We performed a comparison between StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and VxRail 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."Quick setup, great support, stability is great"
"The StarWind Virtual SAN management console is intuitive and easy to use."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a very mature software that supersedes its capabilities with my use cases."
"It integrates (fully) with VMware and Veeam, my hypervisor, and backup vendors, so for me, all the puzzle pieces simply fit and work smoothly."
"It's very easy to resize disks and they show up in VMware almost instantly."
"The license price is one of the cheapest in the market."
"StarWind support has been great in helping resolve other issues not caused by their software."
"It includes every feature that a traditional SAN offers and so much more."
"StarWind's proactive support is my favorite feature."
"The easy way everything can be configured and ready to run in less than a day is great."
"It is a safe, fast, and cost-effective storage system that improved our systems to have zero downtime."
"The presence of built-in storage saved the company from having to purchase a separate storage array and related network equipment."
"The most valuable feature is the high-availability. We have three nodes, and all data will be synched instantly through all the nodes. Even if we had a disaster where two nodes failed, containing dozens of critical machines, almost automatically, all the loads would be run on the remaining node."
"The solution has easily deployed instances for multiple fast-paced projects."
"We run probably 16 virtual machines, and all of them are now highly available, and highly redundant."
"We also opted for 24-hour support monitoring for any issues. They are extremely quick to respond on issues we even cause ourselves such as bumping a network cable."
"The update process is very convenient."
"The compute is good and we have not had any issues with the vSAN."
"RecoverPoint give us peace of mind knowing any corruption or server issue can be rectified very quickly, making sure the business impact is minimal."
"I can roll out the system in thirty minutes and the customer can work with it."
"Enterprise is a complete solution that includes performance, backups and disaster recovery."
"The stability is very good. We haven't had any issues at all. There aren't bugs or glitches. There aren't system crashes or anything of that nature."
"What I like the most in terms of features is the fact that the VxRail update can be done in one week. It takes much less time to do a whole server upgrade and an infrastructure update as well."
"This product has given us clear visibility into what we need technology-wise to grow."
"Improvements in documentation and support resources could enhance the user experience."
"It is not very clear within the StarWind Management Console or the StarWind support documentation how to perform maintenance on a single node in a two-node HA cluster."
"Server-side snapshots are one thing the Linux appliance can't do yet."
"If there was one thing we could request, it would be the ability to shrink volumes. For example, we want to be able to decrease in the size of the volume."
"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."
"While it is possible to implement disk encryption in StarWind using Windows Bitlocker, such a solution can be a little tricky to manage."
"Some of the documentation seems to be a bit older and refers to deprecated items."
"It would be helpful to have a little more insight into what kind of performance the VSAN cluster is utilizing; something that would be more proactive on our side, versus their ProActive Support."
"Although the setup documentation was very complete and succinct, I found StarWind documentation to be a bit sparse."
"We have to pay for support, which is high-end support. That can be expensive, at least for us."
"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."
"A possible thing is perhaps a customer portal to schedule a time with support online via a calendar."
"What would have to be done urgently is the adaptation of the hardware to the configuration."
"We ran into some issues with going from Hyper-V 2012 R2 to Hyper-V 2019."
"This product is not one hundred percent enterprise-ready, so it is more suitable for SMB."
"An emphasis on security can be improved."
"The SCL database sends out a warning and you have to download the adjacent file from the Dell website. You have to upload it and retest it. We cannot always connect our systems to the internet which means we sometimes miss these important updates."
"The cost is quite high. It's a very expensive solution to run."
"When it comes to maintenance, it takes 16 hours to upgrade a 12 node VxRail plus. This could be improved in the system."
"The way that the VxRail is licensed could be improved."
"Sometimes during the upgrade process of VxRail, we experience errors that have nothing to do with reality and I cannot troubleshoot them without calling Dell and bringing in an engineer to figure it out."
"The configurations of VxRail can be difficult. However, it has improved in the newer version. From version 6 to 7, there has been a lot of changes."
"Sometimes during implementation, you can some scripting errors. And there are some issues when we update the version. There are some issues like the version will not get updated or stable at some time. Dell needs to resolve these problems, we don't waste time fixing them."
"The scalability is limited to a single cluster with 64 nodes."
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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 120 reviews. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6, while VxRail is rated 8.6. 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 VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, StorMagic SvSAN and Red Hat Ceph Storage, whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and HPE Hyper Converged. See our StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. VxRail report.
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