Great performance at a great price.
October 30, 2020
Great performance at a great price.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with StarWind Virtual SAN
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
- Reduced the possibility of downtime tremendously.
- Improved productivity due to access time on local database apps.
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.
Management is pretty straight forward. In the virtual appliance install, I have a small vm on each host that acts as the storage device for that host and syncs with the appliance on another host forming two pairs that sync together. There is also a management console for the system as a whole that is easy to use.
The biggest difference in my opinion between these two is the level of integration that VMWare's solution provides. It's a purpose-built solution for their environment so it will enjoy tighter integration across their product stack. Because StarWind is platform-agnostic it's not going to be as tight as the vendor-specific solution. I went with Starwinds vsan because it provided similar performance for a better price.