StarWind Virtual SAN is software-defined storage for efficient storage and backup.
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VMware vSAN
Score 8.7 out of 10
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VMware vSAN is an enterprise-class storage virtualization software that provides a simple path to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and multi cloud. VMware vSAN is no longer sold as a standalone product and is now available as a part of VMware Cloud Foundation.
Simply put VMware vSAN - if not included in your license package - is not cost effective at all for an SMB. It was totally out of our price range. Not worth the license upcharge at all. And as I previously mentioned StarWind VSAN is much more cost effective than any hardware …
StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere allows you to use two node setup and still provide highly available storage compared to VMware vSAN which requires three nodes minimum, also with VMware vSAN you have to use certified hardware and you have fewer options to choose from. StarWind …
StarWind in our experience has a better pricing service and customer support. Additionally, only 2 host machines are required to setup the VSAN compared to 3 machines minimum recommended by VMware vSAN. This allowed us to save money on the licensing costs,hardware costs, and …
These products are awesome, but not cost-effective for me. VMware vSAN integrates like a glove if you are running fully VMware environment, not other hypervisors. ONTAP Select is awesome, like a real cabinet, but licensing is a bit complex, and expensive. in both cases in a …
When it comes to virtual storage solutions, there are a few options to choose from including StarWind Virtual SAN, VMware vSAN, and TrueNAS. I've evaluated each of these solutions and found that StarWind Virtual SAN stacks up well against the competition. For me, the deciding …
We were initially utilizing HPE Lefthand OS as a virtual SAN which was then set to EOL. We evaluated a number of solutions including VMware vSAN and settled on StarWind. StarWind provided a better value, easier and more intuitive interface, and wasn't wizard driven.
StarWind Virtual SAN is generally less expensive than VMware vSAN, especially when it comes to licensing costs. StarWind Virtual SAN is licensed per node, whereas VMware vSAN requires a license for each CPU core in each node. This can make VMware vSAN significantly more …
VMware vSAN requires 3 physical hosts or 2 and a witness, and this was not practical for our situation as we are SMB. StarWind allows us to continue our 2-host virtualization setup and keep all our redundancy and performance.
StarWind Virtual SAN Applicance is available in a hyperconverged scenario, it means you can run it on existing virtual machines and it does the backup against each other by synchronizing the data store with each other. Vmware does not have this type of hyperconvergent approach. …
StarWind Virtual SAN is easier to setup and use, and less expensive. It also has the flexibility of working with Hyper-V or vSphere. StarWind Virtual SAN as a company is also much easier to work with.
HPE and Dell solutions were just too expensive for our budget. HPE's solution lacked performance. Dell's solution is plagued by bad reviews which told stories of broken patching procedures and terrible support experiences. The only company who offered me a trial of their …
We have found the solution surprisingly simple to use. The management
console allows us to monitor the solution and we have configured email
alerts to alert us about critical issues. These alerts have been proven
StarWind Virtual SAN is the most flexible and reliable system I tested. Although there are other good systems in the market this is the most flexible allowing integration with many Hypervisors
It came down to two things! First a solution that would fit our budget AND having top notch support handling install/implementation and resolution of issues!
I selected "Windows Server" since I couldn't find S2D in the list... S2D just sucks overall. Crap UI. Crap CLI. Megacrap documentation. VMware is very expensive...
the features that StarWind offer, especially in a ROBO scenario, are the same as all the other competitor but with a fraction of the cost
Verified User
C-Level Executive
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
Ease of use, simplicity of set up and deployment, licensing cost and structure, and hardware freedom. When comparing to other big name solutions there is clearly a advantage from a cost and simplicity perspective while not sacrificing performance and reliability.
The biggest difference in my opinion between these two is the level of integration that VMWare's solution provides. It's a purpose-built solution for their environment so it will enjoy tighter integration across their product stack. Because StarWind is platform-agnostic it's …
Verified User
Manager
Chose StarWind Virtual SAN
Starwind VSAN is also as integrated as these other solutions but its cost point is ridiculously less to integrate. Also, Starwind VSAN literally configures your environment and helps you manage it. Also by extension, you have more flexibility in adding storage to the VSAN …
For companies that have 4-5 or more servers, StarWind is a great solution to provide high availability for a low price. It can scale up very nicely for larger implementations to more like 15-20 servers with ease. Although we haven't used it for even larger environments, it's doable. What its not appropriate are really small locations that have 1-2 servers. Unfortunately no one seems to have a good HCC solution in this space.
The product is a must for enterprise & SMB segments as this gives a good value for money and the licensing policy is very well defined and cost effective for the feature set it provides. This is very well suited for organization which have multiple brand storage systems and would like to consolidate them all together, thus providing a huge storage capacity for the organizations data growth. The product becomes less appropriate in organization where they have single storage platform as the service provider would have the ability to consilidate all the storage systems. Hence this products may be under utilized.
the StarWind Virtual SAN allows us to use Starwind Management Console to confirm health of the sync
The High Available nature of the deployment means we can fail over VMs without end users noticing any downtime
Their support is proactive alerting when firmware updates are needed (including iDRAC firmware) or when there are any warnings in the event logs, and schedule a time to remediate the issue with you.
VMware runs VSAN certification programs to make sure the OEM sells validated nodes. It helps customers to select appropriate certified ready nodes like Lenovo ThinkAgile VX which comes factory configured and easy to set up.
Hyperconverged solutions reduce real estate space and networking costs when compare with shared storage. The host overhead also less.
Supports All-Flash (SATA and NVMe SSDs) and Hybrid vSAN with HDD and SSD. So customers can choose cost-effective solutions appropriate to their workloads.
Supports different storage policies, RAID and duplication, and compression features and it makes a complete storage solution.
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
Limited scalability for storage-only deployments: In storage-only deployments, StarWind Virtual SAN has a limit of 32 nodes per cluster
Lack of reporting and analytics: StarWind Virtual SAN has limited reporting and analytics capabilities, which can make it difficult to monitor and troubleshoot performance issues
Limited backup and recovery options: While StarWind Virtual SAN provides some basic backup and recovery options, it lacks advanced features such as snapshot management, backup scheduling, and offsite replication
We were a fairly early adopter of VMware vSAN and as such experienced several growing pains.
We experienced a few bugs that took a few software versions upgrades to go mostly away.
The biggest issue we had overall was with host drivers. Even with vSAN ready node compatible hosts, you have to be very careful that the drivers for NIC and RAID controllers are right.
StarWind Virtual SAN is a great solution and is now an integral part of our network of servers. The product is superb and the support has been amazing. It's perfect for our organisation and we won't be looking to come away from it any time soon!
Overall I like the usability of StarWind Virtual SAN because it is a "Set-up and forget" software. Once you correctly have set up the parameters, StarWind Virtual SAN pretty much rolls by itself. The biggest fact that one needs to keep in mind, though, is that the licensing for StarWind Management Console needs to be purchased separately, and while managing StarWind Virtual SAN through the paid Management Console is really easy and is well documented, going the free or - in other words - PowerShell Template route can be taxing if you are not that deep into the topic. You need to be especially careful with it if you switch from paid to free because using the templates incorrectly can cause issues.
Deploying and configuring VSAN is a relatively simple process for people that are already used to working in virtual environments, primarily for those that are familiar with vSphere. The compatibility of those two products is amazing. You shouldn't really encounter any issues and if you do, you surely did something wrong.
Their support team is dedicated to providing top-notch customer service and is always available to help with any questions or issues that may arise. Their expertise and responsiveness have proven invaluable in ensuring the smooth operation of our virtualized environment. With such excellent support, we feel confident in our ability to utilize this product to its fullest potential, and we highly recommend it to others.
Support is (as always forVMware) top notch and easy to work with. The majority of computer companies are outsourcing their tech staff, and it seems they do as well. But their guys know the product well and are quick to respond to your ticket (if the severity is right!).
Overall the setup was easy, we did require some help from the technical support team but other than that, we followed all of StarWinds prerequisites and everything else just fell nicely into place with hardly any downtime. The downtime was only due to moving VMs from our previous cluster over to the new StarWind storage cluster.
We have found the solution surprisingly simple to use. The management console allows us to monitor the solution and we have configured email alerts to alert us about critical issues. These alerts have been proven to work in an actual failure scenario, for example, when we had a memory issue with one of our servers that caused the entire server to crash. The management console also allows us to monitor the solution performance and provides us with access to system logs.
Our VMware solution is built in-house for the organization's private application, we don't want to put our data on cloud premises. Also, vSAN is a cost-effective solution for our environment. We have done the POC with both products to understand the Flexibility, Management, and cost. After the successful POC, we have chosen the VMware vSAN.