We performed a comparison between Azure Stack HCI and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI.
"StarWind vSAN is easy to deploy and administer."
"The license price is one of the cheapest in the market."
"You can build cheap, reliable, replicated virtual machines clusters using simple servers with an all flash disk or SAS\SATA hybrid tiered by performance storage."
"The best part is the easy way it operates with a very clear GUI without any unnecessary items."
"The ability to choose our own hardware and our own vendors for this was hugely beneficial, as we had pre-existing relationships with vendors we wanted to maintain."
"It enables us to provide more solution options for our clients, with the reassurance that, when implemented, they will be efficient and stable."
"It's quite easy to manage."
"vSAN we found was simple to set up, easy to configure and manage and allows us to achieve storage redundancy."
"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 solution has the latest processor."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its ability to manage VMs."
"Technical support is very helpful and very good at resolving issues."
"The most valuable feature is the simplification of storage. We no longer need to deal with Fibre Channel and the external storage arrays."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to continue our business needs and have higher visibility. It has definitely increased our business productivity levels."
"There is not a lot of maintenance required."
"The solution's technical support is good."
"We don't have to order a storage system, we can just use whatever we have on hand and roll it into our virtualization system."
"The most valuable feature is the fast performance."
"Technical support is good."
"Proper training sessions should be included with the licensing."
"They recommend RAID10 for HDD, which reduces the usable storage capacity."
"There should be some kind of active monitoring connected to StarWind vSAN, so you will be able to act when needed."
"There needs to be more visibility on how long the cloud replication will take as there is no current ETA."
"The only way I can see this product needing improvement is the consultation level of the StarWind sales and engineers."
"I would love to see more vendor selection to be available for the HCA/vSAN appliances."
"While it is possible to implement disk encryption in StarWind using Windows Bitlocker, such a solution can be a little tricky to manage."
"Ability to to test the virtual storage are network area and storage speed from StarWind Management Console."
"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."
"The product's initial setup phase can be a bit complex, making it an area where improvements are required."
"We faced multiple problems with the product’s stability."
"Reporting currently depends on third party applications and that could be improved."
"Pricing is something of a concern."
"The usability is pretty good but it could use a little tweaking on the UI, with a clearer definition of exactly what some of the things do."
"We often run out of space but we have enough capacity for memory and CPU. It's difficult to find the balance between storage and memory CPU."
"Better options would be clustered nodes, or even cloud configuration. There is room for improvement in cloud configuration, we typically do web browsing for management."
"This is quite an expensive solution."
"The price can be reduced. Small businesses cannot afford this solution."
"Because of virtual storage, the system reaches reserve storage for its functions. It also consumes a certain amount of storage, which then results in the creation of a fault tolerance for the system. All of this adds to a lot of capacity being consumed in terms of storage for each drive for vSan. I find this to be one drawback of using vSan."
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.
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