Grayson County, Virginia, ensures 24/7 operations of administrative platforms and policing systems by creating a stretched cluster with StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN)

CHALLENGE

Before deploying StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN), Grayson County, Virginia, relied on basic Windows servers with standard backups to support daily operations across government and law-enforcement offices. The environment was built on Microsoft Hyper-V and technically worked, but the Windows clustering approach was unreliable and often behaved in a quirky way. This created uncertainty for IT staff who had to keep critical systems available with limited resources.

Expanding the infrastructure was also difficult because every upgrade meant a sharp increase in costs. With pressure to move more workloads to Microsoft 365 and OneDrive, the County still needed a stable on-premises platform for Active Directory (AD) and special-purpose virtual machines that could not move to the cloud.

With StarWind, we are now redundant at two locations, which is critical for policing and gov offices. StarWind VSAN works as expected, and the monitoring is priceless.

Ernest Ochoa, IT Director

SOLUTION

Grayson County, Virginia, chose StarWind VSAN because it allowed connecting two locations into a single redundant cluster. This immediately removed single points of failure and created real site-level resilience, which is critical for public safety and government offices. The new setup works as expected and provides consistent performance for AD and other special workloads that must remain on-premises. The built-in monitoring is described as priceless, as it gives clear visibility into system health and simplifies daily administration.

The County now has a reliable and predictable platform that supports its hybrid strategy with Microsoft 365 while keeping essential services protected.