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March 29, 2021
We use StarWind vSAN on our main web hosting clusters for the web hosting portion of our business. StarWind vSAN solves the problem of cost effectively providing a high-availability failover cluster utilizing standard server and networking hardware.
- The technical support experience is some of the best we've experienced.
- The vSAN software allows us setup small Windows Server hyperconverged clusters at a price point that cannot be beaten.
- Their documentation is extremely clear.
- Given how easy their GUI is for managing everything else, perhaps the iSCSI configuration could handle more of the technical details behind the scenes.
For us, it simply meant that we could continue using our preferred hypervisor which keeps everyone happy!
January 25, 2021
Starwind Virtual SAN is being used by our department, I'm not sure if any other departments at our organization use it. It allows us to run our new vital signs capturing software on Hyper-V hosts sharing local storage. Our existing, older hardware SAN was slow and we didn't have to budget to purchase a new, faster SAN.
- StarWind VSAN is a unique product. It works very well creating shared storage using local drives.
- Their tech and customer support is excellent. They are very responsive and knowledgeable.
- Setup is fairly straightforward. If you have any issues with setup, their support is very helpful.
- It would be a nice feature if the virtual disks could automatically enter maintenance mode when one of the nodes is shutting down.
- Some of the networking portion of the setup isn't straightforward, it would be helpful if the GUI recommended some best practices.
It is helpful that StarWind VSAN is hypervisor agnostic. So far, we have used it only on Windows Hyper-V hosts and Windows virtual machines. It is nice to know that we could use it on Linux or to deploy Linux virtual machines. At this point, we do not have plan for Linux machines, but it would save money to not have to purchase another solution if we do.
December 11, 2020
StarWind Virtual SAN is being used by the whole organization and it addresses the hyper-v needs with its ability to create use of high-speed storage across multiple high-speed NICs and with 2 separate 2 node clusters in use it makes it easier to leverage both of or heavy-duty needs and also the ability to move as needed between clusters.
- Consolidate NVME storage and allow for scalability.
- Allow for fast synchronization between cluster nodes.
- Allows for faster recovery when a cluster goes down.
- Notifications could use some work.
- Mobile app companion could be helpful.
- Better pricing would also be helpful.
Our hyper-v environment has become more stable and resilient for our users and allowed us to add more and more heavy-duty VMs with lots of storage up to 4TB in size with increased reliability. We are very thankful for the technology that StarWind Virtual SAN has brought to our infrastructure and ultimately our end-user environment.
January 29, 2021
It is being used by the IT department. We chose it as we wanted to be 3-2-1 backup compliant and implement a DR strategy. Prior to implementing Starwind we had a singular backup server with a backup to disk solution. no we have a backup to disk, backup to tape and backup to cloud.In addition to the multiple backup destinations, the backups are also very secure. The StarWind server is air-gapped, in addition, the virtual tapes are also impervious to malware/ransomware. Lastly, the cloud backups are stored at Wasabi which is also highly secure.
Our backup process is now fully automated. the tapes are automatically shipped/uploaded to Wasabi.
Our backup process is now fully automated. the tapes are automatically shipped/uploaded to Wasabi.
- Ease of implementation
- Robust - it works well and integrates with a multitude of vendors
- Support - the support team is very quick to respond
- The console could use some work. It is not the most intuitive console or design. i feel it could have some improvements both from a technical perspective (introduce right click options) and introduce better formatting. when you are scrolling through your tapes its easy to get confused on what you are looking for.
We actually don't use it with a hypervisor. We have it installed on a physicals server running as a virtual tape library for backups and as a means to ship the virtual tapes offsite to a cloud provider. StarWind actually recommended this setup based on what our needs were.
Our VMS themselves are backed up to our physical Veeam server. Once that backup is complete, Veeam backs that backup set up to tape via StarWind and then StarWind will ship those tapes offsite.
Our VMS themselves are backed up to our physical Veeam server. Once that backup is complete, Veeam backs that backup set up to tape via StarWind and then StarWind will ship those tapes offsite.
January 29, 2021
We used StarWind Virtual SAN as a department. Initially, we had not planned to use virtualization, but at some point we realized that it was necessary. We had no opportunity to install any shared storage and, in this case, StarWind Virtual SAN was perfect. We did not have any type of failover cluster. StarWind Virtual SAN for Hyper-V solves the problem without any kind of hardware lock-in and is a low-impact, easy-to-configure virtual SAN solution. This made it possible to create a failover cluster with high performance without significant costs.
- StarWind Virtual SAN requires at least two 1 GbE networks. I think this is important since the alternatives that I considered required 10 GbE of network.
- StarWind Virtual SAN does 2-way or 3-way replication. It fully replicates the cluster, which means that you can lose storage between the members (even cache one or two nodes of the cluster to handle the scenario). Requires nested resiliency to handle failure of multiple nodes. Since the storage is sustain node + disk failure in a 2-node fully replicated, the failure of single node + at least one (depends on RAID level) disk in an active node will not lead to any data loss.
- StarWind Virtual SAN works on top of a hardware RAID or a software RAID. As an alternative to StarWind VSAN for Hyper-V, we considered Microsoft S2D, but we had to abandon it due to the fact that it does not support hardware RAID.
- Usage of raw partitions instead of file containers.
Our organization has an agreement with Microsoft and therefore we have the opportunity to use Windows server licenses at a good price. Using a virtual SAN that is vendor agnostic allowed for more flexibility in the choice of servers, which had a positive impact on the performance of our virtual machines.
January 14, 2021
StarWind VSAN is used as a 2-node replicated storage, which allows us to eliminate single point of failure and re-use our current servers. It is being used across the whole organization as it hosts our critical systems like databases, remote desktop infrastructure and other systems that are most important for our non-stop work.
- Quick implementation.
- Runs really well and stable.
- Good support.
- No mobile app.
As mentioned before I have used it with Hyper-V only, but it works as expected and the virtual machine performance is better than it was on the physical SAN.
December 23, 2020
StarWind VSAN Solution is currently being used in one of our data centers located at Limassol, Cyprus. The solution includes utilization of storage out of physical servers in order to implement it to our VMware Vcenter environment, creating datastores/LUNS that we provide as a service to customers in order to create workloads.
- Read and write operation speed on VMs is incredible.
- Really easy to manage web interface.
- Integration with VMware was done pretty easily.
- Monitoring of workloads on mobile.
Since we are currently using it with our Vcenter environment and ESXI Servers, I must say that the integration of the product is pretty good, and we really haven't encountered any bugs so far. Plus, the overall performance of the VMs that we deployed using the solution, is pretty amazing , since we never had a failed VM, with storage as its cause.
October 29, 2020
We use Starwind VSAN in our main vsphere 7 cluster. It is the primary storage system for our organization and is used by every user in our organization. We selected Starwind VSAN to provide a boost to the speed of our VMware infrastructure and to provide better high availability to systems in our vsphere cluster.
- Speed
- High Availability
- Price
- Setup complexity
I'm not sure I have a specific instance to point to from one vendor or another. We have always used VMWare and that was how we evaluated the solution. I can tell you that the performance has been great and certainly comparable or better than VMWare's own vsan product. The integration is obviously not as tight as VMWares vsan but I think the Starwind product is a better value.
We implemented StarWind VSAN on two dedicated Dell Windows servers, logically sitting between the VMWare front end hosts and the Dell EqualLogic back end SANs. There are two sites connected completely redundantly with stacked switches at both ends and two separate fibers taking two different geographical paths between sites. Each site hosts VMWare hosts, a StarWind server, and a Dell SAN. This solution serves two virtual server clusters which collectively represent the entirety of operations for the end customer's internal and customer-facing services. Previous to implementing StarWind, the existing SAN hardware was being underutilized. The Dell EqualLogic SAN replicated all volumes to an offsite SAN through a direct L2 fiber connection every 5 minutes. The downside here was that if there was a DR scenario, data loss of up to 5 minutes was possible, and the process of mapping existing VMs to replicated iSCSI volumes would have been very tedious. Additionally, a SAN failure would inevitably result in downtime for running VMs in addition to data loss.
- Realtime storage replication.
- Resilient and redundant iSCSI targets.
- Flexible for use with almost any back-end storage solution.
At the same time that we implemented the StarWind solution, we also converted the front-end virtual infrastructure from Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V with Microsoft Failover Clustering to VMWare vSphere 6.7 Enterprise Plus with a single vCenter standard server. Implementing both of these projects simultaneously didn't cause us any headaches at all. That's pretty impressive to me.
July 31, 2020
Physical to virtual environment migration, requiring a VSAN storage for data center we had an old BLC 460 gen 6 blades with physical storage attached, so basically if we had any issues with the hardware or operating system the downtime for production would be for hours, so we created a virtual data center with VMware vSphere and added 3 20TB storage on each host then created 3-node StarWind scenario being shared on all 3 hosts, and creating virtual machines on 3 hosts and now running on StarWind storage.
- The three-node hyperconverged scenario for our data center works as fault tolerance and less worries on data loss.
- The management console over Windows, installing together with the PowerShell library, you can put images on maintenance mode from the management console which saves you a lot of time on syncing.
- With the PowerShell library I created a batch file for putting images on maintenance mode when our UPS reaches 10% battery capacity in case of a blackout and this lets you bring all host backup and StarWind storage not requiring sync.
- An easy migration to ZFS system that is being presented on a new version of StarWind, migrations look complicated as this restructures the whole architecture on the raid level, but could be a good option just by having it and letting the user decide this new feature migration, as based on our experience with ZFS systems they work pretty fast and secure.
- Android app for monitoring and receiving push notifications as alarms or monitoring I/O from any mobile device.
Currently using a 3-node Hyperconverged Scenario with vSphre 6.7 and VSAN storage shared on all hosts, this lets us have the high availability feature from vSphere as virtual machines are running on a VSAN storage replicated in between the three nodes and if one of the hosts fails, virtual machines keep on and end user won't notice what happened in the background.
July 29, 2020
Highly available HyperV cluster. Our environment includes 2 Hyper-V hosts with onboard storage running about 20 virtual machines. StarWind allowed for a redundant cluster to be configured without any extra storage and easily create an HA cluster. StarWind Virtual San functions as the primary drivers for all of our storage needs in the highly available cluster. It is used almost daily to allow for live migration of machines and failover in the event of maintenance or physical host hardware problems.
- Software defined storage. It's easy to set up and get going rather quickly.
- Intalls right on Hyper-V Core. Not GUI needed.
- StarWind support is unmatched and their proactive support is excellent.
- A better management interface.
We have only used StarWind Virtual SAN with Microsoft Hyper-V. It works very well and I would recommend it in the future regardless of hypervisor technology being used due to its ease of use and great support team.
VSAN is used on one of our virtualization clusters. It is used across the whole organization. We ran 40 VMs on top of two Dell PowerEdge servers.
- Good job on data redundancy.
- Good performance both in writes and reads operations.
- Very low learning curve.
- Management tools.
- Ability to run on all mainstream flavours of Linux.
- Usage of raw partitions instead of file containers.
Performance of my VMs is increased thanks to RAM caching.
We are using StarWind's VTL to augments Veeam's ability to offload existing backups to a tape library. This allows for easy compression of backups to a virtual tape library. We were able to get rid of costly and backups of shipping hard drives. StarWind vSAN made it easy. We've been using it for 1 year. This is very easy when you want to configure and make changes. We are glad to be using this product.
- Support is quick to respond
- Allows you to use Veeam and other software that uses Virtual Tape Libraries while getting rid of actual tape drives and tapes
- vSphere integration would be a major improvement.
- There is no multi language ability, but technical support speaks my native language perfectly.
The performance of our virtual machines has increased.
July 01, 2020
StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere provides redundant and highly available storage for our VMware vSphere environment. We have two Supermicro 2029BT-DNC0R servers with VMware ESXi 6.7 and one StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere virtual machine on each. Local SSD-s are directly attached to StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere virtual machine and software RAID is used to make storage from them. For StarWind synchronization we are using Mellanox ConnectX-4 adapters
and directly attached cable between nodes.
and directly attached cable between nodes.
- Reduce complexity.
- More cost efficient.
- No vendor locked-in hardware restriction.
- iSIR not only experimental.
- More detailed reports via e-mail.
- Security and bug fixes without active support agreement.
Previously we had separate storage (EMC AX4-5) with fiber channel environment. With StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere we are not forced to use vendor locked-in storage hardware - SDD, HDD etc. , have to deal with costly fiber channel environment and our power consumption is also reduced. Also now we have less hardware components to worry about and more flexibility to change storage when and where needed.
A shared storage solution for our 2-node Hyper-V cluster. We've been looking for a solution that will fit our humble needs for shared storage of a cluster, as our in-house team is small and compact and we do not have the funds to invest, implement or maintain a traditional SAN. After careful consideration, we decided that using the disks of our servers and going the vSAN route is the best solution for us.
- Easy to implement.
- Stable.
- Requires little to no maintenance.
- Reporting.
- Auditing.
No issues so far. Integrates perfectly with Hyper-V, it's very stable and runs smoothly with little maintenance.
May 14, 2020
We use StarWinds vSAN as a highly available SAN in our private cloud to offer VMs to customers. We have two vSAN nodes in a highly available cluster and serve CSVs to a group of Hyper-V Clusters. We are able to use completely off the shelf hardware, which allows us to be flexible and reduce cost.
- Highly reliable.
- Off the shelf commodity components work well.
- Premium support is very useful.
- Deduplication inside of CSVs would be very useful.
- Management/control of underlying storage instead of relying on RAID volumes/OS level disk volumes.
- Web interface for management.
- SNMP monitor
We have only used it with Hyper-V but the flexibility to switch Hypervisors if ever required was a major factor when considering the capital expense. We have noticed the IOPS bottle neck on our infrastructure is actually our RAID card and not the vSAN software or networking which is great.
We needed to deploy the new infrastructure in the new data center as soon as possible. As reliable, fault-tolerant storage, we used the StarWind solution with two old servers and a raid array on SSD drives. Storage is used for a VMWare cluster for virtual machines that have MS SQL servers installed.
- Easy installation.
- Excellent performance.
- Low price compared to hardware storage.
- Possibility to use different equipment.
- The storage size limit of 4TB is less than I would like.
I used the StarWind solution only as an iscsi target.
We started using StarWind Virtual SAN in 2016 after evaluating it. It is used as the backbone of our Hyper-V cluster that runs all of our business-critical virtual machines. Our entire infrastructure is run on our StarWind Virtual SAN, including domain controllers, database servers, file/print servers, application servers, and all of our supporting virtual machines. StarWind has greatly reduced our CAPEX and OPEX costs; prior to adopting StarWind Virtual SAN, we had a physical SAN and all of the fiber-channel and networking infrastructure to support it. Now, we simply have 2 nodes that do everything!
- Reliability - The StarWind nodes are Active/Active, so we can operate without any downtime if a node is down for any reason. The built-in data sync capability also assures us that our data is safe.
- Management and Maintenance - Although I hardly have to open the management console, management and maintenance are very simplified.
- Dependability - It just works! The Cluster Shared Volumes created in StarWind are always there for our Hyper-V cluster. Even if a node goes down, the other node does all the work. Downtime is simply a thing of the past.
- Value - CAPEX and OPEX costs are significantly lower vs buying and maintaining a traditional SAN.
- Ease of upgrades - Upgrading requires no downtime! Just update one node at a time and wait for it to reboot and you're done.
- Performance - I worked with StarWind's engineers before I purchased my hardware. A mixture of SSDs, HDDs, 10GB Ethernet cards, and 1GB Ethernet cards was all I needed to achieve high IOPs and excellent performance in this hyper-converged solution.
- Data sync after an unplanned hardware failure - Although this doesn't affect the production environment or the end-user experience, from a peace of mind perspective, I like to see when my data is synchronized between both nodes. I wish the sync was faster.
December 30, 2019
We have set up a dual StarWind SAN with a fault-tolerant volume for our critical virtual servers in addition to some non fault-tolerant volumes for less critical virtual servers in both our corporate HQ and one of our large divisions. The corporate site is using HyperV and the other division using VMWare ESX. Between the two sites, we have 15+ physical servers with over 150 VMs running. Our corporate site used Dell servers w/SAS drives for the 2 StarWind nodes, and the division site built 2 Whitebox type servers using NAS specific SATA drives. Both solutions have been outstanding.
- StarWind is an excellent software-based SAN solution that is easy to set up and manage.
- Fault tolerant volumes provide peace of mind and solves downtime due to storage.
- The only improvement I would like to see in StarWind is centralized management for UPS Battery backup shutdown in the event of a power loss.
StarWind provides an easy and economical way to create a fault tolerate storage volume for virtual machines.
November 26, 2019
We use it as a VSAN for Hyper-V Clusters. We originally had 2 2012 R2 Clusters and are now migrating to Server 2019. We needed a SAN that could deliver different performance tiers, be highly available, scalable, and adapted to our size and budget. We built our own nodes and validated the HW choices with StarWind support.
- Simple to configure and manage.
- Our choice of hardware.
- High availability, with separate nodes allowing for easy maintenance.
- Easy to tier, creating fast or cheap storage and letting us use what we have or exactly what we need.
- Better performance on storage-separated mode.
We used StarWind Virtual SAN with 3 Lenovo servers with SSDs for our in-house data center. We run multiple servers through a 10gbit fiber connection. Works great.
- Simple interface
- Just works
- Graphical interface is easy to read and understand
- Support is awesome
- Easier setup with vlans
- Pricing is a little difficult to understand.
Works with VMWARE Vsphere ESXI. We are able to take down servers and move them around. We have N+1 redundancy and support helped us get this done. They are dominating the SAN area for the price.
October 13, 2019
StarWind Virtual SAN is used in our organization on servers for high availability. Hyper-V-based virtual machines that host database management servers access fault-tolerant storage. This allows us to give uninterrupted work of our employees with databases even while servicing one of the servers.
- Fault-tolerant and high-performance storage.
- Servers of one cluster can be located at a distance from each other.
- It works even on the oldest servers and requires nothing but two network cards.
- For me, management through poweshell is not very clear, and there is very little documentation on this issue.
- There is no multilanguage, but technical support speaks my native language perfectly.
December 05, 2019
It is being used by the entire organization, and resolves my pre-requisites of high availability and failover.
- High Availability
- Failover
- Replication
- Bugs with hardware (Broadcom NICs and Jumboframes)
- Could use more video tutorials
- Describe additional support options
December 09, 2019
We use StarWind Virtual SAN to provide high availability for our 2-node Hyper-V hyper-converged cluster. It provides high availability and zero downtime for our entire company. We initially looked at S2D but found it isn't really designed for 2-node hyper-converged clusters. We demoed StarWind VSAN because of all the great reviews and mentions from the community, but what sold me was an amazing support. During the demo, I was able to work with a very knowledgeable engineer and after our purchase, an engineer validated EVERY aspect of the configuration. Not only did they validate everything and correct problems, but they also explained everything and really increased my knowledge. Support even checked back several times to see if I needed anything.
- High availability.
- Seamless fail-over.
- Rock solid performance.
- None that I've experienced.
October 08, 2019
It is currently being used by the small office of JLT in Barbados. It supports 11 users on-premises and runs across three VMware physical hosts. It addresses problems of business continuity due to potential system failures that can happen and hence VSAN allows for redundancy to be apart of the business resilience in having highly available systems. Another business issue was less complex and integrated storage solution where all computing services can run and be managed from a single hypervisor platform such as VMware.
- Integration into already existing infrastructure.
- Provides immediate high availability of storage for VMs.
- Excellent customer support if you do not have storage experience IT staff essentially Starwind highly experienced engineers provides support not only for VSAN but also on your VM estate to ensure your infrastructure is optimal.
- It can have an easier way to reboot the VMs that manage the storage for the hypervisor to avoid long syncing between storage nodes. My storage runs on Win 2012 VM and when patching the OS I have to reboot and sometimes the VSAN service hangs and I have to force a reboot. OS boots fine but sometimes it does long syncs, like 11 hours to replicate changes to the other two storage nodes.
- A manual assignment of which hosts is primary if all hosts failed due to sudden power outage. This can allow for the host that has a priority 1 status not to have a fill synchronization of storage as the other storage nodes in cluster syncs to this host.
- The VSAN software has an all-compassing feature set in the console that may concern other products of Starwind. I suggest a more simple console for system admins like me and closer to Vmware builtin VSAN solution.
StarWind Virtual SAN Scorecard Summary
What is StarWind Virtual SAN?
StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) is presented by the vendor as a lightweight software-defined storage (SDS) for Enterprise ROBO, SMB & Edge that removes the need for physical storage. The solution is compatible with any hypervisor of choice, and is hardware-agnostic. The vendor invites users to integrate it into an existing infrastructure with minimum requirements, and enjoy constant uptime in a true 2-node scenario.
StarWind VSAN has no strict hardware compatibility lists (HCLs) and is licensed per node. A license unlocks access to all features upon purchase and differs only by capacity volume. The vendors promises customers get the chance to reduce their total cost of ownership (TCO) while receiving 99.9999% uptime. StarWind also helps with configuration, deployment, and migration.
StarWind Virtual SAN:
- provides 90% of raw performance
- squeezes 100% IOPS out of existing hardware
- works on the iSCSI layer
- “speaks” most uplink protocols, including NVMe-oF
- works on top of Hardware or Software RAID (MDADM, ZFS)
- does 2- or 3-way synchronous replication, and more.
The true 2-node solution is enabled through HeartBeat (no witness required). Thanks to “mirroring” of internal disks and flash between hypervisor servers, customers receive fault-tolerant storage. It’s scalable up and out, allowing users to introduce infrastructure changes without downtime or additional licensing costs.
StarWind Virtual SAN makes enterprise-level virtual shared storage accessible.
Categories: Software Defined Storage
StarWind Virtual SAN Screenshots
StarWind Virtual SAN Videos (3)
StarWind Virtual SAN Downloadables
StarWind Virtual SAN Competitors
VMware vSAN, Microsoft S2D, StorMagic SvSAN
StarWind Virtual SAN Pricing
- Has featureFree Trial Available?Yes
- Has featureFree or Freemium Version Available?Yes
- Has featurePremium Consulting/Integration Services Available?Yes
- Entry-level set up fee?No
For the latest information on pricing, visit https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san#quote
StarWind Virtual SAN Technical Details
| Deployment Types: | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems: | Windows, Linux |
| Mobile Application: | No |