StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews

We provide managed web hosting services, including dedicated servers in physical or virtual configurations, for various customers, including small, medium, and large companies. We started hosting operations in 1995 and operated our own hosting infrastructure in data centers in North Carolina and Virginia, USA.

Our infrastructure included physical and virtual hosting environments based on VMware, which is where our StarWind Virtual SANs were deployed.

With our growing needs and customer requirements and demand, we added virtualization to our infrastructure, based on VMware. Storage requirements for the virtualized infrastructure also grew rapidly. We explored all available options, from hyper-converged solutions to the large "big name" solutions. Our infrastructure was too big for hyper-converged solutions. However, we were not ready for the major investments that a full-sized storage infrastructure would need. StarWind's offerings were a perfect fit for us, and remain so until today, almost ten years later.

Prior to StarWind, we were using "local storage" with each hypervisor, and this had many drawbacks, including size limitations, performance, technical management, and redundancy. 

With StarWind Virtual SAN, we could easily deploy and manage the storage solutions, add additional storage servers when needed, implement automated redundancy and failover, and scale storage allocations as and when needed, including adding high-performance SSD solutions alongside traditional hard disk solutions.

The Windows-based StarWind GUI is easy to use and understand and integrates seamlessly with VMware's vSphere portal as well.

While it is possible to implement disk encryption in StarWind using Windows Bitlocker, such a solution can be a little tricky to manage, for example, when servers are rebooted. Bitlocker solutions require a physical presence in the data center to enter the encryption string on the server's physical console.

Built-in "Data at Rest" encryption would be an important need, especially for customers with sensitive compliance requirements e.g. Government customers, healthcare customers, eCommerce customers, and many other compliance-sensitive application areas.

We have been using the StarWind Virtual SAN product since 2014.

StarWind Virtual SAN is very scalable, simply by adding additional Windows servers and installing the StarWind Virtual SAN software on it.

We did not previously use a different solution.

Compared to similar solutions from NetApp etc., our savings were likely in the tens of thousands of dollars over the years, and we did not need to pay for features that we do not need.

We were very happy and impressed with StarWind's products and the technical support from StarWind's support team. If and when we needed assistance, StarWind's tech support has been very responsive, thorough, and very helpful.

We found the licensing costs and pricing to be very affordable and manageable.

We looked at big-name solutions such as NetApp, Cisco, and others.

Our storage infrastructure had been operating flawlessly with great performance and reliability.

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

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

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

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

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

The solution has improved our organization by:

1. The variety of services offered

2. The financial viability compared to the services offered

3. Product functionality and performance is suitable for our organization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We built an HCI Hyper-V two-node cluster without SAN or S2D at our main site. It is used to run 25 virtual machines that host operating systems and applications including Windows 2016/2019, Debian, SQL, and PostgreSQL. It provides business continuity to my organization.

We also implemented a "Windows 2019 Guest Cluster" inside a Hyper-V Cluster without any problem. 

I'm not an IT Manager but an insurance broker with limited IT knowledge, and I was able to install, configure, and manage a hyper-converged cluster in a couple of hours without any problem.

VSAN works great; it's very easy to install, configure, and manage. I received precious support before buying, during the installation, and after.

All of our mission-critical applications and services are now completely redundant.

VSAN doesn't require either an expensive SAN or the expensive hardware required for Microsoft S2D on Windows Server Datacenter Edition. I can have an HCI two-cluster node using our 2,5" SAS HDD in RAID 10 without an SSD and the performance is great.

In the case of power failure or critical events, it's very simple to get back in production. The console is very simple and clear, and the PowerShell commands are very useful. 

Using one of the numerous tutorials, we created scripts to shut down and restart the cluster in case of a power outage.

There is no Italian-language version of the software available. Although I'd prefer an Italian version, I received extensive and comprehensive support in all of the deployment steps. This included communication by email, call, and video.

During a long power outage our UPS batteries was completely discharged, on power on Starwind vSAN wasn't able to choose which node was the correct node to sync from so we had to "mark as Syncronize" one of them. Then we wrote some powershell scripts to power off and power on   the nodes in sequence  before ups completely discharghe and then on power on. I'd like to manage these cases directly on GUI. Something like "in case vSAN isn't be able to mark as Syncronized a node, mark this node as sync"

We have been using StarWind Virtual SAN for six months.

StarWind is extremely stable.

In case we should decide to add other nodes, I think that this solution will scale easily.

Technical support is perfect.

We did not use another similar solution prior to StarWind.

The initial setup is very simple.

I was able to install VSAN on my own and I'm not an IT manager but an insurance broker. I received great support from StarWind technicians.

We found that the pricing was perfect; simple and clear.

We evaluated Microsoft S2D before choosing this product.

In summary, I think it's the best solution I could buy to achieve my goals.

We are using this to replicate the onboard disks from our Hyper-V Hosts (Dell T640 Servers) for both replication/data protection, but most importantly, to function as shared storage enabling us to have a functional Hyper-V cluster with failover through the shared storage without needing to purchase oversized and pricey dedicated SAN hardware.

This solution enables us to make better cost-effective use of our existing hardware and leverage the current infrastructure at a higher level than we could before.

The data replication and shared storage have enabled us to dramatically reduce unplanned and planned downtime. With our Hyper-V cluster now able to do automatic failovers of our Virtual Machines, we have reduced the effects of reboots that would have interrupted access before.

We have also noticed performance benefits with this new deployment over the previous configuration that was implemented. This has also allowed us to increase our storage capacity by adding more cost-effective disks rather than pricier SAN solutions.   

As a technical admin, the GUI is a nice bonus that allows sometimes faster actions rather than going into the CLI. A great benefit in my current solution is showing off GUI configurations and monitoring to our non-technical administration in the school and helping them understand implementations and values from that.

This product would benefit from having automated alerting functionality.

We deployed StarWind Virtual SAN in March of 2021.

The scalability is great, so proper sizing makes entering into the solution easy and without waste. We should not exceed the scalability options available.

I have been very impressed with the support team. Every encounter I have had has been quickly responded to with both the right person and the needed solution. I feel very confident that they are available and accessible if any issue arises that I need to get help addressing or just ensuring my configuration is best practices.

We did not use another similar solution prior to this one.

The initial setup was straightforward and guided by a very knowledgeable engineer on their team.

This solution is very accessible and the pro-level for support is well worth the cost. 

Other than automated alerting, there is no real product feature that I feel would be useful to us. We have had no issues with the software as is. There are no gaps that we have had to fill in with other solutions or challenges that have caused us to redesign or change our intended implementations.

I have installed a few updates from the initial installation and found that process to be quite easy and successful each time as well. I look forward to seeing how they may innovate in the future and bring benefits we have not considered.

StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere provides redundant and highly available storage for our VMware vSphere environment. We have two Supermicro 2029BT-DNC0R servers with VMware ESXi 6.7 and one StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere virtual machine on each. Local SSD-s are directly attached to StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere virtual machine and software RAID is used to make storage from them. For StarWind synchronization, we are using Mellanox ConnectX-4 adapters and directly attached cable between nodes.

StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere has helped us to reduce complexity and is more cost-efficient than an old solution. Previously, we had separate storage (EMC AX4-5) with a fiber channel environment. With StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere we are not forced to use vendor locked-in storage hardware, have to deal with costly fiber channel environment, and our power consumption is also reduced. Also now we have fewer hardware components to worry about and more flexibility to change storage when and where needed.

StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere is a software-defined storage solution that has reduced administration time for storage. It's pretty straightforward to install and setup it and so far it has been robust and worked as advertised from StarWind. It does have Windows Management Console, from where you can make main configurations and monitor events, etc. and Web-based Management interface where you can make software RAID and monitor environment main characteristics like LAN and disk traffic, and so on.

When StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere nodes go offline unexpectedly, the nodes have to re-sync disks fully which takes a long time. We had a power failure and when both nodes came online, VMware vSphere didn't see StarWind disks before I manually re-scanned them form ESXi administration console even though it should happen automatically - maybe I had to wait till all the StarWind disks were fully synchronized but that toked in our case 8+ hours.

There are no security and bug fixes without an active support agreement!

I have been using it for a little bit more than one year.

Product is stable and works most of the time on it's own.

It's scalable.

Customer service is helpful.

This is the first software-defined storage solution for us.

It took some time to get familiar with the software and I did mostly set it up myself and in the process, it was inspected and checked by a StarWind technician.

In-house implementation.

We have not calculated ROI.

Something to keep in mind is that you are not allowed to install security and bug fixes without active support agreement.

VMware vSAN financial aspects give StarWind an advantage.

Product updates are not that frequent (two-three times per year). Also, it concerns me that back-end OS (we are using StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere and it's built on top of CentOS 7) is not updated every time the update is coming out. For example, our installation is more than half a year un-updated, and there are many updates available for CentOS. StarWind support does not recommend installing them independently.

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.

NVME Target for windows is taking a bit to become available!

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 13 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.

We have two Windows Servers (2019), and two locations, and needed Virtual SAN so that we can use disks that are installed on each server. With StarWind Virtual SAN, we created multiple SAN disks that helped us create a real-time failover cluster replication service for data and SQL. 

Installation of Virtual SAN from StarWind was very easy, with a pre-ready directory full of PowerShell scripts that you can easily edit to suit your needs and just run them. That way, you create an environment that fits your needs and is something that you can edit very easily or delete.

We have been searching for a Virtual SAN for a long time. When we found the Virtual SAN from StarWind, our problems were fixed. The easy PowerShell scripts are ready to edit and run for everyone. We are using it for GEO Failover Cluster and have now been using it for a few months with no problem. We also have real-time replication that is working great. We've had no errors. The startup when using Windows is working with no problem with StarWind, so we connect very easily.

The solution offers easy one-click PowerShell scripts that are ready to run. It comes with a bunch of free PowerShell scripts that you can edit and run, and also you can create your own with help of PowerShell.

Not so many Virtual SANs work great with a failover cluster as StarWind does; it has no lag, is working great, has no errors, and we can log it easily.

It has minimum hardware usage, which means a lot to us.

The deployment of StarWind Virtual SAN is very easy; they have online manuals that can help you and guide you with your installation.

We are really looking forward to the release of more PowerShell scripts that are easy to use and can be edited by rookies. 

Their support is really fast and reliable. You can get it via email or the there's forum community where you already find a lot of questions/answers to your problems and the community will help and guide you through the problems that you have.

We tried to find a con, however, it's really hard. The product just works. If I had to find something, then it would be the GUI. For someone entering the IT sector with little knowledge of storage, iSCSI, and virtual disks, they might not find the GUI immediately obvious.

I've used the solution for a few months now.

The stability is great.

The scalability is great.

They offer great support.

Positive

The initial setup is easy.

We handled the setup via an in-house IT team.

Our initial requirement was to have instant failover to another node in the cluster. Starwind Virtual SAN (vSAN) allowed us to meet the organizational requirements. It is installed on two of my Production servers for use in a Hyper-V cluster for a few years. 

Our initial requirement was to have instant failover to another node in the cluster. Starwind Virtual SAN (vSAN) allowed us to meet the organizational requirements. It is installed on two of my Production servers for use in a Hyper-V cluster for a few years. 

Starwind support was excellent in setting up all the connections between the servers and doing the configuration. Performance has been excellent with no issues. 

I don't even notice it's there. Since installing and initial configuration, I have not needed to engage with support.

The instant failover, with vSAN copying data to the second node, allowed for the continuous availability of our applications. By far, the best features are implementation and support. 

From our research into other options, an equivalent installation would have been quite a bit more than the StarWind solution. We did have to invest in another server and improve the connections between the nodes. This implementation now far exceeds our previous setup, which, in hindsight, was convoluted. 

So far, for our use case, I haven't noticed issues with the product. 

The few times I've ever engaged with technical support were during the initial phase of the implementation. However, I would absolutely like to see a lot more on the monitoring side. The information currently does not give any performance of the VSAN. 

I would also like to see the activities occurring on the nodes, bandwidth, replication and synchronization. Diagnostics information or alerts on the state of systems could also be implemented to give more visibility. 

I've used the solution for over two years.