StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Reviews

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.

Using the StarWind solution, I was able to consolidate all the servers, hardware and firmware, with a three-node StarWind cluster, based on Hyper-V. As a result, in this company, I have seen gains in I/O rates on the order of ten times what they were and a better performing environment.

Overall, the solution has definitely improved our system's performance. When I started with this firm last year in May, they really had a poor performing environment. The StarWind solution has made everything at least ten times faster.

The fact that it has helped increase the redundancy and failover capabilities is implicit. It's a hyperconverged solution. It's all-inclusive. It runs all the time and the technology takes care of failures. It works as it should.

The solution has also saved us money.

StarWind delivers what they promise. In this case, the client is a company working in the food sector and they don't have innovative demands. What I have implemented for them has already brought them ten years ahead of where they were.

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. So it features high-availability and provides business continuity. They are the most important elements for me.

It's also fine-tuned, so the performance is the second most valuable feature. It provides great performance. I've only seen I/O performance like this in solutions that are ten times more expensive than the StarWind solution. In the SMB market segment, you cannot sell Dell EMC-like solutions. Thus, StarWind would be the best solution with the best price for the performance that you receive.

I only have three nodes, so the footprint is very small, yet I can provide all the IT services that the company requires, including a very demanding ERP system. It would fit in a half-rack if you put everything in one place. But of course, it's high-availability, so you have to spread it between locations. But the footprint is really small.

In addition, we have full support from StarWind, 24/7. They know about issues in our environment before we know about them. They see, for instance, network errors before we do and what implementations we have. They send a message to us and our engineers respond with a local, physical check on what is happening. Although the environment of StarWind is great, the overall network environment of the company where I'm working is not so good. StarWind notices when there is something wrong in the network, an issue which might affect the performance or the availability of the StarWind solution. We instantly know whether our problem is in the network, before we actually know about it ourselves, by their sending us emails about the site being down or an error.

A past problem that they fixed was related to split-brain syndrome. 

The only thing that is lacking would be a fool-proof GUI for system administrators. 

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.

My history with StarWind goes way back to somewhere around 2008 or 2009 so it's been over ten years. When they first started introducing the so-called virtual SAN solution, I owned a cloud computing business. At that time I was looking for an affordable storage solution that was scalable and highly available. 

Later on, I moved towards an IT consultancy business where I was asked to solve a problem with an ERP system in one of the Dutch government agencies. Because I'm also an IT architect, I noticed that had a big challenge with I/O. So I designed a solution for them around StarWind, also based on a highly-available solution they offered. The application, before I provided my solution, had query response times of over 60 seconds, and some queries even ran for a couple of minutes. Using the StarWind solution, 80 percent of the transactions completed in less than two seconds. That really was a big performance gain from using the StarWind solution. That was about five years ago.

StarWind is almost infinitely scalable. It depends on the use case. You can scale it on-premise or you can scale it towards the cloud. And then you get the disaster-recovery option included because you can easily move the machines from on-premise to a StarWind solution in the cloud. But for my current client, the cloud is not an option, with all its manufacturing equipment in-house. You have to have the computer system close to the points of contact.

I praise them for their support and the willingness to always be available. I would rate their support at ten out of ten because they are the best. I have experience with a lot of other companies, like Dell EMC. StarWind goes much further than other companies, without asking for money for it. You can get similar support from Dell EMC or IBM or HPE if you are willing to pay big-time. Compared to all the others, they are really great.

A hyperconverged cluster had never been used at this company, but from a storage point of view, LeftHand was used. The company moved to StarWind because I advised it. I know StarWind, how it performs and how good it is. To me, there was no other option. I will always start with StarWind, for all clients I will service in the future. I know it's good, it performs well, and the price is right.

The initial setup is absolutely straightforward. Just open the box and follow the instructions, do the cabling, and you're set. And StarWind gives good implementation support. The moment it has been set up and is running, they will do a complete operational test. The moment they say, "Okay, the system is good to go," you're able to use it. It's a matter of one or two days.

The deployment plan for the company I'm currently at was to virtualize all the operating systems, to get rid of all the hardware and consolidate. They had outsourced their systems services. By putting it back on-premise and hiring two full-time equivalents, I saved 50 percent of my IT budget.

The pricing model is very straightforward. I always go for the maximum, enterprise-level. It includes all the services I need and availability guarantees. It's a turnkey solution. It's a whole package, including five-year support on everything.

There are not so many companies that offer hyperconverged solutions, the way StarWind does. HPE doesn't offer it. Dell EMC doesn't offer it, although they do offer a solution combined with Cisco. There is no real comparison, other than parties that are working together. The closest to this would be the Dell EMC/Cisco solution, and that is four or five times more expensive.

If I have to decide, if I can choose, I will never evaluate other options. I know the market. I have been in the IT business for over 35 years. I know what's good and I stick with what's good and I don't need to compare every other solution in the world.

I would advise you to let StarWind be in control. Let them guide you through the process. If you follow the procedure they offer you, it will be an easy implementation.

Overall, I have more than ten years' experience with StarWind. They are a trustworthy company and they are a very technical company, meaning that they like to solve all the issues. For instance, in all the projects that I have done with StarWind, when we did the implementation at any client or customer, they provided us with remote support and they didn't leave until everything worked as it was supposed to, and they did so without any additional financial implications. It all comes with within their service. I can only praise them for all they do, what they deliver, the service, technology, and performance. They do what they do and they're very good at it. It sounds too good to be true, but that has been my experience.

The product does do everything I expect, and at a high level, so I would also rate it a ten out of ten.

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.

By using this solution we have reduced some of our physical machines and virtualized them. We've consolidated some other standalone, virtual hosts into the single cluster. It's really helped that P-to-V movement and reduction of other hardware and services.

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. A lot of it has to do with updated hardware. The previous hardware was probably ten years older, but still, we were concerned about that overhead with virtualization and it's not present.

The fact that it has eliminated a separate SAN has been really handy. We moved away from an older SAN and that's one of the reasons we got this. The synchronization has also worked really well. From a feature point of view, it does what it's supposed to do and that's the best you can hope for.

The ProActive Premium Support feature has helped for sure. If there's an issue that we don't know about, we get an alert email. They are very proactive. Where it has created an even greater benefit for us is purely on support. If we have a problem, I can send an email and within an hour somebody's trying to set up a remote session with us.

It's very stable. It does everything it's supposed to do. The monitoring points out any issues with connectivity or downtime.

One of the reasons we got it was that we could deploy with as few as two nodes. We're not a large environment and a lot of solutions out there started at three nodes and more. This was attractive because it was just two. I understand it could scale but we're not going to scale it.

We have approximately 100 users using basic Windows functions like file shares. The common user would you utilize those things which are running off of this solution.

We don't require much staff for maintenance. We only have two onsite administrators, me and someone else. Between us we can handle the Windows updates and additions of VMs if we need to.

I would commend the support. They have very knowledgeable people. If they don't have the answer, they quickly access colleagues who do have the answer or more experience. They're very fast.

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, considering they are non-U.S. citizens speaking English. The language barrier is not even as bad as it is for some other products we have.

We never had anything that was hyperconverged like this. We had a standard pair of Windows servers that were utilizing a SAN appliance. That equipment was becoming very old and with the StarWind solution we could eliminate the SAN component altogether.

The setup was straightforward. We completed a survey which provided information to configure the appliance and they did that before shipping it to us. By the time we received it, it was very simple to physically install and get it on our network. Everything else was pretty much configured.

The most time in the process was probably due to moving and converting the virtual machines. It wasn't the nature of the product itself, it was just our workloads on it. The whole process, once we received it until we were up and running in production, took about four weeks.

Our implementation strategy was to make it a secondary environment. We transitioned from our old Hyper-V host structure to this one, one VM at a time. We had some flexibility to keep up and running in both the older and the newer environments, as we were completing the transition.

We handled everything directly.

This isn't like a revenue-generating purchase. It's more about risk-avoidance by not continuing to use aging hardware, and it's about the elimination of additional components like a SAN. We've reduced the points of failure and increased stability, but it's not like we're going to make revenue out of this.

At this point, the solution is probably costing us money but you get what you pay for. We have newer hardware and the support is very good. The service makes sense for what we're paying for it. But when you're going from equipment you've owned for ten years to buying brand new equipment, it's not really saving you much money.

There was a one-time, upfront cost but I don't know what the recurring cost is. I imagine it's the standard 18 to 20 percent maintenance. Nothing stands out as unusual about this solution in my memory, so whatever is standard for keeping support and hardware is what this solution would cost.

There are no other costs that I'm aware of.

The only thing I could compare it to is the cost of Windows Server and Windows licensing in general, but not to a specific StarWind-type of product. The fact that some of the other solutions that I researched operate on a minimum three-node basis — not a minimum of two nodes — that factor alone would make the cost of StarWind less.

I don't think we considered anything else like this. Our other choice would have just been to update our SAN and update our other Windows servers: keeping the old model but with new hardware.

Know what your needs are. Know your requirements. Know your environment. Those are the typical things you ought to know before investing in something like this. Beyond that, ask any questions you have and think about the future.

I got most of the recommendations for this product from reading online user forums. The users are always pretty accurate and this was no exception to that. A lot of people didn't have the HCA, the hardware-based solution, but they had the software-based component of StarWind and really liked it. They said how good the performance is. All of that is true.

From a product point of view, it's been ideal. I did my research beforehand and got an idea of what it would offer and it's done everything that I thought it would, plus things I wouldn't have considered. It's stable.

It's a typical rack-mounted device. Each unit is two U's so it takes four U's of rackspace. It's like anything else we've got.

The solution doesn't really help to increase redundancy or failover capabilities because we already have a cluster. This is just refreshing it with better hardware and removing the SAN element from it. It hasn't increased reliability but it has given us continued life, to move forward.

I would rate it at ten out of ten because we know what we need to know to run it and, if we don't know, support provides it and they're very responsive.

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.

It's just taken over the job of something that was going out-of-support. The only thing that we have really noticed as being a massive improvement — because of the live migrations, because it's disk-based rather than iSCSI — is that it is super-fast now.

It's fairly instant. Before, live migrations meant we had to leave it on a countdown. So if we had to move stuff around quickly, we had to do some quick live migration. It would take a few minutes and only one could be done at a time. There is an improvement in having a new Windows Server. The 2008 R2 Server that we replaced didn't have PowerShell for Hyper-V, but obviously this version does. We've just scripted it and, bang, with the improved response times from it being disk-based instead of iSCSI, trying to shove an 8 Gig memory file through goes a lot quicker. It's not really something that's saved our ops at any time but the improved performance is pleasing.

It hasn't increased redundancy or failover capabilities, it has just like-for-like replaced. We did have three servers, two switches, and a disk array, whereas now we just have two servers. There's a big chunk of less stuff doing the same stuff. So we've consolidated. We're doing the same with less. It has saved us money in the sense that there is less stuff to pay out warranty on.

We bought their ProActive Premium Support. That's why they email us when we have rebooted to patch, and they check with us that everything is okay. We've not really had any problems with it, so it has not really presented with any real-world benefits yet. Obviously there are benefits to it because it's monitored. We do monitor stuff onsite, but it's good to have backup. We're a small team so that is one of the major benefits of it.

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. As part of the installation, the StarWind representative took me through it. We just migrate everything to the other server, put it into maintenance mode, increase the size, and commit.

There really isn't any maintenance. It's fairly self-sufficient. 

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. They asked for some email addresses for iDRAC and the like. We thought, "Oh good, it's Dell. We're familiar with that kind of hardware infrastructure." Our other servers here are Dell so we know how the Dell ecosphere works. But then, these weren't Dell. These are Supermicro, which, when you boil it down, are the same Intel parts. But it's a little reminiscent of putting together OEM PCs. That's how the servers look. But they're in and they're working.

What you're not paying for, and that may be why it was £36,000 instead of £110,000, are those Dell Concierge services. They've got a well-rounded, iDRAC infrastructure and we could integrate it into our other stuff. We're all used to how all the ILO stuff works on it. But here it's, "Oh, Supermicro. It all looks a bit '2002.'" It's not what we weren't expecting but it works.

The stability has been great. There have been no problems, not a hiccup or anything. So far, it seems fine.

It would be fairly easy to add to it. We could add a third node with another card.

Tech support is very prompt, very friendly. They're knowledgeable. I don't think I have come across anything that they couldn't answer.

It was just a straight one-for-one swap. Decomplication was really was the main driver for it. If you're troubleshooting problems on Windows Server core on iSCSI and logging into a bit of an unfriendly VNX with no info panel on it, and if it was struggling, it had a lot of trouble telling you. We had to actually order a special cable to be able to serial into it at one point. This solution is relatively straightforward now.

We came across StarWind by just having a look at what options were out there. I liked StarWind because, when you look at their material online, they seem more geared towards education. They've got a quite extensive Knowledge Base and they are very good at tutorials. Other companies seemed more to emphasize the marketing: "Look at our shiny boxes."

The initial setup was fairly straightforward. The only thing that wasn't straightforward was, "Oh, we've never had Supermicro before." It was a matter of getting used to, and documenting, how stuff works.

There were no instructions. We just got two boxes. There wasn't any "Welcome to your StarWind Hyperconverged Appliance." It was just two brown boxes with two servers in them.

We just racked it up and then had a phone call with them and let the guys at StarWind know when it was online. It was up and running in our environment pretty much straight away. The only problem I had were the SFP cables: "Which way up do these go? And does it go A to B, or A to A and B to B?" So that required a phone call.

The only other problem that we encountered, that protracted the migration, was that while they've got good V-to-V migration software, our old environment was 2008 R2 and it wasn't supported by the migration software. So we had to "handle" it. It was a matter of having to recreate the service. I scripted it from PowerShell myself, and did them one or two each weekend over a period of three or four weeks. They're production servers so they had to be down to do the Hyper-V conversion process. Our file server took a while. It is about a terabyte-and-a-half. It took about 11 hours to convert, but I had it scripted anyway. So once it converted, I just did a convert from source to the StarWind. That was part of the copy process. It was then just create out and boot and notify me.

For the setup it was just me involved.

We looked at Nutanix and found it did almost the same thing but for more money. In fact, StarWind was nearly one-third of the price; it cost us £36,000. That includes five years of monitoring. If we have to reboot we get an email from them saying, "Is everything okay guys?"  We tell them, "Yeah, yeah, it's fine. Don't worry. Patching". The Nutanix was near enough £110,000 for relatively the same amount of performance and storage.

There were no additional fees for StarWind. That amount is for five years, done and paid for.

They're not really appliances, they're are just two servers with a bit of software on them. It's slightly misleading that it's hyperconverged appliances. It's just two white-box servers with a Mellanox card in it.

In terms of improvement to IOPS or latency from using it, we haven't seen anything drastic. But then again, we weren't really hitting it hard before. I've not measured it. It has just not caused us any trouble. So it's all good.

I would give it a solid eight out of ten. It's trouble-free, it's very clear to use. It's not one of those implementations where you're tearing your hair out. If you are tearing your hair out, it's about other things, not the actual StarWind part of it. I would probably have given it a ten if the hardware was a bit slicker, or there was more actual, "Welcome to your new StarWind implementation. Here's where everything plugs in," type of documentation. We did get some e-mail stuff, but it tended to look like it was more for Dell hardware and not Supermicro, white box, no-name servers.

I've found its flexibility and performance to be the most valuable.

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

The price could always be reduced.

We never have any problems with stability.

In terms of adding processes or new user licenses, we've never had to do that, but from the documentation and speaking with support, it is relatively easy.

I only had to call technical support once, and they were very responsive and quick. Overall, I've been satisfied with them.

The initial setup is straightforward once you know what you're doing. It's a solution that people should be able to install it on their own.

When I researched they came the most cost-effective. If you're in a small to medium business, I certainly advise any users to evaluate it. At the moment I haven't any reason or cause for improvement because it does what it does as it says on the tin, and it just works.

I can see for a large enterprise that it could cause problems because it's not one hundred percent enterprise-ready, but for small and medium companies, when you have a smaller system, it does what it says.

I think the more you add to it the more complicated it gets and then it'll make it more difficult for a small company to manage it. It does exactly what I need it to do, so I don't need any more features or anything more. I'm used to the user interface so it doesn't have any tricks or any hidden things that I can't find so for me it's ideal.

I would give the solution a rating of nine out of ten.

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.

The solution has allowed us to focus on streamlining our IT Infrastructure. We no longer need multiple staff members performing small, mundane tasks. We have ProActive support and alerting that takes care of our day to day infrastructure management. We were able to consolidate a number of servers and truly cut down on our overall storage costs.

The most valuable features are consolidated storage, low cost and overhead compared to previous solutions. As an NPO, we are always concerned with new technology and the associated costs. The solutions from StarWind were not only a major increase in performance, but they were very affordable for us.

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.

There is nothing else I would recommend improving because everything from sales, installation to post-install service for the past year has been great.

One year.

Previously we used a mix of physical and virtualized servers. This was antiquated and inadequate for our organization, so we gave StarWind a try.

For organizations such as ours (NPO), the Microsoft Hyper-V route was too affordable to pass on. Some of our team prefers VMware, but Hyper-V has been pretty good for us with StarWind.

We evaluated other options before choosing this solution, including some time we spent working with Scale HC3, and a little with SimpliVity.

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

The cost to support and maintain every part of the aging infrastructure was pretty high. Also, the SANs were being rather complex to maintain and the time to resolution on tickets was pretty long with the vendor.

StarWind offers an hyper-converged solution that is very well priced and offers remote monitoring and support, resolving both the cost and support issues we had with the previous multivendor solution.

The ease of management through one console for the storage of all of our datacenters worldwide: Going from managing multiple SANs with each of their own consoles and software versions to having a single console to handle all of the company's storage simplified things a lot for us.

Another thing worth mentioning that isn't really a feature: The support provided by StarWind is among the best we've ever gotten for any solution. During the implementation of one of our datacenters, our team took an action that made all storage on a cluster unavailable. StarWind got notified of that situation by the cluster. They contacted us, provided us with a fix and also gave us a procedure for the next time we need to perform this type of maintenance.

It's been a few months since the implementation, and so far, the only improvement I'd like to see is the addition of a web console to manage the clusters instead of a client to install.

Less than one year.

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

We successfully migrated to a virtualized environment, storage performance was increased, and now we had a redundant, failure-tolerant infrastructure. With ProSAFE support, we are sure that our infrastructure is safe and we don't need highly specialized personnel to monitor our infrastructure 24/7.

StarWind HCA delivered us a complete solution that works out of the box. We received everything we needed to get it up and running.

StarWind HCA delivered us a complete solution that works out of the box. There was no need to buy additional hardware; everything came in a box. Also, the software was preinstalled.

Better overall monitoring software. Maybe integration with Windows Admin Center was a good direction to go with on monitoring software.

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.