My impressions with the StarWind HyperConverged Appliance
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is used as shared storage in a 4 host cluster. The connection is via LAN (10Gb) and runs with good …
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What is StarWind HCA?
The StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution designed to reduce application downtime on a reasonable budget.
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What is StarWind HCA?
The StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution designed to reduce application downtime on a reasonable budget.
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What is StarWind HCA?
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) is a turnkey hyper-converged platform that merges compute, storage, network, and software into a nuclear 2-node footprint. The solution is designed to simplify HCI management for Enterprise ROBO, SMB & Edge, while offering flexible scalability and powerful performance.
Users can start with two nodes, based on HeartBeat, that can be switchless and function without additional equipment. StarWind HCA is a software-centric architecture that removes the need for proprietary components. StarWind Engineers perform the configuration, testing, migration, and integration for users, free of charge.
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance:
- allows using 100% of underlying storage performance
- has no hardware compatibility lists (HCLs)
- does 2- or 3-way replication + local RAID 5/6/10
- does VAAI and ODX data offloading
- includes load balancing and data locality
- does VM-centric hypervisor-level snapshots, and more.
To minimize CapEx and OpEx further, StarWind ProActive Premium Support (included in every license) substitutes an IT squad for the sake of cluster health assurance. ProActive Support monitors user environments 24/7/365, and uses machine learning to detect abnormal behavior so issues are prevented before they can become a problem.
The vendor presents StarWind HCA as a hyper-converged world enclosed in a tiny “building block” that comes at a reasonable price.
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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
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StarWind HCA Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Linux |
| Mobile Application | No |
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Frequently Asked Questions
The StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution designed to reduce application downtime on a reasonable budget.
Scale Computing Platform and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure are common alternatives for StarWind HCA.
Reviewers rate Availability and Support Rating highest, with a score of 9.7.
The most common users of StarWind HCA are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Reviews
(1-25 of 31)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is used as shared storage in a 4 host cluster. The connection is via LAN (10Gb) and runs with good performance. In this way we can virtualize an area of IT and thus relieve the hardware costs. In addition, data security is increased, although there is a stable backup and restore concept.
- turnkey hyperconverged appliance
- uninterrupted application delivery and data security
- improving the graphical interface with pnp functions
- Extension of the display to performance parameters via latency, access, etc.
December 01, 2022
High performance and redundancy, with 24/7 support, at a surprisingly reasonable cost.
The StarWind HCA solution is used for our VMWare virtualization environment in a two host high-availability cluster to support critical business operations running over 20 virtual machines/servers. I needed to have a setup that provides the highest level of performance, due to a few critical virtualized servers, as well as the highest level of redundancy in the situation where we will need to recover from any given incident affecting business operations.
- Redundancy provided by the clustered hardware and synchronized storage vSAN
- High level of performance due to the quality hardware components that comprise the system
- 24/7 support team that is always available, professional, and very responsive
- Some aspects of their online documentation could be a little more detailed. Although, their support team is very helpful with any questions.
- The StarWind vSAN system is complex and proprietary. Without their strong support team, I couldn't troubleshoot or manage it myself.
- The StarWind vSAN virtual machines run on each host and use 24GB of memory on each host. That was not known when I built out my system.
September 26, 2022
Efficiency, Performance And Piece Of Mind With Minimal Cost
We had a two physical host, two SAN VMware setup on aging hardware. The SAN's setup as a pool, therefore not redundant. We wanted to simplify this setup, improve performance, reduce the single point of failure, all while dealing with a SMB budget. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) allowed us to simply migrate our VM's over to a new set of HCA hardware. All setup and support is included and within an hour or two overall we were all setup.
- Simplifies infrastructure
- Knowledgeable support
- High performance
- Easy migration
- Better support portal
- UPS shutdown setup
- A webinar or training session on how it works.
September 05, 2022
Affordability and Redundancy made easy
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) is our primary server setup. The setup has allowed us to have a redundant server solution with lower hardware costs. The support the solution comes with means you always have an extra set of eyes watching your servers and will notify you when you have issues on the servers. The solution has allowed us to extend our server offerings due to an HDD\SSD hybrid configuration.
- Reduced Hardware Costs
- Support
- Simplified set up
- Control centre needs email notifications
- CSV creation could be easier
August 31, 2022
Top product and good price policy
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We would like to have a cheaper solution compared to a storage system but with all the advantages and not the disadvantages. Here only StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) came into question. On average, we achieved a saving of 20% with comparable storage systems. Also the possibility to build a scalable virtual cluster that guarantees high availability. A high availability cluster was created for a data center. Active Directory Application Server DMS Pros: - cheap - Scalable - top support - the best of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) server and storage systems Cons: - Delivery time - Limited hardware packages
- Good price policy
- best support compared to other
- the product itself
- More choice in server components
- Better set up guide
August 30, 2022
StarWind Goes above and beyond.
Starwind HyperConverged Appliance is used in a two-node cluster running HyperV. HCA has allowed for easily entering the hyper-converged market, kept costs down, and added much resiliency to my on-premise network. It addresses my virtualization needs while being very user-friendly, budget friendly, and management friendly. It solves my highly available virtualization problem.
- Virtual san.
- Virtualization
- Budget
- Management Console.
August 17, 2022
Very happy with the product and the support!
We are a company with about 50 employees and StarWind HCA is the backbone of our on-prem IT infrastructure. It runs 4 Windows Server VMs in a high-availability cluster + 2 Domain Controllers. When I started at the company everything was run off a single bare-metal server install and downtime was common. Since migrating to StarWind HCA performance has improved and downtime has been reduced to almost 0.
- A single off-the-shelf solution for a high-availability system (usually entails a mix of solutions)
- Support is excellent. Responses are prompt and reps are knowledgeable.
- Relatively low cost
- Command Center (web portal) management is slow and clunky. I find it easier to manage directly from the node OS.
- Scalability could be problematic for larger/faster-growing companies
May 05, 2022
Reliability and simplicity is good!
We use StarWind Virtual SAN on-premise to host 30+ Hyper-V VMs. We also have a test environment with 15 VMs. The product is amazing due to its ease of use and reliability. Before StarWind, we were on a traditional SAN/Switch/Server setup (AKA inverted pyramid). Obviously, storage was not fully redundant, so we wanted to address this in the new solution.
- Simplicity and ease of management were great. Much easier to maintain than other complex redundant solutions.
- Proactive support is great and available 24/7.
- Reliability have been solid (no downtime at all) for 5 years.
- Support team has slight accent but is not too difficult to understand.
- Emphasis on security can be improved. Things like default passwords were not changed initially until requested.
- Can't really think of much else...If I had to split hairs...on reboots sometimes it took a while to sync with the other node. Max was 30 minutes, but 99% of the time it's 3-4 minutes.
April 25, 2022
StarWind HCAs Help Me Sleep at Night
Virtual file server and Active Directory domain controller for the corporate office and virtual development and technical support environments for our Developers and Technical Support staff at our corporate office. Has provided our company with a fully redundant virtual environment at half the cost of a traditional SAN implementation. Previously, we had the traditional SAN environment of 2-3 virtual hosts, 2 SAN switches for iSCSI, and then one storage array/server (all Dell hardware). The problem was the single point of failure (SPoF) at the bottom which was the one storage server. Because of the cost, we could only afford one storage server but this meant that SPoF. Now we have a completely fully redundant SAN solution at half the cost and rackspace footprint.
- Reliability.
- Redundancy.
- Ease of use.
- Ease of installation/setup.
- Our use case is very simple and I can't think of anything that needs room for improvement.
- For our use, it's mainly set it and forget it and it does everything we need it to do out of the box.
April 25, 2022
Amazing product, Amazing support
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We used to have a large physical server farm. A few years ago we decided to condense this down into two, HCA, hyperconverged devices. Starwind was the obvious choice. It allowed us to decrease our overhead costs on power, cooling, network, and physical devices and focus the environment into a very manageable, very scalable machine. We can now spin up new servers in a very short time period - thus making the response to business needs nearly instantaneous.
- The appliance scale very well. If need be, we can add new appliances to the pool with ease.
- The appliance runs maintenance-free. We rarely have to touch the StarWind software or the appliances beyond routine VM maintenance
- It load balances extremely well.
- Price. It is a little expensive for small businesses to buy into - however it is on point with other solutions in this market space.
April 21, 2022
Excellent service and reliable hardware
We were looking to expand our virtual environment and VMware was too costly of a solution so we were looking to move to HyperV since we are already a primarily Microsoft shop. We were looking for something reliable but also wouldn't break the bank. StarWind was able to provide high end hardware and support for a great price.
- Easy to use and deploy
- Great service and support
- Failover and live migration are quick
- We haven't run into any issues with the product in the time we've used it
April 19, 2022
Amazing product, better support
We use StarWind HCAs as primary servers for operations. They have been used to carry the load of some of our more critical systems and have been amazing hardware. The failover clustering has performed flawlessly in testing and in production, I trust it wholeheartedly.
- Failover
- Clustering
- Customer Support
- The interface can be confusing to a novice, but their support is awesome at making sure you understand the capabilities.
April 06, 2022
StarWind a very good solution
The challenges we faced were finding a reliable, robust, efficient, and economical solution, and StarWind covers all the areas described.
- reliability
- flexibility
- medium
- Trust
- Hyperconvergency
- Sincronization
- Proactive support
April 04, 2022
4 Years Running Strong with 2 Node HCA Appliance
We are running a two-node HCA cluster and have been very happy with the performance and proactive support. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is one of the only solutions that allowed us to simplify with hyper-convergence without spending a fortune. We looked at other HCI systems to replace our traditional SAN/host system and nothing compared to StarWind HyperConverged Appliance in terms of cost or functionality. If you are a smaller organization or school, I would highly recommend looking at StarWind HyperConverged Appliance.
- StarWind HyperConverged Appliance allows you to run hyper-converged infrastructure for a fraction of the cost of other solutions.
- They offer proactive support to quickly identify problems in your environment.
- StarWind HyperConverged Appliance virtual san software works as advertised and does so efficiently and effectively.
- I would like to see some better power management/additional sync settings during an unplanned power outage.
April 02, 2022
Incredibly Experience with StarWind
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) is hands down the best for managing virtualized servers. This solution has reduced server downtime and increased productivity. StarWind support is also exceptional and incredibly prompt. Managing servers for high availability with this solution is incredibly simple, StarWind delivers on all of its promises, hands down.
- Manage Virtual Servers.
- Decrease server downtime.
- Provide high server availability.
- Hard to name anything specific that could be improved, the solution delivers on its promises.
March 31, 2022
Simple To Set Up And Manage, A Dream To Work With
We were looking to replace a large amount of older physical servers, and move to a smaller footprint, with a lot more virtualized systems. We also wanted to be able to increase uptime of our server by being able to failover between nodes. We had all our eggs in one basket - a single powerful Hyper-V server running VM's which ran our business systems and customer systems. If that machine had died our business would've died. We implemented HCA and were then able to load balance and have resiliency for all of our systems across the infrastructure estate. We initially ran with a demo system, a couple of older servers with some high-speed network cards configured using the StarWind software - which was provided as a demonstration even with some technical support for a number of months, so that we could try the system out. We had some very niche bespoke software that we provided to the recruitment industry, which in turn used some bespoke indexing and categorising software which was very picky on how it run. StarWind amazed us by being able to host this bespoke software on the HCA and fail over between nodes with Live Migrate without any issues whatsoever.
- Provides a stable platform for Hyper-V.
- Provides fast migrations between Failover Clustering nodes.
- Provides powerful branded servers in a simple solution.
- Provides a fantastic management interface.
- Easy to configure and simple to manage.
- Initial configuration could do with more documentation.
- A fully supported trial version.
- A minimal GUI version for the Free version after license expiry.
January 28, 2022
Starwind HyperConverged Appliance Is One Of The Best Solution
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We were in the middle of an installation of a new ERP system and we were needed a stable server that would be running 24/7 since we are working round-the-clock and in multiple locations around the world. When looking for a redundant system to put some of our most important VMs (HyperV), we found a Starwind solution. We got a great demo from the StarWind sales department and we proceeded with a 2 node server. Until now, this is one of the best systems that we have and we have increased our partnership with them with another 3 node server. We had some issues with the creation of the CSV and other small issues, but the support from their customer service is really great and proactive. I say proactive because they are keeping track of the system alerts and contacting us to offer their help. "
- Strong customer focus (great support)
- Overall cost
- Proactive support / advice
- A bit hard to implement at the beginning but worked with the help of the support
- I would have purchased a 3 node instead of a 2 node to start. The 3 node is better since we can have 2 servers down and still be running.
- Since the 3 nodes are plugged together, the cabling management is a bit of a mess behind the server but not so bad either.
December 14, 2021
High Availability at an Affordable Price.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Starwind HCA is used as the primary [solution] for our virtualization environment on Hyper-V. We run a wide selection of [virtual] servers on this [hardware]. Virtualization brings a large number of [advantages] over physical servers, and Starwind's HCA solution provided a very [cost-effective] solution for creating a [highly] [available], clustered storage and [virtualization] solution. Starwind's support has been great in transitioning from our old [environment] of Cluster-In-A-Box solutions.
- Cost Effective
- Great Support
- Great Hyper-V Solution
- Easy To Work With
- Flexible Solution
- More documentation -- particularly in regards to Starwinds VSAN
- Management Console Could Use [Improvements].
- More detail into what data is reported to Starwind ongoing.
December 10, 2021
Affordable and Rock Solid
We use StarWind HCA as our main server infrastructure and all of our core VMs are hosted on this platform. We needed a product that could provide high availability, but not have a large hardware cost, because our infrastructure is relatively small. StarWind HCA allowed us to accomplish both things with their HCA by providing a highly available cluster with only two physical nodes.
- The VSAN software is extremely stable and easy to use.
- The hardware setup was extremely easy because most of it was pre-configured before it was shipped.
- The ability to use any hypervisor that you prefer is a great feature.
- The support level is fantastic.
- Honestly, they don't need to improve from my experience, the whole experience has been perfect.
December 01, 2021
Great Solution, easy transition
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We migrated from a two-host replication back and forth configuration to a fully highly available solution with ease. The servers were preconfigured when they arrived, we simply plugged them in, and migrated each virtual machine over, with ease. We can now do maintenance during the day, on either host, with no downtime, and [many fewer] after-hour maintenance windows needed. Support and turn-around have been excellent. The disaster recovery plan has greatly improved after moving to this solution
- Pre-configured System
- Knowledgeable Support Staff
- Great Price point
- Nothing
October 30, 2021
Great HCA product at a great price with outstanding support
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) is being used at our entire organization to server the needs of all of our virtual servers that support the companies entire infrastructure outside of switching and backup. Using StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) we are able to minimize the effort required to maintain and when we do need support, we have superior support available at all times.
- Speed.
- Flexibility.
- Support.
- GPU
October 19, 2021
Cost-effective and stable for small environments
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
StarWind HCA is our backbone for our Hyper V environment which runs nearly all processes for our college. We run many different virtual servers on the hardware to serve all needs It was selected due to the value a virtual environment brings over traditional physical hardware. Our old hardware was extremely expensive to support and complicated to manage. StarWind solved both those problems.
- Great performance of hardware.
- Cost effective.
- Great support.
- Facelift management console.
- Management console better guides.
- More complete documentation.
October 07, 2021
StarWind HCA vSAN Post-Purchase Review
We use StarWind vSAN to support the IT needs across the entire company. It allows us to provide high-performance computing and storage to the business needs (i.e.: VMs, apps, desktops, etc.). It also reduces our IT complexity in hardware and maintenance.
- High performance storage.
- Great customer service and support.
- Simple to deploy.
- Reduced single points of failure.
- Documentation.
May 24, 2021
Great solution for SMB infrastructure
Our StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is the core of our organization. All of our critical VMs are hosted on it including SQL databases, line of business applications, ERP software, as well as network monitoring and management software. Being an SMB we needed a highly available VM platform that was cost-effective and not as complex as HA setups with traditional SANs.
- Stable, we have yet to have any downtime due to StarWind HyperConverged Appliance software
- Simple and easy to manage
- Proactive support contacts us if issues are detected
- Could have been better communication during implementation
- Single pane of glass management console for cluster, VM, and backup operations has been slow to develop.
- If you want to set up Starwind vSAN in a lab to test, setup can be tedious. However, with the HCA itself StarWind HyperConverged Appliance handles all of that.
November 30, 2020
Fantastic and cost-effective upgrade to our old mess!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We had a hodge-podge of Hyper-V servers of various ages, capacity, and speed - some being upwards of 10 years old. Finally got budget to upgrade and made the most of the money by going HCA opposed to traditional host + SAN. Going HCA allowed us to not have a huge expenditure on networking.
- Well within budget.
- Easy management.
- High availability.
- Needed to work with sales to get any sort of pricing.