StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Reviews

Prior to Starwinds, we had two hosts in our production site and we would replicate VMs daily as part of our DR plan. In case one of the hosts failed, we had a copy of the VM on the other host.  

Now, we have "copies" on each host, at all times of the day, fully synchronized.  With ESXi and HCA, we can migrate resources as needed, and do maintenance as needed on any of our hosts.  

Each host's specs are enough that we could run everything on one without the users even knowing. We really have had no issues with this solution.

This has been great for our organization.  

We run probably 16 virtual machines, and all of them are now highly available, and highly redundant.  

Also, we no longer need to replicate across hosts on our production site. Doing that was a very clunky, very time-consuming way to do any restore, and it was only up-to-date as of that moment in time (when the snapshot was taken).  

With this solution, we can now do maintenance on our hosts during the day. The other day I "moved" all VMs to one host, took the other down, and did all its maintenance. That afternoon, I moved everything to the other host and did maintenance on the 2nd host - all without the users noticing.

One of the most valuable things we have seen so far is that we can have all of our VMs fully synchronized to another host at all times of the day in real-time. We no longer have to run replication jobs from one host to another (just in case one of the hosts dies, or is unavailable). Now, we can rest easy knowing that if one of our hosts goes down, the VM will run automatically on the other host. It is easy to move VMs around and to find the right fit for memory/CPU usage. That said, we can run all VMs from one host if/when needed.

The only thing I would like to see improved is the level of documentation. I had some initial difficulties understanding the solution which could have been solved via additional documentation aimed at newcomers.

The solution does admittedly have many moving parts. I've found that it has been helpful to have the support is included and I have been able to get them to help with anything I have needed. That said, sometimes, the accent from the support technician is a little strong and hard to follow.

I've used the solution for eight months.

The solution is easy to fit to the size of your organization/network.

Customer support has been terrific and support has been very knowledgeable and timely. Sometimes, the accent has been hard to understand. Other times, it has been just fine.

Positive

We did not previously use a different solution.

It was very simple to set up, and the system came pre-configured.

I have not measured it in dollars, however, it is a high return on investment in terms of peace of mind and improved DR.

We looked at Dell EMC.

On-premises

We were able to consolidate four of our Hypervisors (with no redundancy) into two HCA servers with High Availability. We now have replication across both servers and fewer servers in the rack to power and we are all-flash now.

We also implemented the 10G ports on the StarWind Servers, beginning our step into a 10G backbone. This allowed our rack to become significantly less crowded with cable management.

Our HVAC is having to run less and I am sure there are some cost savings associated with that as well.  

It has brought us to another level in redundancy. We have two replicated copies of our data on-site in HA, which we then backup locally and then offload a copy to the cloud.

We also went with the all-flash solution, so our IOPS jumped exponentially.

In addition to that, we have started to implement a 10G backbone with the StarWind HCA being the first in it.

The most valuable feature they have is their support. We opted for 24-hour monitoring and support, which has already paid for itself. I had decided to move cables around and when they saw it, they and reached out to me to get it corrected.

On top of that, during our initial configuration and migration, they were able to work through any issues that may have come up, mostly due to the specific legacy equipment that we were trying to migrate to the new servers.

The command center is a nice piece of software that lets us view our entire setup.

They have a pre-install questionnaire and it asks about network addresses and such. I made the mistake of thinking they were asking about my current setup. They received that information and applied it to the new servers. When they arrived, I noticed it before we patched them in, which would have caused several IP conflicts.

I think that the pre-installation questionnaire was a little confusing and ambiguous. I could have asked for clarification but I just filled it out and sent it. It would be nice if they were just very clear on what they were asking for.

We are new to StarWind HCA and have been using it for about four months.

Stability-wise, we have had no issues as of yet, whatsoever.

This solution is very scalable. We bought it with plenty of room for expansion as well, so we don't have to worry about outgrowing it anytime soon, but if we do, it is a simple no-downtime, procedure.

Technical support is their best feature!

The initial setup was both straightforward and complex, but their support handled everything.

Implementation was through StarWind and was a great experience.

I was able to bring the price per year down by going out to a five-year plan. That works for our situation, it may be different for yours.

We evaluated Nutanix and Dell HCI.

On-premises

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. 

On-premises

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.  

On-premises

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.

On-premises

We had to replace our infrastructure consisting of about eight aging servers. I began looking for a good, redundant system and ran across the HCAs. 

Having never used one before I began researching the different providers as well as looking at going the traditional route. I lucked out by finding StarWinds through a colleague of mine and was greatly impressed. The Dell Enterprise servers not only replaced what we had but also gave me the piece of mind I haven't had in years.

The StarWind system also made managing the units easy and not too time consuming. For a very small IT department, that was key.

The solution has improved our ability to prepare for future needs by easily being able to add servers, storage, backup devices, and more. 

With their highly knowledgeable sales and support team, we are not anxious about upgrading our equipment or suffering long downtimes. We were hosting our ERP environment outside the organization which limited some of the functionality. 

With the HCA appliance we are comfortable with it being in-house and finally get to take advantage of some advanced features we have been missing out on.

The ability to balance servers across the appliance effortlessly and knowing that if we do experience a hardware failure we can keep on trucking is the most valuable aspect.

I cannot say enough about their support team. They are the greatest and extremely knowledgeable. Proactive support is a lifesaver.

The setup was simple and very fast. Servers came pre-configured for our environment and as soon as they were in the rack, Starwind got them up and running.

Monitoring the servers is a breeze and is possible all on one screen. This makes managing the environment super easy - even for a novice.

Updates need improvement. We do not receive critical update notices from Dell. This would be extremely helpful since my primary focus every day is software and DB development and not server updates. A notification when critical updates are available would make management of the systems even easier than it already is. 

The StarWind Command console stopped working for us and we managed the system manually. There is an update that we will be taking advantage of within the next week that I am sure will correct this issue.

I've used the solution for 14 months.

The solution has been very stable with a single exception. We missed a critical update to the firmware of our Samsung SSDs that took us offline. I wish there had been a way to have had a notification of the missing critical update prior to getting to the failure point.

Even with this,  StarWinds support worked with us and the hardware provider to get us back up quickly with no data loss.

The solution is very scalable.

I have nothing bad to say. They are very quick to respond and with the proactive support, they generally know of issues before I do. They are very knowledgeable.

Positive

We just used standalone servers previously.

The setup is straightforward with handholding from support every step of the way.

We used the vendor team. They were very highly experienced.

Our ROI was almost immediate since we stopped using a hosting company for our ERP environment.

It is a very affordable solution and extremely easy to set up.

We also evaluated Nutanix.

If this is your first HCA or your next, you will not go wrong with StarWind.

On-premises

The StarWind HCA solution provided our company with a turnkey hyper-converged platform that strengthened our processing and storage capabilities by greatly expanding our RAM, processors, and flash-based storage.

It also enabled us to take advantage of VMware vMotion technology. This allows us to transfer a virtual machine from one host to the other without interrupting production, which is critical in our manufacturing plant.

I haven't had to make any software related changes since the solution was implemented.

By having multiple servers, we are able to perform maintenance on one server while the other is still operating. The speed of the flash drives helped with performance, and the support that StarWind offers is very professional and accommodating.

We had to engage with support several times during the migration as we made licensing changes, and moved virtual servers from the old host to the new ones. The response time was quick and although there was a bit of an accent, I had no trouble understanding as the work was being completed.

The presence of built-in storage saved the company from having to purchase a separate storage array and related network equipment. When we looked at the costs for a storage array, they were somewhat higher than the solution from StarWind.

Knowing that the virtual machines will continue running in the event of one of the servers failing provides peace of mind. Also, having support readily available in the event of a problem helps as well.

We were impressed by all of the redundancy built into the solution to protect it from failures.

My only concern was with the terms and conditions of the proactive support. Our legal department didn't accept them, so we weren't able to take advantage of it. Having the heartbeat monitor working would save some time, by getting issues resolved by support as soon as, or possibly even prior to them happening.

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.

We have been using the StarWind HyperConverged Appliance for six months.

There have been no issues with stability since the solution was implemented.

It seemed that we would be able to increase the scale as needed.

The support at StarWind was very knowledgeable and was able to resolve any issues on the current call.

Our previous solution was a single server and it was out of support.

Its initial setup was complex, but that is why we had support from StarWind look after it.

It was implemented mostly by StarWind in coordination with our in house team.

The setup cost was included in the support.

We considered solutions from Dell and Nutanix.

On-premises

We are using the system to run our various virtual machines in a Hyper-V cluster. They run services such as SQL Servers, our Skype for Business phone system, some financial applications, various domain services, and SharePoint servers, among other miscellaneous systems.

We use StarWind’s HyperConverged Appliance in one of our server rooms and plan on upgrading more legacy equipment at another location next year. We have it set up as a Microsoft Hyper-V private cloud.

The old solution we had worked. It was starting to show its age and it consisted of several more pieces of equipment than the StarWind HyperConverged Appliances.

It has saved us time because there are fewer devices to update. We no longer have to worry about updating our hardware SANs, which would actually cause a brief outage, even though the upgrades are advertised as non-disruptive. We just update the StarWind software every once in a while with no downtime.

In terms of overall systems performance, the latency has been reduced. Instead of having to go through two iSCSI connections, the way we had things layered before, everything is direct. We purchased the all-flash HyperConverged Appliance to replace our SANs that had spinning disks. That has definitely reduced the storage latency. We have noticed a substantial performance improvement with our database applications, compared to our previous storage.

StarWind has definitely saved us money. The other solutions we were looking at were priced much higher than this and they didn't necessarily have full redundancy. The other companies provided solutions without enough resources to lose a node and still keep everything up and running. Most of those solutions also required dedicated 10 Gig switching. We are also saving money on the normal support renewal costs since we don’t have separate SAN devices or need dedicated 10 Gig switching.

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.

Another of the most important features we were looking for, since we're short on time, was something that we could deploy quickly and easily. They were offering what they call a "turnkey solution." We could just buy it, they would preconfigure it, we would throw it in our environment and do some very minimal configuration on the phone with them, and we would be up and running. Then we just needed to start moving our virtual machines over, using Hyper-V’s shared-nothing live migration feature.

The solution's hardware footprint is great. We have three 1U servers, a total of 3U, and that's replacing a full rack of equipment.

We haven't had to use the ProActive Premium Support feature much yet. But they contacted me one time because there was network glitch on one server. We hadn't actually started migrating virtual machines over to it yet, but they contacted me within ten minutes of the issue happening, as I was still trying to figure it out. I have not seen the problem since. The ProActive Premium Support was another factor that we evaluated when we made the decision to purchase this solution, to make everything easier with less work for us.

We ordered it at the beginning of the year. It came in around the end of January or early February and we spent the next couple of months slowly moving our virtual machines to the new cluster. So we've been using it for about half a year.

The stability has been great. We haven't had any problems at all.

StarWind’s virtual SAN is limited to synchronizing storage between two or three nodes, which is perfect for us. To scale further, they use a grid architecture, but I don't think that will be necessary for us.

We have about 1,100 users and eight offices. There are two locations where we have servers. We installed this at our headquarters location. Next year, we're going to be upgrading our equipment in another location with more of StarWind’s HyperConverged Appliances.

We're in the process of decreasing our on-premises footprint. Our main initiative is to move everything into Microsoft Azure, but there are several things that need to stay here on-prem. That's what the hyper-converged system is for.

So far, the little that I've worked with tech support, they seem to be pretty great.

We also bought a backup server from them that we're using Veeam software on. While we are learning the Veeam software, it has thrown several alerts. StarWind support is always very quick alerting us of the backup failure so we can remediate the issue.

If we had the option to do this again, we would have purchased the Veeam software through StarWind. If we had purchased the Veeam software through them, they would have helped us set it up, configure it, troubleshoot it, etc. Since we purchased the Veeam licenses elsewhere, we just work directly with Veeam support.

Our previous Hyper-V cluster was a classic architecture cluster with separate iSCSI SANs. It consisted of five Dell EMC servers and four Dell EMC EqualLogic SANs that took some trial and error, along with many support calls to multiple companies, to get running properly. That took quite a while to set up after finding problems with the initial deployment and hidden limitations with the hardware.

One of our initial requirements was to have the data on two separate pieces of hardware, which the EqualLogic SANs support with their SyncRep feature, but the performance was so terrible with that feature activated that we couldn’t even run one virtual machine on the system. We were forced to find a different option, at minimal cost, to fulfill this requirement. We actually ended up buying StarWind's Virtual SAN solution years ago, and layered that on top of the Dell EqualLogic SANs to provide the redundancy that they were unable to provide, out-of-the-box, at a reasonable rate of performance. StarWind’s Virtual SAN software was able to keep synchronized copies of the data on two separate pieces of hardware and the performance was great.

When we first built our previous cluster, we had looked at a hyper-converged option, but that architecture was still very new and we weren’t quite comfortable with it. Since then, the industry has moved towards hyper-converged and there are many more options available. When it came time to refresh the hardware, we wanted a hyper-converged solution to save on expense and complexity. We looked at several vendors before making a decision. We made sure to look at StarWind’s options because we had been using their vSAN for years. It seems like the perfect solution.

The setup was very quick. After purchasing the hardware, before it was shipped there was a form to fill out to specify IP addresses, server OS version, and some other settings so that StarWind could set up the hardware and have it nearly configured when it arrived at our location. There was an initial quick-start guide that I had to go through after it arrived. It was about ten steps and included cabling the hardware, logging in, setting a password, and joining it to the domain. Then there was about an hour-long call with StarWind Support to do the final configuration of creating the cluster. They configured a couple of things and sent us on our way to start moving virtual machines over.

Altogether, there was about an hour or so of pre-call stuff, and then maybe a little more than an hour on the phone. The software and the operating system came pre-installed. There were just a couple of configuration checks and things that they needed to do to finalize everything.

It was mostly just me involved in the setup. I had some help installing it physically, but it only takes one person to do the install.

StarWind provided the Dell EMC servers. We purchased not only the software but the three Dell EMC servers which have the locally attached storage. They helped us with the initial hardware configuration and adding it to our network.

StarWind gets the hardware shipped to them directly from Dell EMC. They installed Windows Server, their software, and all the drivers. Then they shipped it to us. After it arrived here, we just racked it, cabled it up, turned it on, and finished the minimal configuration with their help. After running through the initial setup, we added it to System Center Virtual Machine Manager and started moving virtual machines to the new hardware.

We haven't done the calculations as far as time and support costs go. That's probably something we'll look to develop after we've had it running for a year, versus what we spent in the past.

Other than the standard licensing fee for StarWind HCA, there are the server costs and the server support. We purchased all of this thorough StarWind on one invoice.

We looked at Dell EMC VxRail, Nutanix, HPE Simplivity, and another option. In terms of the differences between these solutions and StarWind, price was a huge factor, as well as flexibility and the additional hardware requirements.

Most of the other solutions we looked at required 10 Gig switches to interconnect all of them, whereas the StarWind solution interconnects directly between the nodes and doesn't require a 10 Gig switch. That probably saved us $10,000 to $20,000 right there.

Nutanix and VxRail were in the final running. We looked at quotes for those and, from what the vendors were telling us, they seemed to be pretty good appliances. But it came down to our price point. StarWind was able to provide a solution for what we wanted - to provide for redundancy. With the other ones, if we were to lose one node due to a hard drive failure or bad memory stick, we wouldn't have enough RAM on the other devices to run everything. We could have asked for additional RAM to be quoted, but they were already at our budget limit.

The other thing we were trying to do, within our budget, was to get a better backup solution in place. We were using System Center Data Protection Manager and we were running into so many issues that it required daily babysitting. We had evaluated Veeam earlier in the year and it just works without any trouble. While working with StarWind to spec out our new environment, they told us about their backup appliance running on Dell EMC hardware. It seemed like the perfect option and getting everything from one vendor makes support much easier. Getting a better backup solution in place was a huge goal of ours and has since freed up a ton of our time.

The biggest lesson that we've learned from using it is to let somebody else do all the hard work of finding the right configuration and putting together the hardware. It will save you a lot of time and get you up and running a lot quicker. With our previous solution, there was a lot of trial and error and learning. The StarWind solution was basically: plug it in, configure it for a few hours, and start moving virtual machines onto it.

It seems like a great product. It does what it's supposed to do and it does it very quickly. Besides making it free, I don't know what they can do to improve it. My advice would be to go for it. StarWind does actually have a free, full-featured version of their vSAN software that just lacks technical support. My company requires that we maintain technical support on this equipment, so that wasn’t an option. You can download their free vSAN software so you can get a feel for it and see how it works in your environment.

They have a product called StarWind Command Center which offers a lot more visibility into everything that's going on but we haven't explored that. The vSAN software gives us basic performance statistics for CPU, storage IOP usage, and bandwidth usage. It seems to have everything that we need.

Generally, it requires zero maintenance. As long as we don't get any email alerts saying something is going wrong, we don't really touch it. As with anything, you have the normal Windows Server updates which require a server reboot, and occasional updates to the StarWind Virtual SAN software, which only requires a service restart and no storage downtime.

The solution hasn't helped increase redundancy or failover capabilities because we had layered the StarWind Virtual SAN on top of our old environment. It will help next year when we place our Hyper-V cluster in a different location which doesn't have that layer of redundancy.

Based on our experience, StarWind HCA has been a ten out of ten.