StarWind Virtual SAN is software-defined storage for efficient storage and backup.
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StarWind Virtual SAN
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StarWind Virtual SAN
Free Trial
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
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Community Pulse
StarWind Virtual SAN
Considered Both Products
StarWind Virtual SAN
Verified User
Professional
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
StarWind Virtual SAN offers more fine-grained features and better performance and stability as compared to the Microsoft Windows Server iSCSI storage server on Windows Server 2019. It also adds the significant benefit of supporting not only HyperV but also VMware and KVM. This …
Verified User
Director
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
StarWind Virtual SAN is easier to setup and use, and less expensive. It also has the flexibility of working with Hyper-V or vSphere. StarWind Virtual SAN as a company is also much easier to work with.
HPE and Dell solutions were just too expensive for our budget. HPE's solution lacked performance. Dell's solution is plagued by bad reviews which told stories of broken patching procedures and terrible support experiences. The only company who offered me a trial of their …
StarWind Virtual SAN Applicance is available in a hyperconverged scenario, it means you can run it on existing virtual machines and it does the backup against each other by synchronizing the data store with each other. Vmware does not have this type of hyperconvergent approach. …
VMware vSAN requires 3 physical hosts or 2 and a witness, and this was not practical for our situation as we are SMB. StarWind allows us to continue our 2-host virtualization setup and keep all our redundancy and performance.
Better offering from a service and hardware standpoint. Multiple purchase options allowed the flexibility needed to move forward with acquiring the hardware.
Have not evaluated or used any other Virtual SAN products. VMWare's offereing requires 3 ESXi host servers so that would have made storage costs too high.
While they may have more robust enterprise grade features like duplication, the price point of Nimble and DD makes it a very tough sell in a cost concious environment. Starwind provides us with great reliability and enough features to make it an easy sell.
Verified User
Team Lead
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
Other solution so far we have evaluated is expensive whereas StarWind Virtual SAN is cost effective.
Verified User
Manager
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
we did not evaluate any other vendors with virtual SANs
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
StarWind Virtual SAN is generally less expensive than VMware vSAN, especially when it comes to licensing costs. StarWind Virtual SAN is licensed per node, whereas VMware vSAN requires a license for each CPU core in each node. This can make VMware vSAN significantly more …
Verified User
Director
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
We have not used VMware vSAN as much as StarWind but cost is better with StarWind and also support
Verified User
Employee
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
Virtual SAN (vSAN), a software-defined storage solution that enables users to build shared storage for virtual machines operating in a VMware vSphere environment, is a great HCI platform.It must be used for remote access, and specific duties must be delegated to internal …
We were initially utilizing HPE Lefthand OS as a virtual SAN which was then set to EOL. We evaluated a number of solutions including VMware vSAN and settled on StarWind. StarWind provided a better value, easier and more intuitive interface, and wasn't wizard driven.
StarWind Virtual SAN is the most flexible and reliable system I tested. Although there are other good systems in the market this is the most flexible allowing integration with many Hypervisors
When it comes to virtual storage solutions, there are a few options to choose from including StarWind Virtual SAN, VMware vSAN, and TrueNAS. I've evaluated each of these solutions and found that StarWind Virtual SAN stacks up well against the competition. For me, the deciding …
One key advantage of StarWind Virtual SAN is its flexibility and scalability. The software's ability to create and manage storage pools and virtual disks directly from the management console allows for easy customization and expansion of storage capacity as needed. This can be …
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.