StarWind Virtual SAN Free
StarWind Virtual SAN Free is the free version of StarWind VSAN, the popular software solution that eliminates any need for a SAN or NAS or other physical shared storage.
Product mainly oriented to SMBs and ROBOs, StarWind VSAN Free replaces expensive physical shared storage in favour of an affordable solution fulfilling the modern business requirements.
Although Virtual SAN Free will not bring all features provided by the paid version, data are always available and secure with a solution that stays on track with your budget constraints.
StarWind Virtual SAN Free features
StarWind VSAN is available for Windows and as a pre-packaged Linux VM, eliminating the need of buying Windows licenses. A fault-tolerant shared storage pool is created by mirroring internal storage between hypervisors and to provide redundancy you need at least a two-nodes deployment.
- The free version doesn’t have any limitation in terms of performance but since no GUI is available, the configuration must be done through a set of ready-to-use PowerShell scripts. You can modify existing scripts or create new ones.
- No HCLs for StarWind VSAN for vSphere are necessary since it fits in every configuration that satisfies the minimum requirements.
- StarWind VSAN can be installed in the following supported environments: VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, KVM and Xen.
- The technical support is community-supported through StarWind Forums.
StarWind Virtual SAN Free can be implemented for the following uses:
- Shared storage for Microsoft Hyper-V VMs and SQL Server DBs
- Shared storage for Microsoft Failover Clusters, Exchange, Oracle and SAP DBs
- Shared storage for KVM, Citrix XenServer and Xen Project VMs
- HA file server
- Shared storage for VMware vSphere Clusters
- Shared storage for VMware ESXi VMs
- HA storage
Minimum requirements
- 4 vCPUs with 2 GHz reserved
- 4 GB of RAM
- 3 NIC ports dedicated as separate vSwitches (management, synchronization, and iSCSI traffic)
Implement a free VMware infrastructure
For businesses with a limited budget or ROBO environments, you can implement a complete virtual infrastructure with minimum costs. Combining the free version of ESXi with StarWind Virtual SAN Free, you can deploy a small environment providing all resources and storage required to run the virtual machines license free.
Due to the limitations of the Virtual SAN Free you can deploy a maximum of three nodes, enough to run for example a two-nodes highly available storage with at least two ESXi hosts (perfect for ROBOs). Data are synchronized across the nodes making the data always available in case of a host failure.
The real limit of this free solution lies in the unavailability of the vStorage API in the hypervisor that doesn’t allow to perform VM backups at the host level, but only legacy backups can be processed with the use of an agent.
StarWind free Virtual SAN is available to download at StarWind website.
