StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Reviews

We use the StarWind HCA as the main solution for hosting all of our core VMs. 

We have about 20 Microsoft and Linux VMs that we are running on Hyper-V on the StarWind HCA. 

Our HCA is made up of two Dell servers running the StarWind VSAN software. The VMs that we have are mainly made up of general-purpose servers with a few other custom-use servers thrown in. 

We also use the HCA to host both of our domain controllers, although we don't have them in the cluster, they are still on the appliance. 

Having high availability has definitely improved the reliability of our infrastructure and made server maintenance much easier, which is a significant improvement for the organization. 

The low cost of this solution has also made a big difference in our budget, which has been very helpful. 

The reliability of the VSAN software has also been a big improvement in our infrastructure. 

The quality of support from StarWind has probably been the biggest improvement though as we went from having a relatively low level of support with our previous solution to having a truly top-tier support team at our disposal.

High availability with only two nodes has really been enormously valuable to us. Our infrastructure is relatively small and we really didn't need more than two nodes, however, for many reasons, we really needed to have high availability. Being able to accomplish that without extra hardware was huge. 

The ability to use whatever hypervisor that we wanted has also been very valuable to us. We were able to switch over to Hyper-V from VMWare and save on the licensing costs that we previously had with VMWare.

I really don't say this very much, however, I actually don't have many issues with this product. However, if I had to think of something, some people might not like the fact that a lot of the engineers tend to have relatively thick eastern European accents, and that might be an issue for some folks. 

If I had to pick something to add to the product, it would be nice if you could have more than one user account on their command center VM. It's not really a big deal, however, that would be a good addition.

I've used the solution for about six months.

It is extremely stable. I haven't had any issues at all. It's one of my favorite things about this solution.

It is extremely scalable.

Their customer service and support are top-notch. 

Our previous solution was very old and not really a good comparison. 

We switched due to the fact that the hardware needed to be refreshed and we needed high availability.

The initial setup was extremely easy and their support team was assisting through the whole process.

It was implemented through their support team and their level of expertise was extremely high.

We've seen an ROI of 100% to 150%

The setup cost and support contract was significantly cheaper with StarWind than with any of the other options that I evaluated.

We considered just buying new server hardware and staying with VMware. We also evaluated Scale and Nutanix.

I really can't recommend them enough. 

Their VSAN software is excellent. The ability to get a highly available setup with just two nodes is fantastic. Their support is top-notch, and from a cost perspective, they blew everybody else out of the water. Give them a call; you won't be sorry!

We primarily use the solution to provide a safe and secure home for VMs. We are currently only using the computer power, but I like the ability to add GPUs to the device if it is ever needed. We run a bunch of SQL, web services, and remote app servers. The hardware has always been solid, and the 24-hour monitoring is a great safety net. VMs being able to live migrate near-instantly has made updating the hypervisors much easier. The hardware comes from known vendors, so replacement parts are plentiful if ever needed.

We upgraded from older servers, and the Starwind HCA is much faster and more reliable. All of the old VMs can do the same job they always did but with less waiting. With 24-hour monitoring, we can worry less about hardware and software failures. Every time the system has detected an issue Starwind has emailed us before anything went sideways. Migrating VMs is much easier now that the Starwind team has configured the HCA boxes. All this has been done without the need for a separate storage device.

The ease of use is great.

The solution is comprised of high-end hardware components.

The 24-hour monitoring is great.

The sales process is easy.

It is extremely reliable, has very very few issues, and has next to no downtime.

The deployment was very fast, and VMs were migrated without any downtime.

SSD Storage is very fast, and everything I want to do is very very speedy.

It is very configurable, with lots of different options.

I can't think of anything that is missing. Everything has been top-notch from start to finish. Every interaction we have had has been 100% positive. If you are hard of hearing some of their team has strong accents, but I have never had an issue understanding them, nor has any of my team that had a bad interaction with them. 

Most meetings are done via Zoom, and I'm sure you could switch to a text based conversation if needed as they seem like a very accommodating team. It's not something I would worry about if you are a potential client.

I've been using the solution for about a year.

Support exceeds expectations every time we work together. I have always been able to work with the same engineer, and he knows our network.

We used a SAN with storage spaces. We switched due to buying new hardware and Starwind offering a one-stop-shop.

The solution is cost-effective.

Yes, we looked at HPE and Lenovo.

We use the solution as a high availability failover cluster in our data center.

StarWind HCA is much more reliable than our original failover cluster solution. Not even just by being more modern hardware, the virtual SAN allowed us to dramatically decrease our footprint and power consumption in our data center and is much simpler to manage. 

Any issues we've had along the way have been Windows issues as opposed to problems with the StarWind vSAN software.

Reliability and overall uptime are key as we're also hosting client environments in addition to our own. Bumps along the way have been resolved with the help of StarWind's fantastic support, and, as previously mentioned, pretty much any and all issues we've had have been Windows issues as opposed to their software, which their support has been happy to help troubleshoot and is refreshing to see

The proactive monitoring is nice. Knowing that they're watching for issues simultaneously with us. 

However, the response time is usually several hours after the issue occurred. Any disruption is felt immediately by the users, so we're already troubleshooting within a few minutes, and we reach out to support if needed before the proactive alert comes through to us.  

We've used the solution between three and four years.

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.

Our primary use case of the HCA is to provide a Highly Available, clustered virtualization environment to house all of our internally operational VMs. 

We host all of our internal server infrastructure on the HCA utilizing Hyper-V as our virtualization platform. 

The performance of an all SSD storage array allows us to easily and quickly expand our interal servers as needed without worries of performance degradation.  

The largest benefit to our company was to finally be able to have a no single point of failure setup at a pricepoint that was below that of competing enteprise oriented solutions. 

The HCA appliance replaced aging hardware, formerly cluster-in-a-box solutions, at a savings of over $20,000.00 and provided increased performance and more redundancy. The pricing and discounts given by Starwind on the hardware were unmatched. 

The HCA solution provides increased redundancy in that all storage is duplicated between multiple servers with multiple arrays of drives, rather than depending upon a single storage solution. It also allows us to utilize more cost-effective storage solutions rather than being handcuffed to dual port SSD with their higher price points when the performance far exceeds our needs. 

If you stay with a two or three-node solution, the HCA allows you to eliminate implementing a redundant storage network switch solution providing tons of savings on top of the affordable HCA offering. 

Additionally, the server cluster manager web tool provided by Starwind provides fast information at a glance to give you a complete overview of all virtualization, compute, storage, memory, and network resources throughout your network in a single plane of glass. 

The support and automated monitoring is a huge improvement over our previous vendor's offerings as well. It truly feels like we have a point of escalation on any issues and that provides a large amount of comfort to our small team. 

Shipping options should be explained in detail and offer more white glove delivery options even if it comes at an additional cost for some SMBs without docks. 

Our only pain point has been dealing with the freight shipping initially not showing up when promised, then showing up unannounced, and then sending us some small fees afterward due to the fact that we made them wait (since we weren't expecting them). Starwind has taken care of all of the fees after the fact, however, and they were more than accomodating in resolving the situation. 

We would like more visibility into the reporting that Starwind uses to monitor our solution for errors. We'd like to be able to receive the same data and notifications that their team receives.

We have been using the HCA for almost one year.

So far, we have had zero downtime. 

The product is moderately scaleable. It should fit any SMB and works even in larger organizations. The product allows quick additional of multiple nodes. At a certain point, eventually your storage replication might be better served by dedicated sans rather than the VSAN, or it might be beneficial to check out the newer Storage Spaces in DataCenter edition when it comes to storage scaling up. However, I think the VSAN included with the cluster will meet most small and medium sized deployments by just adding more nodes with additional storage when needed. 

We used cluster-in-a-box from DataON. We switched as they were reaching the end of life and it did not provide an affordable solution to replace it.

The solution offers an easy setup. Support was there to hold hands as needed every step of the way, with a dedicated contact point who took us through the entire process. She was great!

We do not have any warnings to share. 

We looked at options from TrueNas, DataOn, Dell, and HPE. 

We use the StarWind HCA primarily and in its entirety to serve as our primary hyper-converged infrastructure in order to serve all of our virtual servers. In this environment, we have an RDSH server farm utilizing GPU cards. We also utilize backup software that connects directly to this environment. Being able to have our entire environment run on a single platform by a single vendor both hardware and software is huge for us. We don't have the time or resources to go to many vendors or have them point to other vendors as issues.

This solution improved our environment from an increased user experience and administrative experience. We have had much better uptime and product speed since switching to the HCA platform by StarWind. Our organization has required less 3rd party resources and software to provide speed and flexibility to both our IT staff and our end users. The solution specifically allows us to focus more of our time on software development and process changes utilizing the hardware, as opposed to supporting the hardware itself.

The most valuable feature is the flexibility of Hypervisor and there is no vendor lock-in including the hardware the system runs on. I find it powerful and I am able to use the StarWind GUI or the Microsoft back-end Hyper-V. Everything works hand in hand and neither side forces me to do something in a specific way. Being able to log on to the GUI to see specific data and usage statistics, executing clones, starting and stopping VMs, etc., is great.  These all seem like minor things but have had major impact on our productivity.

I have not had any issues or roadblocks as of yet that require any improvement. Everything that I have needed has been available in the product. 

The only issues are when Hyper V itself has limitations and I'd love to see support or enhancement in the area of direct-attached GPU cards. It would be great to see even more detailed analytics and scheduling reports of such to keep a focus on when and if we need to upgrade the environment.  

It would also be cool to see support in the GUI for more 3rd party add-ons.

I've used the solution for almost one year.

We used Scale Computing. We switched due to the fact that we were too restricted with Scale Computing.

We have found StarWind to be well over 50% more cost effective.

We also looked into Nutanix and Scale.

We are using Starwind HCA for a Hyper V failover cluster at our community college. We use our virtual environment to run nearly all operations at our school. It has slowly grown while replacing old physical hardware with virtual machines. It runs all email, file shares, SQL databases, IT management, PR display devices, and network security software we use to protect our environment. It replaced more expensive and difficult to maintain hardware that was not able to perform all tasks Starwind is able to.

It was much more affordable to replace our aging virtual environment with Starwind HCA than traditional hardware. We needed to come up with a budget-friendly solution to replace our old hardware. The support costs were skyrocketing on the old hardware and the performance was severely lacking. Using Starwind allowed us to replace our existing hardware with much faster hosts - and we benefitted especially from the all-flash storage which gave us a significant performance bump compared to our old environment. Overall, it has been a great implementation. 

The hardware is nothing special, just Dell servers, but the real value is in the software and support. Support is knowledgeable and quick to respond to any issues we have. They helped us configure it from the beginning and were there for us through the few issues we had during the initial configuration.

We also opted for 24-hour support monitoring for any issues. They are extremely quick to respond on issues we even cause ourselves such as bumping a network cable.  They can identify the issue and guide us to fix it without downtime.

We would like more complete documentation to manage on your own without support - even though they are great to work with. Sometimes I like to have a better knowledge on my own in case an extreme situation happens that needs to be fixed immediately. 

The management console could use a facelift. It appears to do everything needed, but sometimes it is not clear what various options are or do which could be tied back to the documentation. A complete single pane of glass for monitoring would be helpful to self-solve issues without involving support and logs.

I've been using the solution for two years.

The solution is very stable as long as you realize there can be possible split-brain issues with sync if multiple nodes lose power at the same time. This is where the nodes do not know which is the more up to date so they are not sure which way to sync. Support can help resolve the issues should they happen.

Ours is a 3 node, but appears to scale much larger as needed.

Technical support is quick to respond and proactive with our additional support.

Positive

 We used a traditional host and separate SAN for shared storage costs, which were too high to replace.

The initial setup is easy with Starwind support.

The vendor team configured our environment without issue.

Pricing is all in one. It is nice to bundle everything together for budgeting purposes.

We also looked at Dell HCL, however, it was more expensive and complicated.

We primarily use the solution just for redundancy. It provides higher redundancy options so that if the server goes down, the other one picks everything up.

The high availability has really benefited the organization so far. You don't need two separate servers. If something were to go wrong with one of the servers, it automatically brings the other server up. It's sort of having a production and a spare, and then when production goes down, you bring up your spare if it takes a bit of time. However, this process is automated. Basically, one goes down, the other one comes up. You don't even know, except via the fact that you get alerts. The servers are on and they are on continuously. Nothing is ever down.

It's flexible. There are so many other solutions that have got very specific requirements, like vSAN from VMware and Microsoft S2D. Those tend to be very specific in terms of their requirements. This is more flexible. We had two separate servers that were not the same spec and the ordered solutions required that at least these specs should be very close. We didn't want to go out and buy new servers. And so, in that sense, it's flexible. It can run without those strict restrictions that other ones have.

It didn't require some of the high-end components, especially with regards to the NIC cards and the storage. In other cases, they require SSDs or a mix of SSDs and hard drives. In this case, it doesn't. 

Basically, it's fairly flexible, and it wasn't expensive compared to the others. If we had gone with another option, it would have taken a lot more money in terms of getting what we wanted.

The support is excellent.

The UI is very good. I know that you have the option of not going with the UI and then just use the PowerShell-based admin options. However, the UI just adds another level of simplicity to the whole thing. 

The sales guys are good. They tell you what you need and they don't oversell their product or anything like that. They tell you this is there, this is there. They are easy to talk to. I've had relations with them for quite some time.

The solution is very scalable.

The stability of the product is very good.

The initial setup seems to be very straightforward. 

We have to pay for support, which is high-end support. That can be expensive, at least for us. It may not be that much for others. 

I've been using the solution for four or five years.

The solution is very stable. We've not had any issues with them. We've been using them for at least four years and we've not had any issues with them.

It's very scalable. We are using it for two nodes, however, there's no reason for the product to not support three, four, or five nodes. You just have to scale in the number of VMs that you need and you just add more servers, really.

We have about 100 users on the solution currently.

We do not plan to increase usage. We do plan to move to the cloud. 

Support is great. You can call them anytime if you have issues and they'll respond to you. They are easy to deal with. Sometimes they even let you know that "Hey, you need to do this and that." 

Our servers are continuously monitored 24 hours/seven by them. That way we know when things are getting worse before they actually get worse and before we are no longer able to react. We basically are able to know things before they go down and we can fix them.

We also use Microsoft as well.

The initial setup is easy. It's not overly difficult. 

You only need one person to maintain the solution once it's up and running. Our network admin handles everything. 

We had our engineers work with Starwind to implement it. It was very easy to work with them.

You can pay for support. If you decide to pay the extra amount for premium would depend on how critical your servers are and if the servers were to go down, how much you're going to lose compared to the cost of the service support.

We don't have any licensing costs. The only thing, with a perpetual license, is that we do pay for the support.

We're customers and end-users. 

We tend to update the solution often. We try to use the latest version of the solution.

In the future, we do plan to move to the cloud, and when that happens, we will no longer need this solution.

It's a good product. It's reliable. The post-sales support services are great. This is a very flexible system, it works with basically any hardware. I'll definitely recommend it. What the others are doing is more expensive, and it can do everything with more flexibility and probably less cost.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten as it meets all of our requirements.