Bedwas High School achieves continuous access to learning resources by deploying a highly available Hyper-V cluster with StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN)

CHALLENGE

Before the deployment of StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN), the IT infrastructure at Bedwas High School relied on discrete standalone servers, mixed with standalone Hyper-V hosts and guests. There was no shared storage and no real high availability (HA). If a server failed, services were at risk, and recovery could take hours. The school needed reliability and failover, but the existing setup could not provide this.

Traditional SAN solutions required Fibre Channel networking and dedicated storage hardware, which were far beyond the school’s budget. As a public school, funding was limited, and capital spending had to be justified carefully. The IT team needed a way to build a resilient Hyper-V cluster using the hardware they already owned, without expensive upgrades or complex redesign of the environment.

StarWind enables the HA cluster to function, providing 5 TB of SSD-based data storage and a witness volume. It always works and (since I changed the cluster hosts) hasn’t failed at all.

Ben Mottram, Network Manager

SOLUTION

Bedwas High School chose StarWind VSAN because it enabled a full HA cluster on off-the-shelf hardware. Using simple copper back-to-back networking instead of Fibre NICs, the school built a reliable two-node Hyper-V cluster. StarWind provided 5 TB of SSD-based shared storage with a witness volume and delivered stable high availability.

Over time, the team replaced old servers with newer ones, moved from HDDs to NVMe, and upgraded the network, while StarWind VSAN stayed unchanged. They built the new cluster in parallel and migrated workloads with no extra license cost. The system has not failed since and continues to “just work.”