We performed a comparison between Sunlight 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."The access to our data is quicker and cheaper than it used to be in a traditional storage system."
"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."
"In our case, the cost and high availability are the two most important factors which we were looking for in a solution."
"This has helped to improve the reliability of service and operation in all departments, without having to stop in case of emergency situations."
"It has reduced the amount of switching, network connections, etc., because the converged StarWind Virtual SAN allows us to connect high-speed network interfaces between different boxes instead of having to connect SANs via the network, then connect those two clusters together."
"The best part is the easy way it operates with a very clear GUI without any unnecessary items."
"StarWind vSAN is a great solution to create a redundant two-node-only Hyper-V cluster, both for domain or workgroup scenarios."
"The failover redundancy is why we bought this product and it has never let us down."
"It supports the latest technology of NVMe SSD, which is PCIe-based SSD. It has a very good IOPS performance as compared to vSAN. For the same system, I get 1,000 IOPS with vSAN, and with Sunlight, I am able to get almost 10,000 IOPS. In terms of features, it has almost all the features, such as HA and centralized dashboards. It can be managed centrally, and the visibility of the system is very good. They also have very good technical support and customer or partner training."
"The performance and small footprint of this solution are its most valuable features. I am able to obtain and use more than 90 percent of the physical hardware capacity."
"One of the valuable features of vSAN is it has a universal type of technology that allows you to deploy it on any server or hardware. Competitors, such as Nutanix, provides the AOS and can be deployed only on certified hardware. For vSAN, it does not require any kind of certified hardware."
"The most valuable features are its performance, simplicity, and synchronicity with vSphere."
"The feature we have found most valuable is the compatibility of VMware products with VCF and VMware Cloud Foundation."
"One of the valuable features for us is the ability to restrict the performance capacity per client. Other solutions don't have this feature."
"It allows us to put our infrastructure in remote locations and still get the same performance we get from our onsite SAN solutions."
"VMware vSAN is easy to implement in a VMware environment and it is not expensive."
"Very easy to implement in any existing environment."
"It helped us survive power outages in one of our data centers, then continued to function without a hitch."
"There is a general lack of documentation, especially up-to-date documentation to get started."
"I had to buy upgraded support, which was not a problem, but it wasn't a prorated amount, so I paid for the support, the full upgrade, but I only got a couple of months out of it because it was only good until renewal time."
"The configuration can a bit cumbersome."
"StarWind relies on the underlying OS to manage the "SAN files" whether that would be a RAID volume, software RAID (such as LVM), etc. It would be useful if StarWind could incorporate the actual physical drive management inside of the solution, similar to Storage Spaces Direct."
"We have, in rare cases, received conflicting guidance between different support folks within StarWind."
"The documentation could be better."
"Improvements in documentation and support resources could enhance the user experience."
"I struggled when bit figuring out how to go about doing the evaluation."
"My recommendation would be to add this technology to Azure, Microsoft Azure so that we can bring it to the market, or deploy it on public clouds such as Microsoft Azure and Google. It is currently only available on Amazon's public cloud."
"Its reporting and dashboards need to be improved. It currently has very basic reporting options. It should also be made easier to deploy on Unix operating systems. It is easy to deploy on Windows and Linux, but it is currently not easy to deploy on Unix."
"We would like to see additional backup and recovery options added. In particular, integration with popular applications like databases."
"One thing in vSAN that I would like to improve is using vSAN as a repository for files or other things. For example, with Horizon, maybe we can save profiles with UEM on there. That would be a good feature that I would like."
"I would like to see the availability of more template based VMware systems. Combined with the ability to check and measure multiple and converging data segments. Another issue I've seen is that the tool seems to be slow when first starting up."
"I would have liked it to have been more scalable. It's scalable but not as much as, for example, the ScaleIO systems were or the Kaminario"
"The ability to access SAN environments with fiber channels (or even NVMe) would be a good addition."
"There's a lot that can be done to segregate. That may be available now in vSAN 7, I suppose, however, the deduplication and compression can be segregated."
"he list of hardware supported should be increased in the future."
"The server files are larger than before."
Sunlight is ranked 28th in HCI with 2 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Sunlight is rated 8.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Sunlight writes "Performs well, effective, and has responsive remote technical support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Sunlight is most compared with , whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Sunlight vs. VMware vSAN report.
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