Keep in mind that StarWind VMs for the vSAN will take up 24GB of memory per host. If you do decide to go with StarWind, adjust your hardware configuration appropriately if you need those memory resources.
StarWind is a good and cheap provider that sells high-quality products. That said, you shouldn't always look for the cheapest price or the cheapest hardware. Sometimes you get a bargain in the higher segment.
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.
Learn what your peers think about StarWind HyperConverged Appliance. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
CIO at a renewables & environment company with 11-50 employees
Real User
Top 20
2022-05-04T15:17:00Z
May 4, 2022
The pricing is very competitive, especially with ProActive support since you gain a "second set of eyes" on the system to monitor for errors which allow staff to not focus on the StarWind cluster all the time.
Director of IT at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
Real User
Top 20
2022-04-19T15:18:00Z
Apr 19, 2022
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.
Network Administrator at Winchester Utility System
User
2022-04-13T21:14:00Z
Apr 13, 2022
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.
I.T. Manager at a real estate/law firm with 201-500 employees
Real User
2021-08-30T19:19:06Z
Aug 30, 2021
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.
Senior Network Engineer at inSync Computer Solutions
Real User
2020-11-26T17:56:00Z
Nov 26, 2020
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.
Systems Admin at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees
Real User
2020-01-29T11:22:00Z
Jan 29, 2020
Regarding licensing fees, the caveat is that with the Windows-based OS, we have to pay for that licensing for both hosts. That's is another reason I wanted Linux. As for VMware, we already had VMware licenses, so we just took those from our old hosts and applied them to these hosts. There is also a cost for the ProActive Premium Support and, on top of that, is support for the Dell EMC hardware itself. We got four-hour, mission-critical, which is what we have on everything else. Because of the absolute redundancy of the two HCA hosts, which they say can tolerate a failure of one host plus one drive, you might be able to save a little bit of money by bumping down the support of the servers and not need four-hour, mission-critical support. You could bump it down and wait for parts to arrive the next day instead of four hours.
I was quite hesitant to buy these, and I don't know why. There is a bit of a start-up cost. Having never used HCAs before, I was reluctant to buy it. I would suggest that you jump in and do it, as I wish I hadn't wasted so much time.
We bought a seven-year solution including licensing, hardware maintenance, and ProActive Support. For us, in a school, we tend to buy high-end equipment — hardware and servers — and look at them in terms of a seven-year lifespan. That's a lot more than it would be in industry, but we ideally try to specify the equipment to have that length of life, if possible, in terms of capacity; or at the very least have the option to upgrade within that time. So, our one-off costs when we bought the equipment included seven years' worth of licensing and everything else that goes with it. We paid it all upfront. Obviously we pay our Microsoft licensing separately and that licensing covers the operating system on the StarWind appliances.
In terms of the hardware pricing, we ended up going with refurbished machines because we're not in quite as critical a situation as other service providers may be. The pricing is pretty comparable between StarWind and other solutions, if you're just talking about hardware and a general support plan. The value starts to come back in a very real way with StarWind when you talk about the reliability of both the hardware and the support structure itself. Our entire package was around $35,000 for everything, including three years of support.
The pricing model is very straightforward. I always go for the maximum, enterprise-level. It includes all the services I need and availability guarantees. It's a turnkey solution. It's a whole package, including five-year support on everything. There are not so many companies that offer hyperconverged solutions, the way StarWind does. HPE doesn't offer it. Dell EMC doesn't offer it, although they do offer a solution combined with Cisco. There is no real comparison, other than parties that are working together. The closest to this would be the Dell EMC/Cisco solution, and that is four or five times more expensive.
IT Manager at a transportation company with 51-200 employees
Real User
2019-10-20T10:33:00Z
Oct 20, 2019
There was a one-time, upfront cost but I don't know what the recurring cost is. I imagine it's the standard 18 to 20 percent maintenance. Nothing stands out as unusual about this solution in my memory, so whatever is standard for keeping support and hardware is what this solution would cost. There are no other costs that I'm aware of. The only thing I could compare it to is the cost of Windows Server and Windows licensing in general, but not to a specific StarWind-type of product. The fact that some of the other solutions that I researched operate on a minimum three-node basis — not a minimum of two nodes — that factor alone would make the cost of StarWind less.
The Nutanix piece was about $45,000, getting close to $50,000 with all the licensing involved, whereas the StarWind was less than half of that, after Microsoft licensing and such. The price point was spot-on. There were no hidden fees. Everything was up-front. We had the option to go with three or five years' worth of support. There was really nothing unexpected. We knew we had to license our Windows Servers, but that was about it.
I honestly feel that there's no one else in the market doing what they're doing for the price point that they're doing it at. That's why I asked them about investing in their company. I think that the options they're providing and the software that they have is sort of revolutionary for the price point. It's making it possible for small businesses and medium-sized businesses to be able to have high-availability at a cheap price. The total cost was $24,400. I believe it was just a one-time fee. They did a per-hour plan for their services, which was for the data migration. If you had a current environment, domain controller, deployment, B-center deployment, stress-testing, performance-testing, all that kind of stuff was figured into a block of 48 hours. If you were to go above and beyond that 48 hours, I'm sure there is an additional hourly fee.
Systems Administrator at Hospice of the Western Reserve
Real User
2019-08-29T09:32:00Z
Aug 29, 2019
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.
For organizations such as ours (NPO), the Microsoft Hyper-V route was too affordable to pass on. Some of our team prefers VMware, but Hyper-V has been pretty good for us with StarWind.
Do your research. You will find that nothing compares to the value you get with the HCA appliance. If you have a limited budget, the decision is an easy one.
For SMB, ROBO and Enterprises, who look to bring in quick deployment and operation simplicity to virtualization workloads and reduce related expenses, our solution is StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA). It unifies commodity servers, disks and flash, hypervisor of choice, StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN and associated software into a single manageable layer. The HCA supports scale-up by adding disks and flash, and scale-out by adding extra...
Keep in mind that StarWind VMs for the vSAN will take up 24GB of memory per host. If you do decide to go with StarWind, adjust your hardware configuration appropriately if you need those memory resources.
StarWind is a good and cheap provider that sells high-quality products. That said, you shouldn't always look for the cheapest price or the cheapest hardware. Sometimes you get a bargain in the higher segment.
The pricing was not the cheapest nor the most expensive. The pricing model is great for the product that you get.
Pricing was a bit high. That said, it was on par with other solutions we looked into. It's worth it alone for the support.
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.
Be ready to use support to get through a few steps; however, after the initial configuration, it should work great!
This product is well priced with very good value for money and the support team is great so the setup is no problem.
The cost wasn't a huge issue for us as it was purchased as a bundle.
The pricing is very competitive, especially with ProActive support since you gain a "second set of eyes" on the system to monitor for errors which allow staff to not focus on the StarWind cluster all the time.
Overall, the pricing was great with StarWind. Other solutions were two to eight times more expensive.
I advise users to trust the sales team as they will help point you in the right direction as far as your needs.
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 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.
The product is very reasonable in pricing and licensing. The setup costs are worth it as the process was very smooth.
We do not have any warnings to share.
The setup cost and support contract was significantly cheaper with StarWind than with any of the other options that I evaluated.
Pricing is all in one. It is nice to bundle everything together for budgeting purposes.
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.
The solution is cost-effective.
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.
The HCA price is all-inclusive (setup, hardware, support, warranty), except for your standard Microsoft Server licensing.
The setup cost was included in the support.
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.
It's an all in one package, making it very easy.
Cost is very reasonable and shouldn't catch anyone off guard if you've looked at other HCA devices.
Regarding licensing fees, the caveat is that with the Windows-based OS, we have to pay for that licensing for both hosts. That's is another reason I wanted Linux. As for VMware, we already had VMware licenses, so we just took those from our old hosts and applied them to these hosts. There is also a cost for the ProActive Premium Support and, on top of that, is support for the Dell EMC hardware itself. We got four-hour, mission-critical, which is what we have on everything else. Because of the absolute redundancy of the two HCA hosts, which they say can tolerate a failure of one host plus one drive, you might be able to save a little bit of money by bumping down the support of the servers and not need four-hour, mission-critical support. You could bump it down and wait for parts to arrive the next day instead of four hours.
I was quite hesitant to buy these, and I don't know why. There is a bit of a start-up cost. Having never used HCAs before, I was reluctant to buy it. I would suggest that you jump in and do it, as I wish I hadn't wasted so much time.
We bought a seven-year solution including licensing, hardware maintenance, and ProActive Support. For us, in a school, we tend to buy high-end equipment — hardware and servers — and look at them in terms of a seven-year lifespan. That's a lot more than it would be in industry, but we ideally try to specify the equipment to have that length of life, if possible, in terms of capacity; or at the very least have the option to upgrade within that time. So, our one-off costs when we bought the equipment included seven years' worth of licensing and everything else that goes with it. We paid it all upfront. Obviously we pay our Microsoft licensing separately and that licensing covers the operating system on the StarWind appliances.
In terms of the hardware pricing, we ended up going with refurbished machines because we're not in quite as critical a situation as other service providers may be. The pricing is pretty comparable between StarWind and other solutions, if you're just talking about hardware and a general support plan. The value starts to come back in a very real way with StarWind when you talk about the reliability of both the hardware and the support structure itself. Our entire package was around $35,000 for everything, including three years of support.
The pricing model is very straightforward. I always go for the maximum, enterprise-level. It includes all the services I need and availability guarantees. It's a turnkey solution. It's a whole package, including five-year support on everything. There are not so many companies that offer hyperconverged solutions, the way StarWind does. HPE doesn't offer it. Dell EMC doesn't offer it, although they do offer a solution combined with Cisco. There is no real comparison, other than parties that are working together. The closest to this would be the Dell EMC/Cisco solution, and that is four or five times more expensive.
There was a one-time, upfront cost but I don't know what the recurring cost is. I imagine it's the standard 18 to 20 percent maintenance. Nothing stands out as unusual about this solution in my memory, so whatever is standard for keeping support and hardware is what this solution would cost. There are no other costs that I'm aware of. The only thing I could compare it to is the cost of Windows Server and Windows licensing in general, but not to a specific StarWind-type of product. The fact that some of the other solutions that I researched operate on a minimum three-node basis — not a minimum of two nodes — that factor alone would make the cost of StarWind less.
The Nutanix piece was about $45,000, getting close to $50,000 with all the licensing involved, whereas the StarWind was less than half of that, after Microsoft licensing and such. The price point was spot-on. There were no hidden fees. Everything was up-front. We had the option to go with three or five years' worth of support. There was really nothing unexpected. We knew we had to license our Windows Servers, but that was about it.
I honestly feel that there's no one else in the market doing what they're doing for the price point that they're doing it at. That's why I asked them about investing in their company. I think that the options they're providing and the software that they have is sort of revolutionary for the price point. It's making it possible for small businesses and medium-sized businesses to be able to have high-availability at a cheap price. The total cost was $24,400. I believe it was just a one-time fee. They did a per-hour plan for their services, which was for the data migration. If you had a current environment, domain controller, deployment, B-center deployment, stress-testing, performance-testing, all that kind of stuff was figured into a block of 48 hours. If you were to go above and beyond that 48 hours, I'm sure there is an additional hourly fee.
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.
For organizations such as ours (NPO), the Microsoft Hyper-V route was too affordable to pass on. Some of our team prefers VMware, but Hyper-V has been pretty good for us with StarWind.
It's the only vendor that allow two nodes, all other vendors I researched at that time (late 2017) requires at least three nodes.
Do your research. You will find that nothing compares to the value you get with the HCA appliance. If you have a limited budget, the decision is an easy one.
Its cost was reasonable.