StarWind Virtual SAN vs. VMware vSAN

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.

Incentivized

The product is a must for enterprise & SMB segments as this gives a good value for money and the licensing policy is very well defined and cost effective for the feature set it provides. This is very well suited for organization which have multiple brand storage systems and would like to consolidate them all together, thus providing a huge storage capacity for the organizations data growth. The product becomes less appropriate in organization where they have single storage platform as the service provider would have the ability to consilidate all the storage systems. Hence this products may be under utilized.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• VMware runs VSAN certification programs to make sure the OEM sells validated nodes. It helps customers to select appropriate certified ready nodes like Lenovo ThinkAgile VX which comes factory configured and easy to set up.
• Hyperconverged solutions reduce real estate space and networking costs when compare with shared storage. The host overhead also less.
• Supports All-Flash (SATA and NVMe SSDs) and Hybrid vSAN with HDD and SSD. So customers can choose cost-effective solutions appropriate to their workloads.
• Supports different storage policies, RAID and duplication, and compression features and it makes a complete storage solution.

Incentivized

• 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

• We were a fairly early adopter of VMware vSAN and as such experienced several growing pains.
• We experienced a few bugs that took a few software versions upgrades to go mostly away.
• The biggest issue we had overall was with host drivers. Even with vSAN ready node compatible hosts, you have to be very careful that the drivers for NIC and RAID controllers are right.

Incentivized

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!

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Deploying and configuring VSAN is a relatively simple process for people that are already used to working in virtual environments, primarily for those that are familiar with vSphere. The compatibility of those two products is amazing. You shouldn't really encounter any issues and if you do, you surely did something wrong.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Support is (as always forVMware) top notch and easy to work with. The majority of computer companies are outsourcing their tech staff, and it seems they do as well. But their guys know the product well and are quick to respond to your ticket (if the severity is right!).

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Our VMware solution is built in-house for the organization's private application, we don't want to put our data on cloud premises. Also, vSAN is a cost-effective solution for our environment. We have done the POC with both products to understand the Flexibility, Management, and cost. After the successful POC, we have chosen the VMware vSAN.

Incentivized

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!

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• we have realized savings in the licensing compared to traditional storage (over $500,000 over the last 5 years)
• we have realized ROI through efficiencies in our staff of approx $1MM (over the last 5 years)
• also, positive impact on the time to value/speed of implementation allowed us to realize business objectives (Over $1MM of ROI)

Incentivized