We performed a comparison between Azure Stack HCI and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It has allowed us to save a lot of time and money by letting us create a vSAN within a Windows VM on the environment it controls."
"The product only requires two VMWare ESXi host servers versus three host servers for VMware's comparable solution."
"The ease of reaching the support team and their promptness for support is great."
"StarWind support has been great in helping resolve other issues not caused by their software."
"StarWind vSAN was very easy to integrate into our system and ran flawlessly during our entire use time."
"Active-active HA provides top performance and redundancy."
"We like their high availability. It reduces the downtime for our entire organization's environment."
"StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution."
"The solution has the latest processor."
"In my hybrid cloud setup, there are three features I've found very efficient. The first is software-defined networking. Similar to Azure where you create virtual networks and software load balancing, Azure Stack HCI lets you configure them with a drag-and-drop experience on the on-premises cluster. That's one of the good feature."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its ability to manage VMs."
"vSAN is one of the easiest implementations of any VMware product. It's almost like click it to enable it, then you're almost done."
"Easy-to-use, and easy-to-scale product."
"The most valuable features are secure IOPs and LAN security."
"It is easy to find information out there, not only from searching the web, but even the times I have engaged VMware support."
"vSAN Health is a feature designed to monitor the health and performance of the vSAN environment. It's crucial for us and our customers to frequently check on this to ensure everything is operating smoothly."
"VMware vSAN is easy to configure, with basic functionality and the customer can maintain the solution."
"VMware vSAN has greatly reduced refresh spending."
"If we decide to expand, vSAN could offer us some flexibility. We are researching ways to set this up from a new data center, which is located somewhere different from the current location right now."
"Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer."
"The GUI deserves a little love."
"I would like to see some additional, and possibly clearer, implementation videos with some slower and possibly more detailed descriptions of what the various steps of implementation are for someone who is unfamiliar with high availability and failover clustering in Windows."
"The software monitoring should be web-based to be reachable from any VLAN workstation."
"The documentation could be better."
"We would like to see the documentation more fully developed."
"The console is something that I feel could be improved. There is nothing technically wrong with it, but it can be jazzed up and/or made to be a little more intuitive."
"Proper training sessions should be included with the licensing."
"We faced multiple problems with the product’s stability."
"The product's initial setup phase can be a bit complex, making it an area where improvements are required."
"There are a lot of areas for improvement. Since I've been working very closely with this product, there are many areas, especially in software-defined networking. We had to improve multiple areas because we depended on the service fabric cluster to manage the software-defined network. That means we're already running a hypervisor inside a VM, and we're managing the control plane of the software-defined network. That's another cluster. So, multiple layers make the complexity more. So, from an operational perspective, it's very difficult to manage."
"It doesn't seem like it gives the performance that an actual SAN would give for heavy IOPS, read/writes."
"The big thing is pricing, and the rest of it is mostly good. From a scalability point of view, scaling the storage from network or compute should be easier. It is again all around the cost, and it would be good if it was easier to scale your storage separately from your compute."
"I would like to see replication as part of it. I would also like to see direct file access, being able to run SIF shares and NFS and the like. I think that would be critical to continuing the use of it going forward."
"The solution could be improved by having more filtered and multiple view volumes instead of a single view."
"The solution functions as the marketing says, as long as you follow certain rules."
"When we talk about improvements for vSAN, there is some way to go from a at least stability perspective. Adding all these new features is nice, but we are now at the level that most of the features you need in production are there."
"This is quite an expensive solution."
"I would like to see better integration between the cloud and our VMware virtual environment. We only have one virtual environment, which is VMware vSAN. Right now, there is little interoperability with the cloud solution at the moment."
Azure Stack HCI is ranked 17th in HCI with 3 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Azure Stack HCI is rated 8.4, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Azure Stack HCI writes "Performs well, provides good features, and has the latest processor". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Azure Stack HCI is most compared with VxRail and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Azure Stack HCI vs. VMware vSAN report.
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