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Simple To Set Up And Manage, A Dream To Work With
March 31, 2022

Simple To Set Up And Manage, A Dream To Work With

Paul Thacker | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)

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.
  • Increased resilience.
  • Increased redundancy.
  • Saved on hosting cost due to reducing physical server footprint.
We had engineers contact us when the system was powered down (even though it was powered down intentionally). This showed they were constantly monitoring the system. The system was located in a datacentre and was not quick to get to. So having the constant monitoring allowed us to know in advance what to expect when we arrived at the datacentre.
We did not have any downtime or unplanned outages since implementing StarWind HCA. The main reason for implementing this was to prevent downtime, and that is exactly what it did. We could migrate VM's to another node during maintenance windows.
We requested to use copper / rj45 cat6 cabling for our network cards, instead of fibre. This was costed out in the solution. Unfortunately the servers shipped with fibre network cards which was not what we wanted. However! StarWind quickly rectified this and sent out cat6 rj45 compatible network cards.
We evaluated both of these systems and obtained quotes for comparison. Unfortunately both were way out of budget. StarWind however was well within budget! I have also used Nutanix, and the complexity of the management and the setup of the nodes is way more difficult to set up and manage than StarWind.

Do you think StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)'s feature set?

Yes

Did StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) again?

Yes

Certero for Enterprise ITAM, Sophos Intercept X, Clearswift SECURE Email Gateway (SEG)
Perfectly suited to SMB due to an amazing price/performance benefit. I believe the hardware scales up and outwards. It is available in a number of configurations. It would suit smaller companies who are not ready to move fully to a cloud provider and still wish to retain a "private cloud" in a datacentre. The hardware configurations could do with being able to have alot more flexible configuration of RAM/CPU/Disks. Although I guess this is down to it being a fixed set of servers.