We performed a comparison between StarWind HyperConverged Appliance 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 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."
"In our case, the cost and high availability are the two most important factors which we were looking for in a solution."
"The solution provides great performance for the price it is listed with."
"StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution."
"The Windows-based StarWind GUI is easy to use and understand and integrates seamlessly with VMware's vSphere portal as well."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements."
"In addition to the main functions of the software, I want to note the excellent work of technical support."
"When we need additional storage but want to keep the size of the SANs manageable, the StarWind Virtual SAN has allowed me to do everything needed."
"It improved all services running on the new cluster and took up less space and less energy."
"We no longer need multiple staff members performing small, mundane tasks."
"We run probably 16 virtual machines, and all of them are now highly available, and highly redundant."
"High-availability is what I bought it for."
"UI Options are simple and easy to find."
"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..."
"The high-quality hardware options, directly affecting performance, have significantly improved the user experience and are well worth the cost."
"It did not hurt that the price for the hardware and three years of support cost less than the disparate hardware the cluster used to run on."
"The solution is simple to use compared to other solutions, such as Hyperflex, VxRail, and Nutanix"
"The most valuable feature is fhe flexibility, the ability to move the machines around without hesitation."
"The simplicity, as well as the integration with virtualization."
"I have found the solution to be scalable."
"The most valuable feature for our customers is vMotion. It allows them to shut down virtual machines and migrate them to others servers."
"It is easier to deploy than the traditional SAN."
"I like the orchestration feature."
"All the features are working great."
"For the StarWind VSA vSphere solution, I would like to see a simpler and automated virtual machine installation process in terms of network settings."
"A mobile app to sync up for overview and status would really be helpful."
"I think the setup could be streamlined a bit."
"I had issues locating the documentation that applied to my version of StarWind vSAN."
"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."
"The main thing I would like to see improved is the level of documentation."
"If there was one feature I would like to see it would be a built-in subsystem for managing UPS backups shutdown procedures providing a way to initiate VM shutdown on all host servers, shut down the host servers, then put the fault-tolerant mirroring in standby, and finally shut down the StarWind SANs."
"While we had no problems setting the system up, and service technicians from StarWind could assist us very well, they could provide some form of in-depth documentation."
"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."
"I would request that the terms and conditions be reviewed and made more acceptable to corporate security so that we could finally turn on the proactive support feature, as it is included with our support agreement."
"The only thing I have run into is that I did want to add more hard drives into the host, so that we could look at doing a RAID 10, and the hard drive prices were pretty expensive... that's pretty nit-picky and I don't think it has anything to do with StarWind itself. I think it's more on whomever they work with for their hardware."
"Maybe they could have a support portal that you can have direct access to a current support representative."
"We need to be very cautious in following every step when updating the physical host. We must move over each VM and drain roles from the servers to ensure everything goes smoothly without interruptions. If this were a more automated process, this would be less taxing each time an upgrade is needed."
"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."
"It would be nice to have some kind of GUI interface implemented to give you an overall view of the system's health at a glance."
"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."
"I see room for improvement with vSAN in particularly in the reporting realm. Now, with vSAN 6.7, they're starting to include vRealize Operations components in the vSphere Client, even if you're not a vRealize Operations customer. So, that's really good. It exposes some really low-level reporting. I would like to see more of that. However, you have to be a vRealize Operations customer to obtain that. I would like to see more include of this included in the vSAN licensing."
"When you upgrade the vSAN, there are some issues like lost data and problems with the log. The log disappears. When you upgrade the solution, you must have several logs, so if you have some problems, you can check the log server to find them."
"Reporting currently depends on third party applications and that could be improved."
"There could be more features with the automatic backup."
"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."
"The product's complex setup phase is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"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 main problem we had was hardware compatibility, finding the right hardware that was certified."
More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Pricing and Cost Advice →
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 226 reviews. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. 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 VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex, VxRail, StorMagic SvSAN 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 HyperConverged Appliance vs. VMware vSAN report.
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