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."It also provides a seamless and efficient solution for personal storage requirements, showcasing the versatility and scalability of my Virtual SAN configuration."
"I've been really impressed with it so far. I think it's pretty great, actually. It does exactly what we need it to do, and it does it well, so I would recommend it. Plus, the support has been very good."
"The management interface on the software is very simple. It is insanely simple compared to most SANs. The interface is also powerful when used to complete tasks that an IT administrator needs to complete."
"The main benefit is that StarWind is almost maintenance-free."
"Given the high availability of the server cluster, we were able to reduce separate physical servers onto one hyper-converged cluster - this saved in OPEX and CAPEX costs immediately, along with licensing costs of the Windows Server licenses."
"Quick setup, great support, stability is great"
"The failover redundancy is why we bought this product and it has never let us down."
"The ProActive support gives me peace of mind because I am a one man shop, but with the technical support behind me, I feel like more than just one person. We spent two to three hours, depending on what we have to do, always on the phone, and they do not push to end the call."
"Their service is top-notch and if a node goes down they immediately are following up with us to make sure that everything is working smoothly."
"We no longer need multiple staff members performing small, mundane tasks."
"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 hardware footprint is perfect. It fits in our rack perfectly, and we were able to condense a lot of physical servers we had. It has greatly eliminated the excess stuff in our server rack..."
"Live migration between nodes was quick and simple."
"The pricing and discounts given by Starwind on the hardware were unmatched."
"The option to deploy a hyper-converged system without an expensive storage switch was a benefit."
"Overall, the solution has improved our system's performance. I was concerned about the physical-to-virtual conversion of our database server. It's actually much faster now, as a virtualized host on this Hyper-V cluster."
"The pricing is very, very good."
"It is truly a hyper-converged infrastructure, so everything is there together."
"We are very happy with the purchase, and it works well. It is fast. We went with the full-flash version, meaning that we have SSDs. So, we can build a Windows virtual machine in two minutes. We were surprised when we first tried to do that."
"The stability of VxRail is good, we have not had any issues."
"It improved from an operations standpoint as we have reduced failures compared to a previous vendor. The hardware that we previously used had a lot of issues with components failing regularly."
"We like the design and that it meets data storage needs."
"Homogeneity is most valuable. The truth is that having everything in a single cluster helps a lot."
"The solution has simplified our operations."
"Ability to to test the virtual storage are network area and storage speed from StarWind Management Console."
"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."
"A great feature would be a wizard and to include a new disk in the SAN. At the moment, including a new disk requires several steps - some that must be done at the OS level and others in each node."
"Besides not being able to use any filesystem, I do not have any additional cons."
"A mobile app to sync up for overview and status would really be helpful."
"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."
"This solution should be more self-sufficient, running without creating domains or failover clusters."
"They require more media visibility."
"At the moment, the initial configuration is very technical and error-prone. That is the reason Starwind does it for you as a service, which is a great thing. But it would be nice if we could change or rearrange storage assignments ourselves."
"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."
"The only area that surprised me had to do with the fact that each host runs a StarWind virtual machine used to maintain the health of the vSAN, which individually uses 24GB of memory per host. You should keep this in mind when determining the resources you will need when selecting hardware and components for your specific setup. If I knew that, I would have chosen to add more memory per host to make up for the use."
"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."
"I think that the pre-installation questionnaire was a little confusing and ambiguous."
"The only issue we have seen is with the StarWind Server Manager. We have had to continually reboot the server in order to use it."
"The StarWind Command Center web portal could use some work."
"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."
"Supply chain capabilities are certainly hurting us. We're in the process of placing a large order for more VxRail nodes right now."
"The configurations of VxRail can be difficult. However, it has improved in the newer version. From version 6 to 7, there has been a lot of changes."
"I can't speak to any missing features or weak aspects of the system just yet. We haven't had a chance to really dig in."
"If VxRail could also offer file services in addition to virtualization, that would be nice because sometimes people want to complement their environment with file services, and you don't have that in VxRail."
"The scalability is limited to a single cluster with 64 nodes."
"Some of the features of the hyperconverged infrastructure could be integrated with external storage. Right now, for example, if I have surveillance going, I need to purchase very cheap storage. So, an integration between the hyperconverged infrastructure and external storage would be good."
"Having a native replication would be an improvement."
"My main issue so far is that the installation created a default datacenter name of "Marvin" and it cannot be changed."
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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 7th in HCI with 65 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 121 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), Dell PowerFlex, VMware vSAN, StorMagic SvSAN and Red Hat Ceph Storage, whereas VxRail is most compared with Dell PowerFlex, VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and HPE Hyper Converged. See our StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. VxRail report.
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