We performed a comparison between StarWind HyperConverged Appliance 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.
"We can lose a site or even two of our three, and we would lose no data and have no outage."
"The failover protection and the ability to expand storage and nodes with no downtime are by far the best physical features we have benefited from."
"StarWind vSAN was very easy to integrate into our system and ran flawlessly during our entire use time."
"Recovery and maintenance are now less stressful and most importantly, it allows our users to keep working."
"This solution enables us to make better cost-effective use of our existing hardware and leverage the current infrastructure at a higher level than we could before."
"I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"The product only requires two VMWare ESXi host servers versus three host servers for VMware's comparable solution."
"We are running Hyper-V on twin servers in failover, and being able to manage servers from anywhere I need to, virtually, has been a game changer."
"It is a safe, fast, and cost-effective storage system that improved our systems to have zero downtime."
"Customer service has been excellent. Any questions we have had have been answered quickly."
"UI Options are simple and easy to find."
"The customer service has been the most valuable feature of the product to me."
"Reliability and overall uptime are key as we're also hosting client environments in addition to our own."
"We opted for 24-hour monitoring and support, which has already paid for itself."
"The presence of built-in storage saved the company from having to purchase a separate storage array and related network equipment."
"Servers came pre-configured for our environment and as soon as they were in the rack, Starwind got them up and running."
"The product’s ecosystem is better than Nutanix’s."
"The most important thing is the simplicity of the product. It is a well-established product with good stability."
"The ability to have an HA cluster in the absence of a shared storage device or SAN."
"To me, VMware is a leader of the visualizations. I think everyone just follow VMware."
"Everyone uses virtualization to more efficiently utilize hardware resources. That's the main point of vSAN and VMware."
"The solution is easy to use."
"it's easy to scale, it's easy to predict IOP needs, and you can design for low latency using all-flash... Also, for setting up new clusters for VDI quickly, it's nice. You don't have to wait on an order for a storage vendor to ship you a system and help you configure it, you do it all yourself. And the sizing guides are pretty straightforward."
"VMware vSAN has greatly reduced refresh spending."
"Other vendors such as VMware vSAN have a bigger community of users, so it is easier to find more pre-sale or post-sale information from users."
"A web management interface would be good, especially for those coming from other solutions that have one."
"Updates seem to be non-existent."
"I'd prefer it if a remote console was provided."
"We have, in rare cases, received conflicting guidance between different support folks within StarWind."
"While we had no problems setting the system up, and service technicians from StarWind could assist us very well, they could provide some form of in-depth documentation."
"Ability to to test the virtual storage are network area and storage speed from StarWind Management Console."
"I am expecting to see it more user-friendly in the future."
"Not much can be improved, to be honest."
"The overall product documentation and knowledgebase articles could use some rewriting and clarification."
"The monitoring and report software is a bit hit and miss."
"The StarWind Command Center web portal could use some work."
"Although the setup documentation was very complete and succinct, I found StarWind documentation to be a bit sparse."
"The only issues are when Hyper V itself has limitations and I'd love to see support or enhancement in the area of direct-attached GPU cards."
"A desired feature or service is the ability to have a hardware subscription plan that ensures routine hardware updates in conjunction with the hyper-converged software."
"At times there has been a language barrier when communicating issues."
"I am looking for more of a software-defined storage platform that uses different protocols, such as iSCSI, NFS, and CIS, and maybe also has an object as part of that. They should 100% make it more of a storage-based product where it is not linked just to VMware, and it also has NFS and iSCSI built-in at a scalable level. They should turn it more into a dedicated storage-as-a-service platform instead of just being built into the VMware kernel. Their level one and level two support is not at all good, and it should be improved."
"I would like compression and deduplication to be offered for offloading hardware, instead of doing it with software. That would be nice."
"This solution would benefit from better collaboration with Cisco for driver updates."
"It would be much improved if we could somehow integrate a better backup with it. Right now, we're using Veeam and it's okay, but I would like more of a VDP vSAN solution. That would be excellent. The VDP, at least the last time we looked at, it was just not quite there."
"If we have some complicated issues, you have to use the command lines interface. Not everything is possible to be fixed in the GUI. This is a drawback, that some things have to be fixed via command-line interface and should be able to be done in the GUI."
"We would like to see even more storage capacity."
"It should be easier to use."
"I would like to be able to limit IOPS."
More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Pricing and Cost Advice →
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex, VxRail, StorMagic SvSAN and Red Hat Ceph Storage, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. VMware vSAN report.
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