StarWind Virtual SAN / HCI Appliance

Two nodes for high availability; no third node needed (Heartbeat strategy).

No StarWind cluster-size limit; the hypervisor cluster limit applies. Each HA device mirrors across 2 or 3 nodes, so larger clusters use a GRID layout with offset replicas.

Standalone (non-HA) LUNs can run on one node, but the product is designed around 2-node HA; no single-node HA cluster.

Core use case. Witness-less 2-node via Heartbeat failover strategy, or Node Majority with a witness node or SMB file-share witness. Replication link needs 1 GbE+ and under 5 ms latency.

Supported: stretched cluster guides (vSphere CVM) using Heartbeat or Node Majority with a witness; synchronous mirroring requires low latency (under 5 ms).

Yes - licensed per protected capacity, so compute and storage scale independently; converged/dedicated storage-node layouts can serve compute-only hosts.

Hosts keep their normal hypervisor storage stack, so existing SAN/NAS datastores can be used alongside StarWind devices.

NVMe drives and NVMe-oF (TCP and RDMA) HA storage supported; HCA uses an all-NVMe storage back end on Xeon 6 nodes.

Not a StarWind-native engine feature in the current CVM (LSFS was removed in 2022); ZFS inline compression and dedup can be used on CVM storage pools.

No distributed erasure coding; protection is 2- or 3-way mirroring across nodes on top of local RAID/ZFS parity.

2-way or 3-way synchronous mirroring plus local RAID/ZFS; automatic failover, failback and self-healing rebuild.

Relies mainly on hypervisor snapshots; ZFS snapshots on CVM pools. StarWind LSFS snapshots were removed with build 14869 (Dec 2022).

Disk-level AES-256 data-at-rest encryption on HCI nodes; no KMIP key-manager integration published.

No per-VM or per-LUN IOPS QoS documented; RAM caching and load balancing only.

Highly available SMB and NFS file shares managed from the web UI.

No S3 object storage in VSAN (DataCore sells separate object products).

Yes - serves iSCSI and NVMe-oF block storage to external hosts as well as HCI-hosted VMs.

Asynchronous replication was removed from VSAN in build 14869 (Dec 2022); use hypervisor or backup-software replication.

Yes - synchronous 2-way/3-way mirroring, zero RPO, including stretched clusters within latency limits.

None built in; relies on hypervisor HA or third-party DR tools.

No backup in VSAN itself; StarWind sells separate Backup Appliance and Virtual Tape Library products.

Not in VSAN; immutable backup targets come from separate StarWind VTL / Backup Appliance or a VSAN-hosted Veeam hardened repository.

Because VMs sit on the standard hypervisor, Veeam, Commvault and others work unchanged; VSAN is Veeam-validated.

No native cloud DR; VSAN is Azure-certified and V2V can move VMs to AWS/Azure.

None; networking is the hypervisor's own.

None from StarWind; depends on the hypervisor or third-party firewalling.

Web UI user roles (preserved across updates); directory, SSO and MFA are handled at the hypervisor layer.

Hardened Debian-based CVM with published security advisories; templates boot UEFI with Secure Boot off by default. No STIG.

Compatibility certifications only (VMware Ready/HCL, Windows Server 2025, Citrix Ready, Azure); no FIPS 140 or Common Criteria published.

Limited: optional StarWind Command Center; fleet visibility mainly through ProActive telemetry.

CVM updates via a VM-based update mechanism (one node at a time); hypervisor and firmware updated separately except on HCA.

PowerShell module and CLI; no Terraform provider published.

Web UI health/performance, alerting, and AI telemetry with call-home (ProActive).

None.

Provided by the hypervisor (vMotion/DRS, Hyper-V Live Migration, Proxmox HA) on StarWind shared storage.

Container storage over NFS/iSCSI; no StarWind Kubernetes distribution.

No cloud edition; Azure-certified and V2V converter for cloud moves.

Shared storage for Citrix/Horizon/RDS on the chosen hypervisor; Citrix Ready certified. VDI listed as a target workload.

GPU passthrough/vGPU as provided by the hypervisor; no AI offering.

None.

CVM templates or Windows installer plus web wizard; assisted deployment by a StarWind engineer is included. Software-only clusters usually reach production within days.

Any x86 server (no strict HCL) for VSAN/VHCA, or StarWind HCI Appliance hardware in V-, C- and P-Spec lines.

Built for ROBO/edge: 2 nodes without a witness, small CVM footprint, 1 GbE minimum, proactive remote monitoring.

Runs without internet; ProActive telemetry/call-home needs outbound connectivity. Offline licensing not documented publicly.

Free StarWind V2V/P2V Converter (ESXi, Hyper-V, oVirt, Proxmox, AWS, Azure); optional migration assistance with VHCA.

VSAN Free and VHCA Free (KVM-based): self-supported with capacity, expiry and HA restrictions enforced. 30-day full trial and NFR licences also available.

Software licences are hardware-vendor and hypervisor independent; no tier gates the hypervisor.

Yes for HCI Appliance (hardware, StarWind software, 4-hour parts replacement); VSAN/VHCA cover StarWind software only.

Severity 1: 1 hour (Premium / ProActive Premium, 24x7); 4 business hours on Standard.

Large SMB install base (63,800+ customers claimed), certifications with VMware, Microsoft, Citrix and Oracle, Veeam-validated; channel via resellers and OEMs.

Low: VMs stay in native hypervisor formats on standard iSCSI/NVMe-oF storage; leaving means migrating datastores, not VMs.