StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Reviews

We desperately needed to update yet downsize our data centre. We had six hosts for only approximately 14 or so Virtual machines and two old SANs. All of this was running on 10+ year-old refurbished hardware! 

As part of our upgrade, we wanted to improve the speed and manageability of our virtual machines and storage. We also wanted to simplify our networking requirements. 

We also wanted to know that we had reliable support in place in case something went wrong. We wanted to keep things simple, making the infrastructure manageable by a small team of IT staff. 

It has improved the speed and resilience of our data centre by five times the previous. StarWind has enabled us to save energy too, as we reduce from six servers and two SANs to just the two StarWind hosts. Simplifying our data centre with StarWind has also helped support less senior members of our team in managing and working with our virtual machines, either just by using the standard Hyper-V management tools or with the StarWind command center. We have peace of mind that our environment is being monitored 24/7 by their pro-active support as well. 

My nonprofit organization purchased a pair of StarWind Hyperconverged appliances almost three years ago. 

We wanted to simplify our environment while also cutting costs on server equipment. We compared other vendors and settled on StarWind for the cost and excellent reviews. 

We replaced our old VMware hosts/SAN storage with the StarWind HCA and have since converted numerous physical servers to VMs and have been smoothly running about 50 VMs on our StarWind HCA ever since then, with no downtime.

We are a small nonprofit, and I am the sole sysadmin. As the sole sysadmin, I am stretched thin across many areas yet must maintain many different systems. 

StarWind's HCA has been very reliable and has allowed me to not worry about the platform that we run our VMs on and instead focus on the VMs themselves. 

StarWind's HCA has also been instrumental in helping us to simplify our server and network environment and provide the capacity and performance we need to virtualize more of our infrastructure.

These are our core virtual servers for an equestrian center/resort. We host our domain controllers, print servers, Quickbooks, remote desktop servers, lock servers, PRTG, horse show management, and several other items on these servers. 

These servers support our daily operations and connections to users for the horse show staff, restaurants, marketing departments, administrative staff, and accounting department. We maintain our printer connects and many small clients that connect to our horse show database to help manage our show.

Having the HA ability to switch over in real-time is extremely important when running a horse show and restaurants. We can feel confident that if any issue arises with one server, we are instantly online with the next server and have not lost any data. With our horse show software, if any data was not copied over before the failure of the other device, we would have corrupted databases which would be extremely problematic during the horse show. Servers are sized appropriately with plenty of resources. 

We are running a small Windows server farm with VMware, and we have chosen StarWind as our solution. It is a hyper-converged cluster connected with 25 GB. The servers themselves are located in different locations to increase security in case of failure. Also, the servers are connected to a server switch cluster to create additional protection. Only the standard servers were set up, such as the domain controller, file server, and app server. The backup strategy was implemented with Veeam and amounts to a synthetic full backup procedure located locally and performed on tape drives.

We had an old server infrastructure from two major vendors that ran without flaws yet were no longer state of the art and thus reached its limits in terms of memory and processor for large projects. 

In addition, the support for the servers was expiring, and we wanted a solution that would allow a live migration in real-time. After extensive research, we decided on StarWind. It has the advantages of a storage solution yet is priced much more attractively than the competition (when considering hardware in the premium range). 

The StarWind HCA solution is used for our VMware virtualization environment in a two-host high-availability cluster to support critical business operations running 23 virtual machines/servers. 

I needed to have a setup that provides the highest level of performance due to a few critical virtualized servers and the highest level of redundancy in the situation where we will need to recover from any given incident affecting business operations. 

The solution provided by StarWind allows me to eventually migrate all my physical servers to the virtual environment, which is something I couldn't do with our older virtualized setup.

StarWind HCA has provided a much-needed upgrade to our aging VMware environment and infrastructure in terms of hardware, cost, and performance. 

All of our virtual machines, across the board, are snappy and running at peak performance. 

Due to the hardware, performance, and redundancy improvements provided by the StarWind two-node setup, we can take advantage of the setup and migrate critical physical servers to our virtual environment. 

Much to my surprise, while moving one of our critical systems from a physical server to a virtual server, users have commented that they have noticed a significant increase in performance on their end when using specific software. 

Also, the high-availability setup provides peace of mind in knowing that there is inherent redundancy provided in our configuration. 

We went with StarWind HCA primarily for Hyper-V Clustering. 

We were having hardware issues that lead to downtime on our single server environment. 

We aren't "huge," so IT budgeting is tight. However, every dime spent on our HCA has been 100% worth it. 

Since implementation, we've had nearly no downtime. No downtime has been thanks to the HCA itself. I'll definitely go with StarWind when we're ready for a hardware refresh. It's a no-brainer. The prices are obviously more than we had been used to in the past. However, it's been worth the investment.

Uptime alone has been substantially increased. 

Repair efforts have been reduced to nearly nothing. 

Monitoring is provided free of cost to StarWind, which also reduced expenses.

In instances where we had issues outside of the HCA, StarWind support has gone above and beyond to help us diagnose Windows issues. 

I've been in IT for 15 years now, and you kind of expect to have to "work on things" as part of your job description. That said, we're 3 years in, and I have yet to "need" to work on anything with the hardware or software. It just works.

I'm the sole IT guy at a construction company of about 50 employees. StarWind HCA hosts all of our IT infrastructure other than the building's security and the phones. 

In total, we are running six Windows Server VMs (one DC directly on each of the nodes and four in the HA cluster). 

We have one of their hybrid systems (mix of SSD and HDDs) and I have all of the Windows server OS installs and databases on the SSDs with simple file storage on the HDDs. Since we self-host most things this is the backbone of our IT infrastructure.

When I joined the company, they were running everything off a single bare-metal server. The downtime was common, there were rampant issues, and backups were simple file copies on a schedule (no configuration backups).

As a jack-of-all-trades IT guy I knew that virtualization would be a massive boon in many aspects, but was intimidated at the prospect of building out a whole system from scratch myself.

StarWind's HCA proved to be an ideal solution. Support held my hand through the setup and configuration of the hypervisors and allowed me to easily migrate the company's ancient bare-metal server to a proper virtualized HA setup.

Downtime is almost non-existent now. Services are compartmentalized to different VMs and backups are full of images that could be spun up on the cloud in a pinch. 

We are running the StarWind HyperConverged Appliances as our Hyper-V Cluster hosts. Our old solution was a three-node Hyper-V Cluster that hosted our VMs. We now have a two-node setup using StarWind HCAs that run/host our Hyper-V VMs in a similar Failover Cluster. This saves room in our Data-Centre and provides a modernized solution compared to what we used. The two hosts each have their own storage bays that host all the VMs and also use the StarWind software to store our VMs in CSVs, allowing us to have even more replication on top of the RAID-5 node runs.

StarWind's Appliance improved our organization by no longer having a single point of failure. Our previous solution had a separate storage bay where the StarWind HCAs each have their own bay that can hold all our VMs and run replication using the StarWind Software.

Our old solution only supported Gigabit connections, while the StarWind solution also supported 10GB. Each node runs two Mellanox interconnects and came with two 10GB ports for our usage. We now have two cables running from the nodes through to the rest of our network and have set up SET (Switch Independent Teaming) for our Hyper-V Cluster solution.