Great solution for SMB infrastructure
May 24, 2021

Great solution for SMB infrastructure

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)

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.

Pros

  • 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

Cons

  • 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.
  • Greatly increased IOPS due to going to all-flash storage
  • Greatly lowered risk by eliminating a traditional proprietary SAN that had poor support
  • Reduced IT complexity, allowing IT to focus on business process improvements.
Customer support has been exemplary. Support is proactive and they will contact you if a problem is seen not only with the StarWind HyperConverged Appliance services but also with Hyper-V or the hardware itself. Support also is always willing to jump on a call or screen share for training purposes or to answer any other questions.
We have not experienced any unplanned downtime. Again, StarWind HyperConverged Appliance in our environment is a standard Hyper-V cluster (you can also get a vSphere flavor). We can do planned maintenance such as Windows updates to the cluster nodes by either cluster-aware updating or manually pausing a node and seamlessly draining VMs to the other nodes.
We also took a look at Cisco HyperFlex and Datacore vSAN. Cisco HyperFlex was a needlessly complicated solution with confusing pricing and licensing. I can't imagine anyone wanting to go that route. DataCore vSAN was much more in line with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's offering and if you already had newer servers it would be a close call. However, we needed a complete hardware refresh and that is where the StarWind HyperConverged Appliance all-in-one solution came in.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (Dynamics AX), Microsoft 365 (formerly Office 365), BarTender
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is great for SMBs looking for cost-effective and easy HA solutions. Even if you are a growing company the platform is essentially commodity hardware that can be upgraded or you can add nodes as you grow. Even though it is cost effective that doesn't mean it isn't capable. You're using a standard Hyper-V cluster and you still have the full features of that platform.

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