We performed a comparison between Lenovo ThinkAgile HX 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."It's very easy to resize disks and they show up in VMware almost instantly."
"Their support goes above and beyond with the integration of their software."
"StarWind vSAN is easy to deploy and administer."
"The control panel is nice. It gives you a lot of good feedback as to the status and health of the VSAN."
"The product has improved the ability to mimic physical SAN environments to demo scenarios and troubleshoot problems."
"StarWind Virtual SAN can improve an organization's storage infrastructure by providing high availability, scalability, cost-effectiveness, performance, and ease of use."
"The product's core feature of virtualizing our storage is by far the most valuable."
"We have been able to use more on-prem hardware to reduce cost and also use old disks that we do not trust enough for ordinary RAID or usage."
"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that the product's deployment phase is pretty easy."
"The most valuable features of the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series are the ease of use and simple configuration."
"The initial setup is simple. We were able to deliver the hyper-convergence solution in a very good time."
"It is simple to manage, very easy to implement and troubleshoot in case of any failures."
"Technical support has been very good. They respond pretty fast, especially if we have a critical issue. Their responses have been great."
"I like the tolerance of VMware vSAN."
"It uncoupled the idea of proprietary technology and component capabilities. It is basically a proprietary technology for a cost-effective infrastructure."
"The most valuable features are ease of deployment, and ease of management. If you compare it to other software-defined storage products, it's much easier. It's a checkbox. It's lot easier to manage."
"The most valuable features of vSAN are its simplicity to deploy and that we can use commodity disks in our servers without complexity or need for external storage arrays or storage specialists on our teams."
"When we do to do more scaled load testing, we can run more dense workloads and still have the same results across all specific nodes"
"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."
"New versions of this solution should be tested more thoroughly before the release as we had a few problems with one version due to a bug."
"StarWind offers the Enterprise-level high availability (HA), deployed and easily configured .maintain and update and with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings a the cost of a Highly Available HCI solution down to a very cost effective point" Having used Starwind Virtual SAN for many years both for clients and for internal systems it has always done exactly what it set out to do, provide a cost effect way to run a HCI storage platform for almost any hypervisor, but it is most effective with Hyper-V, simple, easy to use, -.software monitoring should be web based to be reachable from any workstation in VLAN."
"The cluster configuration is time-consuming and tedious."
"Scaling the product is fairly easy except for the computing aspect. It would entail another appliance. While not a show stopper, it isn't as easy as dropping in a few extra SSDs."
"I had to buy upgraded support, which was not a problem, but it wasn't a prorated amount, so I paid for the support, the full upgrade, but I only got a couple of months out of it because it was only good until renewal time."
"When StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere nodes go offline unexpectedly, the nodes have to re-sync disks fully which takes a long time. We had a power failure and when both nodes came online, VMware vSphere didn't see StarWind disks before I manually re-scanned them form ESXi administration console even though it should happen automatically"
"If there are domain controllers inside the cluster, there needs to be some sort of logic allowing them to boot independently so all the rest of the domain clients can gain the authority they need to come online."
"I am expecting to see it more user-friendly in the future."
"Here in Nigeria, the only challenge that we have, which I think is also experienced globally is the delay in bringing in the spare parts. This is a challenge facing our country, such as the Forex market. However, this is beyond the control of Lenovo themselves."
"There is a delay in the availability of similar versions of firmware from both the products, which are VMware and Nutanix for Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series, due to the delayed releases from both products, maybe by a quarter or so."
"Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series could improve by having better integration with the solutions from VMware and vCenter"
"The only thing that can be improved is the cost."
"Integration could be better."
"Its price could be improved. It is too expensive for our clients."
"More focus has to be put on deduplication and compression with a hybrid architecture."
"It would be ideal if the solution offered some intelligent monitoring."
"If one node out of your ten nodes fails, it takes a lot of time to replicate and rebalance VMware vSAN. This time can be reduced. When a node fails and the data is not accessible, vSAN has to be rebalanced to make the redundancy level of two again. However, if it is taking a lot of time and any other hardware fails during that time, then we have a problem. Two disk failures mean that all data will be lost, and we may have to recover it from the backup. So, the number of threads that run to do the rebalancing could be more so that the time taken to make it fully redundant again is not so much."
"It would be ideal if clients didn't need to monitor the solution on a daily basis."
"I would like to see replication as part of it. I would also like to see direct file access, being able to run SIF shares and NFS and the like. I think that would be critical to continuing the use of it going forward."
Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series is ranked 18th in HCI with 3 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series is rated 8.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series writes "With an easy deployment phase, the tool offers good scalability and stability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series is most compared with Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series, Lenovo ThinkAgile MX Certified Node, Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, VxRail and HPE Alletra dHCI, 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 HX Series vs. VMware vSAN report.
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