I’ve been a fan and user of StarWind products for sometime now, especially their StarWind VTL and StarWind VSAN products. Today, StarWind have released updates to thier VSAN product protfolio which specifically target Hyper-V and VSphere virtualisation solutions.

As a user of StarWind's software, I’ve always found their solutions to be simple to deploy and easy to use, be it as storage for Windows, Hyper-V or VMWare or any other system that can connect over iSCSI.

StarWind have have just announced two new products as part of the StarWind portfolio, StarWind Virtual SAN for Hyper-V and StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere. Both of these products come in either a paid for or free version which is something StarWind have been offering since the VSAN product was first launched.
Of course, The free version can continue to be used with other solutions such as KVM, Xen and so on. the two new appliances are built specifically for VMware Vsphere and Hyper-V.

Delving into the two new offerings it’s worth looking at each individually:

StarWind Virtual SAN for Hyper-V - This product has been specifically designed for Hyper-V based environments, the software installs as a bare metal windows application directly on the Hyper-V cluster nodes and creates a highly available storage pool which integrates with all the usual Microsoft management tools.

StarWind Virtual SAN for VSphere - this product installs as a ready-to-go linux VM which runs on the individual ESXi hosts and allows the local storage of the ESXi host to be used in a fault-tolerant storage pool that the hosts can then use.

These two new products remove the need for dedicated servers to provide storage as they access the storage available to the hypervisor host and in turn, this means that you can install whatever storage you need in those hosts to help provide the IOPS and resilience that your VM’s need.

The StarWind free VSAN solution will still be available and this soltuion provides all of the tools that admins and developers need to maintain a storage environment for a range of platforms. StarWind have a great tech note on the differences between the versions here

It is good to see this type of VSAN option becoming available for both VMware and Hyper-V as local storage used in a pool on a virtualisation host is a great option for shared storage without having to go to the expense of a SAN. As such, these two net products from StarWind are well worth checking out and don't forget that they have a free version which you can use.