What is your primary use case for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

We desperately needed to update yet downsize our data centre. We had six hosts for only approximately 14 or so Virtual machines and two old SANs. All of this was running on 10+ year-old refurbished hardware! As part of our upgrade, we wanted to improve the speed and manageability of our virtual machines and storage. We also wanted to simplify our networking requirements. We also wanted to know that we had reliable support in place in case something went wrong. We wanted to keep things simple, making the infrastructure manageable by a small team of IT staff.

My nonprofit organization purchased a pair of StarWind Hyperconverged appliances almost three years ago. We wanted to simplify our environment while also cutting costs on server equipment. We compared other vendors and settled on StarWind for the cost and excellent reviews. We replaced our old VMware hosts/SAN storage with the StarWind HCA and have since converted numerous physical servers to VMs and have been smoothly running about 50 VMs on our StarWind HCA ever since then, with no downtime.

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.

We were looking to replace aging hardware in our environment. We had the classic two physical hosts with a SAN setup with VMware as our hypervisor. We actually had two SANs since we needed more space. The SANs were not redundant. They were se tup as a pool. We wanted to simplify this setup and also reduce the single point of failure. Being a SMB, we have a small office and rack space is at a premium. We could not fit more than a few more servers on our rack without purchasing a new rack and finding a spot for it.

We are running a small Windows server farm with VMware, and we have chosen StarWind as our solution. It is a hyper-converged cluster connected with 25 GB. The servers themselves are located in different locations to increase security in case of failure. Also, the servers are connected to a server switch cluster to create additional protection. Only the standard servers were set up, such as the domain controller, file server, and app server. The backup strategy was implemented with Veeam and amounts to a synthetic full backup procedure located locally and performed on tape drives.

These are our core virtual servers for an equestrian center/resort. We host our domain controllers, print servers, Quickbooks, remote desktop servers, lock servers, PRTG, horse show management, and several other items on these servers. These servers support our daily operations and connections to users for the horse show staff, restaurants, marketing departments, administrative staff, and accounting department. We maintain our printer connects and many small clients that connect to our horse show database to help manage our show.

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.

We utilize StarWind HCI appliances for our virtualization infrastructure. We needed the ability to deploy application workloads quickly while also maintaining High-Availability and Fault tolerance. We oversee several remote locations and maintain a virtual footprint at each location. We are an agile company, and having the ability to deploy a virtual workload from any of these locations was needed. We also needed to ensure the workloads were backed up and highly available in the event of a host outage.

We currently have it set up with VMware. We use StarWind as a two-node cluster and VMware to host all the servers. All the servers are Windows-based. We use two Lenovo servers with SSDs. We were able to move from three physical servers down to two with the StarWind setup. Also, we wanted a new setup with an easy way to expand. StarWind will allow us to expand with very little setup after our initial configuration. We also set up our servers with multiple 10GB NICs bonded together and were able to separate our traffic easily with the software.

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.

We were running a Hyper-v failover cluster across five servers and six SAN nodes, however, this was becoming dated and we were looking for new hardware to replace this. We looked into a few hyper-converged solutions and Starwind ticked all the boxes and seemed excellent value for money. We are a retail company and were running various workloads including domain controllers, file servers, SQL Server, and app servers. The main workload was MS Dynamics AX 2012 which ran across 13 VMs running various different components. This drastically improved performance.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The product is used to host windows virtual machines. We have various workloads hosted on this environment, from file servers, AD, DNS servers, and IIS servers to SQL databases. We run dozens of production virtual machines on this solution, and use Veeam Backup to backup all the workloads on it. It's a Microsoft Failover Cluster with StarWind storage added as CSV disks. The solutions can be managed via the Hyper-V console, Failover Manager or StarWind console. On the physical side, we have 10GB switches for the management, live migration and cluster communication and physically separate 10GB switches for the storage communication. Storage communication happens over the iSCSI protocol.

We purchased two of these appliances to replace a three-node Hyper-V cluster on Dell blade servers/MXL blade switches with a VNXe3200 as storage. We were able to replace our entire M1000e enclosure and greatly simplified our (admittedly humble) infrastructure. Change from iSCSI over 1GB to local storage was also welcome. These two appliances now house 100% of our VMs and are a breeze to maintain. On-boarding was well supported. We were able to rack, configure, and start migrating Hyper-V VMs in less than a week.

We use the solution to host our development, test, and UAT environments internally. We're running multiple projects side by side. This allows us to quickly create new VMs for new projects, or clone from existing ones. We also utilize it for Infrastructure internal usage servers such as SIEM and Windows solutions. It is hosting Windows 2012, 2016, and 2019 servers as well as a couple of CentOS machines. Currently, we are running around 30 VMs easily. We have gradually increased RAM capacity over the years. Currently, we have two nodes in a cluster and approximately 5TB of disk space.

Our company is using StarWind HCA as the main solution for hosting all of our VMs. This includes productions and dev virtual machines. We have about 30 Microsoft and Linux virtual machines that we are running on Hyper-V on the StarWind HCA. Our HCA runs on two Dell PowerEdge hosts with 2 x 10G each running the StarWind VSAN software. It is an all-flash solution and there is plenty of power left in the system for more virtual machines. Each host's specs are more than enough so that we can run everything on one.

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.

We use the StarWind HCA as the main solution for hosting all of our core VMs. We have about 20 Microsoft and Linux VMs that we are running on Hyper-V on the StarWind HCA. Our HCA is made up of two Dell servers running the StarWind VSAN software. The VMs that we have are mainly made up of general-purpose servers with a few other custom-use servers thrown in. We also use the HCA to host both of our domain controllers, although we don't have them in the cluster, they are still on the appliance.

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.

We are using Starwind HCA for a Hyper V failover cluster at our community college. We use our virtual environment to run nearly all operations at our school. It has slowly grown while replacing old physical hardware with virtual machines. It runs all email, file shares, SQL databases, IT management, PR display devices, and network security software we use to protect our environment. It replaced more expensive and difficult to maintain hardware that was not able to perform all tasks Starwind is able to.

We primarily use the solution just for redundancy. It provides higher redundancy options so that if the server goes down, the other one picks everything up.

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

We were able to consolidate four of our Hypervisors (with no redundancy) into two HCA servers with High Availability. We now have replication across both servers and fewer servers in the rack to power and we are all-flash now. We also implemented the 10G ports on the StarWind Servers, beginning our step into a 10G backbone. This allowed our rack to become significantly less crowded with cable management. Our HVAC is having to run less and I am sure there are some cost savings associated with that as well.

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.

The StarWind HCA solution provided our company with a turnkey hyper-converged platform that strengthened our processing and storage capabilities by greatly expanding our RAM, processors, and flash-based storage. It also enabled us to take advantage of VMware vMotion technology. This allows us to transfer a virtual machine from one host to the other without interrupting production, which is critical in our manufacturing plant. I haven't had to make any software related changes since the solution was implemented.

We used this solution to upgrade a bunch of old stand-alone servers to a cluster. There were at least eight different servers, some up to ten years old, running production loads on Hyper-V. Since everything worked, it was hard to get budget approval. Finally, we got someone to listen and we were able to get momentum on this project. We got the three-node cluster in, and moving everything over was easy with no downtime to the approximately 400 users. Now that everything is on a cluster, the redundancy helps IT sleep at night. We have had to do some maintenance and there has been no interruption.

Our remote office-branch office locations are using StarWind Virtual SAN. I use the vSAN product and it provides the shared solution I need for my VMware hypervisors to be able to use HA and other redundancy solutions. It provides the necessary fault tolerance and continuance of business processes. The HCAs across all sites house more than 200 VMs over multiple networks. StarWind allowed us to create a HA Clustered environment without an expensive SAN while providing hyper-converged capabilities. The units fit us well.

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.

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!!!

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 were running out of storage on our on-prem servers, so originally the HCAs were brought in to combat that and relieve some of the load on the veteran machines. Our file servers, along with one of our file storage, have moved to the HCA. I have put our Exchange server on it and the backup of the domain controller is on it as well. We are using the latest version. We just implemented the HCAs. We added clusters and have moved some of the old virtual machines onto these new HCAs.

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.

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.

I'm a self-employed consultant and I'm currently an interim CTO at one of the largest flour companies in the Netherlands. Here, I have introduced the latest solution of StarWind, the hyperconverged hardware cluster. In the past, it was all software-based. But now I use their latest solution, including hardware. The primary use case is all on-premise. An ERP system is running on it as are a VDI solution and a terminal server, and it is all based on a Hyper-V virtual environment. The complete IT infrastructure is running on the StarWind cluster. The company has about 200 employees.

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.

We've got a two-node, Hyper-V cluster for high-availability. We have it running on Windows Server 2016. It's being used for file servers, database servers, application servers; all on-premise, private cloud-type services.

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

I wanted something for high-availability. We're a logistics company and we have guys working 24/7, to some degree. I needed a solution that was going to provide high-availability. It's all on-prem. It's the two-node, high-availability model.

We are using the system to run our various virtual machines in a Hyper-V cluster. They run services such as SQL Servers, our Skype for Business phone system, some financial applications, various domain services, and SharePoint servers, among other miscellaneous systems. We use StarWind’s HyperConverged Appliance in one of our server rooms and plan on upgrading more legacy equipment at another location next year. We have it set up as a Microsoft Hyper-V private cloud.

We are currently using StarWind HCA to build out a flexible, distributed storage system. We had a myriad of file, application, and database servers that ranged from physical to virtual. StarWind helped us consolidate and make the necessary physical to virtual server moves (P2V), and the entire process was very pleasant. This system also allows us to achieve high availability (HA) across the entire IT infrastructure that we are responsible for, which was a major driving decision. This was all completed at an affordable price point for an SMB, which was also a key element for an NPO.

We had to replace an aging and complex infrastructure. We did so with the hyper-converged appliances from StarWind.

We had non-virtualized and old infrastructure that needed to be upgraded. We use HCA for all of our servers.

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.

Before implementing the StarWind solution, we had standalone servers with Hyper-V on top. With this IT infrastructure, there was no fast and easy way to restore virtual machines (VMs) from backup if a Hyper-V host failed. The process and time it took to restore the VMs from backup were long and tedious. Moreover, there were no constant availability of applications and the necessary protection of the agency’s data. We required a solution with the help of which it would be possible to build a highly available (HA) and fault-tolerant (FT) IT environment at a price affordable for a ROBO’s budget.

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 small business was looking for a reliable and cost effective solution to ensure maximum uptime. We went from a single server to a virtualized hyper-converged infrastructure to allow routine maintenance at our convenience and have peace of mind that a failover system was in place.