We performed a comparison between DataCore SANsymphony 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."It has a nice, simple control panel. You can clearly see the state and health of storage along with the synchronization."
"It has allowed me to effectively and confidently manage the maintenance of hosts where I can power off a host and have its VMs migrate to another one."
"PowerShell library is pretty good feature as I created with APC PowerChute a script to put volumes on maintenance mode then turning off the StarWind nodes together with the VM and Hosts when UPS reaches 15 percent, this way after a blackout or electrical problems when turning servers on again, there is no issues for syncing or data loss due to energy interrupts."
"The best part is the easy way it operates with a very clear GUI without any unnecessary items."
"The primary purpose of this software is to create a virtual SAN between local storage on Hyper-V hosts. I find this feature most valuable since it accomplishes this quite well."
"The management and monitoring have been very easy since the solution's dashboard is very simple and user-friendly."
"The failover protection and the ability to expand storage and nodes with no downtime are by far the best physical features we have benefited from."
"I like StarWind's high availability. The failover is almost immediate, so the end users have no idea the guest VM moved at all. We can failover all guest VMs onto a single hypervisor, place it into maintenance mode, install updates, and reboot a hypervisor all during the daytime and remotely, with confidence the process will be successful."
"The DataCore system has been rock solid since we have been using it - from 2007 on."
"Supporting of Automated-Storage-Tiering (AST) is a good feature that saves money."
"The most valuable feature for us is that we can adjust the size of the storage very easily, without stopping production."
"For us, fault tolerance is the most important feature of DataCore."
"The ability to pool the storage to leverage thin-provisioning is a huge saving in space and costs."
"Continuous data protection (CDP), can be used to "protect" again ransomware by recording all write on disk in a log. You can recover your data with incredible time granularity."
"Mirroring is the most valuable feature because I can provide a high-level of service and optimize the use of obsolete storage."
"SANsymphony is flexible, with many potential options for implementation. SANsymphony's can be used with VMware, Hyper-V, or even with a hypervisor agnostic approach. It can also be used for strictly physical non-virtualized solutions."
"We find it easy to deliver this solution."
"vSAN is scalable for us. If any additional capacity needs to be included, we just add to the host and configure the vSAN cluster."
"We don't have to order a storage system, we can just use whatever we have on hand and roll it into our virtualization system."
"The scalability is very good and the solution is stable and reliable."
"The technical support is good. We are always thankful for the technical support from VMware. They are very supportive when we have a technical problem."
"There is not a lot of maintenance required."
"The most valuable features are productivity and data storage."
"VMware comes with different stacks like VMware Cloud Foundation, which is integrated with different VMware modules. There's interoperability between VMware products."
"The system performs as expected, but we're always looking for performance improvements regarding the best utilization of NVMe disks."
"There is one issue as far as licensing goes and that is a lack of documentation online for users when transitioning from the free version to the paid version, or vice versa."
"This product would benefit from having automated alerting functionality."
"In the next release, they could make some graphs of the real-time loading, speed of storage, and interfaces. Of course, these can be viewed in other places. But, in the event of a malfunction or troubleshooting, this would be convenient."
"The setup and documentation for the installation with the free version could definitely be improved."
"The documentation is good yet is still lacking in a few areas."
"It would be helpful to have a little more insight into what kind of performance the VSAN cluster is utilizing; something that would be more proactive on our side, versus their ProActive Support."
"I would like to see more user-friendly dashboards in future versions."
"DataCore SANsymphony should integrate file servers at a good price into the solution."
"I would like for it to improve into a more ergonomic management console and a translation into the French language. It should have some process for a shutdown of a VM properly in case of a problem."
"I would like to see SMPA (Shared Multi-Port Array) technology developed with the aim of allowing a configuration identical to other storage arrays."
"Right now, the version used is run on Microsoft Windows Server. Having a Linux version or even an appliance would be better as it would eliminate the use of additional licensing for another piece of hardware."
"I think the performance reporting can be improved by adding historical statistics into a database for the purpose of comparing."
"If you're dealing with big databases or transactional databases, it might not be the best-suited solution. The design of DataCore's solution isn't oriented towards this type of data."
"I'd like to see the company make the renewal of the software cheaper."
"The solution could be better packaged and marketed."
"Lacks sufficient storage terabytes."
"VMware vSAN could improve by adding NAS and object storage."
"I would like to see a little bit more documentation on the initial setup, and a little bit more explanation on the expandability: How to extend out your vSAN much more simply through the console because, a lot of the time, you have to do it through the command line."
"The only negative point relates to the licensing. If you want multiple, different servers, it costs money, but you have all the capacity for vSAN. You do not reach the data, but the processor arrays and the current architecture."
"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."
"There's a lot that can be done to segregate. That may be available now in vSAN 7, I suppose, however, the deduplication and compression can be segregated."
"Hardware load balancing is available on the enterprise version of the solution, however, it's extremely expensive and therefore out of our budget."
"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."
DataCore SANsymphony is ranked 7th in HCI with 54 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 226 reviews. DataCore SANsymphony is rated 9.2, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of DataCore SANsymphony writes "Robust with good replication and access protection ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". DataCore SANsymphony is most compared with HPE SimpliVity, StorMagic SvSAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage, NetApp ONTAP and VxRail, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and HPE Nimble Storage. See our DataCore SANsymphony vs. VMware vSAN report.
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