--- title: StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews meta_title: 'StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 201 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how StarWind Virtual SAN works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.7 review_count: 201 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-07-16' parent_category: name: IT Infrastructure url: https://www.g2.com/categories/it-infrastructure --- # StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews **Vendor:** StarWind, Inc. **Category:** [Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) Solutions ](https://www.g2.com/categories/hyperconverged-infrastructure-hci-solutions) **Average Rating:** 4.7/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 201 ## About StarWind Virtual SAN StarWind is the pioneer of hyperconvergence and storage virtualization, offering customizable SDS and turnkey (software+hardware) solutions to optimize underlying storage capacity use, ensure fault tolerance, achieve IT infrastructure resilience and increase customer ROI. StarWind has over 150 employees and caters to more than 400,000 customers worldwide. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) eliminates any need for physical storage by mirroring internal hard disks and flash between hypervisor servers. Thanks to its unique features, StarWind VSAN can be deployed on or integrated in any existing IT infrastructure. By acquiring a single solution, you will get a robust fault-tolerant storage pool, constant application uptime and endless scalability options with just 2 nodes. Key Features: - Allows to achieve high availability - Eliminates any downtime even if 1 or more nodes fail - Ties the cluster into a single storage pool - Overcomes HCLs and has no restrictions on sockets or features - Offers flexible scalability, up and out - Easy management through a web console or thick client ## StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews ### 1. An SDS Solution Easy to set up and Efficient **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Thomas L. | Ingénieur Avant Vente : Virtualisation, Stockage & Disaster Recovery Plan, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 12, 2023 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** An SDS solution under vSPhere that is easy to set up and efficient, thanks to the simplicity of its console and proactive support. Indeed Storage provisioning is very simple and synchronous mirroring is child's play. High availability coupled with VMware's HA cluster works perfectly. Even if you still have to follow some instructions at the hardware level, the Starwind solution remains detached from it, unlike solutions like vSphere VSAN or Microsoft's S2D. Indeed this solution works on practically any server. And a big advantage the option of HeartBeat to replace the Witness Node. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** a zest of sexier design for the console would be a plus :-) **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** A geocluster with only 2 sites because no need for witnesses thanks to Heartbeat ### 2. Brilliant Virtual SAN Solution **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Stefan N. | Principal of ICT Infrastructure and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 23, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Since we installed StarWind Virtual SAN across two storage nodes for our Cluster Storage, we have seen a vast improvement in the replication and redundancy of data. Our previous SAN was slow to replicate data between the two nodes; if one side went down, the other side struggled to fully function or access the needed data. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** So far, we haven't encountered any downsides to StarWind Virtual SAN in our environment. Their technical support team swiftly resolved any issues we had during the setup. StarWind was not the cheapest solution but definitely not the most expensive. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our previous SAN solutions were outdated and had several issues due to age. Looking for a change, we found that all the reviews and people we spoke to about StarWinds said that the software just worked perfectly, and that is all we wanted, a system that, once it was set up, just worked. And that's exactly what we have found to be the case; StarWind's Virtual SAN has been excellent. We monitor the replication health via the software, and that's about it. No issues so far, and like each review we’ve seen, we would highly recommend StarWind Virtual SAN. We had real problems with the replication reliability between our previous SAN servers. StarWind has improved this, and now we have excellent replication, thus vastly improving out failover redundancy. ### 3. Starwind Virtual SAN Cost Effective Solution **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Maryam I. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 02, 2023 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Several aspects make StarWind Virtual SAN a popular option for enterprises, but one of its strongest advantages is its capacity to offer high availability and redundancy for data and applications that are mission-critical. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Technical knowledge is necessary for the setup and configuration of StarWind Virtual SAN, which can be a challenging task. Those who are unfamiliar with virtualization technology or storage area networks (SANs) may find this to be difficult. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our organization was using traditional physical storage platform where we was facing issue with the integration with the virtualization platforms and also the cost of the physical storage platform was high. We came to hear about the starwind virtual san product and now we're satisfied with the solution. ### 4. StarWind Virtual SAN best for backup and restoration **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Banking | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 17, 2023 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** The solution's management GUI is easy and works best with a hypervisor environment. Our organization uses a hypervisor environment to support the same, making it easier to implement and get fruitful results. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** The reporting of the solution needs improvement. They should have some predefined executive reports from which we have insights into the health of the backup that can be shared with senior management. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** To implement a business continuity plan and to perform quarterly disaster recovery in our organization, we require a solution in which we have a backup readily available, so StarWind Virtual SAN help us do that. Initially, we faced some challenges because of the infrastructure, but the support team figured it out well. ### 5. a game-changer for our organization **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Giedrius G. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 27, 2023 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** High Availability: StarWind Virtual SAN is designed to provide high availability for mission-critical workloads. Performance Optimization: StarWind Virtual SAN optimizes storage performance by using a variety of techniques, such as write-back caching, automated tiering, and deduplication **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Complexity: StarWind Virtual SAN can be complex to set up and manage, especially for organizations with limited IT resources. Limited protocol support: StarWind Virtual SAN supports a limited number of protocols, primarily iSCSI and SMB3 **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** We deploy StarWind Virtual SAN to create a shared storage pool from the existing hardware resources. We install StarWind Virtual SAN software on the ESXi hosts and configure them to use local storage devices, such as SSDs and HDDs, to create a highly available storage cluster ### 6. Cost effective SAN software that works exactly as advertised **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Food Production | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 06, 2023 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** The software does exactly what it's advertised to do, and does it well. The cost is much better too when compared to the big name competitions. Without a hardware SAN, there's no native way to do this with Hyper-V so this was a great solution for us. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** I wish there was better documentation for best practices in terms of hardware selection. An overview of the recommended disks and NICs, and the quantity, would have been helpful. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** We needed high availability across two server nodes, on a tighter budget than what the big name alternative would allow. We now have two servers in HA that we can rely on if one goes down to keep the production line running. ### 7. Starwind's Virtual SAN is a great budget friendly SAN **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Alonzo R. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 07, 2023 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** We've had great success in using StarWind's Virtual SAN to help scale our virtual environment. Starwind was easy to configure and their support is top-notch. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** The Windows-based NFS functionality is not good with many, many small files. We experienced issues that forced us to adopt a Linux-based NFS solution. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** We didn't have a SAN solution before Starwind. We were ablet to implement hypervisors and a new database that utilized the SAN after we got Starwind. ### 8. One of the best Virtual SAN Applications on the market! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Arcwell H. | owner, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 13, 2023 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** We used Star Wind Virtual San in our Hyper-V clustered environment to create our virtual SAN storage spread across all of our host servers. The business problem the virtual SAN addressed at the moment was the need to create redundant storage spread across all of our host servers which were populated with huge capacity disks. The scope was to present the data disk as a stor for Hyper- V to look at. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** The fact that application is very simple, easy and intuitive to use as an IT professional. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** The ability to use a virtual SAN and storage for a our Hyper-V cluster build ### 9. Starwind is great solution for our needs **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Harvinder S. | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 19, 2023 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** It is great system fully supported by StarWind & Easy to Setup. Support is very helpful. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Nothing, as it is good and easy to manage **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** We were looking for Hyper converged infrastructure and Starwind best suited due to high availability required by business, so no downtime. ### 10. Big fan of Starwind. Support is great, though the support pricing model could be better. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Chris T. | Chief Information Officer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 19, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** It does what it's supposed to do. It keeps our storage highly available and the support has been exceptional when needed. They are easy to deal with on both the technical and service support side of the house. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** While reasonably priced, it would be nice if it was even more affordable. This day and age, every penny counts. Also, I once had to get emergency 24hour support added on. I paid for the support (a yearly rate) but it was only good until the next renewal (so just for a couple of months.) That wasn't great. That kind of support should be pro-rated or permitted to carry over. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** For us, we had a need to migrate from an older technology to something newer that was cheaper and easier to manage. Starwind solved that with a product that just works. It's most set it and forget it. But when support is required, they are excellent. ### 11. A Reliable, scalable, and Affordable Storage Solution for Virtual Environments especially for SMBs **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nisar A. | Content Writer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 13, 2023 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** StarWind Virtual SAN is a reliable, scalable, and affordable storage solution for virtual environments, especially for SMBs. We have a small VMware vSphere environment and this product helps to store and manage our data. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Overall StarWind Virtal SAN is a pretty good product but its documentation should be more organized and more structured. It should also span to multiple data centers. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have a small VMware vSphere environment and this product helps us really well to store and manage our data and critical applications. We have a plan in scaling out our infrastructure and I believe that StarWind Virtual SAN will definitely help us to so quite easily. ### 12. The Best vSAN software for the money, bar none. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jason C. | Director of IT, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 11, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** The price-to-performance ratio is unmatched. The feature set you get for such a well-priced product and well-designed UI is refreshing. Normally for anything remotely easy to use, I would expect to spend ten times as much (such as products from VMWare) **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** There are a few kinks that need to be worked out if you are transitioning from the free product to the paid product, or vice versa, but it was nothing that customer service was not able to assist with. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** The ability to share storage across multiple Virtual Hosts. StarWind allows us to quickly move virtual servers between hosts with the click of a button. Migrating used to be a lengthy task, but now its easy. ### 13. The best price and best performing SAN software I've used **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Brandon R. | Information Technology Supervisor, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 21, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** We found StarWind when looking for alternatives to our current end-of-life Nutanix cluster, and it has done nothing but impress us. We could minimize implementation cost as it let us use our existing hardware, and the price of StarWind VSAN was less than 1/4th of all other solutions we were quoted. As a bonus, the raw performance has been better than all of the other solutions we tried. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Most guides and whitepapers they provide are windows-centric and don't cover their Linux-based virtual appliance, so finding information on your own can be difficult. It also lacks a web interface which can be troublesome if you use a different solution that provides one. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** StarWind Virtual SAN provides us the high-availability storage for 24/7 365 applications while requiring less maintenance and attention than other brands, but at a fraction of the price. ### 14. A great product with the best support **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Juan Ignacio O. | Consultant, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 14, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** I can describe several points where the product stands out. On the one hand, it is a flexible product that fully adapts to our needs, with great scalability and stability. On the other hand, it is very simple to use, which makes it easy to manage with little experience. The high level of the technicians involved in the deployment and later in the support should also be highlighted. In fact, the involvement of the support team seems to me the most remarkable point of this company. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** At the beginning, before contacting the company, we were doing some tests and we found some documentation faulty. This is solved when you have the collaboration of the deployment team and subsequent support. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** We wanted to be able to provision a VSAN that would make it easier for us to respond to the growing needs of the company, without having to make a large investment. On the other hand, we were looking for a solution that would provide us with an answer to the needs of business continuity management (ISO 22301) ### 15. Starwind Virtual san is a big player. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer & Network Security | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 24, 2023 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** StarWind Virtual SAN is a cost-effective solution, as it does not require additional licensing costs. This can help VAR's where I work to offer competitive pricing to our customers. StarWind Virtual SAN is a highly flexible solution, as it can be deployed on physical servers or on top of virtual machines running on hypervisors such as VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. This allows VARs to offer a solution that can be tailored to the specific needs of their customers. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Geo location could be better, for example site mirroring for DR purposes. I would like future release to explore the possibility of secure reliable site replication.  Disaster recovery site mirroring would provide several benefits, including business continuity, A disaster recovery site can be used to restore critical systems and operations in the event of a disaster, ensuring that the business can continue to function. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** From my point of view, we offer this product, installed, tested and configured on our client hardware who are located in the public and private sector in the UK, StarWind is known for its good technical support and customer service. This helps us to offer a solution that is supported by a reliable vendor, which in-turn improves customer satisfaction and ensure sticky and repeat business for future activities. ### 16. StarWind vSAN is Solid Product at a Affordable Price with Fantastic Support! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Todd O. | IT Operations Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 24, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** I think the support is the best feature! Starwind hit a homerun ensuring that you have proper support whenever you require it! A huge part of the support I enjoy is you work with the same engineer while resolving your issues. For implementation, I did have another engineer assigned, but for any items that required an engineer, I always dealt with the same one making the process much smoother! The cost is unbelievable when considering what we are getting and the amount of support we have had. StarWind really went above and beyond to ensure our PoC was configured correctly and ready to go live! Also, the price compared to similar offerings (VMWare vSAN, HCI solutions) fits much better within the budget giving us the same or similar performance! **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** If you are attempting to install the free version of Starwind vSAN, you will find the documentation well written but lacking on a few levels. While I know it would be impossible to cover every gotcha and hardware choice, initially, when I attempted to do it, I make various mistakes and frustrations. (But once deciding to go with the pay versions, you open up the support and will be so thankful you did!) Would be nice to have additional training or videos on how best to test/maintain the product. While I have not had any major out-of-the-blue failures, it is always scary to think of that first time...fortunately, Support will be a huge safety net! (Yes, I tout support a lot in this review, but when working with many products where support is lacking unless paying a 3rd party, it is such a breath of fresh air!) **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** Allowing us to ensure continuity of service in case of hardware failure while allowing us to grow when needed. While servers are typically solid, a failure can occur, with a three node vSAN cluster, I feel confident in case of failure of a single (or even two nodes) that business will be minimally impacted! ### 17. Huge Software Capability **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ibrahim I. | IT consultant, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 06, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** easy of management: the management was straightforward, and I was able to find all that I needed in the software dashboard ISCSI : the connection using software made it easy to me to connect my servers without extra investment in hardware SAN vCenter Plugin: this allows me to monitor the SAN performance in the VMware web interface Fault Tolerance and High Availability: I can update or restart the physical server without worry Deduplication and Compression: I am planning to use this feature when investing in new NVme disks **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** for now i see all application features which include (Management, ISCSI, NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF), ZFS, Data Locality, Fault Tolerance and High Availability, vCenter Plugin, Deduplication and Compression and Web-based Management fits my requirements **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** i am currently running servers with hosted application for my business and i had a problem having them online all the time because of servers maintenance and updates that's why i started using a VSAN to avoid buying a Hardware SAN and use my existing servers only.the software improved my productivity by allowing me to have a virtualisation high availability and fault tolerance. ### 18. Great Hypervisor Storage Platform **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Keneth R. | Cloud Solutions Arquitect, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 19, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** The user interface for this application is amazing, it's very easy to learn from the beginning and it has a great introductory period that allows you to get used to everything that the software has to offer. I can also say that another BIG advantage for this application is the amazing customer support that they offer, they are able to answer your questions very quickly and they are always available at the most important times. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Having a large support for filesystems is important to our organization, as we sometimes used propietary filesystems like WekaFS for some of the tasks at hand. Specially in the era of Exascale computing, having support for additional features like importing filesystems and be able to do some testing with them is important. Besides not being able to use any filesystem I do not have any additional cons. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** This tool allows my team to be able to deploy NAS solutions in real time, virtually so that we can test those solutions in a quick and easy way before they are needed to be deployed in the real world. This saves in costs of actually having to deploy a physical environment to test and also allows my team to work from anywhere at anytime, which is important in the current times when remote work is vital to the proper workflow at our company. ### 19. StarWind Virtual SAN Cost Effective Solution **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Media Production | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 26, 2023 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** StarWind Virtual SAN is cost-effective, and you don't need any extra physical server for installation. It is easy to deploy and use. Backup and restoration of that backup is easy. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Reporting and analytics need to have much more. Graphs should be there to have a broader picture of the health of all storage. Overall the GUI is good and easy to use. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have a storage issue in our organization. We are a medium-sized organization. We didn't need to spend much on solutions, so we headed towards a cloud base because it was cost-effective. ### 20. Quite fast setup and active Support **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Lukas W. | Technician, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 13, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Starwind Virtual SAN is the perfect solution for our redundant 2 Node VMware Vsphere system. The GUI is self-explanatory, and there are Step-by-step guides on how to set it up on the Starwind Website. When we ran into a problem, support answered our Email within minutes, and we could continue setting up. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** It took us a few hours to find an error in the iSCSI setup. The GUI only showed that one partner node had no connection, although the heartbeat and sync interface seemed to be online. In the end, we found a solution in a Starwind forum. The Problem was just our setup rather than on Starwind's side. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** We use Starwind Virtual SAN for a HyperConverged 2 Node VMware MS-Windows Server 2019 Cluster. It provides HA iSCSI virtual drive space for our SMB file share. In case of a power outage or system failure, the workload will be shifted to the partner node within seconds so that the file share has practically no downtime. ### 21. Starwind VSAN: Inexpensive, Robust, Reliable Solution for HCI Shared Storage **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Narciso S. | IT Systems Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 03, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** I work in a small shop environment that needed an inexpensive solution for a high availability, two node, clustered Hyper-V back end for all our on premise services. The initial options for shared storage for our nodes consisted of S2D from Microsoft, and various hardware DAS units. S2D was immediately dismissed due to the 4 node requirement, and most all DAS units in our storage capacity targets were out of our budget. Not to mention the DAS could become a single point of failure for the entire setup. Enter Starwind. I was initially concerned about performance issues, but lacking any other great alternatives, and a low cost of entry, we decided to give it a try. 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. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** The one downside to Starwind's VSAN might be their scalability. If we needed to add more nodes for compute power, or scale out storage significantly, I'm not sure how easy that would be. 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. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** Starwind VSAN provided us a budget friendly shared storage solution that has proven to be extremely robust and reliable. The only downtime we've experienced since building out our clustered HA Hyper-V solution has been due to total power failure. Starwind requires little to no ongoing maintenance, and I rarely have to even think about it. It simply works. ### 22. The most customizable storage solution I've ever used **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Mechanical or Industrial Engineering | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 13, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** I love how customizable Starwind is. You can set it up to fit your infrastructure instead of the other way around. It's also the most affordable storage solution I have ever used. Their support is great and knows their product well. A lot of software-defined storage solutions force you to work with very specific hardware and configurations, but Starwind will work with your current solution, and they will support it too. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** It's missing some of the flashier GUI components and handholding of the more expensive solutions, so less experienced admins might be a little intimidated at first, but their support will help you with the initial setup and make sure you are good. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** It's saved us 80% on our storage cost from our previous solution. It's also saved us from expanding our rack footprint, as we can utilize our existing hosts for both compute and storage. ### 23. Starwind Virtual SAN Recommended for Virtual Environment **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Hamdan S. | Cyber security engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** March 11, 2023 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Starwind Virtual SAN helps in High Availability and easy integration with virtual environment **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Starwind Virtual SAN user interface is complex and difficult to use for novice user **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our organization was facing issues for the integration of physical storage with virtual platforms then we came to hear about the starwind virtual san solution and it helped our organization in effective way with both cost effective and featurewise ### 24. Great Pricing {free version} and Amazing Product! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Allen M. | Engineering Systems Administrator, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 29, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** I have to say that I love StarWind VSAN! I was blown away by a free product I wasn't expecting much from. The paid features are worth the money, but I can do everything I need with the free version. I highly recommend StarWind VSAN for being able to turn traditional storage into high-performance storage pools. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** The CLI has a learning curve but is not too bad; the CLI configuration can be a little tricky, and limited documentation for the free version. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** Being free for the version I am using has allowed me to put that funding I would have generally spent on other projects and still be able to provide high performance storage pools. ### 25. Perfect vSAN with great technical support **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 25, 2023 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** StarWind created a perfect vSAN solution on a very stable platform. The technical support and after sales support is great. The product is easy to use and to maintain. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Only point of attention at the moment is there are multiple manuals available which on some topics seem contradictory. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** By installing this Starwind vSAN solution on multiple nodes, we have created a very stable, fast and redundant platform. Since installation, the has been no malfunction in the system. ### 26. Stable product with great customer support at an affordable price **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tyler F. | Sr. IT Systems Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** October 08, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** It is "set and forget." I've administered two StarWind VSAN clusters for 5+ years; it's always been rock solid. Updates are simple to perform. I had an issue I caused myself that was quickly fixed by support staff. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** I honestly am not aware of any downsides. In the past, I would've said I wasn't a fan of using Windows virtual machines, but they began offering a Linux appliance for their vSphere offering years ago. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** We're VMware customers, but we began using StarWind VSAN before VMware VSAN was very well established. It works just as well but at a more affordable price. I'm not sure if VMware has an option for a 2-node cluster, but I know in the past 3 nodes was minimum, which was a large difference for our relatively meager IT budget. ### 27. Cheaper and more attractive vSAN than S2D and others **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Oliver P. | Systems engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 09, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** 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 af 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 to 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 install 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...lets 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 😎 MIT PS: We don't like to publicly post as our corp (privacy reasons), but take me posting here at all as an additional hint to at least check out the product. I wouldn't bother if it sucked... 😏 PPS: There is a visual bug with a specific part of iSCSI. Microsoft's fault, as usual has never been fixed in over 15 years. Just don't panic if you experience it, "all is well"... 😂 https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/de-de/000138339/microsoft-iscsi-initiator-source-ip-address-incorrect-in-persistent-target-or-favorite-targets-details https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/d10d87c9-7361-4f0a-8ffe-5c877e6f209d/208-iscsi-initiator-source-ip-incorrect-in-persistent-target-details?forum=winserverfiles **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Since you are relying on Microsofts implementation of iSCSI...should MS decide to break it with a patch, that's that 😁 And since iSCSI has been around for so long, not everything is powershellable. For StarWind's product itself though, apart from an upcoming feature (mentioned above) we aren't missing anything and since the GUI is proper I really don't dislike anything since implementing it. Which is a REALLY rare thing for a sysadmin nowadays 😍 **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** Providing HA storage for a FO cluster ### 28. Excellent support **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Christopher M. | Co-Founder at Markathon, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 14, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** I run an MSP and have installed this solution at a number of our clients over the years. Each install has worked perfectly, stable for years without issue, and what impressed me most is the setup experience with the remote engineer creating a HA cluster on Windows within a few hours. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** I am not a fan of the pricing per TB model however I understand this is normal for the industry. **Recommendations to others considering StarWind Virtual SAN:** StarWinds offers an easy to use and fast track solution to Hyper-converged high-availability cluster **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** We were able to reduce our customers' OPEX and CAPEX on server hardware, along with reduced software licensing costs and support costs - what would normally be done over multiple servers has been consolidated onto a two node cluster. We have deployed this setup at many customer sites. ### 29. Excellent vSAN for a limited IT deparment **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Food & Beverages | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 16, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Immediate redundancy and HA without a huge amount of configuration was ideal. The support they provided was even better - with proactive monitoring and efficient setup and configuration changes. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Some of the new Hyperconverged tools seem basic as a single-pane of glass dashboard, but they are constantly looking at improvements and updates. The actual interface is somewhat cryptic, so we wouldn't know what configuration changes to make, but that is kind of the point - we have their full support and we don't have to staff a Level 5 engineer to make large configuration changes. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** This was a great implementation for a small to mid-size business! Allowed us to take advantage of all the Hyper-V features and live migrations without the expense of dedicated SANs. We can perform maintenance on either host during the day and the users don't even notice a difference in performance. We survived a couple of facility power outages but due to the redundancy of the entire host, the HCA failed over quickly and accurately with no downtime. Support also helps us improve our infrastructure with best practices of other organizations. ### 30. StarWind Virtual SAN experience VSAN cheap! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jose E. | Systems Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 02, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** i use StarWind VSAN in my testing and development environment. this is usually where i practice a deployment using a virtualization software like proxmox, ovirt, redhat enterpise virtualization (rhev), vmware, hyper-v. i also usually use raid techonology like raid 0, raid 1, raid 5, raid 6, raid 10, raid 50, raid 60 etc. we also use iscsi technology with iscsi initiator and iscsi target. with this we also try if we should use multi path technology when we use round robin. we also test thin and thick technology **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** None. so far the StarWind Virtual Storage Area Network is good **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** It help me in my testing ad deployment of virtual environment ### 31. Excellent value for the product, even better support **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospital & Health Care | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 21, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Ability to quickly scale up or scale down storage as needed. StarWind allows you to add two or more nodes to a cluster. Other vendors usually require a physical appliance upgrade or addition to add storage. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Scaling up storage on an existing node is not straightforward and requires some configuration. If this process was better documented, it would be easier for customers to understand. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** StarWind Virtual SAN allowed us to quickly add highly redundant storage to our Hyper-V environment. This allowed us to migrate VM's from one host to another using our existing resources and didn't require extra hardware purchases. ### 32. StarWind Virtual SAN with GEO Failover Cluster **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer & Network Security | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 02, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** We have been searching for Virtual SAN for a long time. When we found Virtual SAN from StarWind our problems were fixed, and easy PowerShell scripts were ready to edit and run for everyone, we are using it for GEO Failover Cluster and have been using it for a few months with no problem. Highly recommend it! **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Feature-wise we are not looking for anything more or less that comes with StarWind Virtual SAN **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** It solves our problem of adding a disk to Failover Cluster that is installed in the server (SSD), with the help of Virtual SAN this works with no problem ### 33. StarWinds VSAN - SAN on a budget **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jethro M. | Senior System Support Analyst, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 16, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** It is a simple solution, and it is not very difficult to implement, but I recommend using technical support to check everything before production. It is stable, and very reliable. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** The documentation on the free tier could be better, but the community is very helpful, so this evens out the documentation I guess... **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** SAN on a low budget, I had old hardware, no money to get all that I need to get a SAN and my main goal was to have HA for a few VMs, StarWinds VSAN came to the rescue ! ### 34. Reliable and easy to set up software **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tomáš B. | Project Manager, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 20, 2023 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** - easy to set up thank to detailed technical documentation - realiable - proffesional technical support **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** we used StarWind Virtual SAN for more than three years and we didn't find anything that we dislike (connected with our use case - synchronous replication of high-availability fileservers) **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** its solving our disaster recovery issues in a virtualization environment through synchronous replication of high-availability fileservers ### 35. Awesome product **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Zafeer K. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** February 21, 2023 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** It makes tasks such as sharing files, giving access and storing very simple and efficient. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** The pricing is a bit over the limit performance was worth it. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** Handling files is mainly the problem, that I am happy that Starwind has made it easier. ### 36. Easy to deploy, great support, great for 2 node only setup **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Yi Da S. | Application Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 19, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** We have not had many issues with Starwind deployments since we started selling their products as part of a failover solution to one of our partner's overall systems. We sold a few systems, and till now there were no issues related to Starwind. We deployed across multiple brands of servers, (Dell, HP, QCT) and there were very ok with our myriads of server designs and configurations. Most of the issues are about hardware failures, and once the hardware is replaced and the configuration restored, we initiated the sync, and the system was back running without issues. One big plus I think it is important, especially compared to products from the likes of HPE Storvirtual VSA, etc, is that Starwind allows you to use 2 nodes only deployment without having to use a witness, meaning I will save cost as I do not need a separate VM / share to host the witness and Starwind will still work. Most of our deployments are either on one rack or 2 racks at a different location, and they do not have the options to allow us to deploy the 3rd location for a witness. Easy to set up. There is a free version with 30 days of GUI usage that you can try on, but you can learn 80-90% of the product capability within these 30 days. With the paid product, the support is good. They can either let you go solo, and help to check on the settings later to advise on things to improve, or they can take over the setup completely. Performance is adequate for our usage. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Not much. Slight improvements to the UI would do wonders, but it is more of nit-picking. Also licensing is by per TB for the lower end, although they give you 4TB from the start. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** Dual node HA without a witness. So far Starwind Virtual SAN is the only product we used that is simple enough to deploy and works. Most of our deployment environment is based on dual rooms without a 3rd location to store witness nodes. ### 37. Powerful and easy to use Virtual SAN device! **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** May 01, 2023 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Being a Windows-based virtual SAN device, the StarWind products fit in our network easily and provide a solid backbone for our data. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** I have found no downsides to using the StarWind Virtual SAN products. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** Consolidation of compute and storage with easy scalability. ### 38. Flexible Storage **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Luke F. | Enterprise Cloud Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 08, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** I think finding that StarWind Virtual SAN was essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customers unique requirements was the most valuable feature of StarWind vSAN. It is a pleasant change to encounter a company who are willing to be flexible over an implementation utilising their product and varying slightly from their normal design specifications. They also helped us qualify the product against the customer's constantly changing requirements. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** There was nothing in particular which I disliked about the product. Performance metrics and insight could be improved upon a little. It would also be good if there was some tighter vCenter integration, specifically around reporting functionality. **Recommendations to others considering StarWind Virtual SAN:** Go with StarWind's design recommendations. Also, if you have the opportunity you should get StarWind to assist in the implementation. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our customer had purchased hardware before us being consulted. They found themselves in a position of requiring stretched vSAN capabilities but not much budget to address this requirement. StarWind vSAN addressed this requirement directly. ### 39. Reliable and efficient solution to improve storage infrastructure **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Cedric G. | Architect, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 28, 2023 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Easy to setup and configure. Create within a few minutes a SAN with a wide range of features. Supports iSCSI, NFS SMB and also most of the hypervisors. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Maybe the interface could be better from a UI perspective. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** Starwind helps me to reuse storage parts in my company. ### 40. StarWind Virtual SAN Is A Software Hich Superseeds In Its Capabilities With My Uses. **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 10, 2023 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Windows-based software environment allows a shared storage system to be set up at no cost, which also can be used productively usage with powershell is possible **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Software is very deep and complex and profound with many features. learning resources were pretty tough to find, but once you get there it is quite alright to use. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** Starwind virtual san Improved my business process agility, it created internal/operational efficiencies, it Enhanced our decision making processes and helped to relieve our Cost management ### 41. Great Product Backed by Even Greater Service **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Construction | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 30, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** The best thing about the product is its simplicity. A product that provides so much functionality yet is provisioned with no complication is what we like the best. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** There is nothing we dislike about this product. If I had to be super picky, the only roadblock we ever hit with this product was the inability to shrink an image once provisioned. But this is not a limitation in the product itself but the actual underlying storage. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** Helping us serve storage to our entire infrastructure with ease of use. We can provide resiliency and scale to our infrastructure and introduce new nodes without impacting the end user. ### 42. Starwind VSAN and excellent option for SMBs **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Joe G. | Principal Specialist - Technology, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 30, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Starwind Virtual SAN (VSAN) is installed on two of my Production servers for use in a Hyper-V cluster for a few years. Starwind support was excellent in setting up all the connections between the servers and doing the configuration. Performance has been excellent with no issues. I don't even notice it's there. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** I haven't had any negative experiences with this product so far. Ensure that you have your hardware tested and configured so that the virtual SAN can run properly. However, Starwind support was able to point me in the right direction for the configuration of the network environment and ensured that my setup was correct. **Recommendations to others considering StarWind Virtual SAN:** If like me your organisation has a need to maintain high availability on critical applications and you want an easy to manage option Starwind VSAN is for you **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** We have critical applications, that required high availability. With our previous implementation the system was cumbersome, The instant failover feature was a key requirement for the business, ensuring that the systems we relied on was always available. ### 43. Virtual San Solution compatible with Hyper-V **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rami C. | Principal Systems & Storage Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** November 11, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Easy to install and configure Easy to use with web management UI Compatible with multiple hypervisors (Hyper-V, VMware, ... ) Compatible with almost any hardware Great Support **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Reporting Capabilities should include more information Documentation should be enhanced to be on par with the competitors Powershell script can include more functionalities **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** It solves the problem of virtual san compatibility with other hypervisors It benefits me by using 3 Hyper-V with failover cluster allowed the use of internal disks of these servers ### 44. Excellent VSAN software, very helpful support **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Connor K. | Systems Administrator, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 07, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Support is exceptional and the product works well. We've not had any issues since implementing it into production two months ago. It supports email notifications out of the box and once you understand how it works it's pretty flexible and easy to tinker with. Pricing is also very simple, it's a perpetual license and you only pay a small fee to renew support. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Some of the documentation seems to be a bit older and refers to deprecated things. Wasn't a huge issue as the technician that walked me through the install was very knowledgeable and gave me a clear list of steps to take. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** The goal was to maintain storage redundancy across both of our Hyper V hosts. We didn't want to go with the traditional three tier approach due to the added complexity and single point of failure introduced. This allows us to maintain full redundancy if any component of the two hosts fails. ### 45. Excellent product that "does what it says on the tin" **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ben M. | Network Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** April 07, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** Starwind vSAN is easy to install and configure. The online white papers and 'recipe books' are really useful and, even for a complete novice, understandable. The GUI (Non-free) is comprehensive and easy to understand. The command line interface to the software is excellent - Powershell examples are provided. There is also an API for C# and VC++ , again examples are provided (I can't comment on those because I haven't used them). Performance is great - even on non 10GbE windows clusters - and I have never had working day congestion (the vSAN does log warnings when the hardware RAID controller is carrying out drive tests/patrol reads overnight, however as far as the cluster is concerned it is business as usual). **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** The only slight issue is that if you install the trial license and use the GUI to configure the system, you cannot fall back to the free license at the end of the trial. The product used to allow this (either by mistake or design) but, understandably, no longer does. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** The systems in place were based on non clustered disparate, un-maintained and unmaintainable servers. We needed to remove these multiple points of failure so that the business has some assurance that things could not go wrong, or, if they did, there was some continuity in place. There was no budget for a hardware SAN, or the servers to drive it, however using Starwind vSAN and refurbished servers provided a simple, reliable, two-node cluster for less than £5k (excluding Windows licensing). Starwind vSAN software has proved completely reliable, and the support is excellent - we suffered power cuts (yes - at the time the business had also made the poor decision that UPS systems were not worth maintaining) which caused the vSAN to become un-usable, Starwind provided full support for sorting out the issue (discovering which copy of the HA images had the last write and re-synching them). Post-installation support is also excellent - they provide a thorough check up on the system once it is installed to ensure all current best practices are followed - and highlight where things could be improved/altered for getting the full performance from the product. ### 46. Easy to implement, great price and support team **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Diego M. | Consultor, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** December 06, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** easy cli management, works on most hypervisors, even on 2 nodes with no witness. deployment is too easy aand works on old hardwares too **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** nothing but some documentation improvements **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** most of our customers dont want to spend a lot of money on hardware or storages, wiht starwind we was able too deploy on old servers and no aditional storages or 3rd party vendors ### 47. StarWind VSAN Makes Hyperconvergence Easy **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Justin G. | Director of IT, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 27, 2020 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** There is no extra storage needed to use StarWind VSAN. Everything is done on a host and defined in the software. It works great and is easy to setup. StarWin proactive support is always on top of everything. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** The lack of a UI to manage the VSAN. However, StarWind is working on that. Also the inabliity to tranistion a free license to a paid license without having to completely rebuild your deployment. **Recommendations to others considering StarWind Virtual SAN:** Evaluate all your options. This is a great solution if you are using Hyper-V. It's easy to rollout and get going. Once implemented, it's nearly a set it and forget configuration until it's time to update the current build installed, and even that's pretty easy. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** Before StarWind VSAN, I did not have any type of HA cluster. All my Hyper-V hosts were standalone. StarWind VSAN solves the problem without any kind of hardware lock in and with it's low impact, easy to configure VSAN solution. The benefits are obvious as now I have high availabity and scable storage all in individual hosts rather than using an inverted pyramid of doom. ### 48. Fantastic support and performance **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Adam C. | DevOps Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 06, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** After deploying a HA SQL Failover Cluster, we started to notice performance issues due to our storage, which was an off the shelf NAS. I had already heard about StarWind and its VSAN software so I decided to run a little test environment. I was pleasantly surprised by the performance gains even on spinning disks and the overall setup being fairly painless. I decided to go ahead with this solution, got the cost signed off and implemented it in production. We had some initial issues but their support was extremely helpful in resolving these and was very patient as we deployed this to a secure environment with no internet access. Yet they still offered support and worked closely with a single point of contact. I then later moved to a different company and implement a similar solution in the Oracle Cloud using their free offering, again this was simple to setup using their collection of PowerShell scripts. **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** The forums can lead to many dead threads without any resolutions. **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** We had issue with our internal warehouse system, that ran off a SQL Failover Cluster. We found the issue was caused by slow disk performance and StarWind removed these. ### 49. StarWind Virtual SAN software **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Thomas W. | systems engineering, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** January 14, 2023 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** fast and good installation good performance values high reliability **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** missing multilingual interface quick and easy expansion of capacity **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** Missing classic storage did not have to be purchased, the free capacity of the servers could be used ### 50. Easy to Use vSAN Solution with Great Support **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Laurence B. | Infrastructure Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** September 20, 2022 **What do you like best about StarWind Virtual SAN?** • Very solid performance- the uptime has been exceptional. • Easy to configure and administer • Superb support **What do you dislike about StarWind Virtual SAN?** • Some of the documentation could be better • The pricing model is a bit confusing **What problems is StarWind Virtual SAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** It allows us to have a 3-node stretched cluster spanning 3 buildings which gives us great flexibility and redundancy. ## StarWind Virtual SAN Discussions - [Is StarWind Free?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/is-starwind-free) - 1 comment, 1 upvote - [What is virtual SAN in Hyper-V?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/what-is-virtual-san-in-hyper-v) - 1 comment - [How does StarWind virtual SAN work?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/how-does-starwind-virtual-san-work) - 1 comment - [View StarWind Virtual SAN pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/starwind-virtual-san/reviews?page=3§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-07-21+16%3A24%3A19+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=c89f40e5-0403-4d70-a73d-53a681ed9b1f&secure%5Btoken%5D=972a097a302442fe3514205938f79fea4be77be30198259b9ad7876fb899d9f5&format=llm_user) ## StarWind Virtual SAN Integrations - [Microsoft Windows Server 2019 with HyperV](https://www.g2.com/products/microsoft-windows-server-2019-with-hyperv/reviews) - [Proxmox VE](https://www.g2.com/products/proxmox-ve/reviews) - [VMware vSphere](https://www.g2.com/products/vmware-vsphere/reviews) - [Windows Server](https://www.g2.com/products/tidal-media-inc-windows-server/reviews) ## StarWind Virtual SAN Features **Core Functions** - Server Virtualization - Storage Virtualization - Network Virtualization **General Functionality** - Dynamic Scaling - High Availability - Data Security - Backup and Recovery **Configuration** - Appliance Independence - Hardware Integration **Agentic AI - Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) Solutions** - Autonomous Task Execution - Adaptive Learning - Decision Making ## Top StarWind Virtual SAN Alternatives - [Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)](https://www.g2.com/products/nutanix-cloud-infrastructure-nci/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (291 reviews) - [SC// HyperCore Virtualization Suite](https://www.g2.com/products/sc-hypercore-virtualization-suite/reviews) - 4.7/5.0 (322 reviews) - [VMware vSAN](https://www.g2.com/products/vmware-vsan/reviews) - 4.4/5.0 (210 reviews)