Great SMB Hyper-Convergence Solution
April 19, 2022

Great SMB Hyper-Convergence Solution

Carl Marshall | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)

We use two of these appliances in a Hyper-V Failover Cluster that host all of our VMs. The two appliances replaced three Dell m630 blade servers, 2 Dell MXL Force 10 blade switches, and an EMC VNXe3200 SAN. They were the last blade switches in our environment, so we were also able to decommission the m1000e blade enclosure.
The appliances are providing nearly all the network, compute, and storage resources for our server needs.

Pros

  • Onboarding is well supported and simple. We were able to migrate all our VMs within a week of receiving the appliances.
  • StarWind's Virtual SAN software gives the reliability of a failover cluster with the performance of local storage.
  • ProActive Support ensures errors are detected and contact initiated automatically.
  • I no longer have to troubleshoot three disparate systems when something goes wrong.

Cons

  • Since Hyper-V Failover Clusters require Cluster Shared Volumes, the appliances have to be configured to access their local storage through an iSCSI connection. It adds a small amount of overhead, but is still much faster than an actual SAN.
  • ProActive Support is sometimes a little too much. We were having issues with our Backup/DR software that was generating errors in the appliances' event logs, and we had a new series of emails from StarWind every morning until they were sorted out.
  • Lead time on receiving the appliances was pretty long. Dell provides the hardware, so their delays are StarWind's delays as well.
  • Each appliance has to be able to be able to support all of the VMs' storage/compute needs, so enough disk space needs to be purchased to house all the storage needs on each appliance. If you require 10TB of storage before taking a RAID into account, you would need to purchase 20TB of storage.
  • Our CIS software has some poorly optimized SQL logic. Our old Failover Cluster w/ a VNXe3200 SAN would take up to 7 seconds to pull a customer's records up. It now takes only 1-2 seconds. Our front office has been much more pleasant since their install.
  • I would only rarely have to interact with our blade switches and VNXe SAN, so I wouldn't necessarily retain the knowledge of how to configure them. Each time I'd need to make a change, I'd have to refer back to my documentation. That's no longer an issue I have to deal with.
  • The rack footprint for our cluster went from 14U to 4U, and we were able to achieve it with much less network cabling and with lowered power requirements.
I've really appreciated the support that comes with these appliances. I'm a lone IT employee, so having another set of eyes on them and rapid assistance when it's needed has been amazing. Sometimes it has been a little much, like when our Backup/DR solution was throwing errors every evening, but mostly I've been very pleased. It wasn't any real factor in our purchase decision, but I've been pleasantly surprised by how helpful it's been.
I have had zero cluster downtime over the year these have been installed and implemented. Not 99.999% uptime, 100% uptime. They support Microsoft's Cluster Aware Updating, and provide scripts and support to assist in getting it configured.
I didn't spend a lot of time looking at other solutions. I did check out Dell's VxRail offerings, but didn't want to switch from Hyper-V to VMWare.

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

We're a rural utility, so I can only speak to their usability in an SMB setting. I've been very pleased with their performance, ease of use, and reliability. They're very extensible; additional RAM, storage, or CPU resources can be added to the appliances. Additional appliances can also easily be added to the cluster. I'm a lone IT employee here, so the ProActive Support has also been very useful. A big part of the reason we purchased these was to simplify our IT infrastructure, and these appliances did an excellent job in that regard. I can't speak to how well these would perform in a large enterprise environment.

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