StarWind Virtual SAN - Great Solution at a Reasonable Price
June 13, 2025
StarWind Virtual SAN - Great Solution at a Reasonable Price
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with StarWind Virtual SAN
StarWind Virtual SAN is our production storage running on two VMWare ESXi hosts.
We are in the process of downsizing on site storage, moving as much as possible to the cloud - and there were not any affordable options available from NetApp a replace our out of production NetApp SAN. VMWare vSAN requires 3 host servers so it also was not a good fit. StarWind Virtual SAN has turned out to be a great soltuon that works just as well as what we had before but at a fraction of the cost.
We are in the process of downsizing on site storage, moving as much as possible to the cloud - and there were not any affordable options available from NetApp a replace our out of production NetApp SAN. VMWare vSAN requires 3 host servers so it also was not a good fit. StarWind Virtual SAN has turned out to be a great soltuon that works just as well as what we had before but at a fraction of the cost.
Pros
- High Availability
- Good performance
- It's reliable with little need to do much to maintain
Cons
- Difficulty understanding some support people over the phone due to heavy accent
- Datastores do not work after power outage with non-graceful shutdown - manual steps required to bring back online
- Full sync required after power outage with non-graceful shutdown resulting in degraded performance until completed.
- We paid less than half for hardware and software to implement StarWind Virtual SAN than our previous NetApp SAN 6 years before - and about 1/3 as much as it would have cost to buy the lowest cost replacement NetApp SAN
- The Software has already been purchased so we only need to buy hardware when it's time to refresh.
- Buying onboard storage for servers is cheaper than buying a separate SAN
Alternative solutions were twice the cost or more which eliminated them. I got input from several companies who used StarWind Virtual SAN and nothing bit good thinsg to say and it was the only option I found that seemed reputable at anywhere near the cost we paid.
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
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