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 For a large, robust, well-secured, and stable storage system, TrueNAS is very well suited. Virtual Machine support is great. Shared filesystems (SMB, NFS, iSCSI, WebDav, AFP) are very well implemented. Time machine support is fantastic; security is very granular. Do not try to use it as a replacement for VMWare... (no migration, etc.)
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 iSCSI Datastores for virtualization. NFS store for unix storage or backups over networking. Very fast performance, sometimes outclassing SSD arrays even in NFS. The ZFS filesystem has given use much greater flexibility. Using their newer servers we could in theory scale to any height of required storage. 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 more graphical interface to admin features like plugins, jails, list are well but a tiles aproach will be better allow bulk upload/download/update to Groups or user accounts from SMB shares. some script language template featured to create/config/change/delete storage pools /dataset or shares . 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 The software has been amazing. It has saved me a lot of headache in the past few years. Also, it's nice to knowing that if any of our current Synology devices were to die I can have an iSCSI system up and running very shortly. I didn't give a 10 score because I find their support to be rather slow and pedantic. They test many things when the answer is right in front of them. The compute sytem (not storage) we purchased from them came with pcie gen4 nvme's. They didn't work, but rather than believe me about the spec's in the motherboard manual saying the onboard was pcie3 ONLY they shipped me 2 replacements until I showed them an old pcie3 device worked just fine. The part that rather frustrated me was the machine was claimed to have been tested / burnt in. How can this be true if the server won't even boot up into the BIOS?
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 The software is fairly straight forward and if you mess up the network interfaces you can login locally at the console and fix any issues that you may have had with VLANS etc denying you network access. There was a little bit of annoying issues when setting up multiple network interface cards. Rather than keeping one interface setup with DHCP, when you add a second one with a new network it disables the first. Which makes it impossible to login again. However if you wait it will revert. I learned after works that you need to set up the network cards and then go back and setup the first one again and THEN test / apply. After that it was pretty good. The summary of the devices is very nice to. You get an accurate snapshot of how well your system is doing as soon as you login
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 The support was responsive for opening cases. However I found solutions to simple problems took far too long. When we had a bad power supply and we had another with the exact same firmware version they should have sent replacement for both. We had to file another case for the other PSU that started dyeing the same week. They also had to do a lot of troubleshooting to replace the fans that were not behaving as they should. I'm not a home user. I know when certain things are failing and the silly hoops the jump through made it frustrating. However, once we finally got the problem identified we had parts shipped out via advance replacement which was nice.
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 The implementation went well after we got the boot drive working properly. The device was setup exactly as i asked with the hardware except for the boot drive. The reason I chose 9 instead of 10 was the boot drive put us back about a week for the part to arrive. I ended up using a personal drive to show them that they were wrong sending use the gen4 drives.
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 Having a better, trusted filesystem to build upon makes a huge difference. I want to know that if something I've written is read, it was the thing I wrote. And if it can't be read, I want to know that soon and know how to repair it.
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 Using a TruNAS integrated solution has reduced support overhead compared to using custom hardware. Being cheaper than full flash storage arrays, this unit allows for a good balance of speed with its use of SSD-based caching drives. The reliability of the hardware/software integration means I spend less time troubleshooting and more time doing business. Coming from a custom-built solution it is apparent that IX Systems has done some extensive testing. Read full review ScreenShots StarWind Virtual SAN Screenshots