"High Availability is the best feature of product."
"PowerShell library is pretty good feature as I created with APC PowerChute a script to put volumes on maintenance mode then turning off the StarWind nodes together with the VM and Hosts when UPS reaches 15 percent, this way after a blackout or electrical problems when turning servers on again, there is no issues for syncing or data loss due to energy interrupts."
"Virtual SAN runs on iSCSI, which is free and easy to configure. It's easy to manage from StarWind's GUI console, and it only required a few extra switch ports."
"The fact that I can now count on a true failover solution is what is most appealing."
"It is extremely stable."
"The most valuable features are high availability and real-time replication between two servers."
"It has given the company an almost zero possibility of downtime."
"VSAN works great; it's very easy to install, configure, and manage."
"The most valuable features are the appliance-type feel and that you don't need additional licenses as everything is built-in."
"The initial setup is pretty straightforward."
"The solution is scalable."
"The support is the most valuable feature. The support has been amazing. It's around the clock. One of our hard disks accidentally ejected without me knowing or being onsite. They called and told me about it before I had a chance to see it myself."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the redundancy and its cost. I used to have a SAN, a Dell EMC EqualLogic. Unfortunately, it was they call an "inverted pyramid of doom." It was two or three hosts, two switches, and one storage array at the very bottom. But the SAN, the storage array at the very bottom, is a single point of failure..."
"The presence of built-in storage saved the company from having to purchase a separate storage array and related network equipment."
"What makes it valuable is the high-availability. In the education field, when you've got students in classrooms, any loss of service disrupts the lessons to a point that the whole lesson is affected. For part of the business which isn't business-critical, to have a little bit of a hiccup wouldn't be such a big thing, but here, it's the high availability of service that is important."
"The option to deploy a hyper-converged system without an expensive storage switch was a benefit."
"The low cost of this solution has also made a big difference in our budget, which has been very helpful."
"The full suite of redundancy gives a nice sense of security for the whole environment."
"The initial setup seems to be very straightforward."
"A great feature would be a wizard and to include a new disk in the SAN. At the moment, including a new disk requires several steps - some that must be done at the OS level and others in each node."
"Being able to run StarWind vSAN on top of any free UNIX operating system to build a resilient iSCSI/FTP/SMB storage system would be useful."
"If there was a way to automatically put disks in maintenance mode when shutting the host down and exit maintenance mode automatically, that would simplify things."
"Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer."
"I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues."
"The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us."
"Updating the software can be a bit tricky."
"This product would benefit from having automated alerting functionality."
"Scale HC3 improvements would involve literally fixing up the replication."
"I've had so many issues with the sales team when I was looking to make some improvements, and improve the performance. They would create so many excuses to force me to buy new nodes all the time and not let me add more memory to each node."
"The product struggles to cope with bigger workloads. In the next release, I'd like some backup solutions to be added."
"I would request that the terms and conditions be reviewed and made more acceptable to corporate security so that we could finally turn on the proactive support feature, as it is included with our support agreement."
"Multi cluster support for their Command Console would be very beneficial. Currently, you can only work with a single cluster at a time. The console is new so I expect much growth in this area in the near future. The other area that could be improved is the tech support locale."
"In the future, it would be nice to be able to migrate from the Windows vSAN to the Linux vSAN without having to do a full restore from backups."
"I think some performance metrics would be nice to see, especially on the storage side."
"Possible new features could be CSV-level snapshot capability, Veeam integration, and maybe a more straightforward setup. Granted, you don't have to worry about setups with the HCA, but if you want to implement StarWind vSAN in a lab to test it is a tedious setup process."
"The only issues are when Hyper V itself has limitations and I'd love to see support or enhancement in the area of direct-attached GPU cards."
"There is room for improvement in the setup and installation phase. We had massive problems connecting the StarWind appliances to our network infrastructure. That wasn't necessarily a StarWind problem. I don't know if their business partner in the UK wasn't used to having to deal with the supply of the cabling infrastructure, but that's where the problems started."
"We have to pay for support, which is high-end support. That can be expensive, at least for us."
More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Pricing and Cost Advice →
Try it today
Try it today
Scale Computing HC3 is ranked 16th in Hyper-Converged (HCI) with 3 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in Hyper-Converged (HCI) with 17 reviews. Scale Computing HC3 is rated 7.4, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of Scale Computing HC3 writes "Good stability with a straightforward setup, but scaling is difficult". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Because it's all built into one box, they could offer us the majority of the functionality we wanted, affordably". Scale Computing HC3 is most compared with Nutanix Acropolis AOS, VMware vSAN, VxRail, HPE SimpliVity and NetApp HCI, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Acropolis AOS, VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, VMware vSAN and Dell EMC PowerFlex. See our Scale Computing HC3 vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
See our list of best Hyper-Converged (HCI) vendors.
We monitor all Hyper-Converged (HCI) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
