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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pros and cons

Vendor: StarWind
4.8 out of 5
358 followers
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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.

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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

RB
Jan 22, 2020
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.
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HM
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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DR
Sep 5, 2019
High-availability is what I bought it for.
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Buyer's Guide
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance
April 2025
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Learn what your peers think about StarWind HyperConverged Appliance. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2025.
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reviewer1275825 - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 4, 2020
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...
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KS
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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MT
Jan 29, 2020
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.
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CM
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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AL
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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RM
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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CK
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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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Cons review quotes

RB
Jan 22, 2020
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.
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HM
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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DR
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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Buyer's Guide
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance
April 2025
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: April 2025.
DOWNLOAD NOW
849,686 professionals have used our research since 2012.
reviewer1275825 - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 4, 2020
One area for improvement of the solution is that I had to get Windows, which I really didn't want because of the extra maintenance or overhead, as well as viruses, etc. It's going to take time for them to get their Linux to that point. They already have Linux but it's not as mature and they don't really support it on HCAs. They have it for individuals who want to use it on their servers, but not on HCAs.
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KS
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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MT
Jan 29, 2020
The only real flaw that I have seen so far is this hard drive that was accidentally ejected because when it was received and added back into the RAID. There was an error there. It was not added back into the RAID correctly, so I have an outstanding hard disk. Apparently, a guy just knocked it with his hand as he was in my office, so it was just a small eject. He said that he didn't crash into anything. That is the only thing that has reared its head.
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CM
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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AL
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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RM
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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CK
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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Show 10 more reviews (out of 60)

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Product Categories

Product Categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS)
HCI

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons
Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Logo
Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Logo
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