Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review It's great for provisioning any kind of virtual servers, but for now, we use it to provision only servers for Rancher managed Kubernetes clusters. But we are considering to provision also virtual servers for all kinds of needs on SUSE Harvester in the near future, as it's getting more and more mature with every release.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Fast to deploy new virtual machines It's easy to use Stable and ready for production Free and open source Has a strong community Read full review Cons 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 Read full review It takes expertise to set up SUSE Harvester for production You need to get used to SUSE Harvester to be as "fluent" as in VMWare ESXi You need to well prepare for system upgrades Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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!
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Reliability and Availability Never went out of availability with StarWind.
Read full review Performance It improves the overall performance.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review We used ESXi for years and were happy with it. Then we implemented Rancher managed Kubernetes clusters with nodes provisioned on
VMware ESXi . Later, when SUSE Harvester came out, we started to provision SUSE Rancher nodes on Harvester. Both
VMware ESXi and SUSE Harvester are great products, and I think - we are keeping both, at least for now, when SUSE Harvester is a young project.
Read full review Scalability Is is future proof for us.
Read full review Return on Investment It eliminates the need for expensive storage hardware and provides an affordable software-defined storage solution. It allows organizations to use commodity hardware, reducing the dependency on proprietary hardware. It ensures that data and applications are always available, reducing downtime and increasing productivity. Read full review We can provision more virtual servers It's cheaper than competitor products (tbh - it's free, if you don't need support) It's easy to manage when you get used to it Read full review ScreenShots StarWind Virtual SAN Screenshots