StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Reviews

We migrated away from separate storage, computing, and switches to StarWind to enable us to condense and simplify our environment. 

We rely on StarWind to provide all of our storage, via the flash drives in the box, and the compute in a single solution but also to provide redundancy with its replication to another StarWind box. 

We now host all of our VMWare ESXi environments on the StarWind boxes and we wouldn't look back. We haven't had any real-world failures in the time that we have used StarWind but we have been able to prove it works many times during simulated failures and this gives us the confidence to continue using the platform.

It cut down the need to run multiple pieces of hardware to achieve the same goal, this also freed up valuable rack space. 

How quickly the StarWind solution replicates also gives us the confidence to know that in the event of catastrophic failure of any piece of hardware, we won't be far behind before things went wrong. 

We also used the move to StarWind to finally move to an all-flash array away from traditional HDDs, the performance improvement was noticeable right away and we are so glad we did so. 

The replication between the StarWind boxes. As I stated previously, although we have had no real issues, we have been able to simulate failures and be able to see that the failover kicks in immediately. 

This replication also allows us to perform maintenance easily on the ESXi environment for things such as software updates as we can quickly move all of the computing to a single server and shut the other one down without the need for any downtime during the working day. This means less time out of hours is needed to perform tasks that would have previously meant someone had to work late to complete them.

We haven't yet really found anything that we think needs immediate improvement. I am clutching at straws to find something if I am honest so would probably go with product updates. 

It would be nice if the software told you a new version was available and prompted you to do the upgrade to keep everything up to date. At the moment we tend to find out via the support team on the very odd occasion we do have a reason to talk to them. 

Otherwise, we have found it to work flawlessly and without issue. 

I've used the solution for three years.

Support is absolutely fantastic; we couldn't rate them highly enough.

Positive

The initial setup is very straightforward. 

StarWind themselves set up calls to help us get the environment going.

We trust StarWind and our customers support that trust. It makes virtualization easy and seamless. StarWind gives us what our companies need for optimal and secure growth. The solutions provided by StarWind can be implemented in any industry like government, education, manufacturing, services, or even ISP solutions. 

It is the perfect solution for hyper-convergence at a fair price. Our customers have Hyper-V and VMware environments, with Windows servers and Linux.

It works perfectly both in Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization solutions and in VMware virtualization solutions, integrating perfectly with the solutions of said manufacturers. Specifically, most of the solutions that we have implemented have been with Microsoft Hyper-V; its integration is complete.

StarWind provided better performance and amortization of the implementations we did for clients, making their computer system a stable and agile system. The solution is bug-free and highly available

For us, the greatest value that StarWind brings to Geyma and its clients is the proactive support of the implementation carried out. They monitor the servers, hardware, and services that are running at all times, notifying us very quickly if there is a problem with the implemented infrastructure and quickly triggering the alarms to be able to apply a quick and simple solution to the problem that may have arisen.

For this reason, we consider it a complete and reliable solution and we offer it to our clients.

StarWind can be implemented in any sector that requires high availability, reliability, and performance. The engineering team studies, designs, and reliably makes it available to the market. It is a complete solution.

The product fully meets current needs and I have no doubt that StarWind engineers will develop equally good solutions to meet future needs demanded by the industry.

The truth is that the operation and support offered are good, but we consider that the product's usability could improve, as well as the data resynchronization time after an unexpected closure.

We have been partners with StarWind for 8 years. For Geyma and all our clients, what has helped businesses grow is the robustness of the solution, flexibility, high availability, the support offered, and trust in a company that has demonstrated a successful journey. There has been good work in everything they have done

We previously used HP.

The cost is fair.

We evaluated HP.

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. 

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.

We used this solution to upgrade a bunch of old stand-alone servers to a cluster. There were at least eight different servers, some up to ten years old, running production loads on Hyper-V. Since everything worked, it was hard to get budget approval. Finally, we got someone to listen and we were able to get momentum on this project.

We got the three-node cluster in, and moving everything over was easy with no downtime to the approximately 400 users. Now that everything is on a cluster, the redundancy helps IT sleep at night. We have had to do some maintenance and there has been no interruption. 

Our environment went from a hodge-podge of Hyper-V servers of various ages and capacities to a simple-to-manage three-node cluster. The three nodes are interconnected, so we didn't even have to invest in additional network infrastructure.

There is redundancy, so if one node has an issue, the users have no idea and everything stays functional! There is a noted increase in speed both on the production loads as well as the backup (Veeam) being much easier to manage and running significantly faster.

Power consumption is down, so there was less need for UPS capacity and cooling as well. 

The configuration we purchased was built on Hyper-V, so there was no additional training for staff. The rest of the management tools are on Windows, so anyone with a little bit of IT background should be able to figure it out.

The full suite of redundancy gives a nice sense of security for the whole environment. Support has been stellar and we're notified of an issue before we even knew about it. We worked with support to get parts replaced and delivered the next business day and there was no downtime to the users!

I think some performance metrics would be nice to see, especially on the storage side. Since we have a decent amount of storage on our cluster, 80TB, knowing what our IOPS and typical usage is would be handy. There are times where something 'feels' slow so it would be nice what was happening on the storage side.

I do wish that if we needed more compute capacity, that we could do it without needing to invest in a lot of network equipment. That is hardly StarWind's fault, but just something to think about. 

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

If we had smaller needs, the amount of expansion would have been more. We went fairly large since we only get money once in a blue moon. There is some additional storage scalability, although not a ton.

We can add plenty of RAM. If we wanted more CPU then sure, those could be replaced! 

We had one issue with a part failing, and we were informed by support before we even knew. The part and on-site engineer was dispatched. It was a redundant part, so there was no impact on anything. Nice to know they are all over it!

Nothing in the HCA realm, just stand-alone Hyper-V machines. 

The initial setup was very easy. Support ran through everything remotely and we were up in a few hours. It was nothing we probably could not have done ourselves, but it was nice to have an expert do it and have it up. 

We implemented purely in-house.

We didn't have any issue with pricing or any of the sales process. If anything, we were difficult with changing what we wanted to include on the HCA all the time. Sales rolled with us without any issue. 

We did look at moving hypervisors and HCA platforms but passed because the amount of change to management would have been a lot for the current staff.

We are very happy and the number of incidents and stress has been greatly reduced. 

Our remote office-branch office locations are using StarWind Virtual SAN.

I use the vSAN product and it provides the shared solution I need for my VMware hypervisors to be able to use HA and other redundancy solutions. It provides the necessary fault tolerance and continuance of business processes.

The HCAs across all sites house more than 200 VMs over multiple networks. StarWind allowed us to create a HA Clustered environment without an expensive SAN while providing hyper-converged capabilities.

The units fit us well.

The StarWind infrastructure provided a preconfigured package of software and hardware in a single system for simplified management. With StarWind converged infrastructure, the compute, storage, and networking components were easy to modify to fit our needs at all the locations.

It was a lower-cost solution that enabled us to replace our existing end-of-life infrastructure while taking advantage of new technologies like hyper-converged infrastructure.

This product also enabled us to standardize our server hardware. 

The support has been impressive. 

The option to deploy a hyper-converged system without an expensive storage switch was a benefit. This reduces the complexity of the system as a whole and drives down the cost.

StarWind hardware is also easy to manage and monitor, saving time for my engineers. The most valuable thing about StarWind is the all-in-one solutions that they provide. 

We did have some issues with shipping the product to one our sites. The company shipping the servers lost one of the nodes in transit. But StarWind was quick to order, configure, and ship out a new node so we could meet our install deadline. 

We have been using the StarWind HyperConverged Appliance for more than a year.

It is a stable product so far. 

It is easy to scale.

Their support is top-notch. 

StarWind support is very proactive and easy to work with. Their support engineers know the product inside out and save us time in the long run if a system is down.

Previously, we used the traditional SAN and Host configuration. We needed to find a redundant storage solution.  

Since its an all in one solution, setup was easy with their support. 

We used the vendor team for the first deployment and they were helpful. We did the rest on our own. 

It's an all in one package, making it very easy. 

We evaluated other options including VMware vSAN and HPE. 

For improvements, there aren't many that stick out like a sore thumb. StarWind fits our remote office branch office needs across the company. The compute, storage, and networking flexibilities when buying the product helped us right-size the solution for every site.

Their support is proactive and professional.

Overall, StarWind provides a solid product and addresses our remote office branch office needs.

We are an MSP that offers IT services to SMB companies in our area. We wanted to branch out and start offering hosting services in the form of offsite backup and server. To achieve this we needed a highly available cluster of servers. We started off designing a typical cluster/SAN setup but decided that we wanted the simplicity of hyper-converged architecture instead. In researching HCA we found that StarWind offered exactly that as well of proactive monitoring support for the cluster. Having an extra set of eyes on the health of the equipment was a huge selling point.

StarWind has given us the ability to have a failover cluster without the complications of a SAN network. We are able to offer extra services to our customers that we haven't been able to in the past. Small companies can be wary of the large cloud providers so having a StarWind HCA cluster we were able to give our customers the ability to grow into the cloud while also staying with a company they have worked with and known for years. With StarWind's proactive monitoring we can go about our day helping our customers and not have to worry about our cluster's health.

The most valuable feature is its Proactive support. They monitor the health of the cluster and hardware and reach out if they see anything out of the norm. They will then work with us through the entire resolution process whether it be a hardware issue or an issue with the StarWind vSAN services. If the issue turns out to be hardware related they will then work with the hardware manufacturer and get any replacement parts needed. Their techs are also very knowledgeable and have always been able to resolve any issues without any kind of long drawn out escalation process no matter the time of day.  

Multi cluster support for their Command Console would be very beneficial. Currently, you can only work with a single cluster at a time. The console is new so I expect much growth in this area in the near future. The other area that could be improved is the tech support locale.  Currently, all of their tech support is located in eastern Europe so if you have any issues understanding thick accents it may be a little frustrating. With that being said they have never got frustrated with me asking them to repeat themselves, they've always been very patient.

We've been using it in full production for about seven months.

Stability has been good. We've had one issue with the StarWind service locking up causing full sync to be performed. During this sync, there wasn't any noticeable performance impact by our users.

If you provide your own switches instead of doing their direct connect option you should be able to scale this solution very well. If you go direct connect you are limited to 3 nodes.  Adding additional storage should be easy if you have available hard drive bays.

Tech support has been fantastic. Always willing to help no matter what time of day/night.  I've never had to have an issue escalated as the first contact tech has always been able to solve any issues/questions.

This is my first venture into the HCA world.

StarWind performed most of the initial setup for us. We racked the equipment and then they remoted in and configured everything. We did not have any existing VMs to migrate so it was a simple setup.

Cost is very reasonable and shouldn't catch anyone off guard if you've looked at other HCA devices.

We also looked at Nutanix, HP Simplivity, VxRails, and Scale.