Cheaper and more attractive vSAN than S2D and others

We are an SMB that can't be bothered paying tens of thousands of dollars just to get a proper HA storage for a two-node failover cluster. Therefore StarWind's vSAN was financially attractive from the start. The reviews you can find all over the web incentivised us to research this solution deeper (e.g. just check all the great posts vom Kooler on Stackoverflow), leading to us actually implementing it. We were coming from an S2D implementation which already gave us a ridiculous amount of headaches (bugs, performance stalls, "we know what's best for you" automatisms) IN ADDITION to being slow AND annoying to administrate/debug WHILE ALSO having the most annoying documentation ever to be created by mankind. Just the usual MS crap basically. Rush out some code and ship it and never fix anything (but break it every few weeks with patches)... The initial tests were easily implementable (without begging some sales folks for a POC, due to a free version being available) as well as proper documentation *that you actually LIKE to read due to it having been typed by a tech* (and that also isn't behind a pay/registration wall). As close to perfect as the documentation is, do read the blog posts e.g. the 2 node HA setup as well - some minute details were only found in those. No showstoppers, and not many things in general, just a few hints here and there. The installation itself is easy as pie, the config file is properly documented (you can do most things via GUI, just some things are set in the main config file). Do help yourself to the iSCSI Powershell commands (Windows defaults from MS) when implementing, way more attractive than clicking via GUI! (New-IscsiTargetPortal, Connect-IscsiTarget etc.) Some things must be done via GUI though since iSCSI has been implemented way back and "making scripting available" wasn't that widespread for developers back then. This being a Microsoft topic, not StarWind though...they would have had to make their very own iSCSI implementation otherwise. For testing, you should use a proper tool like https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure-stack/hci/manage/diskspd-overview since "Windows copy from within the VM running on the test setup" can be flakey. Not as in "the results aren't valid real-world performance if you check with the Windows copy within a VM" but rather "non-scientific" since you can't extract much data from that process aside from size/time. Feature-wise we are only waiting for the release of a... let's call it "planned disaster"...feature that would allow us to patch a hypervisor node without having to take the full storage offline. Atm (20220609) this is still necessary since taking a node offline without properly activating maintenance mode on the vSAN would trigger a full sync of the vSAN nodes. This is fine and a good thing! since it ensures data integrity. But there is something in the making that would ensure integrity without a full sync after a node goes down...which, as stated above, one could "abuse" to patch (and boot = take down) the hypervisors during business hours. Other than that the thing is rock stable and chugging along without issues. Like I said we are an SMB so we "only" have around 50 VMs on our FO cluster, which is a medium load for SSDs. So if you plan to go more to the "max" side of performance use, do proper testing! Price-wise this is very attractive, the support is great (little that we needed due to the good docs) and I would expect you to reach very good performance just like we did. The next-best solution from my research back then - that you would actually want to use, so no S2D crap or anything - would have started at 7x or 8x the price. Started! So...since StarWind's solution has served us very well over the last two years already...you get who I would recommend.

Aside from possible feature/price changes on the vendor side, I wouldn't change my process.

Vendor documentation is proper, so that's all you need.

Yep, because you can't be on your on with such a critical solution.

Wasn't needed since the product works very well since implementation.