Item: StarWind Virtual SAN
Rating: 8
Author: Mart Vernik

Overall Satisfaction with StarWind Virtual SAN

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Reduce complexity.
More cost efficient.
No vendor locked-in hardware restriction.

Cons

iSIR not only experimental.
More detailed reports via e-mail.
Security and bug fixes without active support agreement.

Return on Investment

Less time for administration.
Less hardware.
Less worry about hardware problems.

Support Rating

Most of the time support for StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere is quickly addressed and they are very helpful. Also I have one experience when I asked question and they didn't respond at all before I did send additional question after five days waiting - maybe at first my question was not so clearly presented.

Alternatives Considered

VMware vSAN

StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere allows you to use two node setup and still provide highly available storage compared to VMware vSAN which requires three nodes minimum, also with VMware vSAN you have to use certified hardware and you have fewer options to choose from. StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere licensing is more affordable compared to VMware vSAN.

Other Software Used

CentOS, Red Hat Gluster Storage, Windows Server

Likelihood to Recommend

If you need software defined storage for VMware vSphere virtual machine environment StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere is a good solution as it can provide highly available storage even if you have only two physical servers. If you are Linux user, then you are happy to use StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere as it's built on top of CentOS.

Comments

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