1. Home
  2. Software Defined Storage (SDS) Solutions
  3. StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews
  4. User Review of StarWind Virtual SAN
Excellent and affordable VSAN software
April 12, 2022

Excellent and affordable VSAN software

Connor Koch | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with StarWind Virtual SAN

We purchased this product to manage storage between our two node hyper v cluster. We wanted to avoid the added complexity and single point of failure that a traditional three tier approach brings, so we went with Starwind vSAN to ensure we had 100% redundancy in the event of either host failing completely.
  • The product simply works, it's been very reliable and robust in my experience.
  • Support is fantastic, they were quick to respond throughout the whole process and were always knowledgeable.
  • Pricing is simple and easy to understand. It's a perpetual license and you only pay a reasonable fee to renew support yearly.
  • Some of the documentation on the website is a bit dated, leading to some confusion as I found some older articles in my initial research.
  • The UI of the software isn't the most intuitive. This isn't a huge issue as it's not something you're going to be looking at every day, it's very much set it and forget.
  • It can be a bit confusing to try and understand the full process based on the documentation alone, definitely leverage their support if you have any questions or issues.
  • We've got the added redundancy of having a second hyper v host for our production VM environment.
  • Built in notifications means you can set and forget the product, no one needs to spend time monitoring it daily.
  • Excellent and affordable support options means you can be assured that a quick resolution will be found in the event of an issue.
Support for Starwind Virtual SAN is fantastic. During every step of the process, from requesting a trial key to demo the product in a test environment to a production implementation, support was always responsive and knowledgeable. The engineer assigned to my onboard review was very knowledgeable and always explained why he was making certain recommendations.
The only other option we really considered was Microsoft's storage spaces direct. The biggest issue we had with that solution was the lack of local disk redundancy in a two node environment. With Starwind, it doesn't matter how many nodes you have, and we were able to leverage our hardware raid controllers for an extra layer of redundancy.

Do you think StarWind Virtual SAN delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with StarWind Virtual SAN's feature set?

Yes

Did StarWind Virtual SAN live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of StarWind Virtual SAN go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy StarWind Virtual SAN again?

Yes

Starwind Virtual SAN seems like the perfect solution for a virtual SAN in smaller scenarios. For our case, we're running a two node hyper v cluster, and the built in alternative from Microsoft, Storage Spaces Direct, seems mostly intended for 3 or more nodes in a cluster. I can't speak to how well Starwind scales beyond our two node system, but it works perfectly for our smaller setup.