StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere allows you to use two node setup and still provide highly available storage compared to VMware vSAN which requires three nodes minimum, also with VMware vSAN you have to use certified hardware and you have fewer options to choose from. StarWind …
GFS is well suited for DEVOPS type environments where organizations prefer to invest in servers and DAS (direct attached storage) versus purchasing storage solutions/appliances. GFS allows organizations to scale their storage capacity at a fraction of the price using DAS HDDs versus committing to purchase licenses and hardware from a dedicated storage manufacturer (e.g. NetApp, Dell/EMC, HP, etc.).
For companies that have 4-5 or more servers, StarWind is a great solution to provide high availability for a low price. It can scale up very nicely for larger implementations to more like 15-20 servers with ease. Although we haven't used it for even larger environments, it's doable. What its not appropriate are really small locations that have 1-2 servers. Unfortunately no one seems to have a good HCC solution in this space.
Scales; bricks can be easily added to increase storage capacity
Performs; I/O is spread across multiple spindles (HDDs), thereby increasing read and write performance
Integrates well with RHEL/CentOS 7; if your organization is using RHEL 7, Gluster (GFS) integrates extremely well with that baseline, especially since it's come under the Red Hat portfolio of tools.
the StarWind Virtual SAN allows us to use Starwind Management Console to confirm health of the sync
The High Available nature of the deployment means we can fail over VMs without end users noticing any downtime
Their support is proactive alerting when firmware updates are needed (including iDRAC firmware) or when there are any warnings in the event logs, and schedule a time to remediate the issue with you.
Documentation; using readthedocs demonstrates that the Gluster project isn't always kept up-to-date as far as documentation is concerned. Many of the guides are for previous versions of the product and can be cumbersome to follow at times.
Self-healing; our use of GFS required the administrator to trigger an auto-heal operation manually whenever bricks were added/removed from the pool. This would be a great feature to incorporate using autonomous self-healing whenever a brick is added/removed from the pool.
Performance metrics are scarce; our team received feedback that online RDBMS transactions did not perform well on distributed file systems (such as GFS), however this could not be substantiated via any online research or white papers.
Complexity: StarWind Virtual SAN can be complex to set up and manage, especially for organizations with limited IT resources
Limited protocol support: StarWind Virtual SAN supports a limited number of protocols, primarily iSCSI and SMB3
Limited scalability for storage-only deployments: In storage-only deployments, StarWind Virtual SAN has a limit of 32 nodes per cluster
Lack of reporting and analytics: StarWind Virtual SAN has limited reporting and analytics capabilities, which can make it difficult to monitor and troubleshoot performance issues
Limited backup and recovery options: While StarWind Virtual SAN provides some basic backup and recovery options, it lacks advanced features such as snapshot management, backup scheduling, and offsite replication
StarWind Virtual SAN is a great solution and is now an integral part of our network of servers. The product is superb and the support has been amazing. It's perfect for our organisation and we won't be looking to come away from it any time soon!
Overall I like the usability of StarWind Virtual SAN because it is a "Set-up and forget" software. Once you correctly have set up the parameters, StarWind Virtual SAN pretty much rolls by itself. The biggest fact that one needs to keep in mind, though, is that the licensing for StarWind Management Console needs to be purchased separately, and while managing StarWind Virtual SAN through the paid Management Console is really easy and is well documented, going the free or - in other words - PowerShell Template route can be taxing if you are not that deep into the topic. You need to be especially careful with it if you switch from paid to free because using the templates incorrectly can cause issues, we had a similar occurence, where we needed to re-provision the SSD cache and the StarWind Support (Yaroslav) helped through remote support and a switch to the Free version afterwards.
The solution has been tested under constant usage for 5 years now and there (knock on wood) has yet be an outage. There were instances if human error during the operation and the StarWind reliably intervened, either through a synchronization or reporting of a degredation of interfaces, e.g. the heartbeat interface.
The software delivered exceptional performance until now with very fast write and speed rates, around 900MB/s through a 10GBit connection on a virtualized fileserver. It meets our demands without any problems whatsoever and we are a very media heavy environment with TBs of raw data.
Their support team is dedicated to providing top-notch customer service and is always available to help with any questions or issues that may arise. Their expertise and responsiveness have proven invaluable in ensuring the smooth operation of our virtualized environment. With such excellent support, we feel confident in our ability to utilize this product to its fullest potential, and we highly recommend it to others.
Overall the setup was easy, we did require some help from the technical support team but other than that, we followed all of StarWinds prerequisites and everything else just fell nicely into place with hardly any downtime. The downtime was only due to moving VMs from our previous cluster over to the new StarWind storage cluster.
Gluster is a lot lower cost than the storage industry leaders. However, NetApp and Dell/EMC's product documentation is (IMHO) more mature and hardened against usage in operational scenarios and environments. Using Gluster avoids "vendor lock-in" from the perspective on now having to purchase dedicated hardware and licenses to run it. Albeit, should an organization choose to pay for support for Gluster, they would be paying licensing costs to Red Hat instead of NetApp, Dell, EMC, HP, or VMware. It could be assumed, however, that if an organization wanted to use Gluster, that they were already a Linux shop and potentially already paying Red Hat or Canonical (Debian) for product support, thereby the use of GFS would be a nominal cost adder from a maintenance/training perspective.
We have found the solution surprisingly simple to use. The management console allows us to monitor the solution and we have configured email alerts to alert us about critical issues. These alerts have been proven to work in an actual failure scenario, for example, when we had a memory issue with one of our servers that caused the entire server to crash. The management console also allows us to monitor the solution performance and provides us with access to system logs.
The software is very scalable storage wise. The storage is provisioned through config files, which are created either through PowerShell scripts or the Management Console on the paid version. After that the storage is provisioned through iSCSI. In our case, in case of expansion, we would have to run the PowerShell scripts and do another full synchronization to update any remaining backup nodes, but the procedure is clear and even easier via Management Console, just expand the RAID array, punch the new capacity into the console and start the synchronization!
