The StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA) is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution designed to reduce application downtime on a reasonable budget.
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SUSE Harvester
Score 10.0 out of 10
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Suse's Harvester is a cloud-native hyperconverged infrastructure. It is used to unify infrastructure workloads with Harvester and is designed to help operators consolidate and simplify their virtual machine workloads alongside Kubernetes clusters. Harvester is presented as a next generation of open-source hyperconverged infrastructure solutions designed for modern cloud-native environments. Suse Harvester is open source and free to use.
As a nonprofit, we needed a virtualization platform that was reliable, cost effective, and simple to administer. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance checked all the boxes for us. We went with their refurbished models to lower the cost, and they've been rock solid. We were able to simplify our environment and the platform has been so reliable that I really don't have to think about it. This has been great for me as the sole sysadmin. There are a lot of pieces to manage, and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance have allowed me to focus less on the platform and more on the VM's themselves and the other pieces of our network environment. I think as long as you get the "right size" of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance that this platform could work well for many organizations.
It's great for provisioning any kind of virtual servers, but for now, we use it to provision only servers for Rancher managed Kubernetes clusters. But we are considering to provision also virtual servers for all kinds of needs on SUSE Harvester in the near future, as it's getting more and more mature with every release.
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.
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.
The hardware appliance convinced me. It is also good to use as a product in the box.Experience of the speed and security of the storage and the data on the storage is important.Installation is relatively easy and support is supportive. You are not left alone.Therefore a clear recommendation
Overall, the appliance is versatile. It covers the adaptation to all current hypervisors and can be addressed via different protocols. This prepares you for a wide range of uses.Rack mounting is also well thought out. And last but not least, apart from the technical performance, it is also an eye-catcher.
Working with the support team has been great. Connecting with somebody during and after business hours has been smooth, and they have always been responsive and professional. I don't have to wait very long to hear back from them when either sending out an email with a question or inquiry or when calling after business hours when we had to shutdown and bring back up the servers due to hurricanes here in Florida.
StarWind's proactive support will notify us of any non-responsive issues that they may see on their end. Thankfully, no serious issues with the HCA's have occurred but several times network connectivity was lost to the HCAs and StarWind's proactive support notified us.
The old saying: Preparation is everything.It should be ensured in advance that the operating system is up-to-date and therefore suitable for the appliance.The recommended network adapters should also be used in the network and the firewall rules adjusted.If this is planned in advance and everything is prepared, then the installation can be carried out relatively quickly.The manuals and the StarWind website are also a very good help.
Honestly using Starwind was our first jump into Clusterd services. We utilized standalone business grade hardware/software prior to moving to them. It was a great migration. Everything wen't smooth, support was great, the hardware is great, and performance is perfect. If you're hesitant, don't be. If you have worries, drop them. It'll be fine :)
We used ESXi for years and were happy with it. Then we implemented Rancher managed Kubernetes clusters with nodes provisioned on VMware ESXi. Later, when SUSE Harvester came out, we started to provision SUSE Rancher nodes on Harvester. Both VMware ESXi and SUSE Harvester are great products, and I think - we are keeping both, at least for now, when SUSE Harvester is a young project.
