StarWind HCA

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.

We utilize StarWind as a clustered Hyper-V platform in our organization. We upgraded from a stand alone Hyper-V server to StarWind in 2019 and its been absolutely amazing to use. Support monitors the devices 24/7 which takes additional time off my hands to work on my other responsibilities. I've even been surprised a few times when we had a Guest issue and Starwind support actually remoted in and resolved it with our assistance. Its been a great experience, I can't imagine going with any othet vendor from here on out.

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.

I use StarWind to provide shared storage for my hypervisor cluster servers, it solves and addresses the business problem of having to manage additional shared storage solutions and the complexity of networking this requires, my use case is the norm for many IT professionals in this current day and time, and I confirm it does everything they advertise after extensive testing it performs as well as any other solution, with the added benefit of low deployment timeless management overhead and a monitored system by StarWind directly.

We use StarWind managed HyperV service for Virtualized Servers, redundancy servers and the Star Wind support alerts us if there are any issues with the HyperV servers. Their phone support is professional and great.

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.

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.

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.

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. "

We settled on StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) as a less expensive alternative to VMWare's more expensive license for vSAN shared storage between our two VMWare hosts, providing full hardware redundancy of everything. The peace of mind knowing that all of our data and VMs are running on two fully redundant hosts is amazing.

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.

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.

It is being used across the organization. We had experienced some data loss due to a failed backup and knew that we needed to address that in the future. Not only does it give us redundancy on-site (mirrored HA servers) it brought us up to an all-flash solution as well. The performance is amazing.

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.

I manage a number of different IT environments ranging in the 10-500 staff level

Starwind by far provided the best bang for the buck. The big players are a stretch pricewise for the clients in this range and Starwind beats them everytime

Having said that – Starwind performs just as well performance wise. I opt for all flash arrays everytime and I see they made the announcement they are only selling all flash. This is a great move as all flash at the server level is an absolute game changer. Whole environments run so much smoother and really makes the IT admins life easier. If we have to deploy on prem servers its all flash or nothing for us. Having instant failover redundancy helps me sleep easier at night.

What also sets Starwind apart is the support. They have techs that are not just call routers that actually know and can troubleshoot issues 24x7. Most do have accents which may be an issue for some, but everyone I have worked with in support has been patient and professional so in my opinion this is not an issue. Besides at the end of the day the goal is to solve issues which you definitely will achieve.

There are several other competitors in this space which I did look at, but Starwind was just really easy to work with, has resources on every team to get you what you need (Pre sales, design, management escalation, and tech support) provided the specs I needed, so I didn’t really need to look much further.

How they can offer all of this and 24x7 level support and provide the hardware at extremely affordable costs is beyond me. There is no question for future purchases Starwind will be my #1 go to.

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.

We are an IT service provider. A new area that we wanted to branch out into is hosting services/data for our customers. Starwind HyperConverged appliances helped us do just that. With two clusters, we are now hosting critical servers for our customers and are also able to give our customers offsite data backup for their onsite servers with disaster recovery into our private cloud.

We are a small to mid-sized Eye Clinic that in 2015, had to upgrade our Patient Management & Billing system so deciding to stick with our current vendor, we migrated to their “cloud” product which is a hosted RDS Farm solution. Our 2 year experience on their “cloud” was coupled with numerous outages and continual slowness issues on a weekly basis. In 2017, we decided to bring the system back on-premise and so we began looking for a solution to run it along with our other virtual machines. Fault-tolerance was the primary requirement in our search and having worked with VMware vSAN in the past, we knew that it would be a viable solution but also one that would exceed the budget. That's when we discovered the StarWind HyperConverged Appliance, a 2-node highly available solution that fell within the allotted budget. We purchased the StarWind solution and it ran flawlessly for 2 years, then in late 2019, the unthinkable happened, our clinic caught fire and the building and all its contents were destroyed. Knowing we had offsite backups, we just needed the hardware to restore our servers. In contacting our StarWind account rep, they completely understood the circumstance we were in and accelerated the order, build, and shipment of the new 2-node appliance. As management worked on obtaining an alternate building to restore the service of treating our patients, the servers were delivered to my home so the restoration process could begin. The StarWind engineering and support staff were a tremendous help as they assisted in the restoration process. Knowing that StarWind will drop and do what’s needed to help a customer in dire straights has won us over as a faithful customer for life...thank you StarWind!!!

We are currently using StarWind HCA to build out a flexible, distributed storage system. We had a myriad of file, application and database servers that ranged from physical to virtual. StarWind helped us consolidate and make the necessary physical to virtual server moves (P2V) and the entire process was very pleasant. This system also allows us to achieve high availability (HA) across the entire IT infrastructure that we are responsible for which was a major driving decision. This was all completed at an affordable price point for an SMB, which was also a key element for an NPO.

StarWind HCA delivered us a complete solution that works out of the box. We received everything we need to get up and running. Support was really helpful, they configured the whole cluster and helped us a couple of times when something went wrong during configuration. HCA with ProActive support guaranteed us that migration from our old environment went smooth and fast.

We had to replace an aging classic infrastructure because the cost to support and maintain every part of it was pretty high. Also, the SAN was becoming rather complex to maintain, and the time to resolution on tickets was pretty long with that vendor.
We spent some time looking at different solutions, since we have resources with experience on a wide range of hyper-converged solutions, including VxRail, Simplivity, and Nutanix. To a point, we did get quoted from a highly renown solution, but it was simply too expensive.
Then we found Starwind. They were offering a Hyperconverged solution that is very well priced and offers remote monitoring/support, resolving both the cost and support issues we had with the previous multivendor solution.

We used to have 4 Dell PowerEdge hosts running various version of Microsoft Hyper-V with no redundancy.
We are also running out of storage space and have been dealing with the increasing complexity of Windows server licensing. We investigated and received proposals from three vendors (Dell, Scale Computing and StarWind). Ultimately the main decision point was cost. StarWind is the only vendor that only needs two nodes to set up the cluster. Not only did we save on the extra node, we also did not have to license another Windows Server Datacenter edition. Our StarWind HCA has been in production for over 12 months, and we have had no issue or a single instance of downtime so far. And it has achieved our goals of centralizing storage management because of the StarWind Virtual SAN, added fault tolerance, and simplified Microsoft server licensing by using the Data Center edition.