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StarWind Virtual SAN eliminates any need in physical shared storage by simply mirroring internal hard disks and flash between hypervisor servers.

Its solution use a hyperconverged approach to maintains high performance and data high availability on minimalistic resources (it’s build around a two nodes architecture).

There are different forms to deliver this solution (included a StarWind HyperConverged Appliance), but also different software editions, with different prices.

Including a StarWind VSAN Free edition!

VSAN Free from StarWind is shipped with a set of ready-to-use PowerShell scripts that would help users to quickly deploy the VSAN environment and configure most of its features quickly and simply. VSAN free product is designed for production purposes, POC (Proof of Concept), or test and development.

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.

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: “HyperConverged”, “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.

Also it has 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.

Note that the free edition supports Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix Xen, KVM, and VMware vSphere… so the entire full sets of hypervisors.

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