StarWind Virtual SAN on Windows Server 2016
StarWind | 8.0.0.14398aWindows, Windows Server 2016 Base Windows Server 2016 - 64-bit Amazon Machine Image (AMI)
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Very easy to deploy!
What do you like best about the product?
Service. Fast and professional! Works well with VMWare.
What do you dislike about the product?
so far, other than licensing working with the amount of GB used, I have yet to see a downside.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Availability to have multiple host with true redundancy. We already performed a test of shutting down a host to see all the VM's being migrated over the next one.
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Excellent Performance and Customer Service
What do you like best about the product?
The performance from our traditional NAS iscsi has been amazing. We are a small shop so this has been a great upgrade from our traditonal shared storage and our users have reported noticeable speed improvements. I'm also loving the resiliency it has added to our system. The last thing I want to mention is that the install experience was great. The tech I worked with, Max, was very accommodating with scheduling and provided some great suggestions to get the most from the system.
What do you dislike about the product?
If I was going to install this myself it would have been a bit overwhelming I think.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
We were looking to increase the speed and resiliency in our VMWare environment and Starwind Vsan accomplishes both of those objectives.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
I think it's a slam dunk if you have been scared off by VMWare pricing.
High Availability that works for VM Storage!
What do you like best about the product?
With Starwind VSAN, we are able to totally change how the existing SAN infrastructure is utilized. Before
there was a very expensive SAN sitting at a secondary location literally service no purpose for
production. It would only ever be used if there was a site failure or SAN failure. But with this new
solution, both our SANs are actively used to provide storage for production VMs, basically turning our
two SANs into a RAID1!
there was a very expensive SAN sitting at a secondary location literally service no purpose for
production. It would only ever be used if there was a site failure or SAN failure. But with this new
solution, both our SANs are actively used to provide storage for production VMs, basically turning our
two SANs into a RAID1!
What do you dislike about the product?
If I could think of any cons to mention, I'd list them. But I honestly can't think of any. My experience has been overwhelmingly positive.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Previous to Starwind VSAN, one SAN replicated all volumes to an offsite SAN through a direct L2 fiber connection every 5 minutes. The downside here was that if there was a DR scenario, data loss of up to 5 minutes was possible, and the process of mapping existing VMs to replicated iSCSI volumes would have been very tedious. Additionally, a SAN failure would inevitably result in downtime for running VMs in addition to data loss. Now with Starwind VSAN, data replication is realtime, not on a schedule.
Great VSA solution
What do you like best about the product?
easy deployment and great support for installations, has a free version to test before purchasing
What do you dislike about the product?
SMTP make the management services to crash if not well configured
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
using vsan storage for the whole datacenter
Recommendations to others considering the product:
working good and fast on RAID 5 with write cache enabled, imagine with RAID 0 or RAID 6 , fast Vsan storage
StarWind VSAN Makes Hyperconvergence Easy
What do you like best about the product?
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 the product?
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.
What problems is the product 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.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
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.
Happy Customer from Higher Education Institution
What do you like best about the product?
Very easy to deploy; only require 2 nodes to run with HA; good value for features and performance; option to use RAM as a storage cache
What do you dislike about the product?
None for now, did not face any critical issue for our main purposes
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
As a higher education institution (university), we're very concerned with the investment cost for our infrastructure. We're using a VMware solution for our server and desktop virtualization environment (small scale). The challenge is always about storage performance, and our server's vendor suggests a SAN solution for our virtualization environment, but those hardware-based (traditional) SAN were so expensive for us. Until we did a little research, and comparison, then decided to use Starwind vSAN solution as leverage for our storage infrastructure. Their solution allows us to leverage our old server becoming SAN storage and at the same time with HA features for reliability.
Previously, our configuration was limited in DAS (Direct Attached Storage), now we have HA and vmotion on our infrastructure environment. Starwind vSAN is also very easy to deploy, I was one the lecturer for server virtualization class, and feel confident to introduce Starwind vSAN to our students.
Previously, our configuration was limited in DAS (Direct Attached Storage), now we have HA and vmotion on our infrastructure environment. Starwind vSAN is also very easy to deploy, I was one the lecturer for server virtualization class, and feel confident to introduce Starwind vSAN to our students.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
So far we found vSAN solution is very easy to deploy, especially for the first timer, and some existing servers. It has competitive license cost, good support and allow us to have vSAN and HA with only 2 nodes (small footprint).
StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere
What do you like best about the product?
Easy to use and affordable share storage solution that are hardware agnostic, works with two nodes, reduces complexity and takes less administration time.
What do you dislike about the product?
iSIR is experimental. No security and bug fixes without active support agreement.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Highly available storage for our VMware vSphere environment. Less complex system compared traditional storage, less administration time.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
It's kind of software you setup and forget.. it just works. Also it provides redundant and highly available storage with two nodes - nice for SMB-s.
Good performance and stability in relative low price
What do you like best about the product?
StarWind Virtual SAN is for me easy to underatsnd, to configure and to use.
What do you dislike about the product?
In path Server/Configuration/Event Notifications/Action we could configure an e-mail address. But unfortunately there was no place to write login and password of sender. So this only colud be use in internal company e-mail server. All public e-mail servers require that the sender logs in.
But in last update this problem is solved and now I can use public e-mail addresses. so now there is nothing to dislike.
But in last update this problem is solved and now I can use public e-mail addresses. so now there is nothing to dislike.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Our company exists since 1991.
Among others we also run a business of alarm monitoring central station.
Because of this alarm monitoring central station we need fully redundant system of data collecting and processing. Even a single minutes of interruption in signal receiving and/or processing could cause very big problem.
Several years ago we used cluster of 2 windows servers with shared storage system on a single SAN. On theme was working clustered SQL server with database mirroring. Every part of system was redundant except of SAN.
It was almost satisfying.
This time we did not use VMs except for testing purpose.
Everey cluster server system we know needs shared storage system. Cluster server system could be fully redundant, but this redundancy is worth nothing without redundant storage system. (Actually I heard newest windows server supports solution similar to starwind, but I’m not sure).
We had a single SAN system. As a single, SAN was not redundant. But we needed redundant storage system. We always were afraid that once upon a time our SAN will stop to work…
We off course had backups, but it was not enough.
What we needed was the system with no data loss in case of issue and with no interruption (or only several seconds of interruption) in data processing.
We were looking for relative simple and not very expensive solution.
Actually I don’t know why StarWind. I was looking for solution using Google. StarWind was first system I found that gave me a hope. When I did some tests with StarWind I stopped to look for anything more.
Now we have redundant storage system, so our cluster system is fully redundant.
As we bought two 2-nodes Starwind V-san licenses (one for Electronics Box and other one for Monitoring Łódzki) we have now 2 clusters of two nodes Windows Hyper-V servers with StarWind V-san working as hosts.
Both clusters are in different locations (same city but couple of miles far one to another). Both locations are connected with rented 100 Mb/s optical fiber connection.
On the host clusters are running several clustered VMs. Among VMs we have 2 nodes SQL cluster with Always On High Availability.
As disaster recovery VMs running on one of locations are replicated on another one.
Among others we also run a business of alarm monitoring central station.
Because of this alarm monitoring central station we need fully redundant system of data collecting and processing. Even a single minutes of interruption in signal receiving and/or processing could cause very big problem.
Several years ago we used cluster of 2 windows servers with shared storage system on a single SAN. On theme was working clustered SQL server with database mirroring. Every part of system was redundant except of SAN.
It was almost satisfying.
This time we did not use VMs except for testing purpose.
Everey cluster server system we know needs shared storage system. Cluster server system could be fully redundant, but this redundancy is worth nothing without redundant storage system. (Actually I heard newest windows server supports solution similar to starwind, but I’m not sure).
We had a single SAN system. As a single, SAN was not redundant. But we needed redundant storage system. We always were afraid that once upon a time our SAN will stop to work…
We off course had backups, but it was not enough.
What we needed was the system with no data loss in case of issue and with no interruption (or only several seconds of interruption) in data processing.
We were looking for relative simple and not very expensive solution.
Actually I don’t know why StarWind. I was looking for solution using Google. StarWind was first system I found that gave me a hope. When I did some tests with StarWind I stopped to look for anything more.
Now we have redundant storage system, so our cluster system is fully redundant.
As we bought two 2-nodes Starwind V-san licenses (one for Electronics Box and other one for Monitoring Łódzki) we have now 2 clusters of two nodes Windows Hyper-V servers with StarWind V-san working as hosts.
Both clusters are in different locations (same city but couple of miles far one to another). Both locations are connected with rented 100 Mb/s optical fiber connection.
On the host clusters are running several clustered VMs. Among VMs we have 2 nodes SQL cluster with Always On High Availability.
As disaster recovery VMs running on one of locations are replicated on another one.
Cost efective virtual san
What do you like best about the product?
It easy to setup and operate, very reliable and with good performances
What do you dislike about the product?
Not really much, its works just fine without any issues
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Consolidation of multiple storage system into one Active-Active System, cost reduction, performance improvement
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Its really nice alternative to costly SAN solutions, it flexibble and you can get it as a software only and deploy it on your hardware or as a ready made appliance, their support is really good.
A perfect solution for those looking for an alternative to a traditional SAN!
What do you like best about the product?
Ease of deployment! Takes less than an hour for a simple deployment scenario!
What do you dislike about the product?
Haven't encountered issues with it so far!
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Cost and operational efficiency. Relatively cost effective compared to a traditional SAN and easy to operate and maintain. Set it and forget it.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
If you're looking for an alternative to a traditional SAN, this is the way to go.
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