StarWind, providing high availability storage in a HyperV cluster
April 09, 2019
StarWind, providing high availability storage in a HyperV cluster
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with StarWind Virtual SAN
My team supports the IT infrastructure of a college, K-12 school and a large church with several hundred full-time staff and about 1,000 total users. We needed a product that would meet our High Availability (HA) needs as well as interoperate with our existing Microsoft HyperV cluster. It currently provides the Virtual Machine (VM) backing for about 40 VMs.
- StarWind uses a lightweight frontend that runs on top of our HyperV storage nodes. It is fast, easy to navigate and provides a clear indication of the synchronization of our storage across nodes.
- StarWind leverages the server hardware and HyperV setup we already have. It was easy to stand up a second node and replicate our RAID 5 array to the second server, providing HA.
- Given the criticality of the storage, we were concerned about support. StarWind provided us several options for support and has always been available when needed. They worked with us on TeamViewer to get the configuration up and running in just a few hours.
- Starwind currently has a Windows native application that it uses for management. There is not a web-based GUI at this time. This may be a choice to reduce the services running on the storage nodes but does seem like it would be a good alternative.
- Our IT team and management is now assured of high availability and meets both our audit, uptime, and disaster recovery mandates because of StarWind. Our stress level is a lot less as well.
The other alternatives we researched or tested were either too high priced are too complicated. We want our storage to be as simple and as solid as possible.