StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

We used Starwind to provide HA ISCSI storage to a Hyper-V Cluster for VM Storage. This was mounted through MPIO on Windows for both nodes, using data locality for high levels of speed and performance. 

The devices are connected via fiber over a 10-mile line, over an isolated subnet. This has been great, as we've been able to shut down an entire site and have the machines not notice any difference. This was done over our existing network, using an isolated VLAN to have traffic be in its own area with no other issues.  

Starwind made it easy to deploy fully redundant, highly available storage at a low cost. We were unable to find a solid replacement for our aging HP Lefthand solution, and Starwind stepped into that fantastically. 

Prior to this, based on a design issue, traffic for storage replication was served on the same network as ISCSI traffic. This had the expected issues you'd think, leading to bad performance. Starwind doesn't allow this by default, and as such forced our architect to realize the mistake and worked to get it set up better, with Starwind support. 

The support has been top-notch. The engineers you get are knowledgeable and are able to solve issues right out the gate, which is huge for us. We don't get finger-pointing between vendors with them either, as they own issues and take care of them from the beginning. The installation and setup were done with a dedicated engineer, who went through the system step by step and made sure our techs understood the process while getting a great setup out the gate. This was all handled via Zoom, which was a nice thing to not worry about it. 

It would be nice to see a new UI for the windows client, as it is not the easiest to find settings. However, we normally don't have to. 

I do see a lot of info about them now offering a VSAN-like software that is a Linux VM base for VMware. I'd like to see this same option available for Hyper-V, or at least make it more apparent the differences between the two. 

I would like to see more US-based resellers. Working directly with the company was fine, but we prefer to have local resellers available as needed. 

I've used the solution for two years.

It is as stable as the Windows OS it runs on. Take that as you will. 

It appears to scale horizontally well, as you're able to keep data locality present and it will allow you to pick which data is replicated or not. 

Support is easy to get a hold of, and usually first-call resolution. 

Positive

We used HP Lefthand/StorVirtual, which was end-of-life. 

IT was straightforward, as it was vendor-led and handheld through. They helped us every step of the way. 

The implementation was vendor-led, and they were highly available. 

The ROI we witnessed was within 7 months, due to hosting on our system. 

The cost isn't too good to be true. If you're able to use commodity hardware, it's worth a look. 

We looked at Truenas. 

Give it a shot. They may not be the biggest, however, they're able to play in the field. 

We use the solution to create a highly available server cluster. 

I currently have two physical servers running 25 virtual machines in a highly available cluster. StarWind Virtual SAN enables this without any extra hardware and any kind of hardware vendor locking. 

We use the vSAN product to run a production cluster but also a secondary cluster that houses low-level and testing servers. StarWind vSAN is used to cluster everything together into a solid hyper-converged structure that requires less hardware, less energy, and far less maintenance.

I have been able to do more with less hardware. StarWind vSAN allows us to create a hyper-converged server cluster on a friendly budget without being locked into a specific hardware vendor. 

The product, server, and support are top tier. Their proactive support is on top of every little anomaly in the vSAN. The product is fairly simple to get running and operates with little overhead. 

It makes setting up a high available environment easy and very manageable. Everyone from sales to support are very engaged and proud of the product.

The most valuable aspects are the support and the high availability.

They offer top-tier support. The support staff is knowledgeable and very willing to help. The proactive support option is unlike any support I've ever dealt with. If anything gets out of sorts, the team is on top of it with an email.

Achieving a highly available environment can be hard to execute and lead to a hardware vendor lockin. StarWind is hardware agnostic and supports as few as two hosts to create a fully functional, hyper-converged, highly available server cluster at a fraction of the cost of other vendors.

A good area of improvement would be at the level at which StarWind vSAN is managed. Currently, the StarWind management console is a bit clunky to navigate and isn't the most user intuitive interface. It gets the job done, however, following guides and documentation is highly advised to make sure things are being set up correctly. 

Another area of improvement would be the ability to manage your entire setup using StarWind software. Hyper-V, for example, still needs to be managed using a manager and failover cluster. Combining these into the StarWind product would be a game changer.

I've used the solution for five years.

The solution is very stable. It's been running for five years with nearly no problems in the software itself.

You can start with just two nodes and scale from there. It's very helpful.

The technical support is A+.

Positive

We did not use a different solution previously.

The initial setup is straightforward. The support helps with the initial setup. I had to rebuild a cluster once and support also assisted with that process.

We handled the setup in-house with the manufacturer.

The product offers a very straightforward cost model versus its competitors.

We did also evaluate VMware, Nutanix, and Scale.

We have utilized StarWind Virtual SAN (vSAN) as an iSCSI server alternative in a Hyper-V based installation. We ran a 30-day trial license in a lab environment. The StarWind vSAN solution was used as a software-defined iSCI storage solution for an imminent SQL Server cluster installation. This allowed us for a fairly quick integration solution for our SQL Server cluster shared disk requirements, without the need to invest in a high-cost Storage Area Network (SAN) solution. 

It is a good practice to use storage performance evaluation tools, such as Microsoft DiskSPD, to evaluate IOPS metrics and perform stress testing in a lab environment with synthetic transactions for your prospective application. In our case, we conducted synthetic transactions for stress testing to prepare for a SQL server failover cluster installation.

There are various reasons that led us to pick StarWind vSAN for our implementation. 

Firstly, because it offers a robust iSCSI-based virtual server which is software-defined and comes at a fraction of the cost, as compared to buying an expensive hardware Storage Area Network (SAN). 

Secondly, because it is compatible with KVM. We do implementations based on the KVM hypervisor besides HyperV and VMware, and StarWind vSAN is among a limited number of platforms which offer native support for KVM. 

Last but not least, it offers a fully functional trial license to test the product in a lab environment in a variety of deployment options, including both Linux-based virtual appliances and Windows-based executables.

StarWind Virtual SAN (vSAN) offers a significant breadth of features. The ones which were the most significant and value-adding in our topology and implementation included the overall admin and user-friendliness of the solution and the rapid deployment times gave us a platform for a very quick-to-market solution for our SQL Server cluster-based applications. It allowed us to develop a solution in less than 30 days with less than one-third of the overall estimated cost investment compared to a traditional hardware-based SAN.

The StarWind vSAN solution is versatile and offers broad support for different hypervisors and deployment formats. During our evaluation of our on-premises setup, we did not find any significant flaws. 

One point for improvement is to increase the performance capabilities of the Windows-based executable as compared to its Linux Controller Virtual Machine (CVM) equivalent. 

Another point for improvement would be to incorporate a more granular Role-based access control system (RBAC) natively inside the software to allow for more granular administration. 

Yet another point would be to achieve tighter integration and automation with cloud-based platforms, such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

I have used StarWind vSAN installations in a lab environment on many occasions over the past five years; the most recent of which was during a 30-day trial run in 2024.

There have been no dropouts nor any downtime during the deployment and during the evaluation operations of the product with our SQL Server cluster instances.

StarWind vSAN performs steadily under heavy usage and can scale well if needed to support larger-scale systems. In our case it supported a significant number of clustered SQL Server instances without any issues in scaling up when needed.

The customer service and sales team have been very responsive and helpful throughout the evaluation of the product.

Positive

We have used hardware-based SAN solutions based on the IBM V5000 series. We did not switch this solution. We continue to trust IBM V5000 and V7000 solutions for higher-end implementations, where budget is not an issue. In cases of lower budget and quick time-to-market implementations, though, StarWind vSAN has helped us make good progress.

The setup was straight forward in most aspects and it was based on a well documented step-by-step procedure, which was provided by the vendor.

Implementation was an in-house one.

Make the most of your 30-day trial license, and if needed, you should contact the sales department of StarWind to extend the trial license or upgrade to a full license. 

We based our decision on previous positive experience with StarWind vSAN. Also due to brevity of time and tight project timeframe, there was no sufficient time for evaluating other options.

I would advise that you implement the Linux-based Controller Virtual Machine (CVM) during your evaluation phase, since the expected performance metrics are better, as compared to Windows-based executable. 

As per StarWind software documentation, the Linux-based CVM offers a a wide range of features, better performance, and stability, including reduced CPU usage and lower I/O latency.

Our client had very little IT infrastructure in play relating to servers. They had a single Windows 10 low-end workstation that was acting as the controller for their food production assembly line. They were tackling a huge expansion and needed a more robust controller as their current one would go down often. 

StarWind vSAN gave us a cost-effective option to leverage three Dell servers, with two in HA and a third acting as a replica in a separate building on their site. This way, it can tolerate two full server failures and still allow the assembly line controller to run.

The product gave us a cost-effective way to deploy a highly available server environment. This allowed our client to have their food assembly line controller always available, as it costs them a lot of money if it goes down for any more than a few minutes. 

With Hyper-V and StarWind, they can have a quick turnaround in case a server goes down. It also gave us an insight into StarWinds as an alternative for future clients of ours if their server capability requirements ever increase. It's a great tool to have knowledge of and to offer as an option if needed.

The core feature of the entire product is the most valuable aspect. There aren't any features that stand out that provide a lot of value. We just like the ability to have HA storage replicated in real time between two nodes - which is enough for us to be more than satisfied. We do not interface with this product very often, so I can't speak to any feature in particular that stands out as being exceptional and valuable. The value of the product is the services given at a great price which is what drew us to the StarWind Virtual SAN to begin with.

It is not very clear within the StarWind Management Console or the StarWind support documentation how to perform maintenance on a single node in a two-node HA cluster. We had to reach out to support to confirm the process to power cycle a single node, and even then, we had to go back and forth a few times with support to get a clear and concise answer to the question we had. It would be nice to have the option to put a single node in maintenance mode so we know we can safely perform updates and power down the server if required.

We've had the solution for six months in production.

The product is very stable.

I get the impression that this is better geared towards a smaller scale, for example, ad two or four-node cluster. Anything bigger, and it would make more sense to go with the big-name competitor. 

Technical support is Exceptional. They have very helpful and prompt responses.

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution.

The setup is straightforward with the help of the support engineers to fine-tune our deployment.

We had setup help from the vendor team. They were quite knowledgeable. That said, I do recall them doing a few things in a different way than described by their setup guide.

I have not researched ROI.

The cost and licensing are very competitive.

We did not evaluate other options.

We were previously using old conventional backup methods. Last year, our organization decided to move to some cloud base storage solution, and we moved to StarWind as our primary storage solution. 

StarWind Virtual SAN is the solution exactly we are looking for. It replicates the data between the hosts, giving us 30 TB of usable redundant storage. 

StarWind Virtual SAN is a flexible solution in terms of storage expansion. The big advantage we got from StarWind is the ability to meet compliance requirements to ensure we are fail-safe.

StarWind Virtual SAN is cost-effective, with high availability and good flexibility, and is a high-performance software-defined storage solution. 

StarWind features like high availability and cost-effectiveness improve the ability of our organization by reducing the cost of old storage methods. Additionally, StarWind Virtual SAN provides excellent performance. It delivers fast data access and efficient data transfers, which actually improves the application performance and user experience.

In our case, the cost and high availability are the two most important factors which we were looking for in a solution. StarWind Virtual SAN is a cloud-native solution, and cost and other factors are favorable to us. I would recommend this solution if a company has a tight budget and hardware limitations in its environment. Of course, users do need to consider other factors as well as every organization has its own preference for solutions.

There is always room for improvement, and user expectations never end.

The first and most important thing the solution needs is video tutorials. There should be more focus areas. To use the solution, users should not need to always create tickets to get support from the vendor. There should be publicly available tutorials on YouTube or other platforms that help the users to integrate this solution with other platforms, for example. 

Documentation improvement is the second area that needs focus. We require more detailed documentation. That will definitely help users to effectively utilize this solution. 

I have been using this solution for more than one year. 

We were a using conventional backup solution previously.

We have evaluated a few options previously. However, I can't recall the names. That process was handled a year ago.

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.

Positive

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 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.

One of the biggest hydroelectric power plants in the world asked us to prepare a project using HA Virtualization for environmental weather monitoring. In this project, we used three hosts virtualized by VMWare ESXI+VCenter (Essential Plus License). However, one of the prerequisites was that it should be able to integrate with other preexisting virtualized systems that were deployed by other suppliers and use other hypervisors like HyperV or Proxmox. That is where StarWind Virtual SAN comes in. It is really flexible and reliable. We were able to assemble this pilot project using it, and it is in testing, so far, without failures or any malfunctions. It is really an excellent solution.

The flexibility of StarWind Virtual San allowed us to create a system that is integrated into pre-existing solutions and is also independent of VMware itself, making it more reliable and robust.  

It made the system much easier to operate, maintain and manage inside the data center alongside many other systems. It is very easy to migrate the entire virtual system to other hosts or other data centers safely. 

It is really a good solution when you need to be flexible and, at the same time, reliable in a critical system.

First of all, the flexibility and reliability are great. 

The ability to be managed by PowerShell scripts made the management of the system really easy and efficient. We're able to do remote operations or even some operations different from the standard ones (allowed by the GUI).

It also runs under a Windows OS, so it is able to be installed in any virtualized system, independent from the Hypervisor itself.

The available GUI is excellent for monitoring and operating the system in an easy and direct way. It also makes it very easy to deploy and configure. 

It has good documentation, and I did not need technical support once during the entire deployment.

It should be improved in the way it detects the right filesystem image after a complete shutdown of the system or in the case of disaster recovery. I would also recommend an easier way to back up/restore and export the filesystem images.

Another feature that I would like to see implemented is a configurable email alert and report system. While it can be managed using Powershell, it would not be hard at all to configure reports using PowerShell scripts, it would be nice to have some additional features in the GUI.

I've used the solution for about two years.

It is really stable and reliable. It perfectly fits our solution with an active-active failover solution.

The free version is limited, so it is not so scalable. If you need more scalability, you have different license options from the paid versions and the cost is totally worth it.

I did not need any service and support as it is really well documented.

Positive

We also used VMware VSAN and Nutanix. The StarWind Virtual SAN seems to be more flexible and easier to manage in the case we were developing.

The initial setup took about ten days. This included the studying of the documentation, setup, testing, and commissioning. It is well-documented and really easy to operate.

We handled the initial setup in-house.

The Star Wind Virtual SAN has a free/trial version that can be used for study and is suitable for simple solutions. The pricing for the paid versions is really worth it. When you need flexibility and reliability with good technical support, you are paying for what you get. 

We also evaluated VMware vSAN.