Regina Catholic Schools ensures continuous access to critical learning platforms by deploying a high-availability cluster with StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN)

CHALLENGE

Before deploying StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN), Regina Catholic Schools operated a K-12 environment with a hybrid IT model, combining on-premises infrastructure and Microsoft Azure services such as Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, and web applications. The on-prem setup included two Hyper-V hosts running 12-15 virtual machines (VMs) with hardware redundancy at the power and network levels. However, there was no shared storage or automated failover.

In case of host failure, VMs had to be manually migrated, which was slow and operationally disruptive. The issue was compounded by hardware limitations on one host that prevented the use of native Hyper-V live migration features.

We’ve tested the live migrations and failover, and it worked perfectly. StarWind VSAN meets exactly what we were wanting it to do. The support we received for setting up StarWind on our hosts was great!

Thomas Fennell, Systems Architect

 

SOLUTION

Regina Catholic Schools chose StarWind VSAN for its feature set and cost efficiency. With guidance from the StarWind Support Team, the solution was quickly deployed and configured. VSAN enabled shared storage between the two Hyper-V hosts, allowing seamless live migration of VMs and providing failover capabilities. The IT team successfully tested both live migration and failover scenarios, confirming stable and reliable operation.

The solution met all requirements and removed downtime risks. Future plans include expanding storage capacity to enable full bidirectional migration between hosts.