Item: StarWind Virtual SAN
Rating: 9
Author: David Benz

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

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.

Return on Investment

StarWind VSAN allowed us to save the money it would have cost to purchase a fast hardware SAN.

Support Rating

StarWind's support for their VSAN product is very good. I had a major issue and their tech support helped me to work through it and enabled me to get the virtual disks back up and running without data loss. I was somewhat surprised they were able to solve the problem.

Their customer support is also very responsive.

Other Software Used

Windows Server, Hyper-V, Microsoft SQL Server

Likelihood to Recommend

StarWind VSAN is well suited for scenarios where an hardware SAN will not meet the demands or is not available, and there is plenty of internal storage on the server nodes. VSAN works really well if you have available internal storage but not sufficient external storage in terms of speed or space.

It would not be appropriate for scenarios where a fast hardware SAN is available.

Starwind VSAN saved us money

Overall Satisfaction with StarWind Virtual SAN