We performed a comparison between Azure Stack HCI and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI."The ease of reaching the support team and their promptness for support is great."
"StarWind Virtual SAN can improve an organization's storage infrastructure by providing high availability, scalability, cost-effectiveness, performance, and ease of use."
"We have experienced multiple hardware failures at one site and the fault-tolerant volume worked exactly as expected with zero downtime."
"The solution is also quite flexible. As an example, other vSAN solutions that we looked at had more stringent requirements regarding mixed HDD/SSD storage which wouldn't have worked in our environment."
"The StarWind tech support is extremely helpful, especially during the initial setup."
"Integration with Microsoft clustering has been perfect, allowing us to leverage our investment in MS server licensing to the fullest."
"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 StarWind products have enabled our organization to modernize stations where larger and more expensive equipment was not an option."
"In my hybrid cloud setup, there are three features I've found very efficient. The first is software-defined networking. Similar to Azure where you create virtual networks and software load balancing, Azure Stack HCI lets you configure them with a drag-and-drop experience on the on-premises cluster. That's one of the good feature."
"The solution has the latest processor."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its ability to manage VMs."
"I like the scalability and the fact that it reduces your total cost for storage over several years."
"Its ease of use is most valuable. It is easy to configure, and there is a unified interface, which makes things slightly easier."
"The implementation is simple, it was very straightforward. It took us approximately three weeks because it was installed in four locations."
"VMware vSAN has greatly reduced refresh spending."
"The product's initial setup phase is simple."
"You get the benefit of local storage, but you have the protection of shared storage."
"Flexibility, growth, and expansion are probably the more important features for us. As our environment grows, the more users come on, the more VDI workstations that we need, we can easily expand either horizontally or vertically with the environment"
"The most valuable feature is that it is software-defined storage. Also, being able to do maintenance on the fly is a real benefit: migrating off, updating, and then moving the guest back on to the nodes."
"I wish the sync after a failure, such as hardware failure or power-related issues, for example, was faster."
"StarWind really needs to market its product more."
"Server-side snapshots are one thing the Linux appliance can't do yet."
"vSAN's free version does not have a graphical user interface."
"The documentation can be better for the free tier."
"It should reclaim white spaces after big files are deleted."
"I see no need for major improvements but there could be some improvements in the form of notifications and the simplifying of maintenance mode."
"With data verification, I would like to know how does the solution perform validation of data being synced between two VSANs."
"The product's initial setup phase can be a bit complex, making it an area where improvements are required."
"We faced multiple problems with the product’s stability."
"There are a lot of areas for improvement. Since I've been working very closely with this product, there are many areas, especially in software-defined networking. We had to improve multiple areas because we depended on the service fabric cluster to manage the software-defined network. That means we're already running a hypervisor inside a VM, and we're managing the control plane of the software-defined network. That's another cluster. So, multiple layers make the complexity more. So, from an operational perspective, it's very difficult to manage."
"The pricing model is sometimes a challenge for us because their licenses are very costly."
"Ease of administration is one area where vSAN could be improved."
"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."
"I would love for this product to be cheaper and easier to configure."
"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."
"The technical support, it's not satisfactory. Whenever we raise a ticket it takes a lot of time to have an engineer get involved sometimes, or we receive a less experienced engineer. We then have to repeat the situation to the next engineer which all takes time."
"Better options would be clustered nodes, or even cloud configuration. There is room for improvement in cloud configuration, we typically do web browsing for management."
"I would like to see better integration between the cloud and our VMware virtual environment. We only have one virtual environment, which is VMware vSAN. Right now, there is little interoperability with the cloud solution at the moment."
Azure Stack HCI is ranked 17th in HCI with 3 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 226 reviews. Azure Stack HCI is rated 8.4, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Azure Stack HCI writes "Performs well, provides good features, and has the latest processor". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Azure Stack HCI is most compared with VxRail, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray.
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