We performed a comparison between Azure Stack HCI 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."Recovery and maintenance are now less stressful and most importantly, it allows our users to keep working."
"Starwind support is excellent. They are very fast and have very good knowledge of Starwind and Hyper-V Cluster software."
"The license price is one of the cheapest in the market."
"A great feature is that I basically set it and forget it, as everything is automatic."
"The features that I found most valuable are ease of use of the software that StarWind offers - with the first setup being a bit painful."
"The fact that I can now count on a true failover solution is what is most appealing."
"Being hardware agnostic is a must and definitely scored points for us."
"The performance of the solution is accurate and concise."
"The solution has the latest processor."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its ability to manage VMs."
"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 scalability is very good and the solution is stable and reliable."
"We have found the solution to be very scalable."
"I have found the solution to be scalable."
"The product’s most valuable features are performance and expandability."
"We've found the solution to be scalable."
"It is easier to deploy than the traditional SAN."
"vSAN is integrated into VMware."
"I like that we could choose whatever hardware we wanted, rather than having to use one particular vendor."
"We would like the documentation to be more complete. Most items are covered, but if you don't know something, you may need to contact their support."
"I would like to see some additional, and possibly clearer, implementation videos with some slower and possibly more detailed descriptions of what the various steps of implementation are for someone who is unfamiliar with high availability and failover clustering in Windows."
"The documentation is good. However, if compared with competitors, it could be enhanced and made more professional."
"It should reclaim white spaces after big files are deleted."
"While we had little to no issues in setting up StarWind and received excellent support from the StarWind technicians, we would have appreciated a clearer guideline for a setup with the free version of StarWind Management Console or, in other words - for the setup with the PowerShell."
"StarWind Virtual SAN could benefit from better integration with other tools and technologies, such as backup and disaster recovery solutions."
"The system performs as expected, but we're always looking for performance improvements regarding the best utilization of NVMe disks."
"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."
"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 product's initial setup phase can be a bit complex, making it an area where improvements are required."
"Licensing costs are a little too high for smaller sized companies."
"I would like to be able to limit IOPS."
"The customer service is good but there is a cost for it. It does not come free."
"The price for the hard drive, for vSAN, is very expensive."
"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."
"VMware vSAN could improve by having better integration with other vendors and the storage is limited, I prefer it to the traditional storage."
"This solution is not great for large file shares/object/rich media repository."
"I'd like to see better integration with the Update Manager, with respect to firmware updates for hardware."
Azure Stack HCI is ranked 17th in HCI with 3 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 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 and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Azure Stack HCI vs. VMware vSAN report.
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