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StarWind Virtual SAN

StarWind Virtual SAN

Overview

What is StarWind Virtual SAN?

StarWind Virtual SAN is software-defined storage for efficient storage and backup.

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Recent Reviews

It's a Winner!! for us

10 out of 10
March 21, 2024
We have been using a StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) on two production locations with a Hyper-V Cluster for almost 7 years now in my current …
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Awards

Products that are considered exceptional by their customers based on a variety of criteria win TrustRadius awards. Learn more about the types of TrustRadius awards to make the best purchase decision. More about TrustRadius Awards

Reviewer Pros & Cons

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Verified User
Director in Information Technology
Education Management Company, 11-50 employees
DT
Daniel Turner
IT Infrastructure Architect
TFS Buying Ltd (Retail, 501-1000 employees)
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Product Details

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.

StarWind Virtual SAN Screenshots

Screenshot of StarWind Management ConsoleScreenshot of StarWind Management ConsoleScreenshot of StarWind Virtual SANScreenshot of StarWind Virtual SAN

StarWind Virtual SAN Video

StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN)

StarWind Virtual SAN Competitors

StarWind Virtual SAN Technical Details

Deployment TypesOn-premise
Operating SystemsWindows, Linux
Mobile ApplicationNo

StarWind Virtual SAN Downloadables

Frequently Asked Questions

StarWind Virtual SAN is software-defined storage for efficient storage and backup.

VMware vSAN and StorMagic SvSAN are common alternatives for StarWind Virtual SAN.

Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 9.6.

The most common users of StarWind Virtual SAN are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Comparisons

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Reviews and Ratings

(143)

Attribute Ratings

Reviews

(1-25 of 139)
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April 18, 2024

StarWind Virtual SAN - Easy, Resilient, and Cost Effective

Verified User
Director in Information Technology
Education Management Company, 11-50 employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
StarWind Virtual SAN is best suited in any scenario that involves the need for a virtual SAN. Support is very picky about deployment scenarios, and hardware compatibility is carefully scrutinized, but I believe this to be a good thing because no one wants storage to fail. It's much easier to configure and maintain than Vmware's vSAN product.
March 27, 2024

Needed a SAN - StarWind fit the bill

DT
Daniel Turner
IT Infrastructure Architect
TFS Buying Ltd (Retail, 501-1000 employees)
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Likelihood to Recommend
One of the primary use cases of StarWind VSAN is to ensure high availability of storage resources. By synchronously mirroring data between multiple servers, it eliminates single points of failure and provides continuous access to critical data even in the event of hardware failures or server downtime. This is particularly crucial for mission-critical applications and virtualized environments where uninterrupted access to data is paramount.
March 21, 2024

It's a Winner!! for us

Verified User
Engineer in Information Technology
Building Materials Company, 201-500 employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Likelihood to Recommend
It's an easy and simple way to get a great HA Cluster environment without the need for expensive third-party appliances like physical SAN/Switches.
January 31, 2024

The right sized storage solution for our business

Jonathan Armstrong | TrustRadius Reviewer
Jonathan Armstrong
Senior Systems Officer
Domino Machine (Machinery, 51-200 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
The excellent support I experienced during the onboarding process really sold me on the solution as a whole. I feel that our company can count on StarWind Virtual SAN to be there if we have a question or if we have an urgent situation.
January 19, 2024

StarWind Virtual SAN, reliable and easy to use.

Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology
Government Administration Company, 501-1000 employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
Very good support and very good value for money. If you want redundancy with reliable software it's my choice to implement this in a failover cluster. Nice not to depend on MS for a change. Due to hardware restrictions we couldn't use Microsoft. Another reason to choose Starwind, it's quite independent of the hardware you use in your environment
October 24, 2023

Great product and nice and reliable team behind! Very professional

Verified User
Consultant in Sales
Information Technology & Services Company, 201-500 employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
The team was very reliable and helpful to answer an RFP and design a solution for our customer. They gave good hints how the network design should be done and what network adapters are not recommended. Very experienced! Clear pricing structure! The deployment and maintenance is very easy and the scalability of the SAN is great!
Only one point is not so nice. The vendor does not recommend to use broadcom network adapters. We currently cannot find other negative points.
August 22, 2023

Great Hyperconverged solution for the price and stellar support.

Raffi Jamgotchian - Cybersecurity for Investment Firms | TrustRadius Reviewer
Raffi Jamgotchian - Cybersecurity for Investment Firms
CEO (Chief Executive Officer)
Triada Networks (Computer & Network Security, 11-50 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
ResellerIncentivized
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.
August 18, 2023

True 2-node VSAN, perfect for SMB!

Seth Weber | TrustRadius Reviewer
Seth Weber
Network & Systems Administrator
Clarion Forest VNA (Hospital & Health Care, 51-200 employees)
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
If you're a small business (SMB), StarWind is PERFECT for your virtual SAN needs. Whether it be initially designing your infrastructure or replacing an existing SAN setup, a VSAN with StarWind will cut costs and give you all the benefits of SAN (redundancy, expand-ability, etc).
August 11, 2023

Starwind vSAN 2 thumbs up

Danny Rackow | TrustRadius Reviewer
Danny Rackow
IT Director
Precise Imaging (Health, Wellness and Fitness, 11-50 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
Our needs were pretty basic. We needed a 3 node cluster without using switches. Vmware could NOT accommodate this so we looked for an alternative which I am glad we did as Starwind customer support is 10x better than VMware and the vSAN product is near comparable. Only drawback was the lack of encryption and dedup which was not a deal breaker for us luckily as it hit every other mark we needed.
August 10, 2023

Starwind HCA, a scalable solution for SMB that won't break the bank

Verified User
Manager in Information Technology
Non-profit Organization Management Company, 11-50 employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
Starwind allows for organizations with a small budget to deploy a modern, robust HCA solution.
Organizations that have a need for remote office deployments can find a resilient solution with Starwind HCA as well.
The ability to scale by simply adding additional nodes to the stack provides a unique opportunity.
August 01, 2023

Simple, great and cost effective, doing exactly what it is supposed to do

Joni Ljungqvist | TrustRadius Reviewer
Joni Ljungqvist
Engineering Technician
JPL Music (Media Production, 1-10 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Likelihood to Recommend
Despite some of the drawbacks (lacking documentation that is not updated, GUI not being the prettiest), there really is no alternative to a simple, reliable and cheap virtual SAN solution on the market today. In my opinion, if you have local disk and need fault tolerance for a failover cluster for example, StarWind Virtual SAN really is the best. If you do need a bigger high availability setup using more than 3 nodes, then I'd look at investing in an actual SAN or similar solution instead. But for everything else that is 3 nodes or smaller, StarWind Virtual SAN does the job.
June 07, 2023

Cost effective solution that works exactly as advertised.

Verified User
Administrator in Information Technology
Information Technology & Services Company, 1-10 employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
It is a great solution if budget is of concern, or if you are using a virtualization product other than VMware and cannot utilize their vSAN. If you're deploying a large scale cluster and using VMware, vSAN might be a better option, depending on the budget available.
May 02, 2023

Enterprise grade software for SMB pricing.

Derek Clarke | TrustRadius Reviewer
Derek Clarke
Director Business Services
Provision Infotech (Information Technology & Services, 11-50 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Likelihood to Recommend
Based on my knowledge of StarWind Virtual SAN, I can suggest the following scenarios where it is well suited:
Small to medium-sized businesses: StarWind Virtual SAN is an affordable and easy-to-deploy solution for businesses with limited IT resources. It provides high availability and fault tolerance for mission-critical applications.
Hyper-converged infrastructure: StarWind Virtual SAN is ideal for organizations that are looking for a hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) solution. It eliminates the need for a separate storage area network (SAN) by converging compute and storage resources into a single server.
Remote and branch offices: StarWind Virtual SAN is a good fit for organizations with remote and branch offices. It allows for centralized management and monitoring of storage resources, while providing local access to data.

On the other hand, there may be scenarios where StarWind Virtual SAN is less appropriate. For instance:
Large enterprises with complex IT infrastructures: While StarWind Virtual SAN can scale to support large environments, it may not be the most suitable solution for complex IT infrastructures that require advanced features such as storage tiering, QoS, or advanced deduplication.
May 01, 2023

StarWind's Very Simple, Veritably Sound Virtual SAN

Verified User
Consultant in Information Technology
Information Technology & Services Company, 11-50 employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
The StarWind Virtual SAN is a wonderfully cost-effective solution for vSAN deployment. Whether it is being vetted as an additional solution to your existing stack of tech offerings by your R&D department or is simply meant to allow them to dip their toes into virtual SANs for the first time, this vSAN is a very low-risk venture.

However, this vSAN is meant squarely for the small to medium business market. As tempting as it might be, it is not a one-size-fits-all solution.
April 21, 2023

StarWind Virtual SAN adds High Availability with little complexity

Verified User
Manager in Information Technology
Gambling & Casinos Company, 1001-5000 employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Likelihood to Recommend
If you are considering a High Availability deployment of hypervisors with a physical SAN, you should consider StarWind Virtual SAN, especially if space or technical complexity is an issue. If you are a company with no servers considering buying your first server, consider whether the downtime of guest VMs due to installing updates and rebooting the physical hypervisor is costly downtime or potentially difficult-to-schedule maintenance windows. IT appreciates times when they can avoid working after-hours.
April 12, 2023

StarWind Virtual SAN Hypervisor-Centric Virtual Machine all in one solution

Verified User
Analyst in Other
Information Technology & Services Company, 1001-5000 employees
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Likelihood to Recommend
The installation process is simple as pie. The configuration file is duly referenced. (you can do most things via GUI, just some things are set in the main config file).When implementing, do not hesitate to use the iSCSI Powershell commands (the Windows defaults from Microsoft). It is far more appealing than using a GUI to click.
March 30, 2023

Great Product - StartWind SAN

Verified User
Manager in Information Technology
Computer Networking Company, 51-200 employees
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Likelihood to Recommend
We have experienced several benefits from using StarWind Virtual SAN. First, the system is much more reliable, with no unplanned downtime or performance issues. This has led to increased customer satisfaction and fewer lost sales due to system unavailability. Second, the company has been able to scale their storage infrastructure as needed, by adding more servers to increase capacity and performance. This has allowed them to avoid purchasing expensive proprietary storage hardware and reduced maintenance costs. By using this product We ware able to solve their storage issues, improve system reliability and performance, and reduce costs.
March 30, 2023

As a IT professional, I have the opportunity to work with a variety of software solutions, and I must say that StarWind Virtual SAN is truly exceptional

GG
Giedrius Gedeikis
Network System Administrator
UAB Rusnava (Computer Hardware, 11-50 employees)
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Likelihood to Recommend
Very well suited for Remote Office/Branch Office (ROBO): StarWind Virtual SAN is a good fit for organizations that have remote offices or branch offices (ROBOs). The solution can help improve the availability and performance of ROBO workloads by providing local storage that is synchronized with the main data center. Less Appropriate in small workloads, where organizations with small workloads that don't require high availability or performance, StarWind Virtual SAN may be overkill.
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