StarWind Virtual SAN is software-defined storage for efficient storage and backup.
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VMware vSAN
Score 9.1 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.
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.
vSAN is well suited for any application that can run in Virtual Environment. vSAN serves better for VDI, NSX, and vSphere on Cloud solutions. vSAN is a good fit for small and medium business companies. vSAN can't be a good solution where you have Oracle Solaris or IBM power systems. vSAN can't provide storage space using FCP protocol.
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.
Integration with Other Platforms: Some users have reported difficulty in integrating StarWind Virtual SAN with other platforms, such as cloud environments or other storage arrays, making it less flexible for some use cases.
Lack of Advanced Features: Some users have reported that StarWind Virtual SAN lacks some advanced features, such as the ability to perform in-depth storage analysis and reporting, or the ability to manage storage tiering and data migration.
User-Friendliness: While StarWind Virtual SAN features a user-friendly interface, some users have reported that certain features are still hard to use, especially for those without a background in storage technology.
It would be nice to have fabric-based storage acceptance to disaggregate storage and expand beyond the node concept. The assumption that increased storage needs require increased compute or ram is simply not true.
The licensing costs are high but you do get what you pay for.
This review is my baseline experience with StarWind Virtual SAN, should something significantly change in my experience over a longer period, then I will update this review but since the feature-set of StarWind Virtual SAN has been researched to meet our on-premise needs (and StarWind fulfills them), it should be relatively steady.
It was a little complex to get my head around the initial configuration and operation of StarWind Virtual SAN but after following the guides and some assistance from support once the initial setup is complete the day to day management is very straightforward.
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.
The solution has been tested under constant usage for 5 years now and there (knock on wood) has yet be an outage. There were instances if human error during the operation and the StarWind reliably intervened, either through a synchronization or reporting of a degredation of interfaces, e.g. the heartbeat interface.
The software delivered exceptional performance until now with very fast write and speed rates, around 900MB/s through a 10GBit connection on a virtualized fileserver. It meets our demands without any problems whatsoever and we are a very media heavy environment with TBs of raw data.
Having dealt with a bit of subpar support in my career, I can say that the support team at StarWind never drifted lower than middle-of-the-pack. They met my expectations of support from contemporary tech companies, at least, and surpassed my expectations more often than not. Nothing makes a Monday morning scramble easier than knowing that support won't add more stress than it relieves.
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.
While they may have more robust enterprise grade features like duplication, the price point of Nimble and DD makes it a very tough sell in a cost concious environment. Starwind provides us with great reliability and enough features to make it an easy sell.
VMWare stand out compared to all the products. However, it is worthwhile mentioning the following products can be used to achive similar results. Hitachi Virtual Storage Systems Nutanix Cloud Infrastrucure. In case if we are using Nuatinux at the Hypervisor level then it would be recommended to use their very own product for storage virtulization even though the vendors say that all their products are cross platform supportable. However, during tests we have found high performance when using same products accross virtualization.
The software is very scalable storage wise. The storage is provisioned through config files, which are created either through PowerShell scripts or the Management Console on the paid version. After that the storage is provisioned through iSCSI. In our case, in case of expansion, we would have to run the PowerShell scripts and do another full synchronization to update any remaining backup nodes, but the procedure is clear and even easier via Management Console, just expand the RAID array, punch the new capacity into the console and start the synchronization!
StarWind Virtual SAN has helped many organizations reduce their total cost of ownership (TCO) for storage. This has been achieved through cost savings in areas such as hardware, power, cooling, and maintenance
Provides high-performance, low-latency storage that is optimized for virtualization, which can help improve the speed and responsiveness of applications
Provides synchronous replication, automated failover, and real-time replication monitoring, which helps ensure that data is always available and accessible
The ROI for VMware vSAN seems very positive. We have yet to need to upgrade since we put it in a few years ago, but without the heavy cost of dedicated storage, we have already seen reduced hardware maintenance costs and reduced management time spent.
With the cost of dedicated storage and its separate maintenance costs, all this is rolled back into the hosts. The hosts cost more with drives in them, but not near as much as the separate dedicated storage did.
Before VMware vSAN, you had hosts and storage devices aging out, running out of capacity, or underperforming. With vSAN you only have to worry about the hosts.
