We performed a comparison between Sangfor HCI and VMware vSAN based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Sangfor HCI and VMware vSAN come out about equal in this comparison. Sangfor HCI has an edge when it comes to pricing, but VMware vSAN has an edge when it comes to ease of deployment.
"It has reduced our overall maintenance and overhead by having to only maintain physical boxes for one cluster instead of having to manage physical boxes for two clusters."
"It has allowed me to effectively and confidently manage the maintenance of hosts where I can power off a host and have its VMs migrate to another one."
"Their support goes above and beyond with the integration of their software."
"As the client had acquired another company some distance away, they were concerned about having a single SAN in one location or the other. StarWind vSAN allowed us to keep a copy of the data local to each site without asking the client to pay for two SANs in addition to the two new servers they needed."
"The iSCSI protocol is quite simple to configure."
"Virtual SAN runs on iSCSI, which is free and easy to configure. It's easy to manage from StarWind's GUI console, and it only required a few extra switch ports."
"When we need additional storage but want to keep the size of the SANs manageable, the StarWind Virtual SAN has allowed me to do everything needed."
"The solution is also quite flexible. As an example, other vSAN solutions that we looked at had more stringent requirements regarding mixed HDD/SSD storage which wouldn't have worked in our environment."
"The most valuable feature of Sangfor HCI is the built-in recovery functionality. The migration is simple to do from other solutions, such as VMware."
"The interface is very user-friendly."
"The Continuous Data Protection (CDP) feature is one of the good features."
"It was not expensive at all."
"The initial setup isn't hard."
"I would rate the user-friendliness an eight out of ten."
"Sangfor HCI is a one-stop solution that enables you to store and centrally manage your VMs."
"It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten... Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"vSAN that has been most effective in streamlining storage operations. For data recovery alerts, it uses tools like snapshots and vMotion."
"The ability to have a disaster recovery option for our end-users by being able to use VDI and the vSANs, and the ability to do replication across multiple data centers, are valuable to us."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to continue our business needs and have higher visibility. It has definitely increased our business productivity levels."
"We are finding that vSAN is a lot more scalable and adaptable, because we can go in with hybrid arrays for our lower-end storage needs or with all-flash versions of vSAN for places where we need more performance, and it's coming in at a lower cost point than an actual traditional array."
"We didn't only choose vSAN; we chose VMware because of SR-IOV, which is more on the hypervisor level and not on the vSAN storage. It's part of the whole system."
"Storage policies are used to perform operations in the VMs. This feature allows you to create storage policies for VMs to get performance, high availability, I/O policies, etc."
"Storage virtualization software with a good storage management feature. It's a scalable and stable software."
"Provides good performance as well as integration with deployment tools."
"I wish the sync after a failure, such as hardware failure or power-related issues, for example, was faster."
"I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit."
"They recommend RAID10 for HDD, which reduces the usable storage capacity."
"It would help if the manufacturer provided clearer and more detailed documentation, with explanations of how the application can be installed in various HA configurations."
"Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer."
"The software could benefit from more tooling to help with initial deployment."
"Management tools could be improved, sometimes the usage seems to be slowed down and confusing. A native web interface could also be an option. I love to see in the future port of the software on a general Linux distribution like RedHat or Ubuntu in order to avoid windows license costs. I would also like to see features like erasure coding implemented. On the VSAN software, I would like to see some improvements in the storage pools (eliminate the usage of the file as a data container and use the raw partition)."
"We would like the documentation to be more complete. Most items are covered, but if you don't know something, you may need to contact their support."
"The interface could be a little bit better."
"Its virtual machine tools can be improved. These tools should be enhanced for use in other applications and operating systems, such as Linux."
"I would want the product to include Continuous Data Protection (CDP) which can help to easily retrieve the data."
"Sangfor’s hypervisor is not mature enough to handle all the flavors related to industrial needs."
"The processing speed and cost should be improved."
"Sangfor HCI could be improved with certification and the right ecosystem for ISVs like Oracle and SAP."
"Lacks network support."
"Support may be an issue for customers in some industries. For example, financial institutions may require 24/7 support."
"VMware vSAN needs to improve its features because other solutions have more advanced features."
"It would be ideal if the solution offered some intelligent monitoring."
"I would like more integration with the hardware when it comes to disc types and supporting the newer types of storage."
"I would like a better Hardware Certification List (HCL). The HCL should a little easier to deal with."
"What I would like to see, for the really small customers, is the ability to have two nodes."
"When you upgrade the vSAN, there are some issues like lost data and problems with the log. The log disappears. When you upgrade the solution, you must have several logs, so if you have some problems, you can check the log server to find them."
"If one node out of your ten nodes fails, it takes a lot of time to replicate and rebalance VMware vSAN. This time can be reduced. When a node fails and the data is not accessible, vSAN has to be rebalanced to make the redundancy level of two again. However, if it is taking a lot of time and any other hardware fails during that time, then we have a problem. Two disk failures mean that all data will be lost, and we may have to recover it from the backup. So, the number of threads that run to do the rebalancing could be more so that the time taken to make it fully redundant again is not so much."
"Hackers are able to manage to leak information or data from the product using some corrupt files, making it an area of major concern where improvements are required."
More Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure Pricing and Cost Advice →
Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is ranked 9th in HCI with 28 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is rated 8.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure writes "The solution offers straightforward setup, scalability, and manageability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, HPE Hyper Converged and StorMagic SvSAN, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs. VMware vSAN report.
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