StarWind Virtual SAN for Cheap, Reliable, Robust Shared Storage
August 04, 2022
StarWind Virtual SAN for Cheap, Reliable, Robust Shared Storage
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with StarWind Virtual SAN
We are an SMB that was looking for an inexpensive, high-availability, redundant, fail-over Hyper-V solution for our on-premise services at a K-12 private school. I help run a small IT shop that was looking for a highly redundant, budget friendly solution for a two node Hyper-V cluster. We're only running about 15 or so VM servers and several large file shares, but still wanted a robust back-end with as close to zero down time as we could manage. We serve approximately 150 faculty and staff, and 500 students. There are approximately 500 end user clients relying on our on-prem services. Starwind provided a product within budget that met our goal of a robust, redundant, shared storage product that we could base our clustered Hyper-V back-end on.
- Their documentation for initial configuration and setup, while not necessarily 100% thorough, is as good or better than any I've seen. I got through 99% of the setup with a very good understanding of the config concepts and actual real world configuration for our particular environment. Their support was also very helpful in validating our network and node-to-node connectivity design plan. Once our design plan was vetted, it didn't take more than a couple of days to be fully up and running.
- Our Starwind VSAN has been bullet proof. We've had ZERO issues with it since it's been built out almost 4 years ago. This is not an exaggeration. I find it almost ridiculous that it's been so rock-solid. Re-synchronization times between nodes after full power outages are lengthy, but I think that is a small price to pay, and it has never impacted our ability to get back up and running quickly.
- Ongoing maintenance for the VSAN is next to nil. Aside from the periodic Starwind updates, and maybe checking re-sync after full outages, I almost never have to even think about Starwind. It's just there, and it works.
- One downside to Starwind's VSAN is probably their scalability. If we needed to add more nodes for compute power, or scale out storage significantly, that might be a problem. We're a small shop though, and thought out our initial design to last us through at least 6-8 years of growth. Our general trajectory has us outsourcing more and more services instead of hosting them, so I'm not terribly worried about that. If we ever outgrow this solution, I'm pretty sure it will be well after the expected lifetime of our hardware.
- The re-synchronization times after a full power outage are very long (4-6) hours. That does not impact our ability to get back up and running quickly off of one node, however.
- The documentation was thorough, with the small exception of incomplete info regarding all of the iSCSI connections required.
- TCO is fantastic due to the very low overhead of managing the VSAN. Once built out, the Starwind VSAN has had ZERO issues. It just works. The only management required has been the occasional updates, and checking in on the re-sync after full power outages have taken out our entire server room.
- The high-availabilty of our Hyper-V cluster that Starwind allows, gives us zero downtime when running Windows updates that require server reboots. All scheduled server maintenance can be done during normal work hours with zero interruption to our end users.
- We were initially afraid of network shared drive performance issues, but that proved to be unfounded. File transfer speed tests on our network and file shares actually improved.
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