We performed a comparison between StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and VxRail 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."You can turn your local disk storage into high-availability iSCSI storage."
"The support team is available to solve any problem efficiently."
"VSAN works great; it's very easy to install, configure, and manage."
"I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"The solution offers easy one-click PowerShell scripts that are ready to run."
"The access to our data is quicker and cheaper than it used to be in a traditional storage system."
"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 product has improved the ability to mimic physical SAN environments to demo scenarios and troubleshoot problems."
"We no longer need multiple staff members performing small, mundane tasks."
"The hardware footprint is great. We've got two 2U servers which replaced four 2U servers. Granted, they were about three years old at that point, but we actually increased our processing capacity by about 50 percent while keeping our storage capacity about the same. We've actually been able to downgrade to a half rack from a full rack because we've gotten rid of some of our network equipment and some of our additional storage arrays."
"We run probably 16 virtual machines, and all of them are now highly available, and highly redundant."
"How quickly the StarWind solution replicates also gives us the confidence to know that in the event of catastrophic failure of any piece of hardware, we won't be far behind before things went wrong."
"The support is the most valuable feature. The support has been amazing. It's around the clock. One of our hard disks accidentally ejected without me knowing or being onsite. They called and told me about it before I had a chance to see it myself."
"It is a safe, fast, and cost-effective storage system that improved our systems to have zero downtime."
"The biggest thing we were looking for was redundancy, with both the compute and the storage, so that way we could lose a full node and still keep everything up and running, and not have to worry about it... StarWind was able to provide a solution for what we wanted, - to provide for redundancy."
"The solution has easily deployed instances for multiple fast-paced projects."
"It is very powerful. We find that to be the most valuable aspect. The movement of devices between nodes is very easy."
"VxRail's technical support is very good."
"The solution is perfect for the lifecycle management of hardware."
"For me, VxRail's most valuable feature is its life-cycle management."
"It's a good product based on the features. You can upgrade the solution with only one click."
"The most valuable feature is the fact that the storage is integrated with the VxRail so I don't have to go in between systems when I have to monitor my storage."
"It's a turnkey solution, which is good for customers, because they are buying into stability."
"When we have a resource contention, we can easily increase the capacity."
"Security on the ISCSI protocol could be improved by adding features like OS-type control access, especially for the data center environment."
"I would like to see more user-friendly dashboards in future versions."
"The software could benefit from more tooling to help with initial deployment."
"Management tools could be improved, sometimes the usage seems to be slowed down and confusing. A native web interface could also be an option. I love to see in the future port of the software on a general Linux distribution like RedHat or Ubuntu in order to avoid windows license costs. I would also like to see features like erasure coding implemented. On the VSAN software, I would like to see some improvements in the storage pools (eliminate the usage of the file as a data container and use the raw partition)."
"For the StarWind VSA vSphere solution, I would like to see a simpler and automated virtual machine installation process in terms of network settings."
"I wish they would improve the documentation for the beginner level as it's not very clear on the web page."
"The platform needs to improve user management and the web console."
"You have to do a "full" sync on write-back cache disks instead of a quick sync if there is an issue."
"The monitoring and reporting console can be improved in the sense that it can have more information on it."
"It would be nice if it were possible to do the ISCSI setup that you do on Windows directly in the management GUI of StarWind."
"In the future, it would be nice to be able to migrate from the Windows vSAN to the Linux vSAN without having to do a full restore from backups."
"That situation, where Dell EMC servers were going down, has been my only real difficulty... it ended up being something that the wider audience of Dell EMC was actually aware of as an issue. Neither the StarWind technicians nor the Dell EMC technicians were able to actually identify that problem sooner than a week or so... The communication between Dell EMC support and StarWind support, in that particular scenario, left something to be desired, for me. I did express those concerns to StarWind and they were very responsive to that."
"Perhaps the initial configuration and documentation could be a little clearer and simpler to follow."
"We struggle a little with capacity management with the StarWind Hyperconverged appliance."
"I wish I understood what goes into the StarWind software a little bit better. To me, it's kind of magic the way some of it works. As an IT professional, you don't really want things to be magic. I do wish there was a little more "Here's how it works." There could be more documentation given to administrators..."
"Multi cluster support for their Command Console would be very beneficial. Currently, you can only work with a single cluster at a time. The console is new so I expect much growth in this area in the near future. The other area that could be improved is the tech support locale."
"Lacks integration of licenses so that it's an expensive solution."
"The update for the graphics integration and the media drivers isn't included in the VxRail update."
"If they can provide deduplication compression through the traditional hard drives, as Cisco does in the HyperFlex system, it will be very cost-effective, especially when it comes to archiving workload. VxRail doesn't allow the mixing of old flash clusters and hyper clusters. When I'm starting with an old flash cluster and it comes to archiving workload, I will also need to attend the new cluster. So, I either manage two different clusters, or I pay and upload my work with the archiving mobile hard drive, which is not cost-effective at all. The main key is to allow mixing between two types of clustering, like Nutanix, or allow deduplication of completion over the period of shared hard drive on SAV. It will be much better."
"There could be better documentation and they should allow everyone to access the simulator."
"What I did not like so much was the amount of VMware that you have to put in your system related to the VxRail."
"I would love to see license migration from one host to another."
"I would like an easier migration. This way, if a node fails like it did, the data would have been migrated and I would not have had to get up at three in the morning."
"I wish for the performance environment to be improved."
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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 120 reviews. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6, while VxRail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, StorMagic SvSAN and Red Hat Ceph Storage, whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and HPE Hyper Converged. See our StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. VxRail report.
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