We performed a comparison between StarWind Virtual SAN 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.
"The license price is one of the cheapest in the market."
"In the three years that we have been using StarWind, the product has yet to cause us any problems."
"It provides shared storage to multiple hypervisor hosts. Times had changed, however. StarWind Virtual SAN is the “software replaces hardware” for SAN. We have access control and CCTV systems up and running using Microsoft clustering and shared storage"
"It has a nice, simple control panel. You can clearly see the state and health of storage along with the synchronization."
"I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support. They are excellent and you can learn a lot from the support team."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to leverage our server infrastructure more completely without the need to add more hardware."
"Immediately we noticed huge performance gains, even on older hardware and once we implemented a 10GB link between both servers, the sync was near-instant after the initial sync was complete."
"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"
"I have found the solution to be scalable."
"The product's initial setup phase is simple."
"The technical support is good."
"The most valuable features are its performance, simplicity, and synchronicity with vSphere."
"Storage is expandable with no extra cost."
"vSAN is easy for deploying and maintenance, so some customers can do service themselves."
"Overall the solution is very good."
"This product could be improved with the inclusion of new health check procedures."
"If there was one thing we could request, it would be the ability to shrink volumes. For example, we want to be able to decrease in the size of the volume."
"StarWind offers the Enterprise-level high availability (HA), deployed and easily configured .maintain and update and with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings a the cost of a Highly Available HCI solution down to a very cost effective point" Having used Starwind Virtual SAN for many years both for clients and for internal systems it has always done exactly what it set out to do, provide a cost effect way to run a HCI storage platform for almost any hypervisor, but it is most effective with Hyper-V, simple, easy to use, -.software monitoring should be web based to be reachable from any workstation in VLAN."
"There is no IPv6 support. That is our only issue at this time."
"Scaling the product is fairly easy except for the computing aspect. It would entail another appliance. While not a show stopper, it isn't as easy as dropping in a few extra SSDs."
"I would love to see more vendor selection to be available for the HCA/vSAN appliances."
"For improvement, I would like to see how the software determines which networks to use for which purpose. It seems like the naming terminology changes a bit from here to there."
"The system failovers properly on its own without too much worry."
"Disaster recovery needs to be improved, when there is a crisis, there is a problem with what is the quickest way to get out of it."
"The price for the hard drive, for vSAN, is very expensive."
"In a future release, they can bring in the object storage capabilities to this solution. Currently, there is not any compatibility."
"We would like to see additional backup and recovery options added. In particular, integration with popular applications like databases."
"Enterprise customers get discounts on the solution's licensing pricing, but it is too expensive for SMB customers."
"The interface is a little complicated, it could be simplified with more graphical gadgets. We have many servers, and the built-in functions, such as rate configuration, are a bit complex."
"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."
"I would like to see better performance graphs, maybe something that you can export outside to a different console, and maybe a little bit longer time period. The 18-hour maximum, or 24-hour maximum, is kind of short. Also, the hardware compatibility limitations are a little frustrating sometimes, but as everybody's starting to adopt vSAN more, you get more options for hardware."
StarWind Virtual SAN is ranked 4th in HCI with 182 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. StarWind Virtual SAN is rated 9.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of StarWind Virtual SAN writes "Excellent support, great performance, and good redundancy". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". StarWind Virtual SAN is most compared with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, StorMagic SvSAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage, DataCore SANsymphony and HPE SimpliVity, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our StarWind Virtual SAN vs. VMware vSAN report.
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