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.
"The instant failover, with vSAN copying data to the second node, allowed for the continuous availability of our applications."
"StarWind vSAN has a lot of great features and is a perfect solution for mirroring internal disks and flash between servers."
"We are able to execute maintenance on one server while the other is still running."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements."
"The management and monitoring have been very easy since the solution's dashboard is very simple and user-friendly."
"StarWind allows us to move virtual machines from one physical host to another, which greatly reduces the downtime required for maintenance."
"The configuration is so much simpler than that of a traditional SAN with fewer points of failure to worry about."
"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."
"The VX machines are scalable."
"Installation is straightforward because it's a vSAN. It only took one or two days."
"Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series' deployment is easy. We are a tier-one platinum partner who is into multiple implementations."
"We find the setup quite straightforward and very easy."
"vSAN has just one datastore. so customers do not need to think where to put their VMs, how to design the physical disk RAID, the LUN size, the LUN mapping, etc. when they use NetApp/EMC/HDS or other storage systems."
"The product’s most valuable features are performance and expandability."
"While we haven't made major changes to our disaster recovery and business continuity processes yet, moving towards stretch vSAN across sites will simplify and expedite our DR processes in the future."
"The migration of servers feature makes server rack maintenance easy."
"Data management and recovery processes are the most valuable features."
"IOPS is comparatively best to run VDI solution."
"The performance of VMware vSAN is very good."
"Storage virtualization software with a good storage management feature. It's a scalable and stable software."
"I struggled when bit figuring out how to go about doing the evaluation."
"I wish there was online support because email return takes a long time and a faster solution should be found."
"Feature-wise we are only waiting for the release of a "planned disaster" feature that would allow us to patch a hypervisor node without having to take the full storage offline."
"There is no Italian-language version of the software available."
"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."
"It is hard to find adequate technical documentation on their support website."
"It would be great if the Linux version of the management console offered the same features as Windows."
"The documentation is good. However, if compared with competitors, it could be enhanced and made more professional."
"The user management could be a bit better. It's something they could improve upon in future releases."
"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."
"Support could be better."
"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."
"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."
"The solution could be improved by having more filtered and multiple view volumes instead of a single view."
"It is an expensive solution."
"When designing the implementation for vSAN, I have noticed that it requires a minimum of six nodes, and this creates a problem when it comes to maintenance. If, out of the six nodes, I put one node in maintenance mode, then vSAN does not create other VM components."
"On the DevOps side, if there could be more automation it would be more helpful."
"The ability to access SAN environments with fiber channels (or even NVMe) would be a good addition."
"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."
Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series is ranked 15th in HCI with 4 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 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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