StarWind Virtual SAN Reviews & Product Details - Page 9

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Starwind Virtual SAN helps in High Availability and easy integration with virtual environment Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Starwind Virtual SAN user interface is complex and difficult to use for novice user Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Only point of attention at the moment is there are multiple manuals available which on some topics seem contradictory. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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 Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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 😍 Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I am not a fan of the pricing per TB model however I understand this is normal for the industry. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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 Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

None. so far the StarWind Virtual Storage Area Network is good Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.