We performed a comparison between Sangfor HCI and VMware vSAN based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Sangfor HCI and VMware vSAN come out about equal in this comparison. Sangfor HCI has an edge when it comes to pricing, but VMware vSAN has an edge when it comes to ease of deployment.
"Active-active HA provides top performance and redundancy."
"I've been really impressed with it so far. I think it's pretty great, actually. It does exactly what we need it to do, and it does it well, so I would recommend it. Plus, the support has been very good."
"For those basic uses, it's simple to set up and manage, and it seems to do a fine job."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a very easy-to-use solution that can be quickly and easily deployed and configured without intimate and specific knowledge in the virtualization sphere."
"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 product creates opportunities with hybrid on-premise solutions."
"Starwind support is excellent. They are very fast and have very good knowledge of Starwind and Hyper-V Cluster software."
"Before VSAN, hypervisor configuration changes and updates resulted in VM outages. Now, downtime is dramatically reduced."
"The product provides a single management console for managing everything."
"I would rate the user-friendliness an eight out of ten."
"Their GUI interface is a bit easier than VMware's."
"Sangfor is user-friendly and simple to upgrade."
"Very user-friendly and simple."
"Sangfor HCI is a one-stop solution that enables you to store and centrally manage your VMs."
"The most valuable feature is the three nodes and the free hypervisor."
"The most valuable feature of Sangfor HCI is the built-in recovery functionality. The migration is simple to do from other solutions, such as VMware."
"vSAN Health is a feature designed to monitor the health and performance of the vSAN environment. It's crucial for us and our customers to frequently check on this to ensure everything is operating smoothly."
"It scales well. We have plenty of room to grow."
"vSAN provides default HA configurations, where if any host goes down, the VM moves around within the host. Even though the disks are local, the VMs moves around with the vSAN disk and vSAN provides a high availability on its own."
"VMware has been around for a long time are are doing a decent job at catching up with the latest technologies i.e. bringing in kubernetes and containerization. Overall, this is a great tool for virtualization."
"We had very good access to technical support."
"I like the orchestration feature."
"Very good VCG notification feature."
"If we decide to expand, vSAN could offer us some flexibility. We are researching ways to set this up from a new data center, which is located somewhere different from the current location right now."
"I wish there was online support because email return takes a long time and a faster solution should be found."
"Though I have learned some of the nuances with the upgrading of firmware/windows/etc., it would be nice to have a more efficient method of doing so."
"The gathering of monthly consumption and performance reports for future dissemination to concerned parties is very important. Unfortunately, StarWinds vSAN doesn't offer this functionality."
"It would be great to have more automated tooling around managing the iSCSI connections in Windows"
"Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer."
"I would like to see different levels of support offered."
"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."
"The only thing that I have any difficulty with is that in order to perform upgrades, it is required that the SANs be detached from the Hosts before that can happen."
"One question that has come up frequently in the last week is whether or not the renewal cost for Sangfor's HCI solution is too high."
"Sangfor HCI has room for improvement in terms of integration. So, the integration with Sangfor HCI is not as extensive as in Nutanix."
"The processing speed and cost should be improved."
"Sangfor does not support a SAS configuration, which is something that we would like."
"The interface could be a little bit better."
"Currently, when we need to do capacity planning, we have to rely on Sangfor's support team for assistance. However, if there were dedicated tools available, we could handle it ourselves and increase efficiency."
"The error reporting needs to be improved."
"The cost must be improved."
"One of the things that we've had challenges with are when we place hosts into maintenance mode. Sometimes doing so triggers large re-sync processes which can be time-consuming and which have, at times, pushed the capacity to the threshold. I definitely think making some changes in that area would provide some big improvements."
"It doesn't seem like it gives the performance that an actual SAN would give for heavy IOPS, read/writes."
"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."
"We would like to see additional backup and recovery options added. In particular, integration with popular applications like databases."
"The product can be improved in a couple of ways. One of those would be that they have a lot of hidden features, that are through the CLI, that would be great to have in the GUI, or just be more open about those features. It's something called RVC. It's a tool in the back end. It's a really great tool, but I had to find it through Reddit. So more information on stuff like that would be great. Also, in the user interface, giving us more features and more reporting that we can do from vSphere itself would be helpful."
"The vSan product uses a software system called Vsphere to monitor the system. It is sometimes difficult to manage the PCs within the systems."
"It would be ideal if the solution offered some intelligent monitoring."
"On the DevOps side, if there could be more automation it would be more helpful."
More Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure Pricing and Cost Advice →
Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is ranked 9th in HCI with 28 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is rated 8.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure writes "The solution offers straightforward setup, scalability, and manageability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, HPE Hyper Converged and StorMagic SvSAN, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs. VMware vSAN report.
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