Overview
What is StarWind Virtual SAN?
StarWind Virtual SAN is software-defined storage for efficient storage and backup.
It's a Winner!! for us
The right sized storage solution for our business
StarWind Virtual SAN, reliable and easy to use.
StarWind Virtual SAN Review
Simple, effective, and reliable
StarWind Virtual SAN user review
Great product and nice and reliable team behind! Very professional
Great Hyperconverged solution for the price and stellar support.
True 2-node VSAN, perfect for SMB!
Starwind vSAN 2 thumbs up
Starwind HCA, a scalable solution for SMB that won't break the bank
Great solution to downsize on-site storage/costs when moving systems to the cloud
Simple, great and cost effective, doing exactly what it is supposed to do
Cost effective solution that works exactly as advertised.
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
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- Downloadables
- FAQs
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
StarWind Virtual SAN Video
StarWind Virtual SAN Competitors
- VMware vSAN
- StorMagic SvSAN
- Microsoft S2D
StarWind Virtual SAN Technical Details
Deployment Types | On-premise |
---|---|
Operating Systems | Windows, Linux |
Mobile Application | No |
StarWind Virtual SAN Downloadables
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(142)Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-5 of 5)It's a Winner!! for us
- True two node Hyper-V cluster solution.
- Performance.
- StarWind support will install and configure the software and also update it for you.
- Simplicity.
- none yet
- It easy to maintian with a small IT Team because of the great support of Starwind
- It's fast and doesn't need a third witness voor you cluster to work
- All VM can be running on one cluster host
- Storage for our Hyper-V Cluster.
- Hardware is placed on multiple locations so fast sync is important.
- Performance.
- Support from vendor.
- Keep it simple.
- True Two-node HA cluster configuration (no 3rd witness needed).
- none
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Third-party professional services
- none
- No Training
- Installation is done with StarWind Support.
- Check the sync status.
- Iscsi target could be a little difficult if you never used it before
- keep everything up-to-date
- none
Flexible product, easy to implement and easy to use.
- Flexible in storage increase
- Ability to use it on the Cloud solution
- Alibity to use it with most Hypervisors
- Free versions needs to offer full feature and GUI support
- Documentations need some improvements
- No other improvements I'm thinking of
- It provide ROI of 100% over time
- Cost saving in harware implementation are great, since you could by just storage and not entire servers.
- Different range of vendors can be use in the same environment
- To support vcenter infrastructure
- To support our Veeam infrastructure
- To support our Commvault infrastructure
- We added storage on the go
- We used our available infrastruture
- No need to buy additional storage.
- We could integrate it in our cloud infrastructure
- We could use it in our newest datacenter
- We could use it in our customers infrastuture also
- Price
- Product Features
- Implemented in-house
- We did not face nay issue during implementation
- No Training
- Adding of devices
- Adding of Targes
- Adding of VLT Devices
Challenges:
- Reliable sync in a 2-node cluster, e.g., avoid split brain
- Low latency and lightweight solution for storage
- Support as well as community size and up-to-date documentation
The scope is to synchronize a 70TB storage with an additional SSD partition, which runs several critical VM instances, such as HA-Databases, Network Authentication, and ADFS. Additionally, we run a Fileserver on Hyper-V. Considering all those requirements, the storage needs to be reliably fast on broadband of workloads (small to big files)
- StarWind Virtual SAN helps in reliably synchronizing in a 2-node cluster via a reliable heartbeat (384 days uptime so far)
- Ample boost is provided through L1 (RAM) and L2 (SSD) Cache Partition with industry leading bandwidth
- Fantastic Forum Support and even better mail support, as well as up-to-date documentation helped us in setting up StarWind Virtual SAN within 48 hours and bringing it online within 3 days after setup and initial full syncronization
- Avoiding a full sync through its fast sync technology: When running maintenance on the cluster, StarWind Virtual SAN reliably synchronizes data in the background when e.g. restarting the service
- Full utilization of our bandwidth: We use 2x 25GBit for Sync Interface and 2x 10GBit for end user interface and reach a file transfer performance of over 750MB/s through a Windows Fileserver VM
- While StarWinds Documentation is well maintained and up to date, we wished that it was clearer in providing a clearer guideline in setting StarWind Virtual SAN up with a free license of the Management Console, resulting in a setup with the provided PowerShell templates.
Another factor in our cost-driven decision was the maximum utilization of hardware, such as network interface and performance-boosting caches, such as RAM and SSD. Those requirements were met as well.
The third and, in my opinion, most important factor was the support, which was fantastic. Even though we did not have a support license, a technician offered us help in correctly setting up StarWind Virtual SAN and checked our configuration. This positive experience is the reason we will be staying with StarWind Virtual SAN for a while.
- StarWind Virtual SAN in combination with the Hyperconverged Environment has saved us approx. 50% in hardware costs, as well as additional maintenance and licensing costs
- The resulting less complex environment helps in better managing the infrastructure and avoiding many working hours
- StarWind Virtual SAN is a "set up and forget" solution
- Up to date documentation as well as support from the StarWind technician via the official forum saved major costs for a setup via an on-premise technician
- High availability / redundancy
- Fast syncronization between nodes
- Performance, ranging from small to big files, additionally with cache support
- No unexpected features, every feature we use was well researched beforehand to meet company needs
- Expanded filesharing or a second highly available storage
- Price
- Product Reputation
- Prior Experience with the Product
Reputation: Using a well-renowned and widely used Software is an important base to create a long-term reliable infrastructure for critical workloads. StarWind Virtual SAN is well-known in the storage industry.
Experience: StarWind Virtual SAN was initially recommended to us by another IT Administrator who works for another company and was ultimately the reason we started researching StarWind Virtual SAN as a VSAN solution.
- Implemented in-house
- Provisioning of the storage during the initial setup took a very long time, and we had to redo it because it froze and we thought it crashed.
- Setting up the infrastructure (redundant switch and connection) to have a solid base took time but paid out in the end.
- No Training
1. What are the recommended configuration parameters in setting up the RAID array for StarWind Virtual SAN
2. How do we efficiently set up L1 and L2 cache without buying the StarWind Management Console
Our post was answered within 2 hours by a StarWind technician, which not only excellently addressed the issue but offered remote support from a certified StarWind technician the same week.
- Putting device in maintenance mode
- Software updates on a cluster
- Editing storage options through the paid StarWind Management Console
- Managing StarWind Virtual SAN on the free StarWind Management Console through PowerShell
Cheaper and more attractive vSAN than S2D and others
- Providing HA storage for a FO cluster
- You can use any underlying disk setup you want.
- Very attractive price
- Good support
- Techy documentation
- Improved sync speed after node failure, e.g. with a journaling kind of system - supposedly coming this year though!
- Other then that we are happy with everything. So nothing to add!
- ROI/TCO in comparison to VMware is ridiculously better since it is way cheaper, and we basically don't ever have to touch this again after the initial setup!
- The usability for us admins is so much better than Microsoft's S2D crap...
- HA storage
- Unexpectedly just as easy to setup and maintain as one could assume by reading their docs. Rare that this is the case.
- More nodes? :) who knows.
Megacrap from Megacr...uhm Microsoft....
No really. Just avoid S2D.
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Prior Experience with the Product
- Implemented in-house
- Initial tests with free license
- Set up one node
- Set up second node
- Activate HA
- Migrate test VMs onto final setup
- Once that's fine and dandy for a few days, migrate all prod VMs to the HA setup.
- None encountered (yes, actually!)
- No Training
- HA device setup
- Performance tracking
- Microsoft iSCSI related things, since CLI is sometimes nonexistant
Excellent Solution
- High availability.
- Performance.
- Gain 100% uptime and full fault tolerance.
- Cost-efficiency.
- Witness server improvement required.
- TTL value below 5ms very tough.
- Linux learning.
- Licensing is very much flexible.
- No add on payments required in future.
- Performance overrides the cost of the solution.
- StarWind Virtual Tape Library and StarWind SAN & NAS
- HA
- Data Scalability
- Performance
- DR
- Failover
- Migration
- Tape Library
- Backup
- Redundancy
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
- Prior Experience with the Product
- Implemented in-house
- Network
- Switching
- IP Mapping
- Firewall
- Data
- no training
- Failover
- Migration VM
- Web Interface
- Starwind Appliance
- Linux commands
- Networks in Starwind iSCSI
- VMware
- HP
- Veeam
- No
- No
- No
- File import/export
- Not Upgraded
- Performance Improvement