StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Reviews

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.

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. 

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 were looking to replace aging hardware in our environment. We had the classic two physical hosts with a SAN set up with VMware as our hypervisor. We actually had two SANs since we needed more space.  

The SANs were not redundant. They were se tup as a pool. We wanted to simplify this setup and also reduce the single point of failure. Being a SMB, we have a small office and rack space is at a premium. We could not fit more than a few more servers on our rack without purchasing a new rack and finding a spot for it.

StarWind, with all SSDs and directly attached servers, gave us far superior performance than our previous setup. We can now have vMotion VMs in a matter of seconds rather than minutes. 

Although we haven't removed the previous equipment yet, I'm looking forward to removing all the cables running through all the switches. Also, having all the extra space on the rack is going to be nice. This will substantially reduce the amount of noise in the datacenter. 

Having this all backed up by pro-active support gives us good peace of mind.

The solution is plug and play. I was very happy that everything was delivered all tested and setup ready to go. I simply racked the servers, plugged them in and called for setup. It's so simple.

The simple two 1U server setup with all flash disks connected together with an ultrafast redundant Mellanox nics is great. It has saved us space and increased performance. It also reduced the noise pollution and energy costs.

The proactive support is a very valuable feature. I have not yet had to use support for anything major, however, I have asked a few questions and there is always a prompt reply.

Maybe they could have a support portal that you can have direct access to a current support representative. 

During setup we had a bit of a tricky situation that had to do with switching. The StarWind engineer recognized the possible problem with migration before it happened.  

During test migration when things went down it would have been nice to be able to reach out directly rather then send an email to support and wait for a reply.  It was not a long wait, however, it can feel like forever when in a tough situation.

We've used the solution for six months.

We have two Supermicro servers in a failover cluster, connected via a 25GB card for faster replication and virtual nic runs through 10GB interface. The disks are hybrid standard HDD and SSD for better performance. The Starwind solution auto replicated the servers and monitors if there are any issues. 

Both are running Hyper-V on Windows Server Datacentre 2019. Each server runs about 13 virtual servers and can run all virtual servers with room to spare. 

We also have an older Dell Starwind setup running Windows Server 2016. These just run standard HDD so are much slower than the Supermicro servers. 

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance has made the servers redundant, reducing downtime from just having a single standalone server with a much lower hardware cost than having an extra storage device which then reduces the redundancy unless purchasing much more hardware that increases the cost significantly. 

The added speed of using standard HDD and SSD meant we could increase what services are stored on the servers without having to have additional servers. 

Also, the servers' support reduces downtime when things go wrong. The support team has always ensured we are back up and running in a short amount of time.

It offers a simple setup. The servers come pre-configured and only require a small amount of setup. The support team is on hand to complete your installation and ensure everything is running smoothly.  

Remote support ensures someone is watching the servers, letting you know if a VM has lost connection or either host has had any issues so you can check the servers and work with StarWind to get the servers back up and running again smoothly. 

Easily expandable CSVs take only a few minutes to get increased.

The control center needs email notifications so any self-monitoring is easier. The control center looks really good and looks like it could be very valuable. However, at the moment, not having email notifications makes it less worth it.

Easier CSV creation would be ideal so there are fewer steps and a check so that if you have created one, it can check all settings within the StarWind software and the ISCSI are set up. 

We'd like an easier setup for Windows updates on the Hyper-V servers so you don't have to use a script to ensure auto-updating is done. 

I've used the solution for three years.

So far, we have had no problems with stability.

The scalability is good.

Support is always very helpful and willing to help.

Positive

The setup is fairly straightforward and issues were sorted quickly.

We implemented the solution in-house.

If you have a preferred hardware vendor, then wait for it to become available if out of stock. 

We did not evaluate other solutions.

The product is used to host windows virtual machines. We have various workloads hosted on this environment, from file servers, AD, DNS servers, and IIS servers to SQL databases. We run dozens of production virtual machines on this solution, and use Veeam Backup to backup all the workloads on it. 

It's a Microsoft Failover Cluster with StarWind storage added as CSV disks. The solutions can be managed via the Hyper-V console, Failover Manager or StarWind console. On the physical side, we have 10GB switches for the management, live migration and cluster communication and physically separate 10GB switches for the storage communication. Storage communication happens over the iSCSI protocol.

It has improved our performance and the support/time required to manage and maintain the HCI solution. It's an all-flash storage subsystem which provides really good disk read/write I/O and law latency. 

With proactive support, StarWind deploys and configures the solution for you. They also help you to migrate any workloads/VMs from the existing solution that StarWind is replacement for. 

They do proactive monitoring so if they see any issues like disk being in predictive failure or some lag/error on the solution they will reach out to you/call you proactively and will fix the issue for you.

It's very easy to deploy and manage. 

I like the idea that the storage is virtualized and that StarWind is a software company with a product that can be installed on any hardware you want/prefer. It will work with any networking equipment you have. 

Their proactive support is great and just offloads the whole management of the hardware/software of the HCI for you. The updates to the new versions are very easy and straightforward. Best of all, it's done by StarWind support engineers so you don't have to worry about it.

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

Granted, StarWind takes care of the monitoring/maintenance. However, as an end-user, it would be nice if, when you login to their console, you could be able to see information about the underlying hardware and how the cluster is performing. 

It would be nice if they created hardware integration packages for various hardware OEMs such as Dell, HPE, Lenovo, etc., so you can manage the hardware via the StarWind console and be able to run firmware updates.

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

The solutions is very stable. StarWind have proactive monitoring so if they see any issues they will call you and will work on the resolution.

Solution is very scalable. Its easy to add more nodes and StarWind support will usually pre-configure and add them to the cluster.

StarWind support is excellent. They are very knowledgeable and thorough. 

Positive

We used a Microsoft Failover Cluster created on Dell servers and using Software Defined Storage (Open-E).  The storage communication was via iSCSI on 10GB network switches and the cluster, live migration and cluster communication was on a different VLAN. 

Its was very easy and straightforward. StarWind will ask you information about your switches, uplinks, IP addresses, domain name etc so they can configure the solution

It was via the StarWind team.

18-24 months

The setup is done from StarWind. It's easy and fast and therefore there is nothing to worry about there. You just need to provide them with some information such as IP addresses, subnet, DNS server, AD name, etc. 

On the cost side, StarWind is a really cost-effective solution. It costs a fraction of what the big name HCI solutions cost yet provides similar performance and capability. 

On the licensing side, generally, the customer provides the licenses for the workloads that are running on the HCI solution. 

We have evaluated other HCI solutions and Storage vendors such as Nimble Storage, Scale Computing, StorMangic, Dell EMC VRTX etc.

It's a great solution. You can set it up and forget it and is the kind of HCI where all the management and maintenance is done by StarWind support so you don't really have to do too much on a day-to-day basis. 

We utilize StarWind HCI appliances for our virtualization infrastructure. 

We needed the ability to deploy application workloads quickly while also maintaining High-Availability and Fault tolerance. We oversee several remote locations and maintain a virtual footprint at each location. We are an agile company, and having the ability to deploy a virtual workload from any of these locations was needed. We also needed to ensure the workloads were backed up and highly available in the event of a host outage.  

Before StarWind, our virtualization infrastructure was combined with several different vendor offerings. This created unnecessary complexity and administrative overhead trying to support and maintain.  

We also had equipment going end-of-life, which created challenges and required 3rd party vendor warranties to keep running. Managing all the different hardware and software made troubleshooting very difficult for our team.

StarWind appliances eliminated multi-vendor complexity and drastically simplified our virtualization landscape.  

Some of the features that have brought the greatest value have been the unified architecture, reliable support, and host monitoring. Not only do we have a unified platform that is simple to use, yet their level of support has been exceptional.  

The support staff was knowledgeable and helpful from sales to deployment and migrating our workloads. An added bonus was their monitoring service.  Anytime we have an outage or an issue with our StarWind appliances, we receive an alert from StarWind support. They also monitor for updates that our hosts and software need.  

At times there has been a language barrier when communicating issues. That said, there was nothing that couldn't be worked through. This made it tough when trying to understand or explain some of the issues we were encountering.  

The user interface for the StarWind product could sometimes be tough to navigate and understand. However, that was not a deal breaker. We would like to see that simplified in the future.  

Another feature we would love to see is a dashboard that gives a comprehensive view of our entire StarWind infrastructure along with metrics on how everything is running.    

Our organization has been using Starwind appliances for the last three years.

StarWind is very resilient and built off of quality vendor hardware. Their software works well and rarely has issues.

Our experience has been positive when adding additional StarWind appliances to scale out when additional compute resources have been needed. Support is easy to get a hold of if there are any questions when scaling their appliances with additional resources or adding to a new environment.

Our experience with customer service and support has been very positive. Sales staff helped us size the appliances we would need for current and future computing needs. 

Their support has been very helpful when dealing with any issue and their response time was quick. Their monitoring service is also very beneficial for us and allows us to focus on other IT initiatives.  

Positive

We used a virtual solution that was pieced together with different vendor hardware. We switched due to the fact that StarWind offered a converged virtualization platform that eliminated the complexity of dealing with different vendor components.

The initial setup was very straightforward. StarWind offered plenty of documentation on their product to give us an idea of what would be needed to integrate their appliances into our environment. 

We ran into issues when migrating virtual workloads from older hardware over to the new appliances, however, their support staff helped us manage that complexity.

We implemented the solution using an in-house team.  

Our ROI has been huge, considering we were able to simplify our reliance on several different vendor offerings for our virtual environment, including software-hardware warranties and licensing fees.  

StarWind was very straightforward with their costs, including setup, which was free. The only thing to watch out for is licensing costs for your chosen hypervisor or backup vendor such as Veeam.  

We evaluated offerings from VMware, however, the licensing costs were too high.

StarWind is a great solution for SMBs and offers a hyper-converged solution that is well supported and easy to deploy in your environment.  

The number of physical servers in our environment was quickly growing. It seems every new software package we purchase needs a web server, utility server, and database server.  

We started searching for a hyper-converged solution and went with StarWind.  

Since we implemented the solution four years ago, we have had zero downtime and have not had the need to add any new physical servers to our environment. This has completely stopped our server racks from growing out of control.  

We only have two hosts and have only needed to upgrade storage and RAM.

We were able to consolidate our ever-expanding server rack down to two hosts.  We have not needed to purchase new physical servers in four years. 

The only purchases we have made are additional RAM and storage drives.  

This has been a massive cost saving for us. We now only need to worry about server licenses and not costly hardware when taking on new projects.  

Also, the time it takes to admin the system is slim to none. Support handles the upgrades. The hosts came preconfigured, and it was plug-and-play.

It flat out just works. It requires very little time to administrate. The support is great; they can quickly install updates/patches when available. 

Most of the time, they send me notifications before I even know anything is wrong.  

We have had a few drives go bad, and they worked directly with Dell to get things fixed fast. This is one less thing we need to worry about daily.  It is also incredibly easy to take a host down for maintenance. Updates can be readily on one host while the other runs all of the VMs.

We have had a great experience with StarWind, and it is hard to find much that needs to be improved. 

The 24/7 monitoring is good but not great. There is a bit of a delay in receiving the emails. We are in a bit of a rural location, so we occasionally will lose internet. We typically receive emails from StarWind to notify us that our system is down a few hours after the outage.  

The monitoring and report software is a bit hit and miss. I don't use it much as it is a bit slow and buggy. 

I've used the solution for four years.

The stability has been rock solid. We have experienced zero downtime. 

The solution is endlessly scalable.

This is the first solution we have implemented into production.

Hosts came preconfigured and required a short phone call with support to set up.

The implementation was done over the phone with support.  

The setup is very simple. The hosts came preconfigured. Everything was up and running for about an hour on the phone with support. 

The price seemed a bit cheaper than comparable solutions. 

We looked at Scale, Nimble, and Nutanix.

It is a great solution. We will definitely be using them in the future when it is time for new hosts.

We currently have it set up with VMware. We use StarWind as a two-node cluster and VMware to host all the servers. All the servers are Windows-based.  

We use two Lenovo servers with SSDs. We were able to move from three physical servers down to two with the StarWind setup. Also, we wanted a new setup with an easy way to expand.  

StarWind will allow us to expand with very little setup after our initial configuration. We also set up our servers with multiple 10GB NICs bonded together and were able to separate our traffic easily with the software.

Before StarWind, we used HP Lefthand.  

While HP lefthand did work, the price difference was a major. Once we started to use StarWind, we found it to be very reliable and fast.  

We are very happy with moving from HP Lefthand to StarWind. During the conversion of Lefthand to StarWind, we used the support and found it very helpful. They were very knowledgeable and easy to work with.  

We needed three servers for our setup when we were using HP lefthand.  With StarWind, we were able to downsize to only two.

One of the best features is how it just works. We had issues with our hardware on our servers; however, once we have the hardware issue fixed, the StarWind services would sync right up.

The documentation is also a plus. We were able to set it up via the documentation and only needed their support a handful of times.  When we needed help, support responded and followed up, verifying our setup was working correctly. We also used their knowledge base and found it very helpful also.

Not having to purchase specific hardware is a plus!

The user interface needs an update for the Windows client. I would prefer it if it was all web-based. This way, you do not have to manage an installation program on a server. If it was web-based, it would work on any platform.

With the new interface, maybe some more reporting features would be nice.  Also, some notifications would be helpful for issues coming about with the system.

We would like to be able to shrink volumes. We know we can increase volumes when we need it, however, shrinking would be helpful.

I've used the solution for five years.

Support is amazing. They are very friendly and helpful.

Positive

We used HP Lefthand. We moved to StarWind due to the price and found it had excellent support.

The solution is mostly straightforward, however, we had to have help a few times.  

We received assistance with the setup from the vendor team. They were very knowledgeable and took care of all issues.

Be ready to use support to get through a few steps; however, after the initial configuration, it should work great!

We did not evaluate any other solutions.

It's an amazing product.