StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

The MSP that I work for brought on a client who realized they needed help with IT after the acquisition of another company. In the space of a few weeks, that client nearly doubled in size, and the aged tech in use at each location previously wasn't going to cut it. 

While we originally quoted a traditional SAN deployment for the client, they were concerned about having a single storage unit with two very distant servers. They weren't interested in buying two SANs so that each location could host one. StarWind vSAN allowed us to keep their data synced between two sites without the extra hardware expenditure.

For my MSP, this successful deployment has earned us another happy customer and another potential future sales lead. The client has expressed no concerns about the deployment since implementation in the handful of times we've reached out to them since the project wrapped up.

Additionally, we have been able to use this deployment solution for the training of lower-level staff to get them familiar with the underlying generic concepts of SANs, both virtual and physical (or at least as much as we can for physical SANs using a virtual SAN as the lab environment).

Easily the core of this solution was the utilization of stretched clustering. As the client had acquired another company some distance away, they were concerned about having a single SAN in one location or the other. StarWind vSAN allowed us to keep a copy of the data local to each site without asking the client to pay for two SANs in addition to the two new servers they needed.

On the acquired end of the company, the reduction in hardware also meant that we were able to use their existing server room mounting hardware, as a new server and a new SAN would require a larger rack to be deployed as well.

The documentation listed on the StarWind website indicated that the search result for vSAN was for Windows Server 2016. It wasn't until we got into the article itself that we saw that Server 2019 and 2022 were also supported by the same document.

While my co-workers might not place as much emphasis on this next topic as I do, I did not see any indication that StarWinds vSAN is a usable solution with non-GUI instances of Hyper-V. While it might certainly be possible, the time restraints on the project meant that my plan to roll out hypervisors with as little overhead as possible (e.g., Windows Server Desktop features) had to be placed at a lower priority, and we were never able to look into this as an option.

The MSP I work for deployed StarWind vSAN to a client over the last month. They have been quite happy with it - and with us as a result.

The client has been happy so far, and we feel confident about this solution as an MSP.

Since the solution is built for small and medium businesses, its scalability is intentionally limited.

Our previous one-size-fits-all SAN mindset often priced us out of successful sales with smaller companies.

I'd advise future users to seriously consider the higher-level support packages. These can mean the difference between hours of downtime/angry bosses and a solution before you've even finished your coffee.

While each of my co-workers on this project researched their own solutions to this project, I only brought the idea of StarWind's vSAN to the table.

Previously, we were using a conventional storage platform, which was costly and not supporting many features. Now, we are using StarWind Virtual SAN, which is more reliable and has many features. 

It works by mirroring data between servers, creating a fault-tolerant storage infrastructure. StarWind Virtual SAN is a cost-effective solution as it uses commodity hardware, such as off-the-shelf servers and disks. This reduces the cost of storage hardware and maintenance. 

We are very satisfied with this product so far.

StarWind Virtual SAN provides a HA feature which actually immediately copies data to the second node over the network and ensures instant failover for our critical applications. 

StarWind Virtual SAN is a software-defined storage solution that helps organizations to reduce costs, improve performance, and increase availability. It works by mirroring data between servers, creating a fault-tolerant storage infrastructure.

StarWind Virtual SAN can improve an organization's storage infrastructure by providing high availability, scalability, cost-effectiveness, performance, and ease of use.

The HA feature is the most valuable to us. Moreover, support services are very satisfactory.  

StarWind Virtual SAN provides high-performance storage by leveraging the resources of multiple servers. 

This improves application performance and reduces latency. 

StarWind Virtual SAN provides the ability to scale out storage infrastructure as our needs grow. By adding more servers, we can increase storage capacity. StarWind Virtual SAN ensures that data is always available by replicating it between multiple servers. This means that if one server fails, data can still be accessed from another server. 

The documentation of StarWind Virtual SAN could be improved to provide more detailed and comprehensive information about the product's features, functionalities, and best practices. 

StarWind Virtual SAN could benefit from better integration with other tools and technologies, such as backup and disaster recovery solutions.  

StarWind Virtual SAN could benefit from better integration with other tools and technologies, such as backup and disaster recovery solutions. 

These are some areas where the product or service could potentially be improved

I've used the solution for one year.

We are currently running a Microsoft environment. The Virtualisation stack is currently hosted through Microsoft Hyper-V. We are using local storage and hosting our storage via Starwind Virtual SAN for our production systems.  

Currently, we are only running a two-node cluster to serve our Hyper-V storage. Both nodes are directly connected. This little two-node cluster currently supports all of our offices across the country.  

Our business has a heavy reliance on the systems and systems uptime of 24/7 is required.

Starwind has significantly improved our performance in comparison to our previous environment. Our uptime and our internal SLAs are great. Over the years, it has not failed us once. 

Their support has been amazing and is always there for us when needed. We have worked with various support members over the years and every single one of them knows the product without needing to escalate. Being Hardware agnostic has also helped us a lot to maintain our systems and update to new hardware without worrying about the usual compatibility issues.

Starwind is very easy to configure and even easier to provision.  

Even better is how simple it is to maintain and patch without any downtime.  

Over the years we have updated both the operating system and the hardware on several of our nodes without any downtime incurred.  

The cache features that are available have significantly improved our performance.  

The ability for us to manage all of our nodes from the same console makes systems administration very easy.  

Tasks such as adding, removing, and expanding volumes are very easy.

Starwind Virtual SAN has fulfilled all of our requirements. There is not anything additional we require. The product does everything we need and more.  

If there was one thing we could request, it would be the ability to shrink volumes. For example, we want to be able to decrease in the size of the volume. We understand this is not a limitation in the product as it can potentially cause more problems by leaving things behind. Also, even though we cannot decrease the volume at this time, it is easily addressed by creating a new volume with the appropriate size and migrating data over to it.

We have been using Starwind since 2015.

The solution is very stable. We have not had a single outage or drop due to Starwind.  Software has never crashed or not performed as specified.  Our uptime is only disrupted by server maintenance and scheduled periods.

The product is very scalable as you can add as many nodes as you require along with additional hardware.

In over 20 years of working in the IT industry, I have never encountered better support than I have with the team at Starwind. 

We previously used Microsoft Storage Spaces.

It was as if we didn't need to do anything. Starwind was there from the start to help us provision.

We handled the initial setup all in-house.

I would strongly advise companies to engage with Starwind very early in the design process as they can help with finding the appropriate path. The pricing model is very simple.

We evaluated HP SAN, Nutanix, and Dell Storage.

We are running Dell PowerEdge Series as Hyper-V hosts with StarWind providing a virtual SAN infrastructure to allow for CSVs and data replication between the hosts without having to add dedicated storage hardware.

This serves to allow us to have a fault tolerance of suffering not just a drive loss (RAID Configurations on each server allow for that) but it also allows for the loss of an entire server since we are running N+1.

The servers are directly connected to one another using 10GB NICs, allowing for fast connectivity and support for direct wiring. This meant that we did not have to invest in a dedicated 10GB SAN switch, either.

Prior to the implementation of this solution, our servers were all standalone Hyper-V Hosts. VMs resided on a host and were unable to live migrate or sustain connectivity when a host had a reboot or maintenance item.

StarWind vSAN has allowed us to leverage our server infrastructure more completely without the need to add more hardware.

The failover ability has proven useful already in maintaining connectivity to VMs during a power event that impacted one host. VMs failed over immediately and the data replication brought the downed host back to fully synced status quickly after reboot. 

The ability to utilize my onboard disk from the Hypervisor hosts, not requiring the purchase of dedicated SAN hardware, SAN switching, etc., is a real cost value.

The replication of data between the hosts that StarWind does also allows us to create redundancy since we are able to operate at an N+1 configuration. This feature allows for much greater fault tolerance than we have had before.

I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues.

It has been a few months since we implemented StarWind Virtual SAN.

The support team, from implementation to general operating questions, has been an incredible value add and well worth our support contract already.

Not at this employer,  but my experience previously does include HP, Dell, EMC, and Nimble hardware-based SAN units.

The initial setup was straightforward. StarWind provided good documentation and access to engineers to help guide the process at each step.

StarWind provided guided installation with an engineer. He was quite well prepared and great to work with on the project.

The support contract is well worth it. The price for it was very reasonable and their team has been very engaged whenever we reach out.

I did preliminary pricing on HP, Dell & Nimble, but the costs associated with hardware were going to present a challenge to our school at this point.

As of this time, I really do not have a wishlist of features beyond perhaps some automated notifications of any changes, sync issues, etc. That being said, we have not had any operating issues come up that I would have really needed automated alerts for, so this would just be a wish list item.

From what we have implemented, we are not finding any lacking features or issues with our configuration that we would like to see improved. If this changes over time, I would certainly update my opinion, but for what was advertised, we feel like this is a pretty stable product that is meeting its goals.

We decided to migrate our infrastructure from Terago Cloud to a Tier III datacenter. It was primordial for our company to have redundancy at every level. It was not an easy sell to make that move and I needed to prove to management that we could have a very secure environment.

I needed to have a software that could create a fail over between my hosts that would work well with VMWare 7.0. After researching several company we made the decision to go with Starwind.

Of course, once we had everything in place, we made a test failover. It failed. I went back to Starwind and this was fix within one phone call. Missing configuration. The following test was successful.

The fact that I can now count on a true failover solution is what is most appealing. Also, it was easy to test the solution to make sure it worked. How many companies out there install software without testing it?

It was easy to get organized and test to be sure it was performing to its full capacity. During the failover, only a few seconds of downtime were seen, proving to me that I can count on StarWind during business hours and know that they have our back at the Host level. Who can afford downtime?

Without a doubt, it would be support. Either we were sending an email to our Rep or simply calling in to open a case, a returned call could be expected within the hour. Always courteous and helpful. Those guys know there products and surrounding, like VMWare. They also keep on following up until you say that all is well.

We were having issues with our vCenter when we first deployed, and we had to call back technical support a few times. Each time was a fast and professional service that was offered to us.

This is a tough question. One that I wouldn't have put in here for the simple fact that I decided to write a positive experience with Starwind.

Now, if I want to be picky, I could simply say that the price is not cheap. I started with the basic package, for 4 TB. Than I had to purchase to go up to 8 TB. It does look now that I will have to pay the remaining fee to purchase unlimited data. Should I have done so first, maybe but things change very rapidly and what wasn't needed not too long ago is now. SO overhaul, price. I would also need to pay extra to be able to have support during the weekend, otherwise, you have support only from Monday to Friday. Can be inconvenient if your business work 24 hrs shift Sunday to Friday.

We have been using StarWind Virtual SAN since the rebuild of our infrastructure in August 2020.

So far so good and since it is running directly on VMware, I do not see any issues in the future either.

With the right licensing, I do not see any issue with scalability.

The installation was straightforward but it still was a new product for us and we didn't know how it was going to integrate with VMware 7.0. At this time, I am seeing a few issues with 7.0, so I wasn't sure if we would have any problems during installation. Nevertheless, StarWind support is what is making me write this review today. Compared to any other company we may have called, no other is as fast and as good to get the problem resolved.

This was our first installation.

The installation was fairly straightforward. Although the first test didn't work for us, only a phone call was required to make this work. We have successfully tested the solution and can see first hand that it work great!

We did in-house with the help of Starwind tech. If you want to make sure it work properly, this is the way to go and their support is fantastic.

N/A

Make sure to look for the next package that they offer for the licensing part. Adding Drives will happen faster than you hope it will.

StarWind came highly recommended and rightly so.

The primary use case is to provide a virtual storage for our data and virtual machines. Not having a budget for a physical SAN, we use what we have to get the best of what we have, this is primary reason for using this VSAN.

I don't have to stay late at night. Prior to using this VSAN, if anything happened to a server, everything went down. We couldn't do anything, and that was a nightmare. There was even a time where all the data on the server got wiped. People were unable to work for half a day.

We did have a backup. We had to go to a third party to get a hard drive, have it shipped, and upload the data back into the server, then foster continuum. It happened like that twice before they said, “Enough is enough, what are our options?” 

We had the option of a physical server, but the cost would have been $25,000 or $30,000. So, we had two servers that were underutilized, and they were good servers, old but well-maintained. Therefore, we sat with the IT company, where I'm employed, and they said, "You can either go with a physical server or a VSAN, Virtual SAN." We were like, “Okay, tell us about the VSAN.”

They mentioned, “You have two servers, buy more hard drive, RAM, and CPU." Those are things we could easily do. “Then, you will have the VSAN mirror one to the other, and whatever you have in one will other copy to the other.” For instance, if we lose a physical server, CPU, etc., it provides peace of mind, is cost effective, and we are able to use our existing infrastructure. 

The most attractive feature is, as a Virtual SAN, the data on one is copied to the data on the second. We have two in tandem. So, the data on one is the same as the data on the second one. If we need to do maintenance on the server, it doesn't necessarily have to be after hours, or recommended after hours. If I need to do something in an emergency, I can stop the sync and know that one server has all the information, do what I need to do, and sync them back.

Once we resolve the syncing issues, a first sync of about 4TB of data was done in under 30 minutes. The ability to have the office run and do emergency backup repairs without the company being down was a feature that I liked about this VSAN.

Initially, when we first started, the sync was horrible. It would take about 13 hours. However, they have since then improved on it. It also depends on the pipe. We had a small pipe back then. So, we would do things at around 8:00 AM, then by 4:00 or 5:00 in the morning (the next day), everything would be back on. Once we upgraded the pipe between them, within half an hour, it was synced.

StarWind made us understand that we had a small pipe and our drives were not SSD, but SATA. All these things contributed because they have tons of clients. Thus, if we were the only ones having this issue, then we had the issue.

Once we made the changes, we saw amazing improvement on the way it synced. Instead of 13 hours, it took five to ten minutes for it to complete. For improvement, there should be simpler, user-friendly training about how the system works. I have dabbled in it, but if I need to do anything I'd rather pick up the phone, call them, and say, "This is what I need to do," and they're more than happy to help. While they do have help documentation, there is a relatively steep learning curve.

You need to take into consideration the amount of data that you are syncing as it will come into play: The amount of data that needs to sync between the two devices and the amount of data that the pipe has to read right. 

With data verification, I would like to know how does the solution perform validation of data being synced between two VSANs. If data is corrupt, how does it determine that I'm not going to sync something because it's corrupt? How does any software determine that the data is bad. Then, how does it fix it? Because if we get corrupted on one server, we don't want to transfer it to the other server.

The product is stable. If we receive error messages, it is usually regarding the underlying technology since we are using servers which are 11-years-old.

If I am concerned about upgrading on my older system, I can schedule time with the support team and they will do the upgrade for me.

The solution is really scalable. They have various models. We told them the maximum data that we have and found the right one for us. We can grow, as it expands. It is not a one size fits all.

We have 41 people who can access data which resides on the VSAN.

I like the ProActive support. All the guys that I have spoken or dealt with are professionals. I find this very important. There hasn't been anything like, “Hold on, let me check with my colleague.” They know exactly what they were doing and are consistent. If guy A connects to my computer, he does step one, two, three, and four. There hasn't been any poking around where they shouldn't. 

Being able to call someone who is knowledgeable about the situation and circumstance is important. They also followed up to say, “Have you resolved the issue? Is everything okay?”

The ProActive Support gives me peace of mind because I am a one man shop, but with the technical support behind me, I feel like more than just one person. We spent two to three hours, depending on what we have to do, always on the phone, and they do not push to end the call. It feels like they are assigned to me until the end of whatever we are doing, which is important to me.

Since the beginning that is how the support has been. That is why we stayed with them. It's not that expensive. I have nothing but good things to say about them. All their work is documented. I receive an email afterwards documenting all the steps that they did.

We did not have a solution before StarWind. A consultant recommended this solution. We were also looking into physical solutions, not virtual.

I didn't build the system for us; I manage it. We had someone else do the build. If you spoke to him, he would tell you the build was easy. Give him the instructions, then he just created it. 

The deployment took two and a half to four hours. We did the deployment in the evening, and it was fully operational before we left. The deployment was done by a single person who did the connectivity and configurations, though there were some things that I had to do to build the virtual machine.

I am the only person needed to maintain, though I occasionally contact StarWind ProActive support, when needed. It is a low maintenance solution. It is as good as your infrastructure. Like every road, the foundation of the road determines the asphalt you put on it. If you have a good foundation (SSD drives), then it works well. The issues that we had were based on server error messages, because sometimes when people were downloading stuff, they'd say, "It is too slow." However, once we built a bigger pipe, we could see the change.

In hindsight, the Virtual SAN was meant to be a stop-gap solution. Make sure what happened before, if a server dies, we have business continuity. That was the goal. It so happened that the business continuity and stop-gap became a lasting solution which we continue to use because it works well.

There was a third-party consultant, who fine tuned it, but our guy created it after downloading the software. He has done it multiple times. If you were to ask him, he would tell you, "It's a walk in the park."

Our experience with the third-party consultant was excellent. The guy who I dealt with is a system admin. He is the one who informed us about the solution. He had deployed it for another client and thought it was just the right size for us, so he recommended it. 

There was an implementation strategy. We had all the data in a hard drive. After a crash, we had all the data in a backup drive. Once it was restored, we configured it on one server, then we transferred the data from that server to the VSAN occupied part of the hard drive array. After that, we built the other one on the other server, then the sync started. It was a phased in implementation.

You need to ensure that you have the right technical resource to implement the solution. Our guy was knowledgeable and a teacher. He imparted knowledge telling you why he was doing what he was doing and consulted you before doing it. He had a plan and submitted a proposal, which we looked at it. It showed what he needed and how it was going to take to get done. Therefore, the technical resource is very important.

This solution has helped us maintain high performance and data high availability on minimalistic resources. We have saved about 80 percent (versus purchasing a physical SAN) and peace of mind, which is important.

The pricing is fine for the work that it does. I have had no issues. When we bought it three to four years ago for what we needed, it was literally cheaper than the alternative which was ten times the amount and took up physical space. 

The license is reusable. We can always rebuild it and apply the license. Then, boom, we get new servers, apply the license, and we're back up and running.

We are not using the Log-structured Write Cache feature nor are we using NVMe.

We have not integrated this solution with server OS native management tools. We are just interested in business continuity. If the server blows up, we will still be in business. It does what we want, and we are happy with it.

As of now, since it does exactly what we want it to do, so I do not see where we would need to use features that we are currently not using. We were sold on the fact that we could use our existing infrastructure, and it syncs data if we lose one server. 

StarWind Virtual SAN might not be for everybody. We had the underlining technology, so it worked for us. Give it a try. You can't go wrong, because one of the things they told us is that if you no longer use it, StarWind would credit us a certain amount against a different solution that they had. It was a win-win for us.

StarWind Virtual SAN, along with two Fujitsu Primergy servers, forms the backbone of our hyper-converged solution. This storage, network, and compute solution is used for our Hyper-V cluster. From this cluster, we run all of our virtual servers, which in turn run our business-critical infrastructure. This includes domain controllers, file servers, database servers, application servers, and everything to support it.

We once operated with a physical SAN, several servers, along with the networking equipment and the required fiber-channel infrastructure.

StarWind Virtual SAN allowed us to eliminate the need for any physical SANs. We also got rid of the expensive fiber-channel equipment. Now, we just have two servers that form the StarWind nodes and that's it!

All of our storage, networking that includes 1GB and 10GB Ethernet, and compute power are all housed in the StarWind Virtual SAN solution. 

It's simple and very reliable.

The most valuable feature is the reliable storage replication, which enables me to create a robust infrastructure to run our business.

Presenting Cluster Shared Volumes (CSVs) from StarWind Virtual SAN to Hyper-V simplifies my storage management and reduces costs vs having a physical SAN.  

The solution has matured and I have no points for improvement.  

We have had StarWind Virtual SAN for nearly nine years.

I've now been using StarWind Virtual SAN for over nine years. While I have had underlying hardware go bad during this time, the Virtual SAN never failed. I have replaced an entire hardware node with zero downtime. It's rock solid.  

Prior to adopting StarWind Virtual SAN, I had multiple Dell Equallogic SAN devices.  When it was time to replace the Equallogic with new hardware, the costs were unjustifiable after learning about and evaluating StarWind Virtual SAN.  

Communicate with StarWind, they will work with you and your team to size a solution that works for you.  

There are 2 server clusters with a software-defined SAN. They are Hyper-V Windows 2016 clusters and have been working fine for several years. We are using both NVME and SSD disks with both are working fine with good levels of performance. We provide a SaaS solution hosted in external datacenters in one cluster and the other hosts our internal servers. Starwind replaced a Dell SAN that had failed. The SaaS solution runs on an Oracle database which has had excellent price-performance using Linux in Hyper-V VM.  

The product allows extreme flexibility for SAN and hyperconverged infrastructure. Using Hyper-V combined with Linux VMs has allowed us to scale our solutions with additional clients and client volumes. We have customers using our platform with over 1.3 million accounts. The databases have scaled seamlessly. We now have over 16 TB of disks in our hyperconverged SD-WAN and Starwind has managed them flawlessly. The ability to grow SAN size by just buying more cheap SSDs or NVME disks has been very useful.

The most useful aspect is the hyper-converged SD SAN and the ease to expand it by just adding cheap SSD or NVME disks. 

A great feature would be a wizard and to include a new disk in the SAN. At the moment, including a new disk requires several steps - some that must be done at the OS level and others in each node. We have no more recommendations for the product beyond that.

We have been using the product for over 3 years.

We have had no stability problems whatsoever.

The solution is very scalable. Right now, we have over 16TB of disks. 

Technical support is always available and helpful

Previously, we used a Dell EMC SAN which was failing. 

The initial setup was supported by Starwind. 

We did look at DataCore.