution in-house with the help of a vendor. I'd rate the setup process, and vendor support six out of ten. 

In terms of ROI, we have achieved our RTO and RPO.

I'd advise others to perform a POC before purchase and check whether it meets a company's needs or not.

I was not a part of the evaluation team.

We had several aging servers that needed to be replaced, including a server from 2008 and one that was an old Microsoft Small Business Server from 2011. 

When we ended up needing to replace everything when they had all reached end of life, we had some hard choices to make. We could have replaced all of those old bulky servers with a new pile of power-hungry and massive machines, or replace them all and virtualize everything and put them on two single-unit rack-mounted servers. We ended up going with StarWind Virtual SAN, and have never looked back.

Want to talk about speed, performance, and reliability? We literally went from having four or five very large and powerful boxes to the two sister servers that were provided by StarWind, and we set them up to have much better performance. Even more importantly, we found support that is world-class. I have never worked with such an impressive and well-balanced crew as the techs that I have had the pleasure of working with over these years. They are absolutely mind-blowing in every aspect that I've had them help me out with, from preinstallation to rollout to maintenance. 

We are running Hyper-V on twin servers in failover, and being able to manage servers from anywhere I need to, virtually, has been a game changer. 

The most valuable feature has been their support and willingness to help me with issues that, frankly, were not their responsibility. Every time I've called or emailed them, they have jumped in anyway and helped me find success in figuring out the issues I was having. They even kept the ticket open until I asked them to close it, which is nice.

Every solution has plusses and minuses, and for someone like me, who has very little experience spending my time in CLI, I appreciate a good GUI. This is the one place I would love to see the experience of StarWind improved. I wish there were more of an explanation or set of instructions that could point me in the right direction when I wanted to increase the size of one of our VMs. I did end up being able to shut the machine down and increase the size of its virtual HDD, however, in the end, I missed the mark and allocated too much space - and in a production environment, that space comes at a premium. I'd love to see more clarification for us folks who are smart enough to do some damage yet not smart enough to use CLI. 

We have had our StarWind Virtual SAN for almost five years now.

Our StarWind Servers have only ever "gone down" when I have been applying an update to the server's software. They have been rock solid and have better than six nines on their stability.

So far, we've been able to add storage and new servers year after year and have never run into an issue.  

Their customer service and support have been world-class. There is no other company I've ever worked with that had the level of support and dedication that I've been able to experience with StarWind.

Positive

We did not have a "solution" like this before. We previously had a hodgepodge of parts, servers, and service providers, which is nothing compared to what we have now.

The setup was amazing. The hardware arrived, we plugged it in, and StarWind connected to them and was off to the races getting our servers converted and up and running within a week. I've never seen anything similar since then.

We used a combination of in-house IT/IS and StarWind support to get these set up and running. In the end, we were all happy with the speed and technical expertise that went into our setup and the dedicated technicians who stuck with us throughout the entire setup and implementation.

The ROI is impossible to know. That said, in terms of reliability and performance, it has paid for itself within the first two years of ownership in electrical costs. They have, in the five years we've had them, paid for themselves in that aspect of cost alone. There is not even a comparison in terms of cost per watt and performance that we have observed.

The solution has given us the best results that I have ever seen in any environment.

We did eliminate several other solutions. That said, it has been too long to remember which ones. I remember worrying that StarWind's performance was going to be one of those too-good-to-be-true situations. It wasn't. The hype lived up to the performance and reliability.

If you are on the fence about them, jump off and land on their side where you never have to look back.

We use StarWind Virtual SAN to create a reliable, scalable, and cost-effective solution for storage requirements. We used it to store data in a VMware environment. 

We have a small setup of servers where we use Starwind Virtual SAN as our primary storage solution to store critical data and applications. We have a 30 TB usable storage where StarWind Virtual SAN provides us with reliable, fast, scalable, and cost-effective features to store and manage critical data and apps. 

It's a scalable storage solution, and in the future, if our requirements expand, we can scale out our storage requirements pretty easily.

It helped us in providing a reliable, fast, scalable, redundant, and affordable storage solution for our VMware-based infrastructure. It's continuously running for the last year or so, which shows its reliability. 

It also helps us reduce maintenance costs as it's working pretty fine for the last year or so. So, we didn't face any issues yet. It's a solution where we can truly say that set up and forget.

I'd like to say that it's one of the best storage solutions for your virtual environment, especially for SMBs.

StarWind Virtual SAN offers high availability and data resilience features to prevent data loss if hardware fails. This feature helps us to save data or any critical application on it. 

You can scale it from a 2-node to a larger, multi-node deployment which makes it a pretty flexible solution for businesses that are growing from time to time. It has very good performance with an improved cache

It has a pretty user-friendly interface that makes it easy to install, configure, and manage storage in any virtualized environment.

While our experience with StarWind Virtual SAN has been positive, we don't have any issues yet. 

The price makes it a pretty perfect and affordable solution as compared to other solutions available in the market for the same deployment scenarios. 

I want to suggest that the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure needs to be reduced. Another thing that I want to highlight about the documentation that needs some improvement and better organization. Right now, I don't have any other issues in my mind that can be written here.

For the last year or so, I've been using this solution.

We don't have any stability issues. 

Currently, we have a small setup, and in the near future, if we need to scale our setup, StarWind Virtual SAN will help us accordingly.

The technical support experience so far has been positive.

Positive

Yes, I use VMware vSAN and FreeNAS.

The initial setup is simple, and a lot of information is already available.

We implemented it in-house.

We have been using it for the last year or so, and it's working very fine in our environment. 

StarWind Virtual SAN is a reliable, scalable, and cost-effective solution. I highly recommend using this storage solution, especially for SMBs.

I evaluated other options and found StarWind Virtual SAN is a reliable and cost-effective solution.

It's a pretty reliable, cost-effective storage solution for virtual environments.

We purchased StarWind Virtual SAN to replace the no longer supported SAN App. Since the hard drive is outdated, the warranty was expired, and the user interface is poor, we decided to upgrade to a newer system. 

We have four server rooms on site, which we equipped with storage servers, each with 45 TB of SSD storage, on which we installed StarWind Virtual SAN software. 

With the help of the fantastic support from the StarWind team, we connected five compute servers from our previous SAN setup running Hyper-V. Everything worked smoothly. All of our data is stored on the storage nodes and replicated almost instantly.

We tried several solutions, such as iSCSI storage and Hyper-V Replication. The results were good yet did not produce the expected results. We had many problems with scheduled and unscheduled failovers. There were also limitations in the application itself.

After some research, I decided to go with the free version of vSAN from StarWind. I followed the instructions and technical support to deploy the SQL cluster using the StarWind vSAN free version. I tested the application with many scenarios. All failover options worked without any interruption.

StarWind vSAN has a lot of great features and is a perfect solution for mirroring internal disks and flash between servers. It provides a high-performance mirrored central disk to perform any implantation with high profitability. 

In my case, I had a requirement to implement a SQL cluster solution with servers and internal disks. 

Without StarWind vSAN there would be a bigger cost for the company, as we would need to buy a lot of disks and, of course, hardware and software, to run everything. That's why we choose StarWind.

vSAN's free version does not have a graphical user interface - all options are available from the command line. The graphical user interface is very important when we need to check the status and fix errors quickly, even if it is not a technical expert team. 

There are a few other limitations in vSAN's free version. They could release a few premium features to its free-use version, as we believe then there would not be so much of support tickets, and not everyone knows how to use Powershell. 

They add auto-update features, so you don't need to do it manually.

I've been using the solution for two years. 

The solution offers great stability.

The scalability has been great.

We have found that we can get a quick response to questions on the forums.

Positive

We previously used an HP solution, however, it was unstable.

In order to do a seamless setup, users need to read the manuals.

We handled the setup with our in-house team.

The solution was free to use. 

I'd advise new users to try the free version first.

We only evaluated StarWind.

In our environment, we are using a full-scale Hyper-V cluster and individual VMware hypervisors. StarWind provides highly scalable, highly accessible storage to all servers within the environment.  

Virtual machines requiring high availability are stored using the StarWind software virtual storage area network. The StarWind software itself is stored on a virtual machine on two nodes within our Hyper-V cluster.  

At present, we only have the two-node solution and would like to upgrade in the near future to provide even more redundancy/data durability.

StarWind Virtual SAN improved our organization by allowing us to sleep at night. The software allowed us to implement a highly scalable software-based storage area network using our existing commodity hardware.  

We didn't have to purchase anything extra to make this project "work"; we just installed the software on two virtual machines, set up the ISCSI networking, and attach the hosts to the ISCSI targets.  

Having the ability to migrate machines live in our environment was made possible by this software.  

The best part of the StarWind vSAN software is having the ability to add as many nodes as you need.  

You can instantly expand storage across a rack, data center, or geographical location. Support by StarWind is awesome. They are able to get on multiple remote sessions to help us go through our proof of concept with both Hyper-V and VMware environments.  

Support also contacted us multiple times after implementation to see how things were going, and if we had any questions or wanted to learn more about the product. If there was a question they couldn't answer, they were sure to get back to us - often within the same day.  The support for the product has been most valuable.  

StarWind really needs to market its product more. It's a game changer not only for our medium-sized business. However, I could see how organizations of all sizes could benefit from their solutions (not just their Virtual SAN product).  

I wish I could tell more people about how great the software is and how phenomenal their support team is. 

The only "improvement" for the software would be having a web-based GUI interface for monitoring their storage nodes. While the software has e-mail notifications and a desktop client for management, having a mobile, web-based solution could make management even easier. Hopefully, this is something that can be included in the next version.   

We have been using StarWind for over two years.

Any interaction with customer service and support has been awesome. They are quick to respond and very thorough.

Positive

I did not previously use a different solution. 

The initial setup was straightforward. The vendor has several Youtube videos showing how easy it is to set up. 

We implemented the solution in-house.  

The pricing can't be beaten. If StarWind is above a company's budget, they should contact them directly, and they may be able to assist with special pricing.  Licensing is based on TBs of data and the number of storage nodes.

We looked into a few other shared storage solutions, such as Dell and Nutanix.

Our infrastructure uses VMware vSphere, and we use StarWind as our primary storage solution. We have three hosts and use a hyper-converged setup, so our computing and storage are spread across the same hosts. 

StarWind replicates the data between the hosts giving us 30 TB of usable redundant storage. StarWind allowed us to consolidate our hardware and grow without expanding our data center footprint. It also gave us more peace of mind since there is no single point of failure anywhere in the solution.

StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution.  

We were also able to avoid a data center expansion as we could combine our computing and storage without losing fault tolerance.  

We were also using another converged storage solution from HPE as well. That solution was strongly tied to ESXi and vCenter, which meant we could not apply WMware updates when they came out until the storage solution updated their product to match without risking compatibility problems.  

Since StarWind isn't tied to the hypervisor, we don't have to worry about how updates to one part of our infrastructure will affect the other.

StarWind support is really good. They help you with the initial setup and will support you down the road as well. The support staff really know their product.  StarWind isn't a black box, either. You can see exactly how the storage and replication are configured, so you know what is going on, and can quickly diagnose any problems.   

Many virtualized storage solutions are incredibly picky about what hardware you deploy them on - even down to the model of a hard drive. StarWind allows you to use any hardware, and they will support you on whatever infrastructure you want to deploy it on.

The management interface is missing some of the flashier features and hand-holding of other enterprise products.  It might be intimidating to someone without a lot of experience, yet StarWinds setup services are good for walking you through everything. The number of different ways you can set it up can make it a little daunting.  

The documentation on their website isn't bad, and yet it could use some better organization. There is also some feature disparity between the Windows-based solution and their virtual Linux-based solution. I'd love to see deduplication added to the virtual Linux appliance.  

I've used the solution for four years.

I only had one stability issue with StarWind. That said, that was down to me not following best practices and not reading their updated documentation. When configure properly, StarWind is very stable.

It's a great option for SMBs. If you start getting into double or triple-digit host count, the increased configuration time may not be worth it.

The StarWind support team is very knowledgeable. When you need support, you speak directly with someone who knows the product well. I was able to get on a Zoom call and have my issue resolved the same day I opened a ticket.

Positive

We previously used a traditional SAN from Nimble and the virtual storage solution, HPE Simplivity. Both other solutions were more expensive. HPE was strongly tied to both the underlying hardware and the hypervisor and didn't allow for any flexibility.

The initial setup was a little more complex than setting up a traditional SAN as additional networking was needed for the replication channels. Planning ahead and help setup help from Starwind makes this manageable.

We did our implementation in-house. We know our infrastructure better than an outside vendor and were confident in our ability to deploy it.

StarWind has the most straightforward licensing model of any storage solution we evaluated. Their pricing was also the best.

We had experience with HPE Simplivity and VMware vSAN.

In a VMware environment, StarWind works best if you can dedicate the RAID card or the HBA to the storage controller VM, so you should store the hypervisor on a separate RAID card or on an SD card. 

We originally had a three-node Nutanix cluster. However, we were asked to spend six figures on replacing it, as the Nutanix license was bound to the hardware. StarWind Virtual SAN could use this existing hardware without any special reconfiguration. 

We decided to go with their Linux appliance and quickly learned we could achieve the same resiliency with two nodes as we did with three nodes on Nutanix. 

They provided guides to help us set up the most efficient cluster, although we did have to use MD/RAID as there wasn't a guide available for ZFS.

Besides being 80% cheaper than the other alternatives, the simplicity makes reconfiguration and support much easier. The performance is much higher than we anticipated and outperforms the other solutions we've tried. 

They provide numerous guides and whitepapers to help set up your own environment, yet can also walk you through the setup, so you understand each component of it. Thanks to their extensive support community, we are no longer 100% dependent on support (or a support contract) for minor troubleshooting issues.

The most valuable feature to us is the basic setup, which makes it easy to understand what's happening under the hood. This, combined with the low price point, allowed us to rapidly implement the solution while giving us better performance than all other products we tested. 

All of the documentation is openly available and isn't hidden behind a support paywall like many other options. Since the setup was so simple, I opted to do the majority of setup myself, however, support was always available to answer any questions or to provide guidance.

A web management interface would be good, especially for those coming from other solutions that have one. All of the setup and configuration is done via a dedicated Windows application, so you'll have to install it on every machine that you want to manage the cluster with. 

Most of the documentation is heavily windows-based, so finding guides on their Linux VSA can be difficult, however, support can usually assist you in finding the documentation. 

An easy/native ZFS option would also be welcome, as we did end up having to use a mdadm setup, but none of these are deal-breakers.

I've used the solution for three months.

It's stable enough that I sometimes forget it's there. There are so few components in it that there's just less to go wrong.

We were able to have the same resiliency with two nodes as we did with three nodes under Nutanix. It also managed to outperform Nutanix by a fair amount.

Support has been phenomenal. They have always responded to emails in mere minutes, and everyone seems to know their stuff. I've never been transferred around, and they've always answered my question or resolved the issue in minutes.

Positive

We previously used Nutanix, which was extremely expensive and nearly ALL of the documentation was behind a support contract. Most of the components had cryptic names, and there were very few options for finding a solution yourself.

The initial setup is extremely simple, and support can walk you through it or give you guides if you are a do-it-yourself kind of person.

Most of the implementation was done in-house, but support was available at any time to answer questions or to provide suggestions. Everyone we worked with on support seemed to know what they were doing.

It came in 80% cheaper than all of the other solutions, and the yearly support contract was a third of the price as well.

If cost and performance are your goals, then definitely look at StarWind. It's a smaller company than almost all of the alternatives, yet they have very dedicated support staff and a great development team. It doesn't have all the bells and whistles as some others. However, if you're looking for a simple hyper-converged solution, this is your best bet.

We evaluated multiple options, including a software-only Nutanix solution and the VMware vSAN. These were both very expensive and had a very strict hardware compatibility list, which caused the project's budget to swell exponentially. We also looked at some open-source options such as ESOS and GlusterFS, however,  these required many hours of setup and there wasn't a real enterprise support option for either.

They have a great trial system with full support, they even extended mine due to my limited time to deploy and test everything.

We have two StarWind vSAN clusters (two nodes each) in two data centers on Dell PowerEdge servers. We're expanding to three-node clusters soon. Our IT footprint and budget are relatively small, so StarWind vSAN was an appealing alternative to VMware vSAN. At the initial time of purchase, and even to this day, for our use case, StarWind vSAN is a more mature product.

Since we began using the product, we have tripled the number of VMs (RHEL, Ubuntu Server, & Windows Server) and added significant storage. Growth has been easy. The vSAN runs as stable as you would hope, where it is generally never a factor when troubleshooting an outage or planning for growth.

StarWind vSAN allowed the retirement of an aging SAN, and availability expanded while keeping costs low. We're VMware customers, but we began using StarWind vSAN before VMware vSAN was very well established. It works just as well, yet at a more affordable price. I'm not sure if VMware has an option for a two-node cluster now; however, I know three nodes were the minimum in the past, which was a large difference for our relatively meager IT budget.

I've had to open a few support cases over the years due to administrator errors, and the support received was top-notch. I found it much more responsive than VMware support.

Support for only two-node clusters is amazing. Without this feature, we wouldn't have been able to modernize our Corporate MDF due to cost. To my knowledge, StarWind vSAN was a mature product already by the time VMware vSAN came to the market. Each additional node would require us to purchase another physical server, storage, and licensing for ESXi, Veeam, Windows data center, monitoring tool licenses, etc. These things quickly add up for a relatively small back-end infrastructure budget.

I don't have many ideas for improvement as the product "just works." I suppose if I had to pick something to say concerning improvement, I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit.

Another thing that isn't very important yet would be nice is an update to the OS of the Linux appliances. They're running CentOS 7, so I understand why they haven't been updated to something newer, due to Red Hat pulling the plug on CentOS 8 in favor of CentOS Stream.

I've used the solution for more than five years.

The stability is rock solid.

We will be adding a new node next year, and it seems highly scalable.

Customer support has gone above and beyond for me in the past, even though I'd forgotten to renew our support contract at one point.

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution. 

the setup was straightforward, however, we utilized support to ensure we had a proper build.

We used a vendor and would rate their services ten out of ten.

The cost is honestly negligible for us.

We looked at VMware vSAN.

Do not hesitate to use their technical support - even if it is just to review your configuration for their best practices.

We have been using StarWind in conjunction with Veeam as our backup solution, and the results have been exceptional. StarWind’s seamless integration with Veeam has allowed us to enhance our data protection strategy, providing robust and reliable backups. 

The performance and stability of StarWind have significantly reduced our downtime, ensuring that our critical data is always protected and easily recoverable. The ease of setup and configuration, along with the comprehensive support from the Starwind team, has made the process straightforward and stress-free. 

Starwind’s flexible and scalable architecture perfectly complements Veeam’s advanced backup features, giving us a powerful and efficient backup infrastructure. The combination of these two solutions has greatly improved our data management and recovery capabilities, making it an indispensable part of our IT operations. We highly recommend StarWind for anyone looking to optimize their backup strategy, especially when paired with Veeam.

Implementing StarWind in our organization has been a game-changer, particularly in terms of cost savings. By leveraging StarWind's virtual tape library (VTL) solution, we have been able to use virtual tapes for our backups, which are then saved in Azure Blob storage. 

This approach has significantly reduced our dependency on physical tape hardware, leading to considerable savings in both equipment and maintenance costs. The virtual tapes are not only more cost-effective but also offer enhanced flexibility and scalability, enabling us to manage our growing data needs without substantial additional investment. 

Furthermore, the integration with Azure Blob storage ensures our backups are stored securely in the cloud, providing us with peace of mind and reducing the need for expensive on-premises storage solutions. The combination of StarWind’s VTL and Azure Blob has streamlined our backup process, reduced our overall backup costs, and improved our data management efficiency. We are extremely satisfied with the financial and operational benefits StarWind has brought to our organization.

StarWind's customer service is exceptional. From day one, their support team has been responsive, knowledgeable, and proactive. They quickly address issues, minimizing downtime, and offer tailored solutions that fit our specific needs. The team's professionalism and courtesy make even complex problems manageable. Extensive documentation and resources further enhance our experience. StarWind's commitment to customer satisfaction is evident in every interaction, making their support truly outstanding.

In the next release, StarWind should include enhanced integration with cloud services for more seamless hybrid cloud operations. Advanced analytics and reporting tools would improve monitoring and decision-making. Improved scalability options for growing businesses and enhanced security features, such as advanced encryption and multi-factor authentication, are crucial. Additionally, a more user-friendly interface and expanded automation capabilities would greatly enhance usability and efficiency, further solidifying StarWind's position as a top-tier solution.

We've had Starwind for almost three years now.