StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

StarWind vSAN is set up on our two host VMware ESXi systems. Each system is running a Linux VM for the vSAN storage and a Windows Server 2022 VM that runs the StarWind vSAN management software. 

The two hosts are connected on a dedicated 25GB backbone with a 1GB management network and a 1GB heartbeat network. ISCSI is run on a separate 25GB connection between the two hosts.

There have been zero issues with stability or downtime in the past three months. One of the servers experienced a random system crash and the vSAN was not affected and there was no downtime with the VMs running on the vSAN storage solution.

It was relatively easy to set up and the support was great. After purchasing the license, it was relatively simple to follow the StarWind documentation on their website.

It has allowed us to set up vSAN with ESXi without spending extra on an ESXi license or needing to buy a third host. This saved us thousands on initial setup costs and hundreds in licensing yearly.

An issue with one of the hosts caused the server to crash, however, our services and VMs running on the vSAN storage were not impacted. The storage implementation experienced zero downtime and behaved exactly how we wanted it to. 

vSAN implementation is straightforward and easy to setup. 

The support has been amazing and quick to reply. They also reached out and made sure that everything was setup correctly. Support quickly answered any questions we had and setup a screen share meeting to validate our install and give optimization tips. 

After the initial meeting, they reached out a few weeks afterward to double-check that their recommendations were implemented properly.

Their support did not try and upset anything and were very helpful and knowledgeable about their product.

Documentation could be a little more clear on what the most recent version of the documentation is. 

I had issues locating the documentation that applied to my version of StarWind vSAN. However, it was easy to follow and set up once I did locate the correct documentation.

It would also be helpful to provide the software download links with the documentation. I had to find the vSAN Linux VM and the vSAN management software in separate locations and with separate download links. It wasn't initially clear that the Linux VMs and vSAN management software needed to be installed. 

I've used the solution for three months.

It seems to work fine on our two host systems. It seems like it would easily be able to expand to a larger system. 

Customer service and support replied quickly and ensured everything was implemented correctly. They checked in and ensured we implemented all their recommendations so that we would have the best experience. 

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution.

It was easy to set up once we found the documentation.

We deployed it ourselves in-house.

The solution allowed us to have a high availability system without having to purchase additional hardware or support licensing.

If you email StarWind, they might give a discount on the licensing compared to what they list online. 

We looked at VMware vSAN.

When support reaches out, they're not trying to sell anything. They just want to ensure everything is set up correctly and you have a good experience! 

We found StarWind when trying to look for a hybrid storage space that could handle various physical hardware as well as virtual operating systems.

Upon first contacting the company, the sales and technical demo were superb compared to other products and they clearly explained and showed us a live demo of our potential environment.

The whole purchase process was swift and followed up by calls and emails from their team.

Compared to other products that we looked at, the cost-saving was so great that choosing StarWind was a no-brainer.

When I need something urgently and very technical, I get the answer back that I want. I don't have to battle through with a first liner that tells me to "turn it off and on again".

The solution has improved our organization by:

1. The variety of services offered

2. The financial viability compared to the services offered

3. Product functionality and performance is suitable for our organization

4. The strong consultation accessibility for customers that wish to discuss the product first with their experts and start the process how they like it, not how the company wants it to

5. The support team has the expertise of a strong service in the products that their customers have purchased

6. StarWinds, in general, has a strong user community that offers help on forums and other sites

7. The company has a firm customer focus keeping in touch with us at all times, even after purchasing the initial product after two years

The features that I found most valuable are ease of use of the software that StarWind offers - with the first setup being a bit painful. However, now that we have a handle on it, it saves a great ton of time on management and caring about the hardware part of it as all it is is a software-based solution. I love managing the cluster that we have set up via the Virtual Storage Attached Network device, with the Web Management being so simple yet packed with all the features that I require. The management of the traffic and the speeds are awesome as well.

Some users have commented on online forums and others that the documentation and KB articles could be clearer or better written. However, I found this to be the case a couple of years ago. Now, in 2022, this has been rectified and you can usually find the information that you are looking for.

Another problem that we have come across is that when you will cease your contract with StarWind (for support) your product won't be updated and that is a big selling point, especially for us, as we have loads of products from StarWind.

I've been using the product for around two years now.

We previously used the standard SAN hardware solution from a big IT company - we switched to basically save on hardware costs and maintenance.

The initial setup cost will be great, especially with the new hardware. The StarWind pricing isn't that expensive compared to others, however, there are yearly maintenance costs to be aware of.

Yes, we had a look at Lenovo XClarity as well as Nutanix AOS and VMWare vSAN.

I'd advise new users to not hesitate and just go ahead with it.

After deploying a HA SQL Failover Cluster, we started to notice performance issues due to our storage, which was an off-the-shelf NAS.

I had already heard about StarWind and its VSAN software from previous blogs.

A VSAN solution seems like an ideal solution as we already had the hardware, minus the disks required. We already had two Dell R540's with six available bays in each server.

After reviewing their documentation, the setup process was simple enough to follow and so I decided to run a little test environment.

I was pleasantly surprised by the performance gains even on spinning disks and the overall setup being fairly painless.

I decided to go ahead with this solution, got the cost signed off, and implemented it in production.

We had some initial issues, however, their support was extremely helpful in resolving these and was very patient as we deployed this to a secure environment with no internet access. Yet they still offered support and worked closely with a single point of contact.

I then later moved to a different company and implement a similar solution in the Oracle Cloud using their free offering, again this was simple to set up using their collection of PowerShell scripts.

Immediately we noticed huge performance gains, even on older hardware and once we implemented a 10GB link between both servers, the sync was near-instant after the initial sync was complete.

In addition, their support contact was fantastic. They spent several hours troubleshooting an issue with me and due to the complexity of our environment this only made it more challenging, yet they were persistent and helped resolved any issues

Additionally, their white papers were a great starting point to get started.

The forums can lead to lots of topics with no resolutions.

The logs can also become very noisy when there is an issue, which is very infrequent. However, when they do occur, it makes it very challenging to figure out what the cause is.

A feature that would be helpful, is a way to update the software automatically on all the hosts. Instead, you must find the download link, which in itself can be challenging, and then manually upgrade each server one by one. This process can take a while depending on the time to resync your VDISKS. 

For about 3 years, in which I deployed it in 2 companies.

Previously we were using a Synology NAS

Try the free version and see if it meets your requirements. 

I did look at purchasing EqualLogic, however, the cost of that hardware would be far greater than StarWind's

We have a  pair of StarWind hypervisor servers that share the internal storage using Starwind's Virtual SAN, eliminating the need for a separate, physical SAN. The primary purpose of this deployment is to provide highly available hypervisors to run file servers, domain controllers, critical servers, and DNS servers.

The vSAN allows us to use Starwind Management Console to confirm the health of the sync. The high availability nature of the deployment means we can fail over VMs without end-users noticing any downtime. While it isn't used for StarWind exclusively, the Remote Console access on the Enterprise iDRAC is invaluable to me in my daily duties. We have had great success live migrating VMs as necessary and adding, removing, backing up, or restoring VMs.  

I like StarWind's high availability. The failover is almost immediate, so the end users have no idea the guest VM moved at all. We can failover all guest VMs onto a single hypervisor, place it into maintenance mode, install updates, and reboot a hypervisor all during the daytime and remotely, with confidence the process will be successful.

The Command Center, a free guest VM for management and monitoring, leaves something to be desired. It could have more accurate real-time information and better reporting visuals, which seem to be an afterthought.

Our inability to use Azure File Sync Share meant we had to deploy a separate hypervisor for a file server that isn't on the Starwind High Availability setup. We could not install SentinelOne EDR on the hypervisors without getting too many warnings in the storage event logs.

We deployed a pair of StarWind vSAN hypervisors in January 2020 and have been using them for more than three years.

StarWind seems highly stable after three and a half years.

StarWind vSAN is highly scalable and easy to configure.

I rate StarWind support 10 out of 10. They are fantastic. The StarWind team proactively alerts us about the latest firmware, including iDRAC and BIOS. They reach out and schedule a remote session when they see warnings on our event logs, such as the time we deployed SentinelOne to the host machine. The StarWind engineers are always knowledgeable and take control to "drive " the session. 

Positive

We used single hypervisors but had never had a failover cluster before StarWind vSAN.

Support walked us through everything after we got the server racked and online.

The in-house team provided access to StarWind support for deployment. After that, we sat back and learned from the support person. StarWind later provided us some training materials.

It is hard for me to quantify the ROI as an IT person, but we would buy it again in an instant.

We underestimated how many guest VMs we would have running on these hypervisors after three years, and would have bought more Windows licenses upfront.

We briefly researched Dell and Microsoft options, but those were physical SAN solutions, not vSAN.

I rate StarWind Virtual SAN 10 out of 10. I recommend purchasing support and contacting them before you install any new agents or sync with Azure File Sync share.

We set up a virtualized environment with the need for extreme flexibility and reliability to provide our IT-Services. 

We had to implement a solution that could take on this task and was very pleased with StarWind Virtual SAN. 

We could implement it into our environment easily with low maintenance and could focus on achieving our central task. 

It made our whole project a lot simpler and more user-friendly. We benefited from the scalability to expand our Service capability and were able to do so easily with StarWind vSAN.

We had a rough time using our previous solution. StarWind vSAN made our whole operation much easier and added a lot of particularly useful features. 

In our highly virtualized environment, we had a requirement for high flexibility due to our wide spectrum of services. 

StarWind vSAN was very easy to integrate into our system and ran flawlessly during our entire use time. 

Scaling our systems was something we'd been worried about before due to growing demands and the complicated software we had before. With StarWind vSAN, we could easily accomplish all of our tasks and could benefit from the amazing performance and reliability this software had to offer.

The web-user interface was very user-friendly, and it did not take a lot of time to school our employees about this product. 

All administrative tasks could easily be done, and integrating new systems was easier than ever before. 

This saves us a lot of time as even more complicated tasks can be resolved in way less time than before. We used vCenter and were very happy to see a dedicated vCenter plugin for StarWind vSAN. 

It made our whole operation much more smooth and reliable, not to mention the saved time on schooling employees.

I would say a point that could be improved upon would be the level of documentation and guides that are available. 

While we had no problems setting the system up, and service technicians from StarWind could assist us very well, they could provide some form of in-depth documentation. User guides would be greatly appreciated by all of us. 

Preferably these documents could be directly in the console. That said, I wouldn't mind having it not as tightly integrated. We have some apprentices that use the console, and we don't want to make them call support every time they don't understand something.

I've used the solution for six months.

It is very reliable, and we were confident storing data using StarWind vSAN.

The scalability is great. We were able to scale our systems effortlessly.

They were very friendly and helpful, staying professional and competent at all times.

Positive

We did use another solution. The previous solution was open source, and we needed some kind of real support on the other end to guarantee reliability.

The initial setup was very simple and straightforward. We were able to implement StarWind into our system, and we did not require special help.

We implemented it ourselves, in-house.

We prefer not to publish our ROI.

StarWind vSAN has great value and is definitely worth the price.

We did not evaluate other options. We used other software from StarWind beforehand and were convinced of the quality of their products, so the first thing we looked into was StarWind's solution to our problems.

I highly recommend the solution. It saves a lot of stress, hassle, and time.

The primary use case is for on-premise synchronous replication of high-availability fileservers. If the primary node fails in our virtualization environment, thanks to simultaneous replication, the backup is immediately available. StarWind keeps both of the disks mirrored.

We are using StarWind as a virtual SAN Solution for our Microsoft Hyper-V Cluster environment. We were looking for a simple-to-use, reliable and cost-effective solution. For our purposes, we also tested Veeam and VMware vSAN. StarWind suits us better.  

StarWind Virtual SAN improved our disaster recovery strategy and made it much more secure. The software is cost-effective when it comes to licensing and maintenance. We don't need any extra hardware just install it on our existing virtual machines

The config, which was initially prepared in cooperation with StarWind technical support, is easy to replicate for purposes of maintenance (the user didn't notice anything in performance during the maintenance).

The main benefit is that StarWind is almost maintenance-free.

It's a reliable software, which you set up once, and doesn't need much maintenance. 

Thanks to detailed technical documentation, it is easy to set up. The technical support team from StarWind is experienced and collaborative. 

We did the implementation by ourselves without any third party (StarWind's technical support team checked the configuration made by our administrators), which is cost-saving. Also, our technical team can provide effective first-level support (which you don't often need as it's a reliable product).

We don't find any parts in need of improvement. We don't use all functionalities which StarWind offers. Maybe we could find a cheaper solution, however, when it comes to the above-mentioned pros at the end of the day it's good value for money.

For every issue we had during the implementation or during the period of usage, StarWind Virtual SAN's technical support helped us to find an effective solution.

If I have to find any area of improvement, there is only one thing - other vendors such as VMware vSAN have a bigger community of users, so it is easier to find more pre-sale or post-sale information from users. 

We've used StarWind Virtual SAN for more than three years.

We did not previously use a different solution.

We took into consideration VMware vSAN or Veeam. However, we chose StarWind Virtual SAN.

I write this from a value-added reseller (VAR) point of view. 

StarWind Virtual SAN provides us with a number of benefits:

StarWind Virtual SAN is a cost-effective solution, as it does not require additional licensing costs. This can help VARs to offer competitive pricing to their customers.

StarWind Virtual SAN is a highly flexible solution, as it can be deployed on physical servers or on top of virtual machines running on hypervisors such as VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. This allows VARs to offer a solution that can be tailored to the specific needs of their customers.

From my point of view, we offer this product and it is installed, tested, and configured on our client hardware, often located in the public and private sectors in the UK. 

StarWind is known for its good technical support and customer service. This helps us to offer a solution that is supported by a reliable vendor, which in turn improves customer satisfaction and ensures sticky and repeat business for future activities. 

StarWind Virtual SAN fills a gap for our clients who can't justify the expensive hardware from Nutanix, HPE etc. Virtual SAN offers an opportunity to repurpose hardware or use non-badged hardware for a very high-end storage solution. This directly benefits my company and me since we are able to cater to this gap in the market.   

StarWind Virtual SAN supports both block and file storage protocols, which provides me with more options to choose from when placing Virtual SAN for a given role and client based on my customers' specific use cases and requirements. 

Data compression, deduplication, and snapshots help optimize storage utilization and protect data. 

This helps me to offer a solution that can help our customers to improve storage utilization and protect data at an affordable price, cutting out expensive enterprise-grade hardware.

Geolocation could be better, for example, for site mirroring for DR purposes. I would like a future release to explore the possibility of secure, reliable site replication. 

Disaster recovery site mirroring would provide several benefits, including business continuity. A disaster recovery site can be used to restore critical systems and operations in the event of a disaster, ensuring that the business can continue functioning.

The deduplication feature could also be more robust. That said, I am comparing it to the features of an HPE Nimble, which is a really unfair comparison given the cost difference.

I've used the solution for two to three years.

The software is very stable, and I have personally never witnessed downtime if the hardware use exceeds the minimum requirements.

The solution is not too scalable to geo-site redundancy. This could be a future feature.

Support is timely, knowledgeable, and has good availability with lots of different contact options including phone, email, web, etc.

Positive

We used to use VMware vSAN.

The guides and support are very detailed. There is a large community that also runs this in their home labs. They are giving lots of community feedback, ideas, and solutions to problems you may encounter.

I am speaking from a vendor point of view.

I would advise users to contact StarWind directly since we have always found they support pre and post-sales and are amazingly knowledgeable.  

We looked into various hardware and software offerings from Nutanix, NetApp, and HPE. StarWind fills the void when the budget does not allow for the expensive hardware, and we have older systems we can repurpose.

Will definitely recommend this product and have been dealing with support for over three years. Normally, the biggest grievance we have in the IT industry is support and support is great. Sales representatives were knowledgeable and very helpful whether you use the free or paid version. 

This is perfect for mainstream organizations. Even small businesses can cover legacy methods and all new methods in terms of hypervisors and backup methodologies. 

I work for an organization that has standalone hosts in rural areas in Africa where tape backup is still a thing. With the assistance of StarWind, we were able to share a backup device on Hyper-V as Hyper-V does not support pass-through natively. It is a fantastic software that I highly recommended for the virtualization of storage and backup methodologies.

It is more appropriate for businesses that use Hyper-V and direct attached storage arrays. This solution works well with VMware as well as with smaller systems, although it is a bit of a waste using it when you have a strong SAN. 

It works very well in clustering smaller arrays to create a bigger array for storage platforms. It is the perfect software for interfacing Hyper-V components with other hosts sharing resources.

The StarWind products have enabled our organization to modernize stations where larger and more expensive equipment was not an option. 

I work for an organization that has standalone hosts in rural areas in Africa where tape backup is still used. With the assistance of StarWind, we were able to share a backup device on Hyper-V which did not support pass-through natively.

The ability to use older native technology integrated with 21st-century AI is what allows these applications to be above their competitors.

From vSAN all the way to their VTL pass-through technology, it is compatible with multiple platforms and is truly a universal application with great potential.

The most disappointing side of the application is the free edition. There used to be GUI attached. That has recently changed to only CLI management of the application. That might be a bit off-putting to customers as they would like to use and play with the application without the limitation of what the free license offers. 

Another downside is there is no way of downloading the older versions online. It would be great to have a content library to get the older versions.

I have been using StarWind for about three years.

I have not used a different solution. During my search, StarWind was the first site that I visited.

Do not waste any time on the free product; it's better to get a license. Use sales to evaluate and explore and you will be ready to implement a solid product.

For storage, I have explored Open NAS (Linux) and Windows NFS 3.0.

Try out all of the other solutions as well; there might be a solution offered by StarWind that might suit your organization's needs.