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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pros and cons

Vendor: StarWind

4.8 out of 5

66 reviews
98% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance simplifies setup with preconfigured options and enhances maintenance with live migration for high availability. ProActive Premium Support reduces monitoring needs, freeing staff for other tasks. Redundancy boosts resilience, ensuring operation during failures. It offers cost-effectiveness with compact design and budget-friendly pricing. Hardware subscription plans improve updates. However, initial setup can be challenging, and the virtual machine's memory use affects resources. Response time post-issue takes hours.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance offers high availability, ensuring that critical data and applications are always accessible despite potential hardware failures.

The device comes preconfigured, simplifying the setup process and allowing for plug-and-play functionality that enhances ease of use.

Customer support has been rated highly, with proactive premium support services that minimize monitoring efforts and quickly resolve arising issues.

Redundancy features are prominent, providing robust failover capabilities to maintain operations smoothly through various scenarios.

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance greatly reduces the hardware footprint by integrating multiple functionalities into less physical space, leading to cost savings and reduced energy consumption.

CONS

A hardware subscription plan for routine updates in conjunction with the hyper-converged software is desired.

The StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is not entirely enterprise-ready and is more suitable for SMBs.

Initial configuration is technical and error-prone, requiring StarWind to perform it as a service.

Communication between Dell EMC support and StarWind support could be improved.

Documentation could be clearer and more comprehensive for administrators.

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Pros review quotes

AW

Civil Engineer at Crossroad Engineers, P C

Jul 16, 2018

This solution came preconfigured. All we needed to do was plug it in and move our VMs.

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BP

Works

May 29, 2019

We no longer need multiple staff members performing small, mundane tasks.

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PG

PieterGrootendorst

Technical Consultant at GMA

Jul 1, 2019

The initial setup is straightforward once you know what you're doing.

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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Free Report: StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about StarWind HyperConverged Appliance. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.

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KS

Kristopher Skully

Systems Administrator at Hospice of the Western Reserve

Aug 29, 2019

The biggest thing we were looking for was redundancy, with both the compute and the storage, so that way we could lose a full node and still keep everything up and running, and not have to worry about it... StarWind was able to provide a solution for what we wanted, - to provide for redundancy.

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DR

CEO CIO at Store & Haul Inc

Sep 5, 2019

High-availability is what I bought it for.

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CM

IT Manager at Projects Inc.

Oct 15, 2019

The hardware footprint is perfect. It fits in our rack perfectly, and we were able to condense a lot of physical servers we had. It has greatly eliminated the excess stuff in our server rack...

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CK

IT Manager at a transportation company with 51-200 employees

Oct 20, 2019

Overall, the solution has improved our system's performance. I was concerned about the physical-to-virtual conversion of our database server. It's actually much faster now, as a virtualized host on this Hyper-V cluster.

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AL

IT Infrastructure Analyst at a retailer with 201-500 employees

Oct 30, 2019

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.

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Interim CTO at Royal Koopmans

Nov 13, 2019

The most valuable feature is the high-availability. We have three nodes, and all data will be synched instantly through all the nodes. Even if we had a disaster where two nodes failed, containing dozens of critical machines, almost automatically, all the loads would be run on the remaining node.

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HM

Owner at Data Barn

Dec 19, 2019

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.

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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Cons review quotes

AW

Civil Engineer at Crossroad Engineers, P C

Jul 16, 2018

A desired feature or service is the ability to have a hardware subscription plan that ensures routine hardware updates in conjunction with the hyper-converged software.

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BP

Works

May 29, 2019

The only thing my team has recommended improving on is possibly a StarWind-customized GUI to monitor the overall system health, similar to 5nine Manager.

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PG

PieterGrootendorst

Technical Consultant at GMA

Jul 1, 2019

This product is not one hundred percent enterprise-ready, so it is more suitable for SMB.

Read full review

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Free Report: StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about StarWind HyperConverged Appliance. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: January 2026.

881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.

KS

Kristopher Skully

Systems Administrator at Hospice of the Western Reserve

Aug 29, 2019

We haven't had to use the ProActive Premium Support feature much yet. But they contacted me one time because there was a glitch on one server, a networking issue... I have not seen the problem since.

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DR

CEO CIO at Store & Haul Inc

Sep 5, 2019

The only thing I have run into is that I did want to add more hard drives into the host, so that we could look at doing a RAID 10, and the hard drive prices were pretty expensive... that's pretty nit-picky and I don't think it has anything to do with StarWind itself. I think it's more on whomever they work with for their hardware.

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CM

IT Manager at Projects Inc.

Oct 15, 2019

I wish I understood what goes into the StarWind software a little bit better. To me, it's kind of magic the way some of it works. As an IT professional, you don't really want things to be magic. I do wish there was a little more "Here's how it works." There could be more documentation given to administrators...

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CK

IT Manager at a transportation company with 51-200 employees

Oct 20, 2019

The only critique I might have is that the support is overseas in Eastern Europe and, on occasion, there has been a language issue. But in general, they're as good as can be...

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AL

IT Infrastructure Analyst at a retailer with 201-500 employees

Oct 30, 2019

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.

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Interim CTO at Royal Koopmans

Nov 13, 2019

At the moment, the initial configuration is very technical and error-prone. That is the reason Starwind does it for you as a service, which is a great thing. But it would be nice if we could change or rearrange storage assignments ourselves.

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HM

Owner at Data Barn

Dec 19, 2019

That situation, where Dell EMC servers were going down, has been my only real difficulty... 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... 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.

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

Popular Comparisons

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Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

VMware vSAN vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

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