My impressions with the StarWind HyperConverged Appliance
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is used as shared storage in a 4 host cluster. The connection is via LAN (10Gb) and runs with good …
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What is StarWind HCA?
The StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution designed to reduce application downtime on a reasonable budget.
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What is StarWind HCA?
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) is a turnkey hyper-converged platform that merges compute, storage, network, and software into a nuclear 2-node footprint. The solution is designed to simplify HCI management for Enterprise ROBO, SMB & Edge, while offering flexible scalability and powerful performance.
Users can start with two nodes, based on HeartBeat, that can be switchless and function without additional equipment. StarWind HCA is a software-centric architecture that removes the need for proprietary components. StarWind Engineers perform the configuration, testing, migration, and integration for users, free of charge.
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance:
- allows using 100% of underlying storage performance
- has no hardware compatibility lists (HCLs)
- does 2- or 3-way replication + local RAID 5/6/10
- does VAAI and ODX data offloading
- includes load balancing and data locality
- does VM-centric hypervisor-level snapshots, and more.
To minimize CapEx and OpEx further, StarWind ProActive Premium Support (included in every license) substitutes an IT squad for the sake of cluster health assurance. ProActive Support monitors user environments 24/7/365, and uses machine learning to detect abnormal behavior so issues are prevented before they can become a problem.
The vendor presents StarWind HCA as a hyper-converged world enclosed in a tiny “building block” that comes at a reasonable price.
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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA)
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StarWind HCA Technical Details
| Deployment Types | On-premise |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Windows, Linux |
| Mobile Application | No |
StarWind HCA Downloadables
Frequently Asked Questions
The StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution designed to reduce application downtime on a reasonable budget.
Scale Computing Platform and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure are common alternatives for StarWind HCA.
Reviewers rate Availability and Support Rating highest, with a score of 9.7.
The most common users of StarWind HCA are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is used as shared storage in a 4 host cluster. The connection is via LAN (10Gb) and runs with good performance. In this way we can virtualize an area of IT and thus relieve the hardware costs. In addition, data security is increased, although there is a stable backup and restore concept.
- turnkey hyperconverged appliance
- uninterrupted application delivery and data security
- improving the graphical interface with pnp functions
- Extension of the display to performance parameters via latency, access, etc.
January 26, 2023
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's have been stellar for our nonprofit organization!
I am the sole sysadmin at a small nonprofit. We replaced our old VMware hosts/SAN storage with a pair of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's and have since converted numerous physical servers to VM's and have been smoothly running about 50 VM's on our StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's ever since then. The StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's have been instrumental in helping us to simplify our server and network environment and provide the capacity, performance, and stability we need to virtualize more of our infrastructure.
- Proactive monitoring of our StarWind HyperConverged Appliances - We've only had a couple minor issues, and all have been identified early.
- Fantastic support - Support is knowledgeable and can fix things in a remote session or provide guidance.
- Very reliable - We've never had VM downtime on our cluster in our almost 3 years.
- Super easy onboarding process - Sales was knowledgeable and very helpful in helping us to pick the "right size" StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's.
- I honestly don't have anything to complain about. Nothing is perfect, but the only issues we had were promptly identified and resolved with minimal effort on my part, and were caught early and did not cause downtime. We've basically had almost 3 years of smooth sailing and 100% uptime.
December 01, 2022
High performance and redundancy, with 24/7 support, at a surprisingly reasonable cost.
The StarWind HCA solution is used for our VMWare virtualization environment in a two host high-availability cluster to support critical business operations running over 20 virtual machines/servers. I needed to have a setup that provides the highest level of performance, due to a few critical virtualized servers, as well as the highest level of redundancy in the situation where we will need to recover from any given incident affecting business operations.
- Redundancy provided by the clustered hardware and synchronized storage vSAN
- High level of performance due to the quality hardware components that comprise the system
- 24/7 support team that is always available, professional, and very responsive
- Some aspects of their online documentation could be a little more detailed. Although, their support team is very helpful with any questions.
- The StarWind vSAN system is complex and proprietary. Without their strong support team, I couldn't troubleshoot or manage it myself.
- The StarWind vSAN virtual machines run on each host and use 24GB of memory on each host. That was not known when I built out my system.
September 26, 2022
Efficiency, Performance And Piece Of Mind With Minimal Cost
We had a two physical host, two SAN VMware setup on aging hardware. The SAN's setup as a pool, therefore not redundant. We wanted to simplify this setup, improve performance, reduce the single point of failure, all while dealing with a SMB budget. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) allowed us to simply migrate our VM's over to a new set of HCA hardware. All setup and support is included and within an hour or two overall we were all setup.
- Simplifies infrastructure
- Knowledgeable support
- High performance
- Easy migration
- Better support portal
- UPS shutdown setup
- A webinar or training session on how it works.
September 08, 2022
Affordable and Reliable Hyper-V cluster
We've been using a StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pair as our Hyper-V solution for 5 years now. Their support remotely configured the initial environment and it just works. Very easy to maintain. Because of its simplicity, I'd definitely recommend for a small to medium business with limited IT resources. It is definitely an affordable and reliable solution without the need for an expensive enterprise level SAN.
- Low maintenace
- Affordable
- Reliable
September 07, 2022
Solid Product and Great Service!
Being a facility that hosts horse shows and restaurants we need servers in a HA solution to ensure that shows are not delayed and we didn't have any major downtime. The StarWind HCA vSAN solution gave us the product we needed to ensure we stay online. Our horse show software is necessary to run each of these shows and very necessary element for our companies success.
- Coping date every second in real time
- instant failover
- the ability to upgrade software in background without affecting users during business hours
- I can't say I know of specific areas of improvement. I like the way the systems work. Sometimes I have hard time understanding the support team on the phone but it's not bad.
September 05, 2022
Affordability and Redundancy made easy
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) is our primary server setup. The setup has allowed us to have a redundant server solution with lower hardware costs. The support the solution comes with means you always have an extra set of eyes watching your servers and will notify you when you have issues on the servers. The solution has allowed us to extend our server offerings due to an HDD\SSD hybrid configuration.
- Reduced Hardware Costs
- Support
- Simplified set up
- Control centre needs email notifications
- CSV creation could be easier
September 01, 2022
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance makes even me look good!
We use them as our main servers. Load balancing between the two nodes to offer faster performance to our end users and allow me to bring once outsourced applications back on-premise. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance replaced a very outdated hodge-podge of PC-based servers that were not keeping up with the demands of our growing business.
- Redundancy
- Load balancing
- Technical Support
- Firmware updates - Though this is more of a server Manufacturer issue. Support does help when there are any questions.
- I would like to see easier to access dashboards and notification areas (This may exist currently, I just don't know about it)
August 31, 2022
Top product and good price policy
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We would like to have a cheaper solution compared to a storage system but with all the advantages and not the disadvantages. Here only StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) came into question. On average, we achieved a saving of 20% with comparable storage systems. Also the possibility to build a scalable virtual cluster that guarantees high availability. A high availability cluster was created for a data center. Active Directory Application Server DMS Pros: - cheap - Scalable - top support - the best of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) server and storage systems Cons: - Delivery time - Limited hardware packages
- Good price policy
- best support compared to other
- the product itself
- More choice in server components
- Better set up guide
August 30, 2022
StarWind Goes above and beyond.
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.
- Virtual san.
- Virtualization
- Budget
- Management Console.
August 29, 2022
Great Product, Amazing Service, Perfect Performance
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
- Network Speed
- Storage Management
- Failover
- UI could be updated
- Some safety checks would be nice
- Make a "entry level admin" security level for some tasks
I run StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) on 2 ESX clusters each with over 100vm's for the past 5 years. I came from a traditional 3-tier architecture and Starwind simplified everything! Gone are the expensive iscsi switches and configurations, crazy tough hardward compatibility, and months to get up and running. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) was able to single source the entire solution for me with hardware and software and remotely install it all. It was a no-brainer and support is awesome to work with. They know everything inside and out and the 24x7 monitoring keeps everything running great. I can't reccomend it enough and should always be considered when looking at other vsan type products
- cost
- ease of use
- ongoing support
August 17, 2022
Very happy with the product and the support!
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.
- A single off-the-shelf solution for a high-availability system (usually entails a mix of solutions)
- Support is excellent. Responses are prompt and reps are knowledgeable.
- Relatively low cost
- Command Center (web portal) management is slow and clunky. I find it easier to manage directly from the node OS.
- Scalability could be problematic for larger/faster-growing companies
August 12, 2022
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) - It just works
We needed a solution to our ever-growing server racks. We previously had a small implementation of ESXi on a single host and many physical servers. We were looking for a solution that would help consolidate all of the physical servers and allow us to scale easily in the future.
- Scalability
- Service and Support
- Reliability
- 24/7 monitoring
- Reporting & Monitoring
- Hardware upgrades can be costly after implementation
- No product update notifications
August 12, 2022
Set It And Forget It - A Great Experience
Our two node Starwind HCA cluster hosts our internal environment as well as environments for some of our MSP clients. The system has proven itself time and time again to be much more reliable than our original failover cluster, leading to less troubleshooting and downtime
- Stable
- Easy to manage
- Great support
- Storage expandability, but that might just be due to how the nodes were purchased (prior to my hiring)
June 09, 2022
CEO
StarWind Virtual SAN is an amazing product. It replaced HP Lefthand for us. This has saved us thousands of dollars in maintenance costs vs HP lefthand. The product is running perfectly. The performance is amazing. Recommend this over HP Lefthand. Very well-built product. We had an issue in the setup of the config of the device, when calling support they were very prompt in their emails. They helped us through the entire problem. The support staff is very friendly. Support contracts are priced at a very reasonable rate.
- Support
- Ease of setup
- Perfomance is great
- Documentation
- Implementing updates
I recently did a hardware refresh and I moved from StarWind VSAN (I have reviewed previously) to StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA). Since this was during a hardware refresh it was obviously to replace old hardware. I chose StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) because of the good performance and support I had gotten when running StarWind VSAN on our own hardware. I went from a three-node cluster running VMware Horizon View to a two-node cluster with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA). One of the key upgrades with the HCA was moving to all SSD.
- It is extremely easy to set up, it comes with most options pre-configured for you. But the support group will walk through your entire setup and migration.
- It is monitored by StarWind 24x7. Instead of issues being reactive with the monitoring I'm hoping things will be more proactive.
- The performance has been outstanding. I think disk was our main limiting factor with our hold hardware.
- I prefer HP hardware to Dell hardware but that's just me.
- The documentation is a bit sparse.
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.
- Storage Sharing
- Perfect for cluster hypervisor solutions
- 24x7 monitored system
- n/a
- n/a
- n/a
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.
- Virtualization
- Hardware redundancy
- The central management
- in the past due to time zone differences to get to phone support later in the afternoon sometimes we could not get a hold of second level technical support on the same day. however we feel that this has been improved in the past year. Normally we can get to first level support immediately and then if an escalation needed, we schedule a time with second level support later
- Customer portal to schedule a time
- Discounts on Upgrades
May 05, 2022
Absolutely the correct decision
We moved to StarWind to allow us to simplify our environment, getting away from traditional iSCSI with compute, storage and switches, to a solution that uses less rack space but can do all of the same. <br><br>We also use StarWind as a form of redundancy, should one box have a failure, we have another ready and waiting to take over almost instantly thanks to the replication the platform provides. <br><br>
- Replication
- Redundancy
- Provide storage
- Product update notifications
May 05, 2022
Excellent product, even better support
We were running MS Dynamics AX2012 on a HP LeftHand SAN solution, but it was just too slow. We moved to an all flash StarWind solution that performed much, much better and improved the user experience greatly, and only took up 4U of rack space rather than the full rack of SAN nodes and servers.
- Very stable.
- Takes up very little physical space.
- Excellent support.
- Easy to implement and use.
- Nothing to be improved.
May 05, 2022
Great Product and Support!
We mainly use this as a failover and not have to expense for additional or separate storage. Our environment is pretty small and with less than 50 users. We only have two servers in the failover cluster that are part of the StarWind Storage. Prior to StarWind we always had to schedule maintenance windows and have all of our services down. Compare to before, our downtimes have been decreased substantially and maintenance windows have almost been eliminated. Not to mention, I no longer have to come in on weekends!
- Easy Implementation
- Easy GUI
- Excellent Customer Support
- User Training
May 05, 2022
Reliability and simplicity is good!
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.
- Simplicity and ease of management were great. Much easier to maintain than other complex redundant solutions.
- Proactive support is great and available 24/7.
- Reliability have been solid (no downtime at all) for 5 years.
- Support team has slight accent but is not too difficult to understand.
- Emphasis on security can be improved. Things like default passwords were not changed initially until requested.
- Can't really think of much else...If I had to split hairs...on reboots sometimes it took a while to sync with the other node. Max was 30 minutes, but 99% of the time it's 3-4 minutes.
April 25, 2022
StarWind HCAs Help Me Sleep at Night
Virtual file server and Active Directory domain controller for the corporate office and virtual development and technical support environments for our Developers and Technical Support staff at our corporate office. Has provided our company with a fully redundant virtual environment at half the cost of a traditional SAN implementation. Previously, we had the traditional SAN environment of 2-3 virtual hosts, 2 SAN switches for iSCSI, and then one storage array/server (all Dell hardware). The problem was the single point of failure (SPoF) at the bottom which was the one storage server. Because of the cost, we could only afford one storage server but this meant that SPoF. Now we have a completely fully redundant SAN solution at half the cost and rackspace footprint.
- Reliability.
- Redundancy.
- Ease of use.
- Ease of installation/setup.
- Our use case is very simple and I can't think of anything that needs room for improvement.
- For our use, it's mainly set it and forget it and it does everything we need it to do out of the box.
April 25, 2022
Amazing product, Amazing support
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We used to have a large physical server farm. A few years ago we decided to condense this down into two, HCA, hyperconverged devices. Starwind was the obvious choice. It allowed us to decrease our overhead costs on power, cooling, network, and physical devices and focus the environment into a very manageable, very scalable machine. We can now spin up new servers in a very short time period - thus making the response to business needs nearly instantaneous.
- The appliance scale very well. If need be, we can add new appliances to the pool with ease.
- The appliance runs maintenance-free. We rarely have to touch the StarWind software or the appliances beyond routine VM maintenance
- It load balances extremely well.
- Price. It is a little expensive for small businesses to buy into - however it is on point with other solutions in this market space.