StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Reviews

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.

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.

We purchased two of these appliances to replace a three-node Hyper-V cluster on Dell blade servers/MXL blade switches with a VNXe3200 as storage. We were able to replace our entire M1000e enclosure and greatly simplified our (admittedly humble) infrastructure. Change from iSCSI over 1GB to local storage was also welcome. These two appliances now house 100% of our VMs and are a breeze to maintain. On-boarding was well supported. We were able to rack, configure, and start migrating Hyper-V VMs in less than a week. 

These appliances have been great for our Failover Cluster, combining storage, network, and compute resources in a single package. StarWind's Virtual SAN software replicates storage in the background, letting each node in the cluster use its own local storage instead of having to create an actual storage network. The ease between setting up the HCA appliances and my previous setup is significant, as is ongoing maintenance.

StarWind also offers ProActive Support that remotely monitors the appliances and automatically opens a ticket and initiates contact when a problem is discovered. As the only IT employee here, it's been pretty great.

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. End users are also pleased with the noticeable performance increase from switching to local storage from 1GB ethernet.

Surprisingly, it's the support that's been most helpful. I'm a one-person IT department. I have monitoring in place, however, I need to sleep sometimes. There were issues with our backup software early on that resulted in VMs failing. I'm not going into detail as the issue was with the backup software, not the HCAs. 

I woke up to detailed emails that let me know what had happened, along with event logs and explanations about why it happened. Even though the issue was with the backup software, they were still invaluable in solving the issue.

CSVs require the storage to be configured through iSCSI, even though the storage is local. It imparts a small performance hit that's easily overshadowed by the performance increase from getting off 1GB ethernet.

The Virtual SAN setup also requires more actual storage than a traditional SAN. My two-node cluster means I need double the amount of physical storage before any RAID is taken into account. A two-node cluster with RAID 1 means one-quarter of the storage you purchase is available.

Even though the support was great, getting the same email three to four mornings a week with the same issue got a little disheartening. 

I've used the solution for just shy of one year.

I've had zero issues with the appliances with anything other than our backup software.

Edit: I've been asked to clarify this. I had an issue with our backup software that was 100% on them. The errors involved VSS and a CBT driver that needed reinstalling. It was a little annoying getting emails every morning from ProActive Support while I got it straightened out, but the issue was between Windows and my backup/DR solution. 

We're small and will likely not have to worry about any serious upscaling in the near future, however, it would be very simple to throw more appliances into the cluster should we need to.

They've always been knowledgeable and friendly.

Positive

We used Dell blade servers/switches with a VNXe3200 SAN. They worked fine, however, the few times something went wrong it made tracking down the issue more difficult. There were also no single administration tools that handled all three hardware systems.

On-boarding was heavily guided. Once racked, powered on, and joined to the domain, they helped with the rest.

We had the help of a vendor team, and they were very efficient. I was up and running quickly.

I have no idea. I'm here to work with technology, not accounting.

We provided our own Windows Server Datacenter licenses. We have a state contract and get them at a reduced rate. I'm sure our reseller would have been happy to include them on the quote as well, though. The software does have ongoing costs for maintenance/support.

We did not look at other options, really. These fit my needs perfectly and were affordable. Had I more time/resources at my disposal, I probably would have sought out other options. In this case, these appliances fit my needs. 

These appliances are probably the best hardware decision I've made in my decade employed here.

We are using the product primarily as the base and storage for our failover cluster on a Hyper-V Environment (Server 2012r2 - 2019). 

All 3 of the HCA are all flash variants and have a 10GB uplink to our network, sync between the nodes is 25/40GB. We have Microsoft SQL Servers, Active Directory, and file servers running across all 3 systems without any major issues so far. 

We have a VMWare ESXI with VCenter 6.7 on one of the HCA. In this scenario, the storage is inside a virtual machine and works without any performance issues. 

It is a safe, fast, and cost-effective storage system that improved our systems to have zero downtime. Before we used manual failover methods and systems by other vendors, that required switching master and slave roles which could result in a longer downtime. 

If a storage error occurred outside of our office hours, it could result in critical downtime and production needing to stop. Besides the business continuity, our performance levels have risen from the all-flash setup and active-active sync scenarios.

The straightforward management GUI and the compatibility catalog are great. You can add every StarWind system into one management GUI and have a complete overview of every system.

You can remotly manage new storage volumes and use the maintenance mode for moving your systems physically to other locations. 

You can practically add any NIC or RAM you want. The compatibility catalog is huge. We have a system with an Nvidia Tesla M60 and DDA which works great in combination with StarWind HCA. Also, we are mixing NICs from Intel, Mellanox, and Broadcom without any issues.

It would be nice if it were possible to do the ISCSI setup that you do on Windows directly in the management GUI of StarWind. Further, it would be nice if you expand the storage of one target, the corresponding CSV would rise the capacity as well. This would lead to lesser missed or wrong configuration steps in the loopback configuration. They could program some checkups for the ISCSI configuration that the management GUI would do and could show you possible misconfiguration that someone evidently has done.

We've used the solution since 2016.

In all the years we've used the product, we have not had any major problems or issues with any StarWind systems. This reality speaks for itself.

You can scale the system very well. You always have the possibility to add another host to your HCA complex if you need more processing power.

We always used customer support on any new HCA setup. They do checkups and look over the configuration to make sure that everything runs flawlessly. We've used the support on two minor cases that were handled very, very well - even on holidays.

Positive

We did use something else beforehand. The previous solution could only do a master/slave switch if a failure occured and there was significant downtime. The architecture of this storage was active-passive, which resulted in some performance degradation by writing always to the second member.

If you are an experienced administrator, the setup is straightforward. Even if you have some difficulties in some parts, they have many guides and services that will support you.

We have implemented the software-only solution by ourselves. The HCA was implemented together with the StarWind support team.

Users should plan the needed space before ordering the whole system. It isn't impossible to expand the physical storage space later, however, it is a time and cost-intensive process.

We tested and used the software-only version of StarWind. We wanted to test the software and its behavior.

They offer a custom trial license for free. Everyone who is interested in storage systems should try the software out.

We use the solution to host our development, test, and UAT environments internally. We're running multiple projects side by side. This allows us to quickly create new VMs for new projects, or clone from existing ones. 

We also utilize it for Infrastructure internal usage servers such as SIEM and Windows solutions. 

It is hosting Windows 2012, 2016, and 2019 servers as well as a couple of CentOS machines. 

Currently, we are running around 30 VMs easily. We have gradually increased RAM capacity over the years. Currently, we have two nodes in a cluster and approximately 5TB of disk space. 

The solution has easily deployed instances for multiple fast-paced projects. 

The brilliant synchronisation and migration processes allow for easy patching and upgrading, we have a cluster configured allowing us to upgrade nodes on the fly without downtime and without the need for work out of hours. 

The speed of moving VMs from node to node is fantastic. 

They provide superb monitoring, alerting and support which really helps in taking the burden off the small internal IT infrastructure team. 

The StarWind Hyperconverged Appliance really took us forward in terms of technology, delivery speeds, and management overheads.

The support is great. The guys in support are fantastic and the round the clock premium monitoring and alerting is brilliant. They are always on top of any alerts and quick to solve issues. Recommendations are well received for firmware and patching concerns. We also have the option of remote sessions and guided support. They are very helpful with any queries and pleasant to deal with, always responding in a very timely manner.  

The solution offers amazing availability. There are very few issues over the last few years. We have been running for years and have never had an outage with the HCA.  

We struggle a little with capacity management with the StarWind Hyperconverged appliance. An improved front end for managing capacity may be beneficial. 

I find it difficult to view which hosts are using the resource, and scaling the allocated resource is difficult from the management console. 

Some integrated tools for managing partitions and disk space would be very beneficial if possible. 

Integrated reporting tools for capacity and resource management would also be beneficial allowing us to quickly spot over-resourced hosts. 

We've used the solution for over five years. 

The stability is very good. There are no stability issues whatsoever.

The scalability is good. We have added more RAM over time. 

The technical support is very good as previously stated.

Positive

We previously used physical servers.

The initial setup is very straightforward. There are no issues at all. It is great working with the team.

We handled the setup in-house and worked directly in contact with StarWind. There were no issues. 

The product is very reasonable in pricing and licensing. The setup costs are worth it as the process was very smooth.

We looked at NetApp, VMware, and Nutanix as an alternative.