StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

We use the solution as a hyper-converged appliance for critical business applications for a 12+TB data set with high availability and proactive storage monitoring. 

We use a two-node HCA cluster running Starwind's vSAN on VMware with 40Gbps storage replication links and heartbeat channels. 

We have been through two sets of StarWind vSAN/HCA appliances over five or more years and migrated from all physical servers to two hyper-converged nodes and then from the two hyper-converged nodes to two new nodes when the old nodes had reached maximum service age. 

We have leveraged StarWind's team for assistance with setup and configuration on both sets of appliances and their support as needed.

StarWind's vSAN took us from an organization with no failover for our infrastructure to having a complete failover within four to five minutes. It also allows our IT staff to perform hardware and software maintenance on infrastructure during business hours, cutting our need for overtime and extended work hours. 

We no longer have to worry about hardware failure since either of our vSAN nodes can support our entire workload until the failed node can be repaired or replaced, then the data stores resynced, and high availability returned.

The ease of reaching the support team and their promptness for support is great. The install team has also been excellent, always performing a thorough job and never rushing thru the process. 

The simplicity of architecture since the nodes can be directly connected. There is no need for a storage network unless you exceed three nodes of storage this is a large cost saving for most organizations that do not have extremely large datasets.

StarWind's VCA also provides a great TCO for the provided features and costs versus other solutions.

I would love to see more vendor selection to be available for the HCA/vSAN appliances. All the appliances are currently Dell, and the additional cost savings could be found with Supermicro or Lenovo configurations. 

If StarWind's proactive support alerting could also have an email integration or work with a PSA system so we open alerts when StarWind has an event generated, it would be great. Right now, we operate off the alerts being sent to StarWind and their proactive service team is reaching out to us to work on remediation.

I've used the solution for over five years.

In our experience, it has been extremely stable. We have several clusters deployed and have never had any large issues with any of them.

The solution is very scalable. You can add nodes to increase computer and storage. You only need to add storage networking once you exceed three nodes.

Support is prompt and usually, they can meet via Zoom in just a few minutes from the creation of a support request/ticket.

Previously we have used other SAN solutions that did not provide the same level of redundancy or support.

The initial setup was very straightforward and well-documented. When purchasing a vSAN, the appliance setup is included with StarWind, and they can do most of the setup with you over a Zoom call.

We used a mix of in-house and vendor support. The vendor's level of expertise is excellent. I've never gotten off a call without a solid answer being provided.

Our ROI was achieved within 36 months of deployment. We ran our first vSAN cluster for 60+ months before replacing it with a new vSAN cluster.

The setup is the most cost-effective as a two or three-node cluster yet is still cost-effective in larger configurations.

We evaluated several solutions, including SCALE, Dell EMC, Dell MD Storage Arrays, HPE 3PAR, and others.

Starwind's vSAN software is available on their websites and you can set up a test environment to vet the product.

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 used StarWind's Virtual SAN to create a cluster of hypervisors and databases that utilize iSCSI to access the SAN.  

StarWind's Virtual SAN allowed us to implement a virtual server environment that lets us scale our applications quicker and easier compared to the bare metal environment we had before. The database is also centralized, which makes it more fault tolerant than using a single-node database.

We are able to leverage the HA capabilities that StarWind offers in the event there is an issue with one of the SAN nodes.

We didn't have a SAN solution before StarWind, which meant all of our servers were bare metal. By implementing StarWind's Virtual SAN solution, we were able to transform our bare-metal environment into a hybrid of bare-metal and virtual servers. 

By utilizing virtual servers, we are able to scale and test our applications easier and quicker than by using bare-metal servers. This saved us in cost by not needing to order expensive parts whenever we needed a simple server. Now we can just spin up a VM.

StarWind is very easy to use, even if you have had no experience using a SAN before. It's very easy to create groups, targets, and review logs.

The management software is a clean and simple GUI. During implementation, StarWind's support assisted in getting everything configured properly, quickly, and to their best practices. On the rare occasion when I contact StarWind support, I always get a prompt reply and a quality answer. Having good support is one of the most important things I look for in a vendor, and StarWind excels with this.

The NFS functionality is a Windows-based NFS which has caused issues and forced us to implement a Linux-based NFS solution. You have to do a "full" sync on write-back cache disks instead of a quick sync if there is an issue. This is annoying since, if you have a very large volume, it can take upwards of 30+ hours to do a full sync. With a "fast" sync, you can just sync the difference instead of needing to do a full copy. 

It would be nice if you could control the software via web GUI instead of the desktop application management software.

I've used the solution for over five years.

The solution is very stable.

We can easily add nodes. It is scalable. 

We have had a very good experience with technical support.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward since they did most of the setup for us.

We handled the setup in-house.

StarWind is very reasonably priced.

We previously evaluated FreeNAS.

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.