One Stop Virtualization Shop

StarWind Virtual SAN®

FREE vs. PAID
AUGUST 2019

WHITE PAPER

BRIEF:

StarWind Virtual SAN® is a virtual shared storage that comes in two scenarios – for vSphere and for
Hyper-V StarWind® eliminates any need for a SAN or NAS or other physical shared storage.
StarWind VSAN for Hyper-V installs on top of virtualized or bare metal servers, whereas StarWind
VSAN for vSphere comes as a pre-packaged Linux VM. The software “mirrors” internal storage
between hypervisor servers to create a fault-tolerant shared storage pool. It integrates into an
operating system or hypervisor for performance and simplicity of use.

When using StarWind Virtual SAN to manage your business data, there are two options to consider,
free and paid: install and “self-support” it or… Invest into our engineers to configure and “babysit”
your virtualization infrastructure completely.
 StarWind Virtual SAN FREE vs. PAID

Introduction
This document compares commercial and free versions of StarWind Virtual SAN. Commercial
version is available in two scenarios – for Hyper-V and for vSphere. Free edition, unlike other
vendors' similar offers, which are essentially cut and limited versions of the main products, StarWind
Virtual SAN Free is a full-fledged production storage platform. The comparison will reveal the
difference between the free vs. paid versions in detail and show the capabilities of different
scenarios.

The common thing is that both versions can be configured as the principal storage provider to
hyperconverged and converged environments. In the first case, StarWind can be used to virtualize
the internal storage of the hyperconverged infrastructure thereby creating Virtual SAN between the
clustered servers. Further, the hyperconverged storage can be carved up into new logical volumes.
In the second approach, when the environment is separated into compute and storage resources,
StarWind pools the resources of the storage servers and thereby builds the dedicated SAN/NAS
storage cluster.

This white paper is intended for virtualization admins and StarWind users who need information on
the commercial and free versions .

A full set of up-to-date technical documentation can always be found here, or by pressing the Help
button in the StarWind Management Console.

For any technical inquiries please visit our online community, Frequently Asked Questions page, or
use the support form to contact our technical support department.

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 StarWind Virtual SAN FREE vs. PAID

StarWind Virtual SAN for Hyper-V

Paid version is an “a la carte” solution that comes with a few “bonus” features and effective support
service. With commercial StarWind Virtual SAN for Hyper-V, you are in the caring hands of StarWind
engineering team, who can assist you 24/7 with any issues.

Being an IT director or senior system administrator, CFO, or other decision maker in

business is a complex task. It is essential to know how to estimate budget and optimize
operational expenses of the company, care about uptime and general availability of the company’s
mission critical IT infrastructure, and actively look for highly performing, well-supported, and still
inexpensive storage built with virtualization in mind. Yes? Then StarWind offers a proper solution to
this challenge! A storage with truly Enterprise features, highest possible performance, unbeatable
support plan, and strict Service Level Agreements.

Use cases include:

• Shared storage for Microsoft Hyper-V VMs and SQL Server DBs (HA iSCSI & CA SMB 3.1.1)
• Shared storage for Microsoft Failover Clusters, Exchange, Oracle and SAP DBs (HA iSCSI)
• Shared storage for KVM, Citrix XenServer and Xen Project VMs (HA iSCSI & CA SMB 3.1.1)
• HA file server (general purpose file sharing, VDI profiles, backups etc.) (SMB 3.1.1 & NFS 4.1)
• Scalable backup storage (iSCSI & VTL)

StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere

The new product comes as a prepackaged Linux virtual machine to be installed as a VM on vSphere.
As it is aimed at VMware vSphere users it will block any possibility of launching a Hyper-V
environment. For now, there is an exploit allowing customers to launch this software on dedicated
VMware servers and share storage with multiple servers.

Top-notch support provided. Technically, there is a complete “fire-and-forget” IT solution. Once

one pulls the trigger and pays the bills, our qualified support engineers do initial PoC and production
setup, they help with picking proper hardware configuration, provide 24/7 support, and, generally
speaking, “babysit” your entire IT infrastructure!

Similar to StarWind VSAN for Hyper-V, VSAN for vSphere is a feature-rich software. There
are only several exclusions: no LSFS, asynchronous replication and offline deduplication. That is only
for now. In future versions, StarWind is planning to upgrade VSAN for vSphere and provide its users
with a full set of features not available in other similar solutions on the market.

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 StarWind Virtual SAN FREE vs. PAID

This version uses two different management interfaces: one for configuring StarWind, and
one for configuring the actual virtual machine storage and networking. User has to go to the cockpit
first to configure storage and networking. Once that is done, all the management is carried out
through StarWind Management Console.

Use cases are:

• Shared storage for VMware vSphere Clusters (HA iSCSI)

• Shared storage for VMware ESXi VMs (HA iSCSI)
• HA storage (VDI, Backups) (HA iSCSI)

StarWind Virtual SAN Free

Free version comes with an unrestricted set of features: multi-tiered server-side caching is
available out of the box, scale-up and scale-out are both allowed, VTL is not included.

StarWind Virtual SAN Free also supports any deployment scenario, such as: “Hyper-
Converged”, “Compute and Storage Separated”, and various combinations. In the first scenario,
StarWind Virtual SAN Free allows creating a hyperconverged infrastructure by converting the internal
storage capacity of the clustered servers into a Virtual SAN. In the second scenario, when the
environment is separated into compute and storage components, StarWind Virtual SAN Free can be
used to build the dedicated SAN/NAS storage cluster. Free version can be deployed on a bare-metal
Windows Server or installed inside a virtual machine.

Unrestricted protocol support. Highly Available iSCSI (including iSER), Continuously Available SMB
3.1.1 shares, and Failover NFS 4.1 mount points are all supported.

StarWind Virtual SAN Free is shipped with a set of ready-to-use PowerShell scripts that would help
users to quickly deploy the Virtual SAN infrastructure and configure most of its features. Moreover,
any StarWind Free user is allowed to modify existing scripts, create new ones, and share them with
others. Finally, the free version doesn’t have any synthetic performance limitations, so the resulting
performance of this solution stands in line with Enterprise-class storage arrays.

Use cases include:

• Shared storage for Microsoft Hyper-V VMs and SQL Server DBs (HA iSCSI & CA SMB 3.1.1)
• Shared storage for Microsoft Failover Clusters, Exchange, Oracle and SAP DBs (HA iSCSI)
• Shared storage for KVM, Citrix XenServer and Xen Project VMs (HA iSCSI & CA SMB 3.1.1)
• HA file server (general purpose file sharing, VDI profiles, backups) (SMB 3.1.1 & NFS 4.1)

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 StarWind Virtual SAN FREE vs. PAID

• Shared storage for VMware vSphere Clusters (HA iSCSI)

• Shared storage for VMware ESXi VMs (HA iSCSI)
• HA storage (VDI, Backups) (HA iSCSI)

Free version is intended to be self-supported or community-supported on public discussion forums.

Our engineers will still do their best to help you with your possible technical “hiccups”, but our
delivery here is not guaranteed because of obvious reasons.

Comparison Matrix

StarWind Virtual SAN

Key Points
StarWind Virtual SAN StarWind Virtual SAN StarWind Virtual SAN
Free for Hyper-V for vSphere

Maximum Number of
3 nodes Unlimited*
StarWind Nodes

Maximum number of
Unlimited
initiator hosts

Served Capacity Unlimited

License Life Time (TTL) Perpetual

Capacity Expansion
Scale-Up and Scale-Out
Options

iSCSI
“Active-Active” mode (workload is distributed
iSCSI
across all StarWind nodes)
“Active-Active” mode
MPIO (Multipath I/O, Multipathing)
(workload is distributed
iSER protocol support (RDMA)
Served Protocols (NAS & across all StarWind
SMB 3.1.1
nodes)
SAN) SMB Direct (RDMA)
MPIO (Multipath I/O,
SMB Multichannel
Multipathing)
SMB Transparent Failover
iSER protocol support
NFS v4.1
(RDMA)
NFS Multichannel
NFS over RDMA

*The StarWind VSAN trial version is limited by 3 nodes.

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 StarWind Virtual SAN FREE vs. PAID

StarWind Virtual SAN

Key Points
StarWind Virtual SAN StarWind Virtual SAN StarWind Virtual SAN
Free for Hyper-V for vSphere

“Hyper-converged”
(Including the ability to run inside hypervisor kernel without a
Deployment Scenarios
“controller VM”)
“Compute and Storage Separated”

Windows Application, Windows VM-based, Cloud- Linux VM-based, Cloud-

Deployment Methods
based based

Hyper-V, Xen, KVM,

Supported Hypervisors Hyper-V, Xen, KVM vSphere
vSphere

Command line Management Console,

StarWind Virtual SAN (Windows Web Console, Management Console,
Management Capabilities PowerShell), VVOLs, PowerShell, VVOLs, Web Console
SMI-S SMI-S

All except LSFS,

asynchronous
Features All
replication and offline
deduplication

• Self-Supported or • Pre- and Post-Sale Technical Support; via Phone,

Community- E-mail, and StarWind Forums
Technical Support supported on • Remote Troubleshooting Sessions
Assistance StarWind Forums • 24/7/365 Premium Support options with 1 Hour
(Give us a call to know Response Time
more as • Strict Service Level Agreements
this one is really • Dedicated Support Engineer
something special • StarWind Virtual SAN Installation and
in our Paid version!) Configuration Assistance
• Hypervisor and 3rd Party Software configuration
• StarWind Proactive Premium Support

©2019 StarWind Software, Inc. All rights reserved. To learn more, visit www.starwind.com

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