StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Reviews

We use the solution as a high availability failover cluster in our data center.

StarWind HCA is much more reliable than our original failover cluster solution. Not even just by being more modern hardware, the virtual SAN allowed us to dramatically decrease our footprint and power consumption in our data center and is much simpler to manage. 

Any issues we've had along the way have been Windows issues as opposed to problems with the StarWind vSAN software.

Reliability and overall uptime are key as we're also hosting client environments in addition to our own. Bumps along the way have been resolved with the help of StarWind's fantastic support, and, as previously mentioned, pretty much any and all issues we've had have been Windows issues as opposed to their software, which their support has been happy to help troubleshoot and is refreshing to see

The proactive monitoring is nice. Knowing that they're watching for issues simultaneously with us. 

However, the response time is usually several hours after the issue occurred. Any disruption is felt immediately by the users, so we're already troubleshooting within a few minutes, and we reach out to support if needed before the proactive alert comes through to us.  

We've used the solution between three and four years.

We use StarWind managed HyperV service for virtualized servers and redundancy servers. The StarWind support alerts us if there are any issues with the HyperV servers. Their phone support is professional and great.

The central management, redundancy, and 24/7 alert systems are managed via a service provider. This is a key component that we are looking for. The HyperV servers come preconfigured and the product sales specialist recommends hardware specs as needed for our environment. 

In case of updates for the firmware and StarWind software, StarWind support contacts us since it is managed service. They remotely do the upgrade - which is great. 

Our organization has improved via:

• Internal/operational efficiencies via the central management
• Improved compliance and risk management
  
• Cost management
  
• Product functionality and performance
• Strong proactive customer service and support
• Managed Support and service for the HyperV environment
• Alert Notifications via email 
• Redundancy and 24/7 alert system via the managed service provider
• User-friendliness of the interface
• Great phone support 
• Managed updates such as Firmware and StarWind Software
• Sales specialist recommendations in the case of hardware upgrades

Instead of having multiple servers and managing them separately, we could have redundant HyperV servers. This creates efficiencies in terms of the management of the servers.

The central management of servers and StarWind software that can show us the health status of the servers are great. 

Product functionality and performance are wonderful.

Customer support is proactive and contacts us if anything needs to be paid attention to with good follow-ups.

The user-friendliness of the interface is great.

Redundancy of Hardware via RAID and power system is good for critical environments. 

Overall, we are happy with the level of service, in the past due to time zone differences, getting to phone support later in the afternoon sometimes meant not getting a hold of second-level technical support on the same day, however, this has been improved in the past year. Normally we can get to first-level support immediately and then if an escalation is needed, we schedule a time with second-level support later. A possible thing is perhaps a customer portal to schedule a time with support online via a calendar.

I've used the solution for more than two years. 

This is used for a two-node VMware Horizon View Cluster. This cluster supports our VMware Horizon View environment. We are a smaller environment supporting about 65-70 users. This disk is all SSD. We support a variety of users from typical office production staff to CAD, Adobe, and some light 3D work. So far the users have been pleased with the performance, even with Adobe products - which is saying something. 

We have a small on-site data center. All files and prints are on HP DL-380s with HP and Meraki networking. 

This was at a hardware refresh. I was replacing the old three-node cluster with a two-node cluster and going from discrete software/hardware to a Hyper-Converged Appliance. Obviously, the performance was outstanding, however, at a hardware refresh, it better be!

I have noticed a definite increase in performance all around. I would say we were most limited in our previous cluster by disk. There just is no comparison to SSD. 

Even with that said, the HCA screams. I've very satisfied. Install, setup and migrations were foolproof. I love that it's being monitored 24/7. I have previous experience with StarWind support and I know it is excellent. 

Having already been familiar with StarWind there really weren't any big surprises but SSD will always be faster than spinning disk of course. I do like that I can manage StarWind with a console running on my local desktop. There is not a lot of management that needs to be done but it's nice not having to go to the Windows server running StarWind, since it is all running on an "appliance" now. I also appreciated the way support walks you through all the startup and migration phases. I appreciated that they were always there to assist and instruct.

My only two cons are sort of minor and one definitely biased towards my taste in hardware vendors. The first "con" is that the hardware is Dell. I much prefer HP servers. I have had a much better experience with HP than with Dell. As I said that's just my preference. Since the hardware is a covered item I can't complain too much. I really don't have much to deal with.

Although the setup documentation was very complete and succinct, I found StarWind documentation to be a bit sparse. Not a lot of this is how this all works type of documentation. Not much on the way of reference. It is totally supported so I guess I can't complain too much. 

I have been using the HCA for four months but have been using StarWind for several years. 

StarWind from my experience is extremely stable. I have used the StarWind VSAN product for several years and other than self-inflicted issues it has been rock solid. I expect the HCA to be even more stable since it is all "in the box".  It has been the best storage solution I have used with VMware. I have used a variety of SANs previously. The whole virtualized SAN concept, I believe, is the smarter choice technology wise. With a smaller environment as we have, two node cluster, it makes more sense and is cheaper than VMware's VSAN product. 

It is highly scalable. Fortunately, we are on the lower-end side of scaling. 

They offer some of the best customer support I've ever had.

Positive

I used StarWind vSAN on my own hardware. I switched as it made more sense all the way around. It comes mostly set up and ready to go.

The setup was simple. They will set up your nodes ahead of time. Then, they walk you through the rest of the process.

I did the in-house part and they supported all the rest.

Our ROI is unknown.

I liked that there were no surprises. The costs were all conclusive and included everything that I needed, including migration assistance. 

I was already very satisfied with StarWind vSAN.

I thoroughly recommend this product. I wouldn't hesitate to chose it again. 

The solution provides hyper-converged storage for cluster virtualization hosts and is used alongside Hyper-v for a highly secure, robust, resilient storage solution. Its works with all hypervisors on the market today.

My use case saw it removing SAN architecture in favor of hyper-converged storage directly attached to my hosts, in testing the speed of which is comparable to any other storage solutions available.

It has allowed me to expand my virtualization footprint whilst reducing my overall physical server footprint.

It has removed the need for large shared storage that is not directly attached to the virtual hosts make it a deal to deal with, it also self heals in the event of any major incident or down time, along with the 24/7 support and the most knowledgably staff when needed.

It has allowed me to expand my virtualization foot print whilst reducing my overall physical server foot print.

This solution has allowed me to remove other storage solutions reduce physical footprint of equipment as well as power usage.

The easy way everything can be configured and ready to run in less than a day is great. 

The support staff knows the product inside out and any issues that were thrown up they knew how to resolve immediately.

The ongoing maintenance and monitoring are key to the product catalog and allow for smooth and seamless ongoing use. 

It is helping reduce out-of-hours calls and it also helps with identifying predicted failure patterns, to assist in the very most uptime of production servers 365 days a year and 24/7.

Not much can be improved, to be honest. The solution is clean, quick to install, and has had no issues since the day we started using it. The features are improving every version level, however, I cannot think of anything I would really require to change at this moment in time.

It also offers an exclusive version of StarWind Virtual SAN which can be installed on just a few nodes in a much bigger cluster. There’s absolutely no need to enable it and pay license fees for all of the nodes. 

Some vendors will currently ask you to pay for all nodes in a cluster. StarWind Virtual SAN does best breed of scale-out and scale-up approaches combined in a single cluster.

I've used the solution for six months.

I have done vigorous testing prior to live install and the stability of the system is excellent.

The scalability is amazing as it allows for a scale-out and scale-up approaches combined in a single cluster.

Every time I have called, I have gotten the person I need along with an answer to my questions.

Positive

I just used a SAN Storage solution. I switched for reduced physical servers and power consumption.

The initial setup was a breeze. StarWind support did it all for me.

The StarWind in-house team did it all for me and I would rate them ten out of ten.

Currently I do not have any ROI figures.

StarWind can help identify exactly what you need and help identify the best hardware for the best price.

We looked at Dell Equal Logic SAN Storage solutions.

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. 

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Positive

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

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

We implemented the solution directly with StarWind. 

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

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

We 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 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 condensed an entire rack of servers/switches and SAN storage nodes down to 4U for two Dell R730xd's, we had more storage, and it was much faster all around. It improved all services running on the new cluster and took up less space and less energy.

Our ERP system performance improved for all users. Lengthy overnight batch jobs were suddenly completed much earlier and enabled us to re-shuffle a lot of tasks into a smaller time window.

We are also finding it easier to maintain two host servers rather than the previous five.

The stability of the system has been the most valuable part. I never have to do anything, it just runs and runs and runs.

We haven't had any problems with Starwind, but some of our VMs have had issues and the proactive support from Starwind meant they knew about the issues before I knew and they were on it straight away. 

When we needed to make some upgrades to the server I contacted Starwind to discuss the changes and they were very helpful and easy to contact. The support is probably better than I have used compared to any supplier.

I cannot think of any way to improve it. They recently added a web-based interface that runs on a small footprint VM. This has massively improved the visibility of system metrics and made interacting with the product much easier.

I honestly cannot think of anything else to be improved, as I rarely have to interact with the Starwind product. My main interaction is with the Microsoft Hyper-V failover cluster running on the Starwind kit and the VMs themselves, which never need any attention from me.

I've used the solution for four and a half years.

The solution is very stable and never has any issues.

The solution is easily scalable. We purchase new nodes or expand the existing nodes if you can, which we have done.

Customer service and support is the best I have experienced with any supplier.

Positive

We use HP servers and an HP Lefthand SAN, however, this was too slow to run our SQL workloads.

The solution was very straightforward and we felt fully supported by the Starwind team.

This product is well priced with very good value for money and the support team is great so the setup is no problem.

We looked at Dell EMC, Nutanix, Scale, and Nimble.

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.