StarWind Virtual SAN Other Advice

kasala - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at River Run Computers, Inc.

StarWind is an excellent solution with top-tier support.

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MG
Network Operations Manager at LocalTel Yellow Pages

I'd advise others to download their evaluation and test it in multiple scenarios. You will fall in love with their product!

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Spencer Lines - PeerSpot reviewer
Information Systems Manager at HALL'S CONSTRUCTION CORPORATION

If you are on the fence about them, jump off and land on their side where you never have to look back.

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Buyer's Guide
StarWind Virtual SAN
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about StarWind Virtual SAN. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
NG
Field Engineering Lead at Superior Support Resources, Inc.

I'd advise users to initiate lots of communication with their support staff. Their responses are quick and sufficient.

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Wires382 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager at WYATT EARLY HARRIS WHEELER LLP

Sales and support have been great to work with and the solution is solid without breaking the bank.

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CT
Chief Information Officer at Ohio Dominican University

To any who are considering this solution, I'd say that I've been really impressed with it so far. I think it's pretty great, actually. It does exactly what we need it to do, and it does it well, so I would recommend it. Plus, the support has been very good.

I would rate this solution as a nine out of ten.

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DR
Director of IT at BLDD ARCHITECTS INC

I think StarWind is a serious contendender. Especially if you don't have the right VMware licenses. But even then - I'm running a 3 node cluster and don't need a separate "witness" box. If you're an SMB and doing VMware you need to consider StarWind as your SAN solution. 

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Eren Cakmak - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Administrator at Kemmler Kemmler GmbH

When setting up StarWind, it is fine to experiment with the config file; however, do back them up incrementally. Take your time in setting up a redundant infrastructure and meet hardware requirements (such as redundancy for Sync and Heartbeat Interfaces). Having solid ground to set up StarWind helped us to have a headache-free solution in the end. But that should be self-explanatory.

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TW
Project Engineer at ACTA inc.

When support reaches out, they're not trying to sell anything. They just want to ensure everything is set up correctly and you have a good experience! 

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MIT - PeerSpot reviewer
IT System Administrator at Ludwig Meyer GmbH & Co. KG

I'd advise others to use the free license to test it. The doc is also public. This is the way.

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JC
Network And Systems Administrator at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

I'd advise new users to give the free version a try to see if the product is right for them. That's what I did, and I am so happy with the solution.

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Laurence Brazil - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Manager at STFC

I highly recommended the product. It has transformed our IT infrastructure.

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CK
System Administrator at Wilson Logistics

I really can't overstate how responsive their support was.

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NisarAhmad - PeerSpot reviewer
Freelance Technology Writer at TechnologyAdvice

It's a pretty reliable, cost-effective storage solution for virtual environments.

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DH
Web Services and Systems Development at a non-profit with 201-500 employees

Overall, StarWinds vSAN is a cost-saving storage option with top-notch support.

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Leone Athayde Salarini - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology infrastructure analyst at Centro Universitário São Camilo - ES

Establish a good relationship with the vendor's support team. They can provide valuable assistance during setup, troubleshooting, and ongoing maintenance.

Keep the software up to date with the latest patches and updates to benefit from security enhancements and performance improvements.

Consider your organization's future growth and ensure the solution can scale accordingly. This avoids potential disruptions due to increased demands.

Implement a robust backup and disaster recovery strategy alongside your virtual SAN solution to safeguard critical data.

Stay informed about industry trends and emerging technologies to ensure your infrastructure remains competitive and efficient.

Invest in training for your IT team to maximize the value of the solution and facilitate knowledge transfer.

Continuously monitor the performance of your virtual SAN to identify and address any issues promptly.

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Raul Faria - PeerSpot reviewer
CTO at Axanet GmbH

I highly recommend the solution. It saves a lot of stress, hassle, and time.

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JM
Information Systems Security Officer at Graham Corp

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. 

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TO
Manager, Network at Burnham Holdings Inc

I cannot say enough good things about the support this company gives; more companies need to model this.

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reviewer189641 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systemadministratör at Hantverksdata Sverige AB

StarWind is the best, and most cost-effective option that we have found on the market.

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BR
Information Technology Supervisor at Northwest Medical Center-Winfield

They have a great trial system with full support, they even extended mine due to my limited time to deploy and test everything.

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TF
Sr. IT Systems Engineer at Weidner Property Management LLC

Do not hesitate to use their technical support - even if it is just to review your configuration for their best practices.

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jioller - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant and Content Manager at Jotelulu

The solution is really easy to implement, manage and maintain.

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KH
Senior Network Engineer at Accel Entertainment Inc

I rate StarWind Virtual SAN 10 out of 10. I recommend purchasing support and contacting them before you install any new agents or sync with Azure File Sync share.

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Indeep G - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Administrator at Prism Economics & Analysis

The initial setup will take time, however, their implementation team will assist all the way through.

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Tayre José Rivas Salas - PeerSpot reviewer
TI support analyst at Invermedia

My overall experience with StarWind has been very positive. It is a very simple solution. It is not tied to any hypervisor or hardware configuration. Their support people are excellent and offer assistance in setting up the solution in your environment. While there is a bit more setup than some other products, all you really need is a basic understanding of storage and networking.

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SN
Principal of ICT Infrastructure and Services at Northgate High School

If you trial the software, you can upgrade from the trial to the full version without any disruption or reconfiguration. StarWind Technical support is outstanding. They were extremely helpful throughout the trial, setup, and during our transitioning period.

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RT
System Admin | Network Engineer | Project Lead at R.K. Black, Inc

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

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Christiaan Engelbrecht - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at Lancet Laboratories

Try out all of the other solutions as well; there might be a solution offered by StarWind that might suit your organization's needs.

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Christopher Morley - PeerSpot reviewer
Founder and Consultant at Unified Microsystems

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

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BW
Director Of Technical Services at D-J Engineering Group Inc.

The solution offers great ROI.

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Jethro Morais - PeerSpot reviewer
Sys Admin at FDC - Fundação Dom Cabral

Go for it; it is awesome.

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SH
Automation Engineer at Wunderlich-Malec Engineering

Before you deliver this to an end client, make absolutely sure that you provide adequate documentation about how to start up and shut down the system. That part can be a little bit tricky and requires you to do things in the proper order.

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RE
IT Infrastructure Manager at Highbridge Caravan Centre

I'd advise others to use their support; it really is great.

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BH
Director Of Information Technology at Cass County Government

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

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CM
I.T. Director at MBI

If you are looking at a simple, affordable vSAN technology, you can't go wrong with StarWind.

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АС
Deputy Director at a government with 11-50 employees

This is an optimal product for large fault-tolerant solutions.

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RG
Network Specialist at Nexans aeA

By letting the support team do it next time, as based on their knowledge we have the correct configurations.

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reviewer1495242 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Administrator at Daifuku America

After we purchased the software, we were able to contact support right away. I would suggest you take advantage of this, as they are quick to respond and got my software up and running literally within minutes.

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BS
Network Administrator at MUM Industries

Go for it. Just set it up and follow the instructions. Start with the free version. Make a test bed and play around with it. Then, see how you like it and how it works. because it works. There is nothing hard about it. Once you get it working and understand how the system is implemented in your data center, then everything else is dotting i's and crossing t's. You can get the official licensing for the support or any larger array sizes that you may need. You can allocate and tell it to transfer things as you normally would, as it is a very impressive system. It is probably one of the things that I have been happiest about in my environment.

The Log-structured Write Cache feature works works transparently, so I haven't really noticed it. I assume it helps with application resiliency and performance since it is working.

NVMe over Fabrics would definitely be incredibly fast. It is something that I don't have the architecture to even consider here, but it does sound very cool and fast. I have worked with NVMe drives and SSD systems, and the interface is much wider and faster than your typical, older systems, like SATA and SAS, which were meant for mechanical systems. It would be very impressive, and I would like to get a chance to work with something like that to see its performance.

I was not even aware that there was a way to integrate the solution with server OS native management tools, like vCenter. We are using the vCenter appliance, which is Linux based. It doesn't seem to integrate things too well into it, even though it is the recommended way that they have us doing it. If there is some plugin, or something for it to directly integrate, I would be totally up for that.

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SS
Area Sales Manager at ABPL

We have a hypervisor environment and it works best with that. If your organization is running any other environment for infrastructure, you need to ensure all features are up and running before implementing them in production.

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JA
Owner at a media company with 1-10 employees

StarWind vSAN is a robust and reliable software-defined storage solution that can help organizations create a highly available and fault-tolerant storage environment. While there may be some challenges with setup and configuration, these can be overcome with proper planning and support from StarWind Software Inc.

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AS
Chief Technology Officer at American Data Technology, Inc.

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

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PeerSpot User - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a energy/utilities company with 11-50 employees

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

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FS
Company Owner at a insurance company with 11-50 employees

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

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IJ
IT Director at Marion County R-II School

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.

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Mart Vernik - PeerSpot reviewer
Digital Archive System Administrator at Rahvusarhiiv

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.

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BD
IT Manager at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees

The solution is very stable.

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CG
CIO at a renewables & environment company with 11-50 employees

I would highly recommend StarWind vSAN for pretty much any SMB infrastructure project.  The reduced single points of failure, increased performance, and reliable support is great.

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T.
Technology Solutions, Support & Training at UNISONMEDIA Group, Inc.

Mainly that the costs would be less expensive.

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MH
Owner at Split Digital LLC

We have plans to increase the usage in the future. As we need data processing capability, we will add more nodes. As we need more storage, we will obviously upgrade the storage licenses. We will need more storage before we need more nodes because we are only using a fraction of our total processing power at this point, but we are slowly starting to fill up on disk space. The time frame for upgrading our disk space will probably be in six to eight months.

We run everything from accounting, databases, email VMs, SQL Servers, etc. on it, anything that someone would expect on an enterprise environment.

We are in the process of installing OS native management tools now. It should make things easier. The Admin Center looks like a good tool.

Follow their recommendations on hardware configurations. The faster you can put in the components, the better the experience will be.

I always recommend everybody do their own research. If you do your research, you will find out that cost-wise StarWind will be more competitive. In terms of form and function, from personal experience, their converged storage system works very well and is extremely reliable. What is most important to a lot of consumers is how good the support is behind the product. While you can research it, you never know until you spend your money. Experientially, their support is some of the best I've ever worked with, even though they are based outside of the US. You're not dealing with Indian accents. They speak very clear English, and there are not the communication issues that you have with non-Western countries.

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BB
Works at GOSHEN COMMUNITY SCHOOLS

Unless you need a lot of special third-party integration with other systems, it is a great low-cost solution that gives you whatever level of performance you decide, based on your hardware.

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EK
Works

In my opinion, StarWind is a great solution for businesses with limited infrastructure budgets.

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JM
Director of Technology at FAFCO, Inc.

Make sure that you understand your performance requirements clearly. Learn how to measure your performance needs in your existing environment BEFORE you shop, so that you can be sure that you are looking at the right solution. In all of the planning that goes into making the correct decision on these types of products, understanding performance (and not just making assumptions) is the most neglected part. There is no quicker way to over or under build your solution than to not have real performance numbers for planning.

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FE
Technischer IT-Berater at ITC GmbH

Consider StarWind's proactive support. It improves the software's already high value and defuses the long learning curve of some processes! When clustering resources, deeply consider your witness strategy! Especially when you can not guarantee 100% stable hardware (e.g., through firmware issues), this can break things very quickly if you have a witness device in the same vSAN.

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JT
Lead Network Engineer at consulting group

I rate StarWind Virtual SAN nine out of 10. 

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PL
Senior Technical Architect at HSData LTD

We strongly recommend that you develop a good relationship with the vendor (or a good partner). In our experience, they played a key role in the success of the solution.

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MC
CEO, Founder at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

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

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reviewer1560054 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works

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.

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RO
Deputy Director of Technology and Communications at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees

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.

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Andrey Naumov - PeerSpot reviewer
System Administrator at Craft Group

Everything works. I am completely satisfied with the reliability and speed.

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AA
Head of Software Development Department at Everest

StarWind vSAN is a great solution to create a redundant two-node-only Hyper-V cluster, both for domain or workgroup scenarios.

You should be totally sure to avoid "split brain" in a two-node clustering with a redundant heartbeat, but without any external witness/arbitrator it is not against the solution`s concept.

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LW
Technical Helpdesk Manager at PurpleJelly Ltd

Overall, I really enjoy this product. It's easy to use and support is fantastic.

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CV
Operations Manager at Lipman Insurance Administrators Inc.

Make the switch to StarWind! Your life will be much easier, and you will have extra budget to spend elsewhere!

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GD
Virtualized Solutions Engineer at Quanti solutions

This is a very user-friendly product that works well overall.

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reviewer1378515 - PeerSpot reviewer
CIO at Sheremetevo Security

This product is definitely worth the investment.

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MH
IT Manager at a hospitality company with 51-200 employees

Utilize the StarWind installation team to get you up and running. They do everything from start to finish and even make sure that your production workload is running sufficiently.

We haven't used the Log-structured Write Cache feature or the NVMe over Fabrics target. Right now, our solution is all solid-state disk.

In terms of maintenance, a lot of it is scripted or managed automatically. It just takes one person to periodically check in to see if it's performing well and if there are any errors. That person is a systems administrator.

I would give StarWind VSAN a nine out of ten. They have good support. It's reasonably priced. It gives you the ability to scale. It offers good storage availability.

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NC
Technical Department Manager at ACS SA

I recommend this solution because it gives me flexibility and expandability.

It works like a charm without any problem or concern.

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reviewer1185738 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works

So far, the software is doing everything we need.

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it_user1146222 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Tech/ Network Admin at Society of St James

Technical support is the thing that completes a good product. If the software is good but you can also count on fast and accurate resolutions then you have got everything you need.

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AK
Head of Local Area Network Department at JSC Ufanet

Overall, this is a good product for good money.

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GrzegorzEBX - PeerSpot reviewer
Owner at ElectronicsBox.com.pl
AM
Works at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

We're satisfied with the features available.

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reviewer1145355 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works with 201-500 employees

Their support team is terrific. I have only had to reach out to them on a couple of occasions. They responded quickly and helped me to get things resolved right away. 

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НФ
Works at Cloud4y.ru #1 корпоративный облачный провайдер

As we now can rely on this company, we recommend that others make the same decision. We would like to add that everyone in our organization has felt the impact of the changes in the services we use and provide.

We also appreciate the long term cooperation that has lasted for years, with a consistent level of service. This allows our company to plan further ahead, as experience has shown that every solution the company provides us is and will remain, satisfying.

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AH
IT Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

The pricing is based on the amount of storage, so you should evaluate how much storage you're going to need for your license. I believe there's an unlimited tier which is also very reasonable.

In our organization, it's the backing data-store for the entire company, which is about 85 users. Programmers and management people make up our studio. For deployment and maintenance, it's just me with the support team at StarWind.

We don't have plans to increase usage. We're a small studio and we're not going to get bigger.

I give StarWind a ten out of ten. They have great support, a great product, it's simple and easy to use, and has a great price.

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Rami.chiha - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal Systems & Storage Engineer at a tech company with 51-200 employees

It is good to have diversity in this market, and StarWind Virtual SAN is a good solution.

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FF
IT Specialist at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Make sure to consider the requirements of your environment. If you're in a high-performance-driven environment, I don't think this is the right solution. In this case, I would go with a traditional storage solution because you'll get better performance out of a physical one. For me, it's just a cheaper solution that doesn't require indigenous apps, etc.

I would not go for enterprise deployment. I'll go with the traditional one. Make sure your requirements fit with what you want to buy.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight.

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AA
Director of Technical Sales at SSTL Group

For now, StarWind has satisfied my needs, as my requirement was to create a failover environment for the servers, also allowing the system to run with less administration. 

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AY
Computer Engineer at Savronik Electronic

Overall, the Starwind software, support, and implementation was great. I would highly recommend it.

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MP
Engineer at Peoples' Friendship University of Russia

I have not been using the product for long enough to objectively name the features that should be added in the next release or would not suit me in the current release. The functions that I needed to work on do not cause any complaints from me.

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reviewer1253883 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Network Engineer at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

StarWind has been an excellent solution for our virtual storage needs. There are features like remote replication that we don't currently use but could provide excellent disaster recovery for a remote site.

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reviewer1244424 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director of Systems and Security at a wellness & fitness company with 11-50 employees

My advice for anybody who is considering this solution is to give it a try.

Implementing a UPS along with it is a good idea.

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RI
Director of IT and Corporate Security at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

We spent time evaluating this product and there is no doubt that the choice to implement this solution for production was the right one.

My advice is to call (contact) them and they will answer your questions to help you find a proper solution.

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reviewer903849 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works

The product is solid, simple to use, and well engineered. Very impressed and looking forward to future releases.

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KL
Specialist in the center of security at PERN S.A.

In my case, in the day-to-day use, I don't see much area for improvement for StarWind Virtual SAN solution. It's fast, reliable, and almost meets all of my expectations.

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DG
Information Systems Manager at a aerospace/defense firm with 51-200 employees

Definitely get a trial license. I'm pretty sure they still have a free version that you can download. Set it up in a sandbox and see if it makes sense for your environment. The great thing about it is it is all Microsoft-based, so if you're familiar with Hyper-V, then it's really pretty simple.

In terms of our users, it's pretty much just me managing it. It's running our production environment. Ideally, I'd like to add our third node this year so that I have extra available overhead so that we can be more proactive with maintenance, etc.

I would rate StarWind at eight out of ten. There's always room for improvement.

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AL
CEO at Simplify Technology
  • It is a fairly straightforward product. 
  • The support is great.
  • It just works. 
  • It meets all my criteria for success. 
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LZ
VMware Administrator, VMware vExpert at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

Thanks support for the quick help: I think you never sleep!

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reviewer1157808 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a educational organization with 11-50 employees

If you're at all interested then build a few systems using old hardware, or just spin up a few VMs. You get ninety percent of the features for free so there is no cost to try it out. The free version is great to use for labs or test environments.

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reviewer1068294 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works

A thorough analysis and testing of existing offerings in the network storage market has shown that StarWind Virtual SAN is the perfect network storage solution.

It provides the necessary fault tolerance and continuance of business processes.

StarWind Virtual SAN is a very easy-to-use solution that can be quickly and easily deployed and configured without intimate and specific knowledge in the virtualization sphere.

Moreover, the manufacturer's website has detailed documentation that helps to resolve issues. In cases when the documentation is not enough, qualified online support specialists are always ready to help.

In the test environment, the product has shown excellent results and currently is implemented in a production environment.

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TT
Regional IT Manager at SABIS

Support is very good.

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it_user1194465 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT at SOMIAC

I think the software is very good.

At the moment, I have not encountered problems that I could not solve.

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reviewer1073631 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees

I have been very impressed with the StarWind application, referring to every parameter. Reliability, cost, and support.

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Buyer's Guide
StarWind Virtual SAN
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about StarWind Virtual SAN. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.