StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

The product is for clients who require high availability of their servers, from file servers and domain controllers, through to line of business applications.

I've done installations of two-node HA clusters running Windows Server Hyper-V. With the HA cluster we then ran virtual machines, both Windows Desktop, Windows Server, CentOS and Ubuntu. We have installed on pysical servers with both DELL PowerEdge and HP Proliant server hardware (Windows clustering requires exact server hardware to be matched - so two-node DELL, and two-node HP).

As an MSP, stability is important for our clients. StarWind's virtual SAN solution has allowed us to have an always-on architecture allowing survivability of hardware failure. We install it for all clients who need high availability of their virtual servers on-premise.

Given the high availability of the server cluster, we were able to reduce separate physical servers onto one hyper-converged cluster - this saved in OPEX and CAPEX costs immediately, along with licensing costs of the Windows Server licenses.

We have multiple sites running StarWindws Virtual SAN, which have been running for years without any issue.

The thing that impressed me the most about the product is the technical support from the vendor. Everyone knows the benefit of high-availability clusters, but setting one up and reading the documentation is an enormous task in itself.

With StarWind Virtual SAN and the installation support, we have high-availability clusters running within a couple of hours. This has been repeated over and over on many customer sites, so they have their process perfected in this regard.

The documentation could be clearer in terms of explaining the installation, although I will make two comments on this.

The high availability of virtual SAN is by its very nature not a simple drop-in thing, so the documentation will understandably be complex.

Secondly, the installation process is completely guided and done remotely by StarWind certified installation engineers, who handle all aspects.

Given the above, the only thing I can really say needs improvement is that I am not keen on the pricing per storage tier model, however, understand this is a common model charged.

I've done multiple client installations over five years.

No, there was no other solution that we have tried.

Consider how much space you will need as pricing is per node and data.

No, we found the price point compelling, which led to immediately trying StarWinds versus traditional SAN costs from DELL and HP, etc.

Overall it has been a great product and company to work with for the past five years and many more to come.

We were using traditional physical storage for our environment, and it was costly for us. On top of that, the performance was not satisfactory. We started using the StarWind vSAN for virtual storage. 

It is cost-effective and has amazing features. The capacity to scale assets to address changing issues and upgrade execution contrasted with conventional capacity arrangements and therefore is another positive aspect when utilizing StarWind Virtual SAN. 

Utilizing the StarWind Virtual SAN gave us a more steady and adaptable arrangement. I noticed a persistent upgrade in the functionalities of the StarWind Virtual SAN, so its development is great.

We were facing issues with high availability and the integration of virtualization platforms then we started using StarWind vSAN to help us improve the high availability and the integration with the virtualization platform. 

StarWind Virtual SAN permitted me to have extraordinary adaptability in making an exceptionally basic framework, where I could gather total independence over vSAN, yet connect it so that it was fit for working with the VMware Hypervisor. That way, I had a more powerful and dependable framework.

The high availability features helped with storage availability 24/7.

Integration with virtualization platforms helped us to resolve many issues we were facing while using the physical storage.

StarWind Virtual SAN is great for a financially savvy arrangement if you're utilizing Hyper-V or VMware. 

Thanks to a simple execution, you can save your expenses and convey the product with your inner sources with the help of a merchant.

The onboarding is effortless. Setting up and designing the Virtual SAN is clear, with an easy-to-use interface that makes it simple to oversee and screen the capacity climate.

We have an elite execution. StarWind Virtual SAN can convey quick, dependable capacity for virtual machines. Its abiluty to use nearby capacity as a component of a profoundly accessible capacity group assists with guaranteeing superior execution.

The platform needs to improve user management and the web console. 

Improved help for more up-to-date advancements would be ideal. As fresher innovations and guidelines arise, it tends to be provoking programming suppliers to keep up. 

While StarWind Virtual SAN, by and large, works effectively to support the most recent advancements, there might be a few regions where it lingers behind the opposition. Further developing help for fresher advances could assist the product with remaining cutthroat and pertinent.

Upgraded investigating capacities are needed. While the product incorporates a scope of symptomatic and investigating devices, there might be a few regions where it very well may be gotten to the next level. For instance, giving more nitty gritty mistake messages or better direction on the most proficient method to determine issues could be useful for clients.

I have been using the StarWind vSAN solution for the last six months and I found this product exceptional and amazing for virtual storage.

The primary use case we had was covering with StarWind vSAN was to provide customers with a redundant solution that was able to guarantee flexibility. In terms of physical storage, we can aggregate in order to provide a redundant, replicated solution. At the same time, we were looking to keep the total cost of ownership as low as possible as the customer may have multiple venues to cover with the same schema of the system. 

With StarWind vSAN we were able to set a simple 2-node cluster leveraging the internal disks to create a replicated vSAN - eliminating any SPOF at a reasonable price.

StarWind, compared to other competitors in the market and in the same range of price, allows us to design system plans with the resilience of enterprise-grade storage, however, we are able to use smaller storage even at the consumer level. This makes us more competitive as the total price of the offered solution was comparable to a usual non-HA system yet with all the resilience features that StarWind is bringing with its product. This combination of low price with enterprise-grade HA features is key in the market.

There are tons of valuable features that StarWind vSAN brings to the table. It is very difficult to choose one to be raised as a role model.

The unique capability to create a vSAN on a 2-node cluster while all the other competitors will require users to have at least an external witness to set the Virtual SAN.

The service team is very collaborative and skilled and followed us from the implementation to the go-live of the system constantly.

The license price is one of the cheapest in the market.

The price is the key aspect (yet not at the expense of reliability and stability). It is not so easy to find an aspect where StarWind can improve their offering or any additional feature they can include for the price they ask. 

I know that StarWind can scale out easily, however, I wasn't in the position to test that. I would like an automated installation/configuration despite the fact that their service is very collaborative, a customer should be able to deploy the solution by themselves. 

I've used the solution for more than one year.

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to test the scalability aspect.

As it was driven by StarWind reps, it was running very smoothly.

There's nothing to finger point on the StarWind team. They were great.

We also evaluated StorMagic, VMware vSAN, and Datacore.

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 are using Starwind as a virtual SAN Solution for our Microsoft Hyper-V Cluster environment. We have multiple clusters in a couple of different locations over the country. 

We wanted a robust HA environment that could run all of our servers on one node without the need for a third witness and without multiple other SAN appliances that need to be managed by a small IT team. We want to make a HA solution with a KIS (Keep it Simple) approach and Starwind has managed to accomplish this for a reasonable price.

We were previously using HP Storevirtual which was very hard to configure and support and the performance was very bad, plus updating was horrible.

We wanted a simple robust easy-to-manage HA software and have been using a Starwind Virtual SAN (vSAN) at two production locations with a Hyper-V Cluster for almost five years now. It has given us very good performance and hasn't had any issues in the past few years.

Starwind support is excellent. They are very fast and have very good knowledge of Starwind and Hyper-V Cluster software.

What we like best about it is that it is the only true two-node Hyper-V cluster solution that's available. On both production locations, we have a two-node setup over two different server rooms.

Our main goal was that we wanted to have all VM servers available on one cluster host in case of a disaster in one of our server rooms.

Microsoft SSD (Storage Space Direct) always needs a third witness (SMB or Cloud), however, in our two-node solution, this is not ideal. Directly connected fiber connections between the nodes make everything fast and make the chance of a cluster split-brain fault less likely.

Pros include:
- Starwind Support will install and configure the software;
- Starwind will do the updates for you, and this all without any downtime of hosts/VMs
- It's the only a two-node cluster scenario available
- It is compatible with the latest Windows Server versions

I don't think there is much change needed with Starwind vSAN. The product works very well as it is. I haven't got any new features that I would like to add. 

If it's possible to make a driver/solution that does not make use of the iSCSI targets of Windows, that would be great. I don't know if that's possible, however, it could make the configuration a little easier.

The support is excellent and all the people I've contacted have good knowledge of the product. There is nothing to change there. 

I've had eight years of experience with the product, and five years of using it at my current company.

Our hardware is located in one of the largest data centers in the country, where we have high availability services for our company. Our internal systems include VPN, hosting services like website, email, database, DNS, FTP/SFTP, and SMB/CIFS.

Replication is between two servers with SAS and SSD storage, based on Dell servers. Network connectivity is 40GE for data synchronization and1GE for the heartbeat, directly connected.

We are using WMware vSphere as a hypervisor. This solution is highly scalable and cost effective.

This solution improves many areas in our company including performance, data availability, and data security.

StarWind VSAN allows us to build high availability and real-time replication, even between two servers. It offers multiple scaling and replication capabilities and includes health and performance monitoring tools. For this reason, we can build highly available services for our company, which are currently essential for the organization's activities.

Our current implementation allows us to maintain the company's production continuity and to maintain constant access to data processed by the company.

The most valuable features are high availability and real-time replication between two servers. StarWind VSAN immediately copies all data to the second server over the 10GE/40GE network to ensure instant failover. Multiple connections can be made for the heartbeat. 

The StarWind Management Console is available only for Microsoft Windows/Windows Server, and should also be available for Linux and macOS, as it would reduce implementation costs.

We have been using StarWind Virtual SAN for one year.

This product is very stable.

The scalability of StarWind Virtual SAN is very good.

StarWind support is amazing. They are helpful and respond very quickly.

Support is available via teleconference, as well as online. They not only assist with the selection of the appropriate solution but also, help with testing and production implementation.

We did not use another solution prior to this one.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was done via teleconference, which made it very simple.

The vendor team assisted us with deployment using teleconference technology. They have a high level of knowledge and skill.

The StarWind VSAN business model is very cost-effective.

We evaluated VMware vSAN and StorMagic.

The StarWind VSAN product is very well developed in many areas.

We're using Starwind as a failover cluster for load balancing and increased availability.

We had no failover solution before, so if our standalone VMware server went down, we'd be out of operation until we restored from backup. Now we have a Hyper-V cluster with shared storage. We can lose one server and stay online. Failover happens smoothly, recovery and maintenance are less stressful, and we no longer need to worry about downtime. When we tested StarWind, we confirmed that the high availability performs as expected. That level of confidence helps me sleep better at night. 

We only had to purchase two new servers and no other storage or networking equipment. Virtual SAN runs on iSCSI, which is free and easy to configure. It's easy to manage from StarWind's GUI console, and it only required a few extra switch ports. StarWind has specialized in storage solutions for many years, and its track record reassures us that the solution will continue to exist and be supported in the future. I scheduled an interactive validation and tuning session before we went live. I found this to be very valuable, and it proved to us how much the company is committed to its product.

It would be helpful if StarWind provided more precise and detailed documentation explaining how to configure the solution in various scenarios, including the advantages and disadvantages of each. 

I'd also like a mechanism for notifying us when updates are available as well as a visual interface for iSCSI and physical storage. A mobile app for alerts and notifications would be helpful, too. We should still have access to security patches even if we don't pay for support. Lastly, StarWind should make it easier to perform an orderly shutdown of the entire environment in a power outage when everything is running on battery.

We've been using StarWind Virtual SAN for less than a year

We had an old standalone VMware server hosting several virtual machines that we wanted to replace with something highly available at a low cost. I researched and found StarWind Virtual SAN to be the best solution. We only had to purchase two new servers and no other storage or networking equipment. 

I'd recommend purchasing at least one year of support. It helps to have support on the initial configuration.

I rate StarWind Virtual SAN nine out of 10. 

We have been running Starwind Virtual SAN in a production environment since 2009 with VMware.

We run all types of software on top of Starwind (Different types of databases, factory software, security software, ERP, etc.).

We don't have performance issues with the software in fact it responds more than enough to our needs.

Since we are a mid-size company; Starwind is perfect for us.

Not everything is great, in the very first editions (a long time ago) there were some annoying issues with the software however, naturally, it evolved.

For us, in the last six or seven years, the uptime has been 100%. It has proven to be a great choice for us and of great value for money.

There are no future plans in changing to a different solution.

We have had Starwind in our infrastructure for about 13 years. It's easy to manage and understand. You can learn it very fast.

For those that aren't familiar with it, they can do a trial try and I am sure users will be surprised at how well it works. It has been a great investment!

Our Datacenter is based on VMware vCenter and initially, after some testing with other vendors and VMware vSAN itself, Starwind, in our case, was a better solution. We prefer to have the storage layer separated from the hypervisor kernel.

We have also products in our Datacenter like VxRail, however, in an honest storage level, in comparison, Starwind has an easier interface.

It's quite easy to manage. Good storage hardware is a must in our case, however, you can also run it in a software solution despite not being recommended in some cases.

Like many solutions today, Starwind should focus a bit on the alarmists of the product.

There are so many potential alarmistic features and protocols that should be incorporated into the software.

Security on the ISCSI protocol could be improved by adding features like OS-type control access, especially for the data center environment.

I have seen 13 years of evolution in the product. Previously, it was short in features. Many customers' requests have been done. I do hope the solution continues to evolve in this way. 

I've used the solution for more than 12 years.

The solution offers good value for money.

Licensing needs to consider future needs.

We also looked at Microsoft and Dell.

The solution is very stable.