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.
"It enables us to provide more solution options for our clients, with the reassurance that, when implemented, they will be efficient and stable."
"StarWind SANs come with outstanding support."
"The iSCSI protocol is quite simple to configure."
"vSAN we found was simple to set up, easy to configure and manage and allows us to achieve storage redundancy."
"Integration with virtualization platforms helped us to resolve many issues we were facing while using the physical storage."
"The most valuable feature is the managed service, which has been an important part of monitoring our critical infrastructure."
"This software lets us maintain storage redundancy across both of our Hyper-V hosts, so if one goes down the environment fails over to the other and we have minimal to no downtime."
"One of the most valuable features is the way it sets up the virtual SAN, because we don't have to buy a separate appliance for storage. It uses the existing storage on the servers, which is definitely a cost savings for us."
"Product functionality and performance are wonderful."
"We have the ProActive Premium Support and it has reduced our monitoring efforts. It has been very useful. They have been able to detect things such as when there's an issue with the cluster or they're getting some kind of weird reading that I have no idea about. They're really quick to let me know about it and even set up a schedule to address it. I've been very happy with their level of support on that."
"The solution has provided our company with a fully redundant virtual environment at half the cost of a traditional SAN implementation."
"I do like that I can manage StarWind with a console running on my local desktop."
"The added speed of using standard HDD and SSD meant we could increase what services are stored on the servers without having to have additional servers."
"We no longer need multiple staff members performing small, mundane tasks."
"It is a safe, fast, and cost-effective storage system that improved our systems to have zero downtime."
"The initial setup seems to be very straightforward."
"I have found that the multi-homing feature is very valuable in VMware vSAN. It is an easy-to-use solution."
"Everyone uses virtualization to more efficiently utilize hardware resources. That's the main point of vSAN and VMware."
"I have found the solution to be scalable."
"It is user-friendly, and its performance is good."
"Stretched Cluster is one of the big features that we use across multiple data centers."
"The implementation is simple, it was very straightforward. It took us approximately three weeks because it was installed in four locations."
"I like the scalability and the fact that it reduces your total cost for storage over several years."
"The most valuable features are its performance, simplicity, and synchronicity with vSphere."
"I would like to see different levels of support offered."
"Geolocation could be better, for example, for site mirroring for DR purposes."
"Other vendors such as VMware vSAN have a bigger community of users, so it is easier to find more pre-sale or post-sale information from users."
"Besides not being able to use any filesystem, I do not have any additional cons."
"Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer."
"The GUI deserves a little love."
"It would help us if the vendor continues to release software updates for earlier versions of the Windows operating systems."
"StarWind Virtual SAN could benefit from better integration with other tools and technologies, such as backup and disaster recovery solutions."
"I think that the pre-installation questionnaire was a little confusing and ambiguous."
"Over the past three years, there were two instances where our cluster had an issue, yet StarWind proactively notified me of those issues and effortlessly guided me through the process of correcting the issue with minimal effort on my part."
"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."
"The response time is usually several hours after the issue occurred."
"I'd like a better UI and some limitations on "breaking it.""
"Multi cluster support for their Command Console would be very beneficial. Currently, you can only work with a single cluster at a time. The console is new so I expect much growth in this area in the near future. The other area that could be improved is the tech support locale."
"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."
"A possible thing is perhaps a customer portal to schedule a time with support online via a calendar."
"The only negative point relates to the licensing. If you want multiple, different servers, it costs money, but you have all the capacity for vSAN. You do not reach the data, but the processor arrays and the current architecture."
"There's a lot that can be done to segregate. That may be available now in vSAN 7, I suppose, however, the deduplication and compression can be segregated."
"It is a memory intensive app."
"It needs to be vanilla. There shouldn't be any custom drivers, any custom anything. It should just be, "Hey, you know what? These drivers are going to work for this version, the next version, and the following version after that." That's the difficulty in this. It takes too much upkeep... The main issue is drivers. Every time we move to a new vSAN version, we're having problems finding the correct drivers for the vendor."
"What I would like to see, for the really small customers, is the ability to have two nodes."
"The updating process could be easier."
"In a future release, they could add micro-segmentation or security level features integrated into vSAN."
"I see room for improvement for vSAN just around general hardware compatibility and expanding that sort of matrix."
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 227 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 Red Hat Ceph Storage, 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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