StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Reviews

I'm the sole IT guy at a construction company of about 50 employees. StarWind HCA hosts all of our IT infrastructure other than the building's security and the phones. 

In total, we are running six Windows Server VMs (one DC directly on each of the nodes and four in the HA cluster). 

We have one of their hybrid systems (mix of SSD and HDDs) and I have all of the Windows server OS installs and databases on the SSDs with simple file storage on the HDDs. Since we self-host most things this is the backbone of our IT infrastructure.

When I joined the company, they were running everything off a single bare-metal server. The downtime was common, there were rampant issues, and backups were simple file copies on a schedule (no configuration backups).

As a jack-of-all-trades IT guy I knew that virtualization would be a massive boon in many aspects, but was intimidated at the prospect of building out a whole system from scratch myself.

StarWind's HCA proved to be an ideal solution. Support held my hand through the setup and configuration of the hypervisors and allowed me to easily migrate the company's ancient bare-metal server to a proper virtualized HA setup.

Downtime is almost non-existent now. Services are compartmentalized to different VMs and backups are full of images that could be spun up on the cloud in a pinch. 

The customer service has been the most valuable feature of the product to me. From the initial purchasing process to the initial setup and configuration to installing routine firmware updates years later. I've been consistently impressed with the quality of the support. It's easy to get a live person on short notice, and the reps always seem to know what they're doing.

Their software is also pretty user-friendly. After having support hold my hand a few times, I feel like I can almost completely manage everything myself. Still nice to know they're there to help, though.

So far, I haven't had any major complaints. If I had to think of some minor nitpicks, they would be:

1) Scalability. I'm not sure what I will do if we start running out of space. Presumably, we'll just have to buy a whole new HCA with more storage and move everything over. I'd recommend buying way more storage than you need to future-proof.

2) The StarWind Command Center web portal could use some work. It looks nice, however, I find it slow and clunky compared to just remoting onto the nodes and working in the OS. 

I've used the solution for three years.

The stability is rock solid. We haven't had any downtime due to hardware/software issues.

The scalability is not ideal. That said, what physical on-prem solution is? No matter what product you choose you're going to have estimate your storage in advance and hope it lasts a good long while. If scalability is king, then a cloud solution is probably best.

Support has been top-notch. Responses have always been same-day and they always seem to know what they're doing. 

Positive

The initial setup was complex. That said, support walks you through every step. I could never have set it up right on my own. 

I did the setup in-house.

I couldn't give an exact number, however, considering how much downtime we used to have with our old system, I'm sure it has already paid for itself over the past three years.

We have a three-host clustered environment which is being used to host about 85 VMs. We have over 1TB of RAM and about 72TB of storage available. Since we are a cloud host provider, we needed a solution that would allow us to rapidly expand and support our ever-growing user base. It is extremely easy to spin up a server using StarWind Manager. It allows us to create a base image and quickly clone new VMs off that image. We have tons of storage space and we can easily add more resources to a VM on the fly. 

It improved our organization by providing us with more resources to allow us to grow our customer base. 

We were able to make a call and quickly get the assistance we needed and had a cluster built in no time. 

The StarWind array has greatly improved our workflow internally as it is quite easy to use and provides robust features that allow us to provide anything our clients need quickly and efficiently. 

The best part is the ability to fail VMs over quickly and hassle-free. It is extremely easy to make any changes and modifications.

The best feature is the StarWind Manager. It allows us to easily duplicate VMs and manage the infrastructure. Hyper-V is a little clunky, so their software allows for a more friendly interface and easier to manage your servers. 

Another feature I like is the ability to quickly failover in the event of any issues with the three hosts in the cluster. We have had small instances where we need to either perform maintenance on one of the three hosts, or one of the hosts is having an issue. When that is the case, we can quickly drain the roles and force all VMs off that host. 

The only issue we have seen is with the StarWind Server Manager. We have had to continually reboot the server in order to use it. This can be frustrating at times when you want to quickly log in and make changes on the fly. I wish there was a way to make the server more stable so that we don't have to perform a reboot every time. 

Honestly, we do not have too many complaints. The best part about StarWind is the customer support. 

The guys on the team are great and have been willing to work with me at any time of the day as well as on the weekends. 

I've used the solution for two years.

The product is extremely stable. We have only had issues from external sources, for example, our Data Center losing power. Whenever you lose power to a SAN, you run the risk of data corruption. Once we got the power back on, the support team was ready to help get our environment back online. They were able to get all the shared storage synced and vm's started again. To no fault of theirs a couple of our vm's had data corruption on the OS level, however that is the extent of the damage. We were able to restore the vm's from backup and were right back to productivity. Meanwhile we noticed other people in different racks had terrible issues with their SAN's. Some people had complete and total data loss, while others were unable to get their environments to boot. Those people were at a total loss. This is why I was so happy to see how quickly we were able to get back online and get back to production. Between the durability of the cluster and the excellent support, we were back up and running in no time.

This is a great solution that offers robust scaling options.

Customer service goes above and beyond to help you. I've never dealt with a more capable team in my years of doing IT.

Positive

We used VMware and we switched in order to find another solution that was more cost-effective and just as robust.

It was straightforward to set up as the support team got us up and running very quickly.

We implemented it through an in-house team and their level of expertise is exceptional.

I advise users to trust the sales team as they will help point you in the right direction as far as your needs.

We only evaluated our history with VMware and decided to make the switch.

Everyone on the support team and all of their efforts has been great. I know that some of the workers are from Ukraine and my heart goes out to them. I am praying for them and their families. 

Our primary use case of the HCA is to provide a Highly Available, clustered virtualization environment to house all of our internally operational VMs. 

We host all of our internal server infrastructure on the HCA utilizing Hyper-V as our virtualization platform. 

The performance of an all SSD storage array allows us to easily and quickly expand our interal servers as needed without worries of performance degradation.  

The largest benefit to our company was to finally be able to have a no single point of failure setup at a pricepoint that was below that of competing enteprise oriented solutions. 

The HCA appliance replaced aging hardware, formerly cluster-in-a-box solutions, at a savings of over $20,000.00 and provided increased performance and more redundancy. The pricing and discounts given by Starwind on the hardware were unmatched. 

The HCA solution provides increased redundancy in that all storage is duplicated between multiple servers with multiple arrays of drives, rather than depending upon a single storage solution. It also allows us to utilize more cost-effective storage solutions rather than being handcuffed to dual port SSD with their higher price points when the performance far exceeds our needs. 

If you stay with a two or three-node solution, the HCA allows you to eliminate implementing a redundant storage network switch solution providing tons of savings on top of the affordable HCA offering. 

Additionally, the server cluster manager web tool provided by Starwind provides fast information at a glance to give you a complete overview of all virtualization, compute, storage, memory, and network resources throughout your network in a single plane of glass. 

The support and automated monitoring is a huge improvement over our previous vendor's offerings as well. It truly feels like we have a point of escalation on any issues and that provides a large amount of comfort to our small team. 

Shipping options should be explained in detail and offer more white glove delivery options even if it comes at an additional cost for some SMBs without docks. 

Our only pain point has been dealing with the freight shipping initially not showing up when promised, then showing up unannounced, and then sending us some small fees afterward due to the fact that we made them wait (since we weren't expecting them). Starwind has taken care of all of the fees after the fact, however, and they were more than accomodating in resolving the situation. 

We would like more visibility into the reporting that Starwind uses to monitor our solution for errors. We'd like to be able to receive the same data and notifications that their team receives.

We have been using the HCA for almost one year.

So far, we have had zero downtime. 

The product is moderately scaleable. It should fit any SMB and works even in larger organizations. The product allows quick additional of multiple nodes. At a certain point, eventually your storage replication might be better served by dedicated sans rather than the VSAN, or it might be beneficial to check out the newer Storage Spaces in DataCenter edition when it comes to storage scaling up. However, I think the VSAN included with the cluster will meet most small and medium sized deployments by just adding more nodes with additional storage when needed. 

We used cluster-in-a-box from DataON. We switched as they were reaching the end of life and it did not provide an affordable solution to replace it.

The solution offers an easy setup. Support was there to hold hands as needed every step of the way, with a dedicated contact point who took us through the entire process. She was great!

We do not have any warnings to share. 

We looked at options from TrueNas, DataOn, Dell, and HPE. 

We use the StarWind HCA primarily and in its entirety to serve as our primary hyper-converged infrastructure in order to serve all of our virtual servers. In this environment, we have an RDSH server farm utilizing GPU cards. We also utilize backup software that connects directly to this environment. Being able to have our entire environment run on a single platform by a single vendor both hardware and software is huge for us. We don't have the time or resources to go to many vendors or have them point to other vendors as issues.

This solution improved our environment from an increased user experience and administrative experience. We have had much better uptime and product speed since switching to the HCA platform by StarWind. Our organization has required less 3rd party resources and software to provide speed and flexibility to both our IT staff and our end users. The solution specifically allows us to focus more of our time on software development and process changes utilizing the hardware, as opposed to supporting the hardware itself.

The most valuable feature is the flexibility of Hypervisor and there is no vendor lock-in including the hardware the system runs on. I find it powerful and I am able to use the StarWind GUI or the Microsoft back-end Hyper-V. Everything works hand in hand and neither side forces me to do something in a specific way. Being able to log on to the GUI to see specific data and usage statistics, executing clones, starting and stopping VMs, etc., is great.  These all seem like minor things but have had major impact on our productivity.

I have not had any issues or roadblocks as of yet that require any improvement. Everything that I have needed has been available in the product. 

The only issues are when Hyper V itself has limitations and I'd love to see support or enhancement in the area of direct-attached GPU cards. It would be great to see even more detailed analytics and scheduling reports of such to keep a focus on when and if we need to upgrade the environment.  

It would also be cool to see support in the GUI for more 3rd party add-ons.

I've used the solution for almost one year.

We used Scale Computing. We switched due to the fact that we were too restricted with Scale Computing.

We have found StarWind to be well over 50% more cost effective.

We also looked into Nutanix and Scale.

We are a small to mid-sized Eye Clinic that in 2015, had to upgrade our Patient Management & Billing system. Deciding to stick with our current vendor, we migrated to their “cloud” product, which is a hosted RDS Farm solution.

Our two-year experience on their “cloud” was coupled with numerous outages and continual slowness issues on a weekly basis. In 2017, we decided to bring the system back on-premises and so we began looking for a solution to run it along with our other virtual machines.

Fault-tolerance was the primary requirement in our search and having worked with VMware vSAN in the past, we knew that it would be a viable solution, albeit one that would exceed the budget. That's when we discovered the StarWind HyperConverged Appliance, a two-node highly available solution that fell within the allotted budget.

We purchased the StarWind solution and it ran flawlessly for two years, then in late 2019, the unthinkable happened. Our clinic caught fire and the building and all of its contents were destroyed. Knowing we had offsite backups, we just needed the hardware to restore our servers.

In contacting our StarWind account rep, they completely understood the circumstance we were in. They accelerated the order, build, and shipment of the new two-node appliance. As management worked on obtaining an alternate building to restore the service of treating our patients, the servers were delivered to my home so that the restoration process could begin.

The StarWind engineering and support staff were a tremendous help as they assisted in the restoration process. Knowing that StarWind will drop and do what’s needed to help a customer in dire straights has won us over as a faithful customer for life.

Thank you, StarWind!!!

Having a two-node, fully redundant host appliance solution that has been 100% reliable makes it easier to sleep at night.

In our experience with StarWind, the support has been by far the most valuable feature.

When we purchased the StarWind HyperConverged Appliances, they shipped with the Windows-based vSAN solution. Since then, they have released vSAN for vSphere, which is based on a Linux VM and would save us money as we would be able to get rid of the two Windows Server Licenses.

In the future, it would be nice to be able to migrate from the Windows vSAN to the Linux vSAN without having to do a full restore from backups.

We have been using the StarWind HyperConverged Appliance solution for four years.

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.

I have burned a lot of time in the past configuring stuff like this myself, so the ability to pay a little bit of extra money to have something like this delivered, where all of the failovers are already configured, and all of the converged storage is already configured, and it's really just a blank slate to start building Hyper-V workloads on, is valuable. The fact that it's preconfigured and that there is a high level of support, so that I don't need to hire someone in order to do all this, has been my favorite feature.

Also, the hardware footprint is great. We've got two 2U servers which replaced four 2U servers. Granted, they were about three years old at that point, but we actually increased our processing capacity by about 50 percent while keeping our storage capacity about the same. We've actually been able to downgrade to a half rack from a full rack because we've gotten rid of some of our network equipment and some of our additional storage arrays. And the fact that that's all contained within 4Us of space is a complete 180 from the strategy we had before, which was four processing units and a few storage arrays. It's cut down on the amount of cabling we have to deal with by about 80 percent, so it's been a pretty big deal for the data center on the physical side of things.

The improved performance has scaled pretty well with the cost. I wouldn't say that the cost of performance is significantly lower. The main benefit is the cost of configuration and ongoing support. We're probably not saving a significant amount on hardware costs, but if I'm saving some 50 percent of my troubleshooting and hardware support time, we're probably saving, as a rough ballpark figure, $10,000 a year. If I were to hire even a part-time person to take care of just the hardware stuff that I'm now not having to take care of, it would be well over $10,000 a year to have a hardware architect available.

In addition, StarWind HCA has increased redundancy for us. Early on, just a couple of months into the tenancy, we had a pretty major hardware issue with one of the hosts, to the point where it was rebooting a few times a day. That was actually all Dell EMC's fault and had nothing to do with StarWind. Even with that host going up and down several times a day, there was only a little bit of inconvenience during the lag time when a live migration occurred from one server to the other, and we were up and running that entire time. We didn't incur any direct downtime over the course of a week-and-a-half where, literally, 50 percent of our processing units were going down three or four times a day. As frustrating as that experience was, it really helped strengthen my faith in StarWind solutions.

That situation, where Dell EMC servers were going down, has been my only real difficulty. I do understand that we were using refurbished Dell EMC hardware, so that may have played into the difficulties we were having. But at the end of the day, it ended up being something that the wider audience of Dell EMC was actually aware of as an issue. Neither the StarWind technicians nor the Dell EMC technicians were able to actually identify that problem sooner than a week or so. I found after, doing my own diagnosis and my own technician work, that there was actually a solution out there that many people Dell EMC's forums were aware of. The communication between Dell EMC support and StarWind support, in that particular scenario, left something to be desired, for me. 

I did express those concerns to StarWind and they were very responsive to that. They seem to really appreciate the feedback. I'm hoping that there has been a change that has already been enacted by them as a result.

We installed in March of this year, so we're relatively new. I believe we got refurbished, seventh-generation HCAs.

The stability has been great, with the exception of that one issue I mentioned which seemed to be Dell EMC hardware-specific. That even spoke to StarWind's stability in the sense that we had one host going down regularly without downtime.

We've had zero issues directly caused by StarWind. Everything is contained within the VM guests. Those are just configuration and Windows Server problems. This is definitely the most stable hardware we've had, and I've been involved in this business for eight years, on various stages of hardware. These past six months have been the lowest in terms of overhead so far.

The scalability seems really good. I haven't hit the need for scalability yet, but it seems to scale pretty linearly with the exception of storage. 

The idea is that all the storage is needed between all the hosts. So if we needed to increase our processing capacity, that would scale perfectly linearly. We would spend another X dollars to increase our capacity by 50 percent with an identical server.

I haven't explored storage capacity yet because we're a pretty low-storage-capacity company. But it seems like, with their additional products that aren't HCAs, their storage arrays, that you would be able to increase storage capacity on level with your costs as well. So you're not incurring a lot of overhead for interconnectivity or additional redundancy. At least that's my impression.

At the moment we're probably at 60 or 80 percent capacity across the board in all system resources, including networking. It's a really even 60 or 80 percent. If we can grow the business by another half next year, we'll be at 100 percent capacity. At that point, it would start making a lot of sense to look at adding another host because, if one fails and we have to fail over, we would effectively need to throttle everyone backed by 50 percent.

We don't use the proactive part of support a whole lot but that's really because we're a very simple setup at the moment. They've come to me a couple of times when they noticed some things going wrong, but that's usually when I'm in there reconfiguring things or rebooting servers. When our proactive support expires we'll probably renew because of the fact that they've been really on top of issues, whether or not I've already been aware of them. 

The part where support has really saved a lot of time is not really directly due to the proactive part of it. It has had to do with the fact that when I do need help, if storage is running slower, or if I see that there's some kind of memory-usage issue on the hosts, they're usually back to me in probably half an hour, at the very most, with a solution.

The main thing I've enjoyed from them is the really fast response when I do need help with reconfiguring or the like. I actually just reached out last week to try and make some networking changes. I got a response in about five minutes and I had an actual solution, with an advanced-tech ready to help me, within about 30 minutes. I don't know if that has anything to do with the proactive part of their support but I would imagine — putting myself in their shoes — that having a customer who is part of proactive support probably accelerates their response a little bit.

I've been really impressed with StarWind so far. They've been really helpful.

I haven't had to talk to StarWind at all for about a month. The last thing was a major networking upgrade request and I was really pleased with their response time. From a small-shop perspective, this is probably the best experience I've ever had in terms of the backing hardware for the services we provide. It's been very nice.

The solution this replaced was all home-brewed. It was all running on a Windows Server. We had a backplane connected to a few different storage area network arrays. It worked well but it incurred quite a bit of overhead just to manage it. If you've ever heard of people working with just Microsoft Failover Cluster Manager with backplanes, it was a bear, both to physically connect and to manage.

The concept of an HCA was actually kind of new to me, at the time. We had been under the practice of putting processing and volatile memory on one box and putting all of our storage into other boxes. That introduced some issues with single points of failure: If your switch fails then your storage is done and if your network switch fails then your communication is done.

I had started researching Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, which I believe was a new feature in 2016. StarWind must have a lot of search engine optimization related to Storage Spaces Direct, because they ended up coming up, really early, as an alternative. They're very active on Spiceworks and they were constantly in threads about Storage Spaces and putting their product out there. I ended up researching them and the total cost of ownership, hardware-wise, was possibly a little bit higher than bringing up your own, but the fact that support and configuration were included in that price, made it a slam-dunk for us.

The implementation was fairly simple.

I had a really big, heavy pair of Dell EMC server boxes delivered to my workplace. I had to schedule some time to go physically into the data center, which is hosted two miles away from my office. The entire installation procedure was really a matter of unbox, throw the rails in, throw the servers on the rails. Each server then needed two power cords and two SFP connections between the servers themselves. And, bare minimum, they need one management connection to whatever your local Cat 5 switch is. That was it. That was really all that that needed to be configured, hardware-wise. 

Once those were up and running, we spent maybe 45 minutes just getting the initial Hyper-V configuration done, and I was off and running. I was able to create and migrate VMs at will. No downtime, no reconfiguration, and literally nothing else.

All together it took about two hours for completely setting up the hardware and getting Hyper-V ready to create guests.

We didn't have an implementation plan. Physically, we had room in our racks and spaces for the power supplies and the cables. The only planning was that I gave StarWind a half-day's heads-up that I was going to get everything installed. They were on the phone and on a remote support session at pretty much the minute that I was ready to do the software side of things.

I enlisted some help to get things physically installed. Once that was done, it was just me and one StarWind engineer. We had to be on the phone for about an hour in total over that entire process. It was just me and that one person. They seem to have their process petty down pat. He was flying through the configuration and I was just sitting in the back seat watching.

We haven't seen ROI yet because we're a pretty low-sales company. We're just sticking with who we have at the moment because we need some more people who are experienced with this Infor product in order to grow the business much. I would expect that we will break even with our hardware investment within the first quarter of the coming year.

That's not bad at all because that will end up being almost right at the one-year mark. Even if we had to throw those servers in the trash at that point we would be at zero loss.

In terms of the hardware pricing, we ended up going with refurbished machines because we're not in quite as critical a situation as other service providers may be. The pricing is pretty comparable between StarWind and other solutions, if you're just talking about hardware and a general support plan. The value starts to come back in a very real way with StarWind when you talk about the reliability of both the hardware and the support structure itself.

Our entire package was around $35,000 for everything, including three years of support.

We evaluated other options and, overall, the thing that made us go with StarWind was really the community involvement, mostly on Spiceworks. They're on Reddit too. Seeing how active they were in proactive troubleshooting and in answering sales questions for whoever was asking was a big deal. The fact they had extra manpower to handle that kind of stuff speaks really well to how efficient their support structure is.

Look long and hard at your current hardware. There is a significant utility in sticking with a single vendor for stuff like this. If you are at that point where you need to refresh pretty much your entire environment, or a significant portion of it, I would say you should seriously look at StarWind because they would potentially be able to take care of just about everything, hardware-wise, as long as you're a small enough shop and you're ready to really commit.

Up until implementation, in March of this year, we were very reliant on ourselves and sub-contractors to support the hardware configuration and make sure everything was up and running. We had to be super-proactive about being on top of Microsoft issues because anything that is 100 percent reliant on Microsoft can go completely haywire if the wrong Windows Update runs. So the biggest change, and the biggest thing that we learned, is that it's nice to be able to rely on an external company, as long as they know what they're doing. We've been able to call StarWind for anything to do with the framework we're built on or anything to do with the substrate that Hyper-V is running on, no matter what happens, and know they're going to take care of it.

I'm the only one dealing with administration or maintenance of the HCA and it will probably stay that way, just for security concerns. It's a lot easier to stay compliant if I'm the only person that can do any of that. We do subcontract to other people for support of our customer VMs, but that's a whole different game. That's all built on the StarWind framework.

StarWind is an easy 10 out of 10.

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.

We mainly use this as failover and to not have the expense for additional or separate storage. 

Our environment is pretty small and with less than 50 users. We only have two servers in the failover cluster that are part of Starwind Storage. 

Prior to Starwind, we always had to schedule maintenance windows and have all of our services down. Compared to before, our downtimes have decreased substantially and maintenance windows have almost been eliminated. Not to mention, I no longer have to come in on weekends.  

Prior to Starwind, we always had to schedule maintenance windows and have all of our services down. Compared to before, our downtimes have decreased substantially and maintenance windows have almost been eliminated. 

It's also been really great that we can schedule maintenance on the servers themselves during on-hours. Since we are able to migrate our VMs from one node to another, this makes it really simple. 

Of course, there is also the fact that if a node goes down, we have one to back it up and continue with our day without management worrying.

The software itself is actually really simple. There isn't much to it at all. 

GUI navigation is simple and intuitive. UI Options are simple and easy to find. 

From one single interface, I am able to connect and or disconnect to any of our servers and see their current status. 

The UI itself lets you add targets, devices, etc. You can view recent events, performance, etc. 

A nice feature that was recently added was the StarWind Command Center. It allows you to manage all of your clusters from a single point. 

There really isn't much to the software itself. It's not something I use on a daily basis and mostly only when needed. I'd have to say I am usually tinkering with the software maybe on a monthly basis, if that. 

The only area that the product could improve would be user training. I've had to learn most of the ins and outs by myself or by asking questions when I have to get tech support involved and that's pretty rare.

I've used the solution for five years.

Support is top quality and their response is exceptional. It's probably one of the best supports I've dealt with. 

Positive

No, we did not use a different solution previously.

It was straightforward and not complex at all to set up. It did take a little bit of time for the setup, however, we never ran into any issues. 

Implementation was done through a vendor.

The cost wasn't a huge issue for us as it was purchased as a bundle. 

Yes, we looked at other options, however, we needed something ASAP and this was the best solution overall.