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Differentiation

StarWind Virtual SAN has a range of unique differences from similar solutions. Here is the essential comparison with the widely-used concepts.

Unlike Microsoft Storage Spaces (including Shared Nothing) and Scale-Out File Server concept, our solution has:


Reduced hardware footprint

  • StarWind Virtual SAN does not require any SAS hardware – spindles, flash, controllers, enclosures or cabling. SATA, PCIe and NVMe are all supported.
  • StarWind Virtual SAN starts on just 2 (two) nodes.
  • StarWind Virtual SAN works with 1 GbE and does not necessarily require 10 GbE or 40 GbE like Scale-Out File Server and Storage Spaces Shared Nothing do.

Full support of Hyper-Converged model in a complete Scale-Out mode StarWind Virtual SAN can start as miniature as two nodes Hyper-Converged and Scale-Out to infinity.

Advanced performance-related and cost-saving features:

  • In-line Deduplication to handle write-intensive workloads.
  • Log-structured File System to eliminate small random writes typical for VM workloads.
  • Aggressive write-back RAM-based cache.
  • Inter-node tiering.

Unlike VMware Virtual SAN, our solution has:


Minimalistic hardware footprint

  • Start as small as just two nodes (literally two) and Scale-Out to infinity.
  • Gigabit Ethernet (10 GbE or 40 GbE would be nice, but not necessary).
  • Switch-less point-to-point configuration fully supported and approved for production.
  • Flash is optional (would be used as a write-back cache or as a tier in an all-flash configurations if installed).

Flexed out “VMware vSphere friendly” licensing

Customer pays for actual consumed storage, while the amount of hypervisor hosts in a cluster does not matter. StarWind Virtual SAN may be installed on just a few nodes in a much bigger cluster (Example: a 5-node vSphere cluster can have VM storage on just two nodes).
Two-node setup is FREE of charge, capacity-unlimited, perpetually licensed with production use allowed. Technically it is possible to run the whole datacenter from just a pair of StarWind Virtual SAN nodes for free.

Complete “All-in-Wonder” ©…

StarWind Virtual SAN does iSCSI, NFSv4 and SMB3 out of the box. Shared storage can be exposed outside the cluster to other consumers including “alien” hypervisors like Hyper-V, Xen and KVM.
There is no need to deploy any flash and RAM caching software as StarWind Virtual SAN comes with its own caching engine. In-line deduplication combined with a log-structured file system maintains performance-targeted all-flash and capacity-oriented parity RAID configurations.

Unlike open-source Software Defined Storage, our solution has:


  • Operational simplicity and higher level of integration with hypervisor as it is installs installed as a native component rather than a virtual machine.
  • Dramatically higher performance as I/O path is shortened and latency is reduced thanks to the fact that we do not spawn a virtual machine or require a stand-alone commodity servers to run storage software: with StarWind Virtual SAN most of I/O happens locally via storage stack and only writes are to be “confirmed” within partners over network.
  • Much faster turn-around support and requested features implementation cycle because we develop all software in-house and have full control and tracked history of our source code base and have originally contributing developers as current members of our team.

Unlike proprietary hardware SAN and NAS, our solution has:


  • An ability to run hardware-less, being installed right on top of a hypervisor, using already available servers.
  • Perpetual licenses, allowing to re-use StarWind Virtual SAN with an upgraded or replaced server hardware.
  • No hardware vendor lock-in. Using StarWind Virtual SAN in either Hyper-Converged or “Compute and Storage Separated” scenarios allows customer to pick up any server, disk, and flash vendor, and not what SAN or NAS vendor insists on.
    This approach saves quite a lot of money with no overpaying for basically rebranded and re-packaged server and storage hardware from Dell, SuperMicro, Seagate and others. As a side-effect it is trivial for re-provisioning StarWind Virtual SAN installation using spare parts in case of emergency.
  • Much better performance thanks to shortened I/O path. StarWind Virtual SAN installs directly on top of a hypervisor so does not need to route all reads and writes over switched network fabric. Fast RAM and flash caches are also local to hypervisor.

Please fill out the form below to download the product. An installer link together with the license key will be sent to the e-mail address that you’ve specified. You may check the Free vs. Paid document if you are unsure about which StarWind Virtual SAN version you would like to try. Aside from this, there is a totally unrestricted NFS (Not For Sale) version of StarWind VSAN available for certain use cases. StarWind Virtual SAN for Hyper-V release notes are available here.