StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Reviews

We needed a cost-effective and simple solution to replace our traditional SAN/server setup. 

Before StarWind, we were running a two-node cluster with a single SAN. Obviously, the storage was a single point of failure and we wanted to avoid this in our next solution.  

The StarWind deployment consisted of one two-node production environment and a second two-node test environment. With each of these two nodes, we accomplished full redundancy. Our production environment runs Hyper-V with 30 VMs and is used company-wide. Our test environment runs 15 VMs.

StarWind Virtual SAN has been a great product for us. The setup was easy to deploy, and management is simplified compared with traditional SAN solutions. Redundancy is achieved at a fraction of the cost when compared to other solutions. We opted for premier support which includes StarWind software support, OS support, Veeam support, patching, and OS updates. 

In addition, our environment is proactively monitored 24/7. We've had experience with other solutions such as NetApp and Dell SAN, however, StarWind was by far a better solution for us. 

The most important feature for us is the simplicity of the product. We are a small IT team and can't afford to spend much time managing and maintaining the servers/SAN.  

With our old traditional SAN, we had to manage servers and a complex SAN system that was connected to switches and then back to the servers. These three pieces made it very difficult to manage. We could not manage this on our own and had to pay third-party vendors to manage it for us. With StarWind, we do it all ourselves with the help of tech support.  

When reaching out to support by phone they do have a slight accent but are not too difficult to understand. 

An emphasis on security can be improved. For example, things like default passwords were not changed initially until requested. 

Veeam support was available, however, we often went to Veeam direct for slightly quicker answers. I can't really think of much else, however, if I had to split hairs I'd say that on reboots sometimes it takes a while to sync with the other node. The maximum was 30 minutes, however, 99% of the time it was three to four minutes.

We've been using StarWind Virtual SAN for about five years.

The stability was rock solid. We have never had any downtime. 

We don't have too much experience with scalability as we only had one site. 

Customer service is available 24/7 - which is great. They have more experience with the StarWind software than with other 3rd party software such as Veeam.  The language accent can be a slight issue as well, however, it's not too bad.  Other than that, they are very helpful and friendly.  

Positive

We had a traditional sever and SAN solution. It was very complicated to manage.

The initial setup was straightforward, however, it helps to have a good amount of experience for a smooth transition. Expert level is not required. That said, admin experience in a virtual environment is very helpful. 

We implemented the solution directly with StarWind. 

Overall, the pricing was great with StarWind. Other solutions were two to eight times more expensive. 

We evaluated other solutions such as Nutanix and the cloud (Azure). They were much more expensive.  

We are running the StarWind HyperConverged Appliances as our Hyper-V Cluster hosts. Our old solution was a three-node Hyper-V Cluster that hosted our VMs. We now have a two-node setup using StarWind HCAs that run/host our Hyper-V VMs in a similar Failover Cluster. This saves room in our Data-Centre and provides a modernized solution compared to what we used. The two hosts each have their own storage bays that host all the VMs and also use the StarWind software to store our VMs in CSVs, allowing us to have even more replication on top of the RAID-5 node runs.

StarWind's Appliance improved our organization by no longer having a single point of failure. Our previous solution had a separate storage bay where the StarWind HCAs each have their own bay that can hold all our VMs and run replication using the StarWind Software.

Our old solution only supported Gigabit connections, while the StarWind solution also supported 10GB. Each node runs two Mellanox interconnects and came with two 10GB ports for our usage. We now have two cables running from the nodes through to the rest of our network and have set up SET (Switch Independent Teaming) for our Hyper-V Cluster solution.

The most valuable thing I have found is the 24/7 Support. Their support team is extremely helpful, and they are pretty friendly and knowledgeable. They monitor your hardware and provide support when you migrate to the new service. 

During our migration, we have sent multiple requests for support and made changes that have caused the network connection to flap. Within minutes of the nodes flapping, we would have a new ticket open with StarWind with them requesting information about the downed Node(s) and asking us if we require any support on getting them back up. 

The team has benefited us and offered support and documentation for the migration and general inquiries about their Hardware/Software.

The only thing that can use improvement is the StarWind Management Console and Command Center.

The management console needs to be restarted each reboot, and you must manually reconnect to each node to see the status. If this could be an automated process or if it auto-connects when you start the program, that would be fantastic.

The Command Center is a great tool, but it stores the ISOs in one of the CSVs, meaning that each ISO uses a lot of storage space compared to one copy. Since each node runs RAID-5 and the two nodes are replicated using the StarWind software, we are essentially using over three times the storage. 

Also, it doesn't feel like the Command Center adds anything compared to using the OS's Hyper-V or Failover Cluster managers.

I've used the solution for about two months.

So far, we've not had a single live down situation.

The solution is very scalable. Only half the slots for both Memory and SSDs were used when we built our complete solution.

They have the best support I've experienced with any vendor I've worked with up until now. We're still only 2 months into using their hardware so we may see a change.

Positive

We did use another solution. We switched because our previous solution was getting to EOL and the new solution offered by that company was more expensive than StarWind for similar builds. StarWind could offer more for less money than the other vendors who wanted more for less.

HCAs came pre-configured and only required minimum input on our end to get up and running.

I discussed and negotiated directly with StarWind.

The staff at StarWind are willing to negotiate. They will take a look at your system diagnostics and make a recommendation, and they will also ask if you have any specific needs/wants on top of the requirements and build you a customizable solution. 

Once you are at the quote stage, they are willing to negotiate with you if you have another vendor offering you similar products for a lower price. This was one of the major reasons we went with StarWind, as they were very open about it and have been very helpful every step of the way. 

Their website support chat will connect you to your assigned sales rep if they are available, and that means the "support" agent is someone who knows your needs well.

We took a look at all the big vendors, including HPE, Dell, Lenovo, and IBM.

Make use of the support and staff at StarWind whenever you need it. They are extremely knowledgeable and friendly. They are staff that feels like they want you as a customer and want to keep you as a customer by offering you great support. For other companies, you must wait on call, whereas StarWind has 24/7 support, and they proectively reach out to you when they detect issues.

Prior to Starwinds, we had two hosts in our production site and we would replicate VMs daily as part of our DR plan. In case one of the hosts failed, we had a copy of the VM on the other host.  

Now, we have "copies" on each host, at all times of the day, fully synchronized.  With ESXi and HCA, we can migrate resources as needed, and do maintenance as needed on any of our hosts.  

Each host's specs are enough that we could run everything on one without the users even knowing. We really have had no issues with this solution.

This has been great for our organization.  

We run probably 16 virtual machines, and all of them are now highly available, and highly redundant.  

Also, we no longer need to replicate across hosts on our production site. Doing that was a very clunky, very time-consuming way to do any restore, and it was only up-to-date as of that moment in time (when the snapshot was taken).  

With this solution, we can now do maintenance on our hosts during the day. The other day I "moved" all VMs to one host, took the other down, and did all its maintenance. That afternoon, I moved everything to the other host and did maintenance on the 2nd host - all without the users noticing.

One of the most valuable things we have seen so far is that we can have all of our VMs fully synchronized to another host at all times of the day in real-time. We no longer have to run replication jobs from one host to another (just in case one of the hosts dies, or is unavailable). Now, we can rest easy knowing that if one of our hosts goes down, the VM will run automatically on the other host. It is easy to move VMs around and to find the right fit for memory/CPU usage. That said, we can run all VMs from one host if/when needed.

The only thing I would like to see improved is the level of documentation. I had some initial difficulties understanding the solution which could have been solved via additional documentation aimed at newcomers.

The solution does admittedly have many moving parts. I've found that it has been helpful to have the support is included and I have been able to get them to help with anything I have needed. That said, sometimes, the accent from the support technician is a little strong and hard to follow.

I've used the solution for eight months.

The solution is easy to fit to the size of your organization/network.

Customer support has been terrific and support has been very knowledgeable and timely. Sometimes, the accent has been hard to understand. Other times, it has been just fine.

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution.

It was very simple to set up, and the system came pre-configured.

I have not measured it in dollars, however, it is a high return on investment in terms of peace of mind and improved DR.

We looked at Dell EMC.

We use it for virtualization related to development. We have two entities in our company. One is corporate, a subcontractor for NASA. And the other one is an electronic timesheet system. For the corporate side, it's mainly a file server. And we use StarWind HCA for development of the electronic timesheet system. It provides us VMs and tools.

We can do updates without any problems. We can move all my VMs to one host and do updates on the other host. We can bring it down, move everything over to the other host, and then update the other host and bring it down.

In terms of redundancy, with my last solution, if we had two VMware hosts and one host went down, everything would transfer over to the other host. StarWind HCA is the same concept except that we don't have the single point of failure of the storage array anymore. It's all in the hosts. We don't have to worry about the storage going down. It used to be that if the storage array went down, we were dead in the water with both hosts.

Our only real choice, other than StarWind, was to buy a Dell EMC Compellent which would have been double the cost and would still be just one Compellent. So if we wanted redundancy, we would have had to put together a solution that would triple or quadruple the cost. StarWind saved us a considerable amount of money.

The most valuable features of the solution are the redundancy and its cost. I used to have a SAN, a Dell EMC EqualLogic. Unfortunately, it was what they call an "inverted pyramid of doom." It was two or three hosts, two switches, and one storage array at the very bottom. But the SAN, the storage array at the very bottom, is a single point of failure, and many people, including me in the past, don't take that into consideration.

The SAN was working for us, but I thought about the fact that it is a single point of failure. Anything could, possibly, take it out, even though it might have redundant hardware inside it: controllers, power, hard drives. The entire unit itself is a single point of failure. If updates were required to an EqualLogic, we would have to take down everything, just to be on the safe side. We'd have to shut down all the VMs. And those updates could always mess up the entire unit and, then, it's a single point of failure and all your infrastructure and VMs are down.

In terms of cost, a storage array is more expensive. It was time to renew our storage array. It was end-of-support, end-of-life, and the EqualLogic line is supposedly being phased out. The next in line is Dell EMC Compellent and we would have had to upgrade to that. It is highly expensive. For half the cost of Compellent, I got two hosts, more storage, and redundancy.

StarWind HCA also has a much better footprint because with a full-blown SAN you have one storage array, or in some cases two, as well as two switches and two or three hosts. Those two hosts are usually 2U each, and the storage array is 2U, and the switches are usually 1U each. We were able to shrink it all down to two hosts that contain all the storage, the switches or the all the storage networking, and the host or the compute/CPU power. In total, the HCA is just two hosts and they're both 2U. So our footprint was reduced to just 4U.

One area for improvement of the solution is that I had to get the HCAs with Windows Server installed to install the StarWind SAN software on, which I really didn't want because of the extra maintenance or overhead, as well as viruses, etc. It's going to take time for them to get their Linux implementation to that point. They already have Linux but it's not as mature and they don't really support it on HCAs. They have it for individuals who want to use it on their servers, but not on HCAs.

With Windows, there's always that fear that, if you add any software to it, if you need to configure monitoring software or the like, DLL conflicts and blue screens can result. Similarly, if you use Windows Update, you can get blue screens. Or, there have been times where an antivirus company has made a mistake regarding its virus definitions and it took down the server. The antivirus blocked or deleted a legitimate OS file that it thought was a virus. So I don't run antivirus on the Windows Servers VMs that run the StarWind SAN software. At the same time, I've had to configure Windows Firewall to block everything and only allow any kind of traffic going to the server. The only thing I allow is just Remote Desktop so I can manage it. But even Remote Desktop, in the recent months, has had exploits. I keep on having to do Windows Updates.

I prefer Linux because it's not as targeted. Don't get me wrong; it is targeted for viruses and all, but not like Windows Server.

We've been using it for a few months.

The solution has been stable so far..

We are using the solution's ProActive Premium Support but it hasn't really reduced our monitoring efforts since we've only been using it for two or three months. We haven't had any issues come up where we've had to use it. I still do all the monitoring of my VMs and the hardware, the HCAs. However, in regard to the support itself, I do like that it's all-in-one. If I need support I call one vendor and they take care of everything. They call Dell EMC, they call VMware and, of course, they take care of the StarWind software. So it is nice.

Plus, each person I've talked to — and I've talked to multiple people there — has been very knowledgeable. I didn't get the sense that any of them were new or learning or that they didn't know what they were talking about. All of them are very knowledgeable and friendly.

I wouldn't say the initial setup was completely straightforward but it's not too complex. I did have a lot of calls with support to help me get it up and running, but I did the majority of the cabling and some of the configuration of the VMs. They took care of many other things that I would not have known to do, but it wasn't too bad.

The deployment took about a month. I had other things I had to do; I'm always doing a lot of things. It probably took longer than it could have taken.

The implementation strategy was that I have all iSCSI. Our previous SAN had iSCSI with RJ45 switches. With the help of StarWind and Dell EMC, I was able to tie in and connect the HCAs to my SAN and see the data stores on the SAN from the HCAs. When the time came, I was able to migrate everything. I placed all the VMware hosts into one vCenter but two different clusters. I was able to simply vMotion them. Once I got the HCAs up and running, configured and set up, I was able to vMotion all the VMs from my old storage array to these HCAs.

Overall, I did like the hardware installation and the cabling and they helped me configure the StarWind software. It was about half and half.

They were top-notch and professional. They know their stuff. I was always able to get them online when needed. Their support was very good.

Regarding licensing fees, the caveat is that with the Windows-based OS, we have to pay for that licensing for both hosts. That's is another reason I wanted Linux. As for VMware, we already had VMware licenses, so we just took those from our old hosts and applied them to these hosts.

There is also a cost for the ProActive Premium Support and, on top of that, is support for the Dell EMC hardware itself. We got four-hour, mission-critical, which is what we have on everything else.

Because of the absolute redundancy of the two HCA hosts, which they say can tolerate a failure of one host plus one drive, you might be able to save a little bit of money by bumping down the support of the servers and not need four-hour, mission-critical support. You could bump it down and wait for parts to arrive the next day instead of four hours.

I looked at Dell EMC storage. The only option was Compellent, which was highly expensive. I looked at Nutanix which was still highly expensive.

I also looked at StorPool; I liked the idea behind it, but I didn't like their implementation. It's roughly the same concept but requires more hardware. They take a bunch of servers that are not purely storage servers but which have the compute and memory. It's a rack mount server with all the storage inside and they aggregate the storage.

StarWind was all-in-one and consolidated on two servers. StorPool would have been three servers just for the storage. I would have had to buy two more new hosts to be the compute.

I love StarWind HCA because of the cost and the redundancy. I love the service, the support. Across the board, it was the best choice. I love the HCA because it's all-in-one and everything is pre-configured. I could have bought my own servers but it would have taken longer to bring up the environment. It would have been less expensive, but StarWind's hardware and software support and the compatibility of all the hardware components add a little bit more to the reliability of the system. That's why I went with the HCA instead of doing it myself. I certainly could have done it myself if I had more time. But, as a small business with one or two people managing all the IT, it was the best choice.

We have two environments, one at the office and one at the data center. This implementation was a trial of sorts, but looking to the future I'm going to implement this for our data center, where we have a standard SAN like we did before this HCA implementation.

The solution has not improved our system performance. There were some things that we couldn't foresee or we didn't test, like restoring databases. It's a little bit slower there. That's more a failure on our part, not having tested it out, rather than StarWind's failure.

We have a hybrid HCA as far as our drives go. Some are flash drives and others are just regular spindle drives. The solution is supposed to move things into the SSDs and then give the appropriate power, from what I remember them telling me. But in one particular case, one of the developers, who is also a database admin, was restoring a file and he said it took way longer than usual. That was one thing we couldn't assess during our assessment of what kind of drives we needed. In this case, we probably would have done better having all flash drives. It might have been overkill — it depends on what you need. But we should have made it all flash drives and we probably wouldn't have had any problems. Again, that's not anything on StarWind's part.

Everything else, performance-wise for all the other VMs that we have that are not as intensive as a database, it works just fine. We have no complaints about the performance in terms of using it as a file server or for web-based development utilities.

We're a small company. We have two entities that these HCAs provide service to. We have about 30 to 40 employees. Of them, 10 or more are on the corporate/sub-contracting side. The rest work on our electronic timesheet system, whether they're in development or technical support. In terms of deployment and maintenance of StarWind, it is just me.

StarWind gives you choices of servers, as far as the HCA goes. It was either all-new certified Dell EMC equipment or equipment from another company that they can place these servers on. With our being an all-Dell EMC shop, and my being familiar with Dell, I opted for all-Dell EMC hardware.

Being a small business, we don't have another product alongside it. It is the product. So it gets 100 percent usage. I don't see us expanding our usage in the future. The power and the storage should last us for, hopefully, the next seven years, which is roughly the Dell EMC support contract life expectancy. We use our servers for seven years and, at the end of the support, we refresh and buy brand-new servers.

Nothing stands out, in terms of problems or issues. They helped me and got everything resolved that I had problems with. I would give it a 10 out of 10.

What we use it for is resilience in our Hyper-V cluster, for both the guests and the data. We have two appliances split between two physical comms rooms onsite. If we lost the power or network to one comms room, all of the guests and all of the data residing in the second comms room would be dynamically available.

Overall, the solution has improved our system's performance. We were with Dell products before and those products were getting towards seven years old so they were at end-of-life. This product has an element of SSD, in our particular solution. The way that the system uses SSDs to cache out load onto the SSDs for regularly-used data means that it is a much better and more modern solution. We can definitely see that in the performance.

For example, we use some database services for our management information system that manages all the kids' data. There are a lot of ways that that information is accessed, through different applications, both internally and externally. Parents might be pulling attendance information from that service. The performance of the servers in that environment is much improved on the StarWind product over the standard Hyper-V host. The fact that the storage and the hosts are on exactly the same hardware reduces the network latency and all the other bits that contribute to the speed as well.

StarWind has also saved our organization money. It has probably halved the cost of a full SAN and individual-host solution.

What makes it valuable is the high-availability. In the education field, when you've got students in classrooms, any loss of service disrupts the lessons to a point that the whole lesson is affected. For part of the business which isn't business-critical, to have a little bit of a hiccup wouldn't be such a big thing, but here, it's the high availability of service that is important.

Also, the ProActive Premium Support has picked up some issues that we wouldn't necessarily have noticed ourselves because the depth of monitoring is pretty aggressive. You have to resolve those issues with StarWind by giving them updated logs, so it does put an onus on you that forces you to be doing a better job. But in terms of day-to-day monitoring, we still do that for each of the servers within it to see if there are any specific problems that are causing performance issues. Ours is probably more of a high-level monitoring than StarWind does in its ProActive monitoring.

So, there are levels to it. They come up with some good stuff in the ProActive monitoring that we wouldn't necessarily have noticed very quickly. The upshot is that you then have to work with them to troubleshoot that issue.

We still have to do a lot of stuff that StarWind doesn't do in their ProActive monitoring, but it gives us peace of mind that somebody else is watching the services 24 hours a day, so that we're notified if there's a potential issue. All the issues that we've had have been potential problems that have been picked up and resolved before they became problems. That's the real positive spin: Because it's proactive, it's stopping you from actually having the issue that would affect end-users.

We do use network monitoring tools to monitor the network and the core processing of all of the servers in our environment, including the StarWind, but we do leave the higher-end stuff to the ProActive Support guys. There are only two of us who are full-time in IT in our organization, so we can't really afford to have bought into something that would have had a big overhead in terms of day-to-day management. StarWind is one of those things that, once it's set up and working properly, there are some checks that you would do naturally on a daily or weekly basis, but there's a whole raft of reporting tools and you're notified if there's a potential problem. It is a put-it-in-and-off-you-go kind of thing. Once that initial commissioning has been done and it's in and working, it's pretty seamless.

We bought into StarWind in the summer of 2019, so it's been a little over half-a-year.

In terms of the solution's hardware footprint, it's very scalable. It's important that you look at future-proofing as much as possible when you buy the product. It's important that you think about three to five years' worth of growth. The ability to upgrade is always there, but that's going to come at a cost later on. Obviously, technologies change reasonably quickly — certainly server technologies, disks, and arrays, etc. So it's good, if you want them to be truly resilient with each other, to keep them at one state of firmware revision, rate controllers, all running at the same level, etc.

For us, scalability is an interesting thing because we have two comms rooms and we want to keep things resilient between those two comms rooms. We have the option, obviously, to increase the space and add additional memory, just like with any other server. We could add a third StarWind appliance and increase our capacity in that way. Clearly, if we were going to do that, our resilience wouldn't be quite equally spread because we'd have two appliances in one comms room and one in another. For us, there are many more options than we would have with a traditional SAN. Certainly, we're not constrained by it in any way.

The technical support from StarWind is excellent. The guys really know what they're doing, and they're really supportive and helpful. Their response is excellent. You feel really looked after. There is nothing that is too much trouble. You could ask them a very basic question if you were concerned about something to do with your own infrastructure that was affected by StarWind, and they're quite happy to get involved.

There's good continuity. You get a support guy dealing with you on a particular problem and he stays with it through to resolution. You're not dealing with a lot of different people. Much of the time you get the same two or three guys dealing with your account, so you know the people that you're going to be talking to and dealing with. I really couldn't rate it more highly, on a personal level. They're very proactive and very responsive.

We had a Dell EqualLogic solution with multiple Hyper-V hosts and resilient SANs before we migrated to StarWind. For us, StarWind was a software option that would potentially reduce our costs and give us the same level of resilience that we had before. We've also increased performance and capacity.

If we had to replace the same technology in a Dell EqualLogic product, or whatever the new SAN product that they might have is called, it would cost us significantly more. Being in education, at the moment, money is quite tight. What we wanted is the best possible resilient solution at a good price point. That's what we got from it.

Also, the StarWind guys worked really hard to make the right kind of compromises to give us both the performance that we needed and a price we could afford. That's another element to this. When you buy a solution from Dell, you have to buy a particular model. There is an element of configuration, and there are discounts available depending on the time of the month or where you are in that calendar year — offers and deals to schools. Whereas StarWind was prepared to drill right down into the solution, look at exactly what we needed it to do, and make the compromises in the right places. So we still got the same level of resilience that we had before, but we got improved performance and improved capacity at a much cheaper price.

There is room for improvement in the setup and installation phase. We had massive problems connecting the StarWind appliances to our network infrastructure. That wasn't necessarily a StarWind problem. I don't know if their business partner in the UK wasn't used to having to deal with the supply of the cabling infrastructure, but that's where the problems started.

Because of the way we are funded, I could spend the money only once. I have to write a business case for everything we do and I put all the costs in that business case. What I can't do is go off and buy a load of additional stuff because I should have added it to the business case. So the agreement was that the cabling for our infrastructure would be supplied with the StarWind but, unfortunately, they just couldn't do that. They supplied the wrong cables and the wrong number of cables. In the end, I had to go and buy all the equipment myself to do it, because they just didn't seem to be able to deal with it. I think the problem was with the UK side, with whomever they outsource the setup and installation to in the UK. If it had been a solution where they'd had to come onsite and install it, it would have been an absolute mess.

We were quoted three to four weeks for the deployment time but, in the end, it took about six or seven weeks.

We did have an implementation strategy for this product, but it all went out the window when we didn't get the cabling right. Because it's a school, the kids were on their summer break from the end of July through until the beginning of September. We had plans to do work in that time but, in the end, we just couldn't do that work because we didn't get the StarWind in early enough to do it. Some of that was our fault. We did order the product later than we wanted because we were looking at HPE, Dell, and StarWind together. But if we hadn't had the issue with the cabling, a weeks-long issue, we would have been a lot more successful in the summer.

Because that's the only time we really get a chance to do anything big on our infrastructure, some of the work we would have done in this past September will now have to be done in August of this year.

Our experience with the StarWind partner was not the best. We spent a lot of time spec-ing and giving them the specs of every element of our network. When they failed to deliver it and we missed a number of deadline dates on the installation because of it, I just phoned up a cabling company, gave them all the details, and I had the right cables the very next day. So it wasn't a massive technical challenge. It just needed someone to take ownership of it. I don't know whether it was a financial thing or something else, but I've not been reimbursed for those cables. So in the end, I did overspend on the project. If you're going to write a business case and you're going to put the costs in it, you want those costs to be right.

In the whole scheme of things, it's not the end of the world, but was annoying. It could certainly be improved.

If we had gotten the StarWind installed more quickly, we would have migrated more to it than we have currently. Our seven years on our existing Dell solution just expired about a month ago. We've migrated the majority of our infrastructure onto the StarWind appliances, but we haven't fully migrated for the reasons I implied before. Until the summer, this year, we won't be able to migrate some elements, which is just a little bit frustrating. So at the moment, those elements are running on Dell solutions that are no longer covered by any hardware maintenance. That is a risk that I would have rather avoided.

We bought a seven-year solution including licensing, hardware maintenance, and ProActive Support. For us, in a school, we tend to buy high-end equipment — hardware and servers — and look at them in terms of a seven-year lifespan. That's a lot more than it would be in industry, but we ideally try to specify the equipment to have that length of life, if possible, in terms of capacity; or at the very least have the option to upgrade within that time. So, our one-off costs when we bought the equipment included seven years' worth of licensing and everything else that goes with it.

We paid it all upfront.

Obviously we pay our Microsoft licensing separately and that licensing covers the operating system on the StarWind appliances.

We looked at Microsoft storage but what we wanted was the resilience and the dynamic replication of data across two comms rooms. Before, we did that with EqualLogic SANs and physical Hyper-V hosts, whereas now, what we've got is the storage and the hosts in one box in each comms room, with StarWind.

We looked at multiple solutions, including HPE and Dell. Dell had been our partner up until this point, but the truth of the matter is that we couldn't afford their products anymore. The cost of their products had just moved out of the reach of a school with the kind of funding we have.

All these products have the ability to do what we wanted to do: real-time failover, real-time data between both comms rooms. The step up to achieve with some of the more well-known players is quite large though. In fact, it's an order of magnitude in terms of money. In layman's language, there are tiers, or steps, that you would have to climb to get more functionality. For example, you could start including cloud, cloud storage, and more. But the jumps and the tiers with StarWind are much closer together. The costs in taking those different steps are still there, but they are much more reasonable. That's because they're wrapping up all the technology in one box, rather than buying separate boxes for separate things.

Unfortunately, in my experience, there is quite a turnaround of technical guys within the organizations you deal with, and it's not easy to get continuity from the people at most organizations to look at your particular problems. What they always want to do is sell you their "gold" product, which is fantastic and very exciting, but if you can't afford it, you can't afford it. That was frustrating for me.

I would speak to Dell, I would speak to HPE, and they would jump up in the air and say, "Oh yeah, great. We can sell you one of those, and six of these, and that will do it. Fantastic." And that would do it. But we just didn't have that kind of money. And when we went back to the table and said, "Well, that's really great, but we can't really afford that," their reaction was, "Oh, well, that's not very interesting, because we will have to this product in instead. And then you can't do this, and you can't do that." And then it was not worth buying from our perspective.

With StarWind, they were much more flexible in looking at compromises and, because it's all built into one box, they could offer us opportunities to do things in a different way and still get the majority of the functionality we wanted. With a lot of the bigger players, if you bought the kind of functionality we wanted, you got a lot of other stuff that we weren't going to use, and obviously that was built into the price. With StarWind you can pick and choose, a little bit more, which elements you want to adopt and use, without having to go to the next, big, more expensive box or software revision.

My advice is to check it out. Everybody has a tick-box of what they want to achieve with a product. If you've got that, apply it to StarWind. Give them a chance to offer you a solution that meets all those ticks in those boxes, because I think they can do it at a very good price. There isn't really a compromise in that in any way. You're getting a really good solution at a really good price, and you're not actually making any compromises.

The biggest eyeopener for me is that there are solutions out there that don't have to cost a lot of money for a very robust and resilient solution. StarWind gives you everything that you're going to get from a traditional SAN host in one box. You get really high-grade proactive support, and the solution is scalable and cost-effective. If we hadn't had the issues with the implementation, I would be saying it is definitely on par with the more recognized players. 

I'd have no hesitation in recommending it, once it has been installed, set up, and configured. It is definitely a challenger among the more traditional and more industry-recognized solutions. The others, Dell, HPE, etc., are all looking more into software storage and Microsoft storage and solutions to fill in those gaps between the tiers in their products. But I think StarWind has gotten there first. 

StarWind's product is very nice and very user-friendly as well. It's very understandable from a higher-level technical point of view. There are no smoke and mirrors with it either. They're not hiding anything, they're not making it unavailable to their customers. It's all very open-book and that gives you an element of comfort when you're making a decision to move away from the more traditional ways of doing it. StarWind's openness, and the information that's available to you on their product, and how the product is going to be implemented and used, allays a lot of those fears.

Once it's installed, I would happily give it an eight or a nine out of 10. It does exactly what it says on the tin, in our experience with it.

We use it to replace some Hyper-V infrastructure. We are looking for some decomplication, hopefully. Our old Hyper-V cluster was three Dell R410 servers with two Cisco switches that were connected by iSCSI to VNX. The VNX was coming toward end-of-life. I've de-cabled it now and taken out the rack and I've got a box of Ethernet cables. There was a massive amount of stuff that did the same job as two servers and a couple of Mellanox cards.

Although it was end-of-life, we got some quite severe warning emails from EMC saying, "This is it guys. Your support is terminating. If anything goes wrong with it, good luck." We could have purchased a third-party warranty on it if we'd wished, but then it would have been a matter of luck in terms of the parts. Although nothing ever actually went wrong on the VNX, hardware-wise, it was about not having that parachute.

It's just taken over the job of something that was going out-of-support. The only thing that we have really noticed as being a massive improvement — because of the live migrations, because it's disk-based rather than iSCSI — is that it is super-fast now.

It's fairly instant. Before, live migrations meant we had to leave it on a countdown. So if we had to move stuff around quickly, we had to do some quick live migration. It would take a few minutes and only one could be done at a time. There is an improvement in having a new Windows Server. The 2008 R2 Server that we replaced didn't have PowerShell for Hyper-V, but obviously this version does. We've just scripted it and, bang, with the improved response times from it being disk-based instead of iSCSI, trying to shove an 8 Gig memory file through goes a lot quicker. It's not really something that's saved our ops at any time but the improved performance is pleasing.

It hasn't increased redundancy or failover capabilities, it has just like-for-like replaced. We did have three servers, two switches, and a disk array, whereas now we just have two servers. There's a big chunk of less stuff doing the same stuff. So we've consolidated. We're doing the same with less. It has saved us money in the sense that there is less stuff to pay out warranty on.

We bought their ProActive Premium Support. That's why they email us when we have rebooted to patch, and they check with us that everything is okay. We've not really had any problems with it, so it has not really presented with any real-world benefits yet. Obviously there are benefits to it because it's monitored. We do monitor stuff onsite, but it's good to have backup. We're a small team so that is one of the major benefits of it.

The software is great. It's very easy to understand. I've not delved into any of the command-line stuff, but there's no real need to script it. Since it went in, pretty much the only thing that I have needed to do is increase device image sizes, and that process is very straightforward. As part of the installation, the StarWind representative took me through it. We just migrate everything to the other server, put it into maintenance mode, increase the size, and commit.

There really isn't any maintenance. It's fairly self-sufficient. 

We were slightly disappointed with the hardware footprint. We were led to believe, and all the pre-sales tech information requirements pointed to the fact, that it was coming on Dell hardware. Then it came on bulk servers. They asked for some email addresses for iDRAC and the like. We thought, "Oh good, it's Dell. We're familiar with that kind of hardware infrastructure." Our other servers here are Dell so we know how the Dell ecosphere works. But then, these weren't Dell. These are Supermicro, which, when you boil it down, are the same Intel parts. But it's a little reminiscent of putting together OEM PCs. That's how the servers look. But they're in and they're working.

What you're not paying for, and that may be why it was £36,000 instead of £110,000, are those Dell Concierge services. They've got a well-rounded, iDRAC infrastructure and we could integrate it into our other stuff. We're all used to how all the ILO stuff works on it. But here it's, "Oh, Supermicro. It all looks a bit '2002.'" It's not what we weren't expecting but it works.

The stability has been great. There have been no problems, not a hiccup or anything. So far, it seems fine.

It would be fairly easy to add to it. We could add a third node with another card.

Tech support is very prompt, very friendly. They're knowledgeable. I don't think I have come across anything that they couldn't answer.

It was just a straight one-for-one swap. Decomplication was really was the main driver for it. If you're troubleshooting problems on Windows Server core on iSCSI and logging into a bit of an unfriendly VNX with no info panel on it, and if it was struggling, it had a lot of trouble telling you. We had to actually order a special cable to be able to serial into it at one point. This solution is relatively straightforward now.

We came across StarWind by just having a look at what options were out there. I liked StarWind because, when you look at their material online, they seem more geared towards education. They've got a quite extensive Knowledge Base and they are very good at tutorials. Other companies seemed more to emphasize the marketing: "Look at our shiny boxes."

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. The only thing that wasn't straightforward was, "Oh, we've never had Supermicro before." It was a matter of getting used to, and documenting, how stuff works.

There were no instructions. We just got two boxes. There wasn't any "Welcome to your StarWind Hyperconverged Appliance." It was just two brown boxes with two servers in them.

We just racked it up and then had a phone call with them and let the guys at StarWind know when it was online. It was up and running in our environment pretty much straight away. The only problem I had were the SFP cables: "Which way up do these go? And does it go A to B, or A to A and B to B?" So that required a phone call.

The only other problem that we encountered, that protracted the migration, was that while they've got good V-to-V migration software, our old environment was 2008 R2 and it wasn't supported by the migration software. So we had to "handle" it. It was a matter of having to recreate the service. I scripted it from PowerShell myself, and did them one or two each weekend over a period of three or four weeks. They're production servers so they had to be down to do the Hyper-V conversion process. Our file server took a while. It is about a terabyte-and-a-half. It took about 11 hours to convert, but I had it scripted anyway. So once it converted, I just did a convert from source to the StarWind. That was part of the copy process. It was then just create out and boot and notify me.

For the setup it was just me involved.

We looked at Nutanix and found it did almost the same thing but for more money. In fact, StarWind was nearly one-third of the price; it cost us £36,000. That includes five years of monitoring. If we have to reboot we get an email from them saying, "Is everything okay guys?"  We tell them, "Yeah, yeah, it's fine. Don't worry. Patching". The Nutanix was near enough £110,000 for relatively the same amount of performance and storage.

There were no additional fees for StarWind. That amount is for five years, done and paid for.

They're not really appliances, they're are just two servers with a bit of software on them. It's slightly misleading that it's hyperconverged appliances. It's just two white-box servers with a Mellanox card in it.

In terms of improvement to IOPS or latency from using it, we haven't seen anything drastic. But then again, we weren't really hitting it hard before. I've not measured it. It has just not caused us any trouble. So it's all good.

I would give it a solid eight out of ten. It's trouble-free, it's very clear to use. It's not one of those implementations where you're tearing your hair out. If you are tearing your hair out, it's about other things, not the actual StarWind part of it. I would probably have given it a ten if the hardware was a bit slicker, or there was more actual, "Welcome to your new StarWind implementation. Here's where everything plugs in," type of documentation. We did get some e-mail stuff, but it tended to look like it was more for Dell hardware and not Supermicro, white box, no-name servers.

We went with StarWind HCA primarily for Hyper-V Clustering. 

We were having hardware issues that lead to downtime on our single server environment. 

We aren't "huge," so IT budgeting is tight. However, every dime spent on our HCA has been 100% worth it. 

Since implementation, we've had nearly no downtime. No downtime has been thanks to the HCA itself. I'll definitely go with StarWind when we're ready for a hardware refresh. It's a no-brainer. The prices are obviously more than we had been used to in the past. However, it's been worth the investment.

Uptime alone has been substantially increased. 

Repair efforts have been reduced to nearly nothing. 

Monitoring is provided free of cost to StarWind, which also reduced expenses.

In instances where we had issues outside of the HCA, StarWind support has gone above and beyond to help us diagnose Windows issues. 

I've been in IT for 15 years now, and you kind of expect to have to "work on things" as part of your job description. That said, we're 3 years in, and I have yet to "need" to work on anything with the hardware or software. It just works.

Support is the highest on my list in terms of great aspects. You simply cannot have issues, as they're on top of monitoring and resolution. 

Uptime is the second-best aspect of the product. The software solution is so solid, you don't really have issues; however, when you do, support is there to jump in and help you fix it. 

Honestly, with those two items, there's no reason to "not" use them. In my experience, you want your solutions to work, and when they don't, to get them fixed fast. It's a combo that StarWind has perfected and is the reason I don't even want to look anywhere else for other solutions.

I'd like a better UI and some limitations on "breaking it." Best practices ask you not to reboot both servers simultaneously, as it breaks the "heartbeat" between the servers. I didn't know that during my first week having it, and sure enough, I had some issues. Maybe there could be some notifications like "are you sure you want to reboot" or whatnot to prevent issues like the one I experienced. 

StarWind did release a VM that had some integration into the Windows cluster side of things. However, I found it easier to just use the Windows tools. Maybe if it was more robust, I'd use it. That's not the case at this point in time.

I've been using the solution since 2019.

We do not need to scale. Still, you can scale to more than 3+ servers in the StarWinds solution.

Support is the best thing about StarWind. I can't praise them enough. The initial setup and purchase are a single point in time and support is ongoing. You need an amazing support team to have an amazing product. And StarWind is an amazing product.

Positive

We did not switch from something else. The adoption of this product was just a massive upgrade for our company.

The setup was easy. The hardware came pre-configured, and support did the rest of the network-specific setup after we had the hardware installed. It was the best experience I've had with a vendor.

StarWind support only employs experts. I have yet to deal with anyone on their support team that didn't know the product inside and out. It's really refreshing compared to other vendors I have to deal with.

We produce 15-20 full kitchens a day. The ROI was almost instant when you consider we had been down two days the month before.

Pricing was a bit high. That said, it was on par with other solutions we looked into. It's worth it alone for the support.

StarWind had me sold. I was looking at doing a SAN with two Hyper-V's, however, why buy additional hardware when it can be done more simply with the same results.

The StarWind HCA solution is used for our VMware virtualization environment in a two-host high-availability cluster to support critical business operations running 23 virtual machines/servers. 

I needed to have a setup that provides the highest level of performance due to a few critical virtualized servers and the highest level of redundancy in the situation where we will need to recover from any given incident affecting business operations. 

The solution provided by StarWind allows me to eventually migrate all my physical servers to the virtual environment, which is something I couldn't do with our older virtualized setup.

StarWind HCA has provided a much-needed upgrade to our aging VMware environment and infrastructure in terms of hardware, cost, and performance. 

All of our virtual machines, across the board, are snappy and running at peak performance. 

Due to the hardware, performance, and redundancy improvements provided by the StarWind two-node setup, we can take advantage of the setup and migrate critical physical servers to our virtual environment. 

Much to my surprise, while moving one of our critical systems from a physical server to a virtual server, users have commented that they have noticed a significant increase in performance on their end when using specific software. 

Also, the high-availability setup provides peace of mind in knowing that there is inherent redundancy provided in our configuration. 

The high-quality hardware options, directly affecting performance, have significantly improved the user experience and are well worth the cost. Granted, the solution was cost-effective and reasonable compared to other "brand-name" solutions out there. 

24/7 support has also been extremely valuable. We are located in Florida and since we migrated to the StarWind setup only a couple of months ago, I've already had to reach out to them outside of business hours to walk me through the shutdown of our systems thanks to two hurricanes. I needed assistance due to my unfamiliarity with the hardware and software, and they were happy to oblige. It was a smooth experience, and I appreciated their help.

The only area that surprised me had to do with the fact that each host runs a StarWind virtual machine used to maintain the health of the vSAN, which individually uses 24GB of memory per host. You should keep this in mind when determining the resources you will need when selecting hardware and components for your specific setup. If I knew that, I would have chosen to add more memory per host to make up for the use. I had configured my setup thinking I would have that much memory available to use to provision additional virtual machines.

I've used the solution for two months.

My experience so far is that it is very stable. Even after having to shut down and start up our entire facility twice due to hurricanes here in Florida, we haven't had any issues.

It looks like we have the option to scale up our solution to three, four, five, or however many nodes we would like. We may be going from a two-node to a three-node solution, so it's good to have these options.

Working with the support team has been great. Connecting with somebody during and after business hours has been smooth, and they have always been responsive and professional.

Positive

I did have a different solution. I switched mainly due to the performance, scalability, and costs associated with either maintaining or upgrading our setup.

The initial setup was very straightforward. Some areas were complex and involved StarWind support coming in and making sure everything was configured correctly. This service is included in the implementation of their solution.

The vendor team was great to work with and are experts in their field and on the StarWind solution. It was a pleasure working with them.

Keep in mind that StarWind VMs for the vSAN will take up 24GB of memory per host. If you do decide to go with StarWind, adjust your hardware configuration appropriately if you need those memory resources.

I evaluated Nutanix, HP, and Dell solutions.

I highly recommend the StarWind solution (high-performance tier). Making a decision after weeks of research, I have been pleasantly surprised and satisfied with my choice.