StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Reviews

I'm a value-added reseller for Microsoft. I do some other stuff on these HCAs too, but that's the easiest way to describe it. 

I'm providing a remote workspace for a special, select subgroup of clients who are running a pretty specific product called Infor. I'm pretty experienced with hosting and supporting this particular product, so I decided to also wrap a value-added reselling business around it so that I could give them a full remote workspace, instead of just support for their product.

We're running virtualized workloads for 300 or 400 users at this point. Our goal is to have them log in every day in and run all of their day-to-day work on these virtualized workloads.

The solution has probably saved me 100 hours of implementation work. 

In terms of support, we're probably on the low end of requirements because we don't have a lot of advanced stuff going on. We just have virtualized workloads, so once they're configured they're done. But we've had a couple of longer support cases, and over the course of a month, it has saved me, on average, six to eight hours. That's as a one-man shop. If we grow and we start adding more HCAs, I imagine that that time saved increases pretty linearly. The support is really a convenience. I could always schedule my own time to take care of issues, but if there's a minor storage or networking issue, it's nice to bring someone in. 

The major way it has changed our organization is that we came from a four-node, pure Microsoft setup, where we were using Storage Spaces Direct. StarWind is able to run on two nodes, so the hardware cost is quite a bit lower. They include support, so I don't need to keep someone on call in order to handle storage issues. And the fact that they were able to over-spec us for a reasonable price has meant that, over the past six months, I haven't had to worry about overhead and I haven't had to worry about budgeting any more systems. We have enough headspace to expand another 50 percent or so before I'll ever need to invest in direct processing hardware again. And when I do decide to invest more in hardware, I'm perfectly confident that they would just ship us a ready-to-go unit that can be plugged in with three cables and it's off and running.

We desperately needed to update yet downsize our data centre. We had six hosts for only approximately 14 or so Virtual machines and two old SANs. All of this was running on 10+ year-old refurbished hardware! 

As part of our upgrade, we wanted to improve the speed and manageability of our virtual machines and storage. We also wanted to simplify our networking requirements. 

We also wanted to know that we had reliable support in place in case something went wrong. We wanted to keep things simple, making the infrastructure manageable by a small team of IT staff. 

It has improved the speed and resilience of our data centre by five times the previous. StarWind has enabled us to save energy too, as we reduce from six servers and two SANs to just the two StarWind hosts. Simplifying our data centre with StarWind has also helped support less senior members of our team in managing and working with our virtual machines, either just by using the standard Hyper-V management tools or with the StarWind command center. We have peace of mind that our environment is being monitored 24/7 by their pro-active support as well. 

We are using the system to run our various virtual machines in a Hyper-V cluster. They run services such as SQL Servers, our Skype for Business phone system, some financial applications, various domain services, and SharePoint servers, among other miscellaneous systems.

We use StarWind’s HyperConverged Appliance in one of our server rooms and plan on upgrading more legacy equipment at another location next year. We have it set up as a Microsoft Hyper-V private cloud.

The old solution we had worked. It was starting to show its age and it consisted of several more pieces of equipment than the StarWind HyperConverged Appliances.

It has saved us time because there are fewer devices to update. We no longer have to worry about updating our hardware SANs, which would actually cause a brief outage, even though the upgrades are advertised as non-disruptive. We just update the StarWind software every once in a while with no downtime.

In terms of overall systems performance, the latency has been reduced. Instead of having to go through two iSCSI connections, the way we had things layered before, everything is direct. We purchased the all-flash HyperConverged Appliance to replace our SANs that had spinning disks. That has definitely reduced the storage latency. We have noticed a substantial performance improvement with our database applications, compared to our previous storage.

StarWind has definitely saved us money. The other solutions we were looking at were priced much higher than this and they didn't necessarily have full redundancy. The other companies provided solutions without enough resources to lose a node and still keep everything up and running. Most of those solutions also required dedicated 10 Gig switching. We are also saving money on the normal support renewal costs since we don’t have separate SAN devices or need dedicated 10 Gig switching.

I wanted something for high-availability. We're a logistics company and we have guys working 24/7, to some degree. I needed a solution that was going to provide high-availability. 

It's all on-prem. It's the two-node, high-availability model.

We're getting close to 50 trucks and growing pretty quickly. We have guys out on the road all the time and this system we're putting in place is going to track all of that in the greatest of detail. If anything happens with a load, it's all being communicated back through the system. That includes dispatching the drivers, monitoring the drivers as they're hauling the load, tracking when they arrive at their destinations. All that is done through the system. Any time that it goes down for an extended period of time is a time that we have to operate on paper. As of now, we are familiar with doing that, and we probably will continue to have a backup plan, but it's not nearly as efficient. Someone is going to have to go back and enter the data in later. That could potentially lead to disruption where wrong information goes to the driver, causing delivery of a load to the wrong location or at the wrong time.

It's too early to say whether or not this solution will save our company money. Right now, I very much think it's going to. Even if I were to have one substantial instance of downtime - if I were to just build it out on a regular host and the host went down and I had to spin up another host and bring up backups, etc. That downtime, right there, would be significant money lost. I'm pretty sure that it will save money but I can't say that it's 100 percent sure since we haven't been through that scenario yet.

We run it mostly for business processes. We have a manufacturing plant. We use it for our ERP system, some of our databases, some IT applications. It really drives the organization and the main things we use on a day-to-day basis.

We used to have a lot of issues with our database servers. At one point, we had a database front-end that required five different servers to run, literally five physical servers. Just one of those computers going down would effectively halt the whole database. Bringing in these units really helped us condense our infrastructure and make things more reliable and redundant. That has definitely been the biggest key value in this.

In terms of redundancy, we were completely physical before we brought these units in. We had no virtual infrastructure at all. In addition to that, nothing was redundant. These really helped to give us some form of redundancy in a pretty compact package. With a lot of hyperconverged units, you need at least three of them, sometimes four of them. One thing that was attractive with StarWind was that we could get it in two units that communicate directly. It is a pretty self-maintained hyperconverged appliance. That was something that was really appealing.

Overall, it has helped to improve our system's performance greatly.

My nonprofit organization purchased a pair of StarWind Hyperconverged appliances almost three years ago. 

We wanted to simplify our environment while also cutting costs on server equipment. We compared other vendors and settled on StarWind for the cost and excellent reviews. 

We replaced our old VMware hosts/SAN storage with the StarWind HCA and have since converted numerous physical servers to VMs and have been smoothly running about 50 VMs on our StarWind HCA ever since then, with no downtime.

We are a small nonprofit, and I am the sole sysadmin. As the sole sysadmin, I am stretched thin across many areas yet must maintain many different systems. 

StarWind's HCA has been very reliable and has allowed me to not worry about the platform that we run our VMs on and instead focus on the VMs themselves. 

StarWind's HCA has also been instrumental in helping us to simplify our server and network environment and provide the capacity and performance we need to virtualize more of our infrastructure.

Our company is using StarWind HCA as the main solution for hosting all of our VMs. This includes productions and dev virtual machines.

We have about 30 Microsoft and Linux virtual machines that we are running on Hyper-V on the StarWind HCA.

Our HCA runs on two Dell PowerEdge hosts with 2 x 10G each running the StarWind VSAN software. It is an all-flash solution and there is plenty of power left in the system for more virtual machines.

Each host's specs are more than enough so that we can run everything on one.

We took our first step into Hyperconverged with Starwind. For us, it means that we can run our DC with less hardware. 

Our setup came with pre-configured software and hardware in a single system for simplified management. With StarWind's converged infrastructure, we don't need to think of any massive support contracts like the other vendors on the HCA market.

As we already were mainly using Dell servers, their hardware (Dell PowerEdge) fits nicely into our data center. Since we are using all-flash, it will last longer.

We primarily use the solution to provide a safe and secure home for VMs. We are currently only using the computer power, but I like the ability to add GPUs to the device if it is ever needed. We run a bunch of SQL, web services, and remote app servers. The hardware has always been solid, and the 24-hour monitoring is a great safety net. VMs being able to live migrate near-instantly has made updating the hypervisors much easier. The hardware comes from known vendors, so replacement parts are plentiful if ever needed.

We upgraded from older servers, and the Starwind HCA is much faster and more reliable. All of the old VMs can do the same job they always did but with less waiting. With 24-hour monitoring, we can worry less about hardware and software failures. Every time the system has detected an issue Starwind has emailed us before anything went sideways. Migrating VMs is much easier now that the Starwind team has configured the HCA boxes. All this has been done without the need for a separate storage device.