We performed a comparison between Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series 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.
"StarWind support has been great in helping resolve other issues not caused by their software."
"The available GUI is excellent for monitoring and operating the system in an easy and direct way."
"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."
"StarWind SANs come with outstanding support."
"The product only requires two VMWare ESXi host servers versus three host servers for VMware's comparable solution."
"This product now allows us to migrate virtual machines between nodes as if we had a dedicated $100,000 SAN in the mix without the additional cost and management of the SAN."
"The most valuable feature is the managed service, which has been an important part of monitoring our critical infrastructure."
"The software is easy to setup and manage, and the support is excellent."
"Installation is straightforward because it's a vSAN. It only took one or two days."
"We find the setup quite straightforward and very easy."
"Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series' deployment is easy. We are a tier-one platinum partner who is into multiple implementations."
"The VX machines are scalable."
"Overall the solution is very good."
"It is easier to deploy than the traditional SAN."
"It easily integrates with all types of storage."
"It is scalable, overall. If you need to add storage, it makes it easy to scale by adding additional hard drives into the existing servers or you can add storage by just adding more servers."
"VMware comes with different stacks like VMware Cloud Foundation, which is integrated with different VMware modules. There's interoperability between VMware products."
"Technical support has been fantastic. We always get answers quickly whenever we call."
"VMware vSAN's most valuable features are the capability to consolidate standalone physical infrastructure into virtualization and the ease of management."
"It helped us survive power outages in one of our data centers, then continued to function without a hitch."
"The management console of StarWind Virtual SAN is pretty complex."
"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."
"Perhaps more reporting features on the utilization, usage, and performance of the configured high-availability images and underlying physical disks would be helpful."
"There is a general lack of documentation, especially up-to-date documentation to get started."
"The only point they should improve is the amount of documentation available for the user, especially in the first preliminary phase in which we were testing the product on our own."
"We would like to see the documentation more fully developed."
"Currently, the StarWind management console is a bit clunky to navigate and isn't the most user-intuitive interface."
"It is difficult to control all of the hardware components."
"The user management could be a bit better. It's something they could improve upon in future releases."
"Support could be better."
"With the VX machines, the clients often confuse the hardware itself with the services and resources. VMs are configured according to resources - memory, hard disk capacity, and network. These resources, including memory and processor, are actually shared on the VX Series. So, if the server's processor is underpowered or unreliable for the VMs, many of the VMs will encounter issues. Ideally, the physical server configuration should align more closely with the needs of the virtual servers."
"Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series needs to improve its stability. Its resolution should be faster."
"There could be more features with the automatic backup."
"I would like to see more comprehensive lifecycle management. The current path and process for upgrading or updating the firmware, as well as the storage controller software to interact with that firmware, is fairly manual and not very well documented. A little more time and effort spent on the documentation of the lifecycle management for vSan would be really great."
"More focus has to be put on deduplication and compression with a hybrid architecture."
"Troubleshooting tools could be improved."
"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."
"I would love to see vSAN integrate Persistent Memory and NVDIMMs. I know they're supposed to be working on an elastic tier so that we don't have the issues with destaging from the cache to the capacity. Those are the things that I'm interested in."
"The only thing that can be improved is the cost."
"I would like more integration with the hardware when it comes to disc types and supporting the newer types of storage."
Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series is ranked 16th in HCI with 4 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 226 reviews. Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series is rated 8.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series writes "simplifies management for clients familiar with VMware, and offers a user-friendly management and configuration experience". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series is most compared with VxRail, Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series, HPE Alletra dHCI and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series vs. VMware vSAN report.
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