We performed a comparison between Lenovo ThinkAgile VX 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."Updates to server hardware are now painless and done during working hours with zero stress. We had a RAID failure a few months back, and nobody in the building even noticed and there was no after hours time used for repair."
"The fact that the solution is vendor-agnostic allows it to be used with any virtualization vendor while remaining a powerful abstraction over storage."
"You can turn your local disk storage into high-availability iSCSI storage."
"It eliminates the use of expensive physical shared storage."
"The StarWind tech support is extremely helpful, especially during the initial setup."
"Having the ability to migrate machines live in our environment was made possible by this software."
"It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it."
"Starwind support is excellent. They are very fast and have very good knowledge of Starwind and Hyper-V Cluster software."
"The VX machines are scalable."
"Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series' deployment is easy. We are a tier-one platinum partner who is into multiple implementations."
"Installation is straightforward because it's a vSAN. It only took one or two days."
"We find the setup quite straightforward and very easy."
"The most valuable features of VMware vSAN are that it receives updates frequently, has good compression, optimized storage, and they provide webinars on what is new. Additionally, the integration with third-party products is good and it is easy to manage."
"Instead of going for SAN storage, customers can use the scale-up and scale-out features of VMware vSAN."
"Allows us to implement more quickly, and to ease the maintenance."
"The lower skill cost of maintaining it meant that we could do more with the people that we had."
"Storage virtualization software with a good storage management feature. It's a scalable and stable software."
"Overall the solution is very good."
"Good performance, reliable and agile."
"It has a single pane of glass for management and operational control, which is the most valuable feature. The integrated storage is also valuable."
"Though I have learned some of the nuances with the upgrading of firmware/windows/etc., it would be nice to have a more efficient method of doing so."
"I would like additional documentation regarding possible networking configurations with 10GbE switching."
"StarWind Virtual SAN architecture is slightly complex and requires the team to carefully identify and study how the solution integrates with VMware vSphere."
"While StarWind.com excels in numerous areas, there are a couple of notable functionalities that it currently lacks. One of these is duplication, which could be an invaluable feature for data redundancy and backup purposes. The ability to duplicate data across different storage locations can be crucial for safeguarding against data loss, and its absence is a minor limitation in an otherwise stellar offering."
"The documentation could be clearer in terms of explaining the installation."
"If it's possible to make a driver/solution that does not make use of the iSCSI targets of Windows, that would be great. I don't know if that's possible, however, it could make the configuration a little easier."
"I would definitely like to see quite a bit more on the monitoring side of things."
"It is not very clear within the StarWind Management Console or the StarWind support documentation how to perform maintenance on a single node in a two-node HA cluster."
"Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series needs to improve its stability. Its resolution should be faster."
"Support could be better."
"The user management could be a bit better. It's something they could improve upon in future releases."
"With the VX machines, the clients often confuse the hardware itself with the services and resources. VMs are configured according to resources - memory, hard disk capacity, and network. These resources, including memory and processor, are actually shared on the VX Series. So, if the server's processor is underpowered or unreliable for the VMs, many of the VMs will encounter issues. Ideally, the physical server configuration should align more closely with the needs of the virtual servers."
"There needs to be an increase in the supported memory and hard disk space, as it is an area where the product currently has certain shortcomings."
"I would rate the stability a seven out of ten."
"Some intelligence can be added to the newest version to provide more flexibility between storage tiers."
"As a software-based product, it requires a lot of system resources."
"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."
"This is quite an expensive solution."
"The product's complex setup phase is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"I see room for improvement with vSAN in particularly in the reporting realm. Now, with vSAN 6.7, they're starting to include vRealize Operations components in the vSphere Client, even if you're not a vRealize Operations customer. So, that's really good. It exposes some really low-level reporting. I would like to see more of that. However, you have to be a vRealize Operations customer to obtain that. I would like to see more include of this included in the vSAN licensing."
Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series is ranked 19th in HCI with 4 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series is rated 8.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series writes "simplifies management for clients familiar with VMware, and offers a user-friendly management and configuration experience". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series is most compared with VxRail, Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series, HPE Alletra dHCI and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), 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 VX Series vs. VMware vSAN report.
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