StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pros and cons

The initial setup seems to be very straightforward.

Their support team is extremely helpful, and they are pretty friendly and knowledgeable.

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.

It did not hurt that the price for the hardware and three years of support cost less than the disparate hardware the cluster used to run on.

With proactive support, StarWind deploys and configures the solution for you.

The high-quality hardware options, directly affecting performance, have significantly improved the user experience and are well worth the cost.

The solution has provided our company with a fully redundant virtual environment at half the cost of a traditional SAN implementation.

StarWind is very resilient and built off of quality vendor hardware.

I do like that I can manage StarWind with a console running on my local desktop.

Repair efforts have been reduced to nearly nothing.

We have to pay for support, which is high-end support. That can be expensive, at least for us.

The only thing that can use improvement is the StarWind Management Console and Command Center.

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.

CSVs require the storage to be configured through iSCSI, even though the storage is local.

The monitoring and reporting console can be improved in the sense that it can have more information on it.

The only area that surprised me had to do with the fact that each host runs a StarWind virtual machine used to maintain the health of the vSAN, which individually uses 24GB of memory per host. You should keep this in mind when determining the resources you will need when selecting hardware and components for your specific setup. If I knew that, I would have chosen to add more memory per host to make up for the use.

The only issue we have had was the issue of performance, however, that is only due to the fact that we purchased a mix of SSD and regular spindle drives, and restoring databases was slow as it was trying to restore the database using the spindle drives.

At times there has been a language barrier when communicating issues.

Although the setup documentation was very complete and succinct, I found StarWind documentation to be a bit sparse.

I'd like a better UI and some limitations on "breaking it."