We performed a comparison between Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series 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."Being hardware agnostic is a must and definitely scored points for us."
"It is extremely stable."
"I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"It has improved our organization in terms of its uptime as our main cluster has never been offline due to a SAN failure."
"We are able to execute maintenance on one server while the other is still running."
"Training is also easy as it is just one system to learn."
"Their support staff is comprised of true experts who can also communicate clearly."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that the product's deployment phase is pretty easy."
"The most valuable features of the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series are the ease of use and simple configuration."
"The initial setup is simple. We were able to deliver the hyper-convergence solution in a very good time."
"Since the storage space is local to the hosts, it reduces the overall response time and improves the performance."
"The solution fits well with my requirements."
"vSAN provides default HA configurations, where if any host goes down, the VM moves around within the host. Even though the disks are local, the VMs moves around with the vSAN disk and vSAN provides a high availability on its own."
"We can scale it very easily for a test environment. We were able to segment our DMZ so it wasn't connected to anything, which we really liked."
"I think vSAN's stability is good. It's an underlying solution for both on-prem and in the cloud, especially the VMC on AWS stuff too. VMware has been around for a long time, so it's pretty stable."
"The lower skill cost of maintaining it meant that we could do more with the people that we had."
"vSAN that has been most effective in streamlining storage operations. For data recovery alerts, it uses tools like snapshots and vMotion."
"It helped us survive power outages in one of our data centers, then continued to function without a hitch."
"A better overall view of the different deployments could be beneficial, although this is difficult due to how flexible the solution is."
"The main thing I would like to see improved is the level of documentation."
"It would be nice to see a new UI for the windows client, as it is not the easiest to find settings."
"Ability to to test the virtual storage are network area and storage speed from StarWind Management Console."
"One main thing this product needs to work on is reporting."
"It would be great if the Linux version of the management console offered the same features as Windows."
"StarWind Virtual SAN could benefit from better integration with other tools and technologies, such as backup and disaster recovery solutions."
"The software could benefit from more tooling to help with initial deployment."
"There is a delay in the availability of similar versions of firmware from both the products, which are VMware and Nutanix for Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series, due to the delayed releases from both products, maybe by a quarter or so."
"Here in Nigeria, the only challenge that we have, which I think is also experienced globally is the delay in bringing in the spare parts. This is a challenge facing our country, such as the Forex market. However, this is beyond the control of Lenovo themselves."
"Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series could improve by having better integration with the solutions from VMware and vCenter"
"Currently, one of the available features is shareable VMBKs. You can create the VMBK disc and you can make them shareable between the ends. But as soon as you start using this feature, you lose the ability to create snapshots."
"I'd like to see better integration with the Update Manager, with respect to firmware updates for hardware."
"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."
"There is room for improvement in vSAN's ability to debug. When it's not working well, debugging becomes quite challenging. Identifying issues when it's lagging or not functioning properly can be difficult."
"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."
"There is a room for improvement on the latest version of compatibility with the VMware product, especially for vSAN and with other vendors on their motherboards and driver configurations."
"On the DevOps side, if there could be more automation it would be more helpful."
"What I would like to see, for the really small customers, is the ability to have two nodes."
Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series is ranked 18th in HCI with 3 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series is rated 8.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series writes "With an easy deployment phase, the tool offers good scalability and stability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series is most compared with Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series, Lenovo ThinkAgile MX Certified Node, Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, VxRail and HPE Alletra dHCI, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series vs. VMware vSAN report.
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