StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Reviews

We use this as our primary data center computing and storage cluster for small/medium businesses. The StarWind HCA serves our domain, email, SQL,  storage, files, and other miscellaneous analytics and automation needs.  

We run VMware on our nodes and we host Windows and Linux VMs. This cluster is a priority-one infrastructure component, it cannot fail or go down. We require quick compute as well as high I/O to support VDI users as well as general server type needs. This cluster serves the core of our business.

StarWind HCA has improved our business by ways of reduced management overhead, increased compute and storage performance, reduced rack space requirements, reduced rack power usage, and improved redundancy.  

The reduced management and improved redundancy are probably the most important as it directly increases the time staff can focus on other tasks  Simply put, StarWind HCA "just works". Furthermore, having ProActive Support as a "second set of eyes" allows us to catch issues without constant "babysitting".

We find the improved redundancy, two identical nodes that can focus independently, as well as reduced management both highly valuable.  

The redundancy of two identical nodes that can run alone allows us to have truly "no single point of failure" in our computing and primary storage infrastructure.  This allows us to handle updates or physical server maintenance without a degradation in performance.  

We also appreciate the lack of management needed to handle sync between nodes or just general housekeeping, the nodes just run and work! 

The overall product documentation and knowledgebase articles could use some rewriting and clarification. Sometimes the documents reference old versions which are unhelpful. Other documents were written and seem to be translated into English so the writing is not clear. 

I would also appreciate some more technical documents on how the HCA appliances function, how sync occurs, the use of PowerShell on Linux systems, and some other details. None of this would stop me from recommending StarWind though since you rarely need to review documentation.

I've used the solution for almost one year.

The stability has been great. We have not had the HCA system fail whatsoever. Minor issues are handled gracefully.

We see no issues with scalability. I doubt we will outgrow the system, although we do always like it faster. You can add more storage, more RAM, and more nodes as needed.

Service from initial questions and review, to demo, to purchase, and post-purchase support has been great.

Positive

We previously used standard computing plus a SAN system. We switched to reduce our rack space requirements and improve redundancy.

The setup was very simple. Support helped every step along the way.

This was done in-house. We have some technical knowledge. Again, support was very helpful.

ROI is hard to measure, however, so far, it has paid for itself in reduced management and improved redundancy.

The pricing is very competitive, especially with ProActive support since you gain a "second set of eyes" on the system to monitor for errors which allow staff to not focus on the StarWind cluster all the time.

We evaluated VMware vSAN, however, the cost was too high.

We migrated away from separate storage, computing, and switches to StarWind to enable us to condense and simplify our environment. 

We rely on StarWind to provide all of our storage, via the flash drives in the box, and the compute in a single solution but also to provide redundancy with its replication to another StarWind box. 

We now host all of our VMWare ESXi environments on the StarWind boxes and we wouldn't look back. We haven't had any real-world failures in the time that we have used StarWind but we have been able to prove it works many times during simulated failures and this gives us the confidence to continue using the platform.

It cut down the need to run multiple pieces of hardware to achieve the same goal, this also freed up valuable rack space. 

How quickly the StarWind solution replicates also gives us the confidence to know that in the event of catastrophic failure of any piece of hardware, we won't be far behind before things went wrong. 

We also used the move to StarWind to finally move to an all-flash array away from traditional HDDs, the performance improvement was noticeable right away and we are so glad we did so. 

The replication between the StarWind boxes. As I stated previously, although we have had no real issues, we have been able to simulate failures and be able to see that the failover kicks in immediately. 

This replication also allows us to perform maintenance easily on the ESXi environment for things such as software updates as we can quickly move all of the computing to a single server and shut the other one down without the need for any downtime during the working day. This means less time out of hours is needed to perform tasks that would have previously meant someone had to work late to complete them.

We haven't yet really found anything that we think needs immediate improvement. I am clutching at straws to find something if I am honest so would probably go with product updates. 

It would be nice if the software told you a new version was available and prompted you to do the upgrade to keep everything up to date. At the moment we tend to find out via the support team on the very odd occasion we do have a reason to talk to them. 

Otherwise, we have found it to work flawlessly and without issue. 

I've used the solution for three years.

Support is absolutely fantastic; we couldn't rate them highly enough.

Positive

The initial setup is very straightforward. 

StarWind themselves set up calls to help us get the environment going.

We trust StarWind and our customers support that trust. It makes virtualization easy and seamless. StarWind gives us what our companies need for optimal and secure growth. The solutions provided by StarWind can be implemented in any industry like government, education, manufacturing, services, or even ISP solutions. 

It is the perfect solution for hyper-convergence at a fair price. Our customers have Hyper-V and VMware environments, with Windows servers and Linux.

It works perfectly both in Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization solutions and in VMware virtualization solutions, integrating perfectly with the solutions of said manufacturers. Specifically, most of the solutions that we have implemented have been with Microsoft Hyper-V; its integration is complete.

StarWind provided better performance and amortization of the implementations we did for clients, making their computer system a stable and agile system. The solution is bug-free and highly available

For us, the greatest value that StarWind brings to Geyma and its clients is the proactive support of the implementation carried out. They monitor the servers, hardware, and services that are running at all times, notifying us very quickly if there is a problem with the implemented infrastructure and quickly triggering the alarms to be able to apply a quick and simple solution to the problem that may have arisen.

For this reason, we consider it a complete and reliable solution and we offer it to our clients.

StarWind can be implemented in any sector that requires high availability, reliability, and performance. The engineering team studies, designs, and reliably makes it available to the market. It is a complete solution.

The product fully meets current needs and I have no doubt that StarWind engineers will develop equally good solutions to meet future needs demanded by the industry.

The truth is that the operation and support offered are good, but we consider that the product's usability could improve, as well as the data resynchronization time after an unexpected closure.

We have been partners with StarWind for 8 years. For Geyma and all our clients, what has helped businesses grow is the robustness of the solution, flexibility, high availability, the support offered, and trust in a company that has demonstrated a successful journey. There has been good work in everything they have done

We previously used HP.

The cost is fair.

We evaluated HP.

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 an MSP that offers IT services to SMB companies in our area. We wanted to branch out and start offering hosting services in the form of offsite backup and server. To achieve this we needed a highly available cluster of servers. We started off designing a typical cluster/SAN setup but decided that we wanted the simplicity of hyper-converged architecture instead. In researching HCA we found that StarWind offered exactly that as well of proactive monitoring support for the cluster. Having an extra set of eyes on the health of the equipment was a huge selling point.

StarWind has given us the ability to have a failover cluster without the complications of a SAN network. We are able to offer extra services to our customers that we haven't been able to in the past. Small companies can be wary of the large cloud providers so having a StarWind HCA cluster we were able to give our customers the ability to grow into the cloud while also staying with a company they have worked with and known for years. With StarWind's proactive monitoring we can go about our day helping our customers and not have to worry about our cluster's health.

The most valuable feature is its Proactive support. They monitor the health of the cluster and hardware and reach out if they see anything out of the norm. They will then work with us through the entire resolution process whether it be a hardware issue or an issue with the StarWind vSAN services. If the issue turns out to be hardware related they will then work with the hardware manufacturer and get any replacement parts needed. Their techs are also very knowledgeable and have always been able to resolve any issues without any kind of long drawn out escalation process no matter the time of day.  

Multi cluster support for their Command Console would be very beneficial. Currently, you can only work with a single cluster at a time. The console is new so I expect much growth in this area in the near future. The other area that could be improved is the tech support locale.  Currently, all of their tech support is located in eastern Europe so if you have any issues understanding thick accents it may be a little frustrating. With that being said they have never got frustrated with me asking them to repeat themselves, they've always been very patient.

We've been using it in full production for about seven months.

Stability has been good. We've had one issue with the StarWind service locking up causing full sync to be performed. During this sync, there wasn't any noticeable performance impact by our users.

If you provide your own switches instead of doing their direct connect option you should be able to scale this solution very well. If you go direct connect you are limited to 3 nodes.  Adding additional storage should be easy if you have available hard drive bays.

Tech support has been fantastic. Always willing to help no matter what time of day/night.  I've never had to have an issue escalated as the first contact tech has always been able to solve any issues/questions.

This is my first venture into the HCA world.

StarWind performed most of the initial setup for us. We racked the equipment and then they remoted in and configured everything. We did not have any existing VMs to migrate so it was a simple setup.

Cost is very reasonable and shouldn't catch anyone off guard if you've looked at other HCA devices.

We also looked at Nutanix, HP Simplivity, VxRails, and Scale.

We used to have four Dell EMC PowerEdge hosts running various versions of Microsoft Hyper-V with no redundancy.

We are also running out of storage space and have been dealing with an increasing complexity of Windows Server licensing.

We investigated and received proposals from three vendors (Dell EMC, Scale Computing and StarWind). Ultimately, the main decision point was cost. StarWind is the only vendor that only needs two nodes to set up the cluster. Not only have we saved on the extra node, but we also don't have to license another Windows Server Datacenter edition.

Our StarWind HCA has been in production over 12 months, and we have had no issues or single downtime so far.

It has achieved our goals of centralizing storage management because of the StarWind Virtual SAN, added fault tolerance, and simplified Microsoft server licensing, by using the Datacenter edition.

• StarWind Virtual SAN. We no longer have to manage storage via multiple local server disks.
• Added fault tolerance helps everybody sleep easier at night knowing we can lose an entire node without affecting production.

It could potentially be less reliable due to the Hypervisor, and the cluster relies on Microsoft Windows Server. However, we have not had any issue since putting them in production 12 months ago.

We have not had any issue since putting it in production 12 months ago.

It's good for what we do — an SMC with hybrid cloud.

Tech support has been quick, has a very quick response, and they also provocatively monitor the appliance's status.

No.

Fairly straightforward because StarWind handles most of the setup. We did handle the network setup because we added redundancy at the switch level.

A combination of vendor team and in-house team. Their level of expertise is good.

We reduced manpower on managing servers and storage. It helps us by not having to hire an extra IT person.

It's the only vendor that allow two nodes, all other vendors I researched at that time (late 2017) requires at least three nodes.

Yes, we evaluated Dell EMC VxRail and Scale HC3.

We are an SMB that hosts our ERP on-site. Our infrastructure is shared with a group of inter-related companies, so uptime is critical since several entities rely on our core services. StarWind HCA is the core of our network and hosts all of our critical VMs. We needed a cost-effective HA solution that was easy to manage, as we have a very small IT department that is concentrated mostly on business process improvements. The last thing we need is complex systems to manage taking our focus away from that.

We went from a vSphere compute cluster with an external SAN made by a company that is in perpetual financial trouble and have shifted business focus several times. Not only was our traditional SAN expensive, but we also had no confidence in the vendor. StarWind HCA is commodity hardware, so we eliminated the proprietary hardware issue. 

We also substantially reduced network complexity by eliminating that standalone SAN. That reduced complexity has allowed us to concentrate on improving other areas of our network.

Proactive support has been great, you will receive an email from StarWind soon after their telemetry service sees anything out of the ordinary with either the StarWind services or any critical issue related to your cluster of VMs. The appliance support goes beyond my expectations by helping with some Hyper-V issues that may not be directly related to the StarWind services.

The most valuable feature is its simplicity. It really isn't any more difficult to manage than a standard Hyper-V cluster.

Communication could have been improved during the implementation process. I've also been looking forward to further development of their management console which has been slow to materialize. StarWind is promising full cluster management and backup integration in a single-pain-of-glass console.

Possible new features could be CSV-level snapshot capability, Veeam integration, and maybe a more straightforward setup. Granted, you don't have to worry about setups with the HCA, but if you want to implement StarWind vSAN in a lab to test it is a tedious setup process.

We've been running our StarWind HCA for about two years.

Technical support has been willing to help and train even on simple questions.

We previously had a vSphere cluster with a standalone SAN. We wanted a less complex solution.

The initial setup is really easy. StarWind handles it.

In-house with StarWind help.

The HCA price is all-inclusive (setup, hardware, support, warranty), except for your standard Microsoft Server licensing.

We evaluated Cisco and DataCore.

We are a small school with 700 users. We replaced an eight-year-old HP system (two HP DL360 G7s and an HP StorageWorks X1600) with a two-node HCA cluster.

Our two goals were to improve performance and add high availability. Even before implementation, the StarWind team analyzed our current workload to determine which HCA would be appropriate for us. This allowed us to make a decision based on data rather than guesswork.

Performance has been excellent, and we have really noticed a big improvement from our old system. Our other goal, improving fault tolerance, was immediately realized with the installation of the second HCA node. We have been running flawlessly since day one with zero downtime. The second node also allows us to perform maintenance without having to take servers offline.

The management interface is really easy to use. Updates are much less painful, and the proactive support is fantastic. New command center is a nice addition.

We are happy with the product, and my only suggestion would be a better process for an unplanned power outage.

Four years

We have been pleased so far. Zero downtime. 

It meets the needs of smaller organizations. I think they are upfront that the HCA solution is not tailored towards large organizations.

They have proactive support which prior to using StarWind, was a new concept for us. It's incredible. We spend less time troubleshooting and more time on other important tasks. 

Positive

We used an HP StorageWorks X1600 for our shared storage with two HP DL360 G7s as our hosts. We switched due to performance issues (slow backups) and to increase fault tolerance since we only had one shared storage device.

So simple. The StarWind team does most of the initial configuration, and we finished on site. We were up and running in two days.  

75% vendor team and 25% in-house. Expertise was top notch which is to be expected since it's their product.

N/A.

Do your research. You will find that nothing compares to the value you get with the HCA appliance. If you have a limited budget, the decision is an easy one.

Yes. We evaluated Nutanix, HPE, Dell, NetApp, Scale.

We have been running Starwind for four years now and it's still rock solid and one of the best decisions we've made.