We performed a comparison between Sangfor HCI and VMware vSAN based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Sangfor HCI and VMware vSAN come out about equal in this comparison. Sangfor HCI has an edge when it comes to pricing, but VMware vSAN has an edge when it comes to ease of deployment.
"Starwind support is excellent. They are very fast and have very good knowledge of Starwind and Hyper-V Cluster software."
"We went from "no way DB applications would have good performance" to "Wow! We can now actually have a DB running and have some VMs running at the same time.""
"The most valuable feature is the managed service, which has been an important part of monitoring our critical infrastructure."
"StarWind Virtual SAN offers high availability and data resilience features to prevent data loss if hardware fails."
"The iSCSI protocol is quite simple to configure."
"The most important feature is the ability to experience the loss of one node or one storage device, and not lose the entire cluster."
"StarWind Virtual SAN can improve an organization's storage infrastructure by providing high availability, scalability, cost-effectiveness, performance, and ease of use."
"StarWind vSAN is easy to deploy and administer."
"It is a smart solution for virtualization"
"Very user-friendly and simple."
"Sangfor is user-friendly and simple to upgrade."
"Sangfor HCI's best features are the ability to scale to a bigger size and the roadmap, whereby if they need to replicate their production to disaster recovery, they can do so on the same platform."
"It was not expensive at all."
"It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten... Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"We find the topology feature of Sangfor HCI particularly valuable."
"I would rate the user-friendliness an eight out of ten."
"Provides good performance as well as integration with deployment tools."
"The solution fits well with my requirements."
"IOPS is comparatively best to run VDI solution."
"The product's initial setup phase is simple."
"It is more stable now than it was before. It's not like it was in the first year. Now it is stable, and we trust it more."
"It's completely hyper-converged, so it's very convenient."
"We've found the solution to be scalable."
"When we do to do more scaled load testing, we can run more dense workloads and still have the same results across all specific nodes"
"The documentation can be better for the free tier."
"I'd prefer it if a remote console was provided."
"Some configuration options still demand service restarting."
"Sometimes documentation on their site can be out of date."
"While we had little to no issues in setting up StarWind and received excellent support from the StarWind technicians, we would have appreciated a clearer guideline for a setup with the free version of StarWind Management Console or, in other words - for the setup with the PowerShell."
"High availability for direct attached hardware drives could be useful for increasing the performance of a storage appliance."
"I wish the sync after a failure, such as hardware failure or power-related issues, for example, was faster."
"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."
"As far as I know, no hyper-convergence solution includes security, so you have to buy security from another brand. For example, you buy SimpliVity or Nutanix. They don't really have a security solution inside the product. It would be good if there is a security solution inside this solution so that it is not only for the virtualization of CPU, RAM, disk, and network but also for security."
"We have had issues while integrating VMware with Sangfor HCI. The tool should be also faster in terms of customization."
"There are certain aspects of sizing of the solution that need improvement."
"Sangfor HCI could be improved with certification and the right ecosystem for ISVs like Oracle and SAP."
"The migration process could be easier."
"There is a feature to upgrade multiple VMs simultaneously, but it crashes."
"Sangfor’s hypervisor is not mature enough to handle all the flavors related to industrial needs."
"Sangfor could improve its built-in CAP system. Right now, we need to use an external tool for CAP."
"I would like to see it be more hardware-agnostic. Other than that, the only other complication is - and it has gotten better with the newer versions - that lately, once you're running an all-flash, if you need to grow or scale down your infrastructure, it's a long process. You need to evacuate all data and make sure you have enough space on the host, then add more hosts or take out hosts. That process is a little bit complex. You cannot scale as needed or shrink as needed."
"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."
"External storage would be a good thing to have in the next release, something other than iSCZI, something a little more, not HA, a little more production-oriented, than iSCZI."
"Its installation should be easier, and its price should be cheaper. It would be good for the product if they can include the data locality feature."
"The solution must provide better customization."
"We would really like them to look at what Nutanix did for day-one/day-two operations deployment: Bringing in the equipment, getting it deployed, getting it setup, and ease of use of one-click for deploying our 30-node solution. With vSAN we had to go into each one individually and set it up."
"This solution could be improved by having more than one controller for the environment. VMware depends on one controller for the whole environment, whereas Nutanix has one controller for each node. Because there is only one controller with VMware, if there was any drop, then the whole environment would stop working. In Nutanix, I have five nodes—there is one controller for each node and it depends on a virtual controller—so if the controller of any node is down, the whole environment will still work."
"Lacks an integrated backup solution."
More Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure Pricing and Cost Advice →
Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is ranked 9th in HCI with 28 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is rated 8.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure writes "The solution offers straightforward setup, scalability, and manageability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, HPE Hyper Converged and StorMagic SvSAN, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs. VMware vSAN report.
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