We performed a comparison between Azure Stack HCI and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI.
"The management interface on the software is very simple. It is insanely simple compared to most SANs. The interface is also powerful when used to complete tasks that an IT administrator needs to complete."
"The customer support provided by StarWind is excellent."
"We went from "no way DB applications would have good performance" to "Wow! We can now actually have a DB running and have some VMs running at the same time.""
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a very mature software that supersedes its capabilities with my use cases."
"The support team is available to solve any problem efficiently."
"In addition to the main functions of the software, I want to note the excellent work of technical support."
"The solution offers easy one-click PowerShell scripts that are ready to run."
"It has given the company an almost zero possibility of downtime."
"In my hybrid cloud setup, there are three features I've found very efficient. The first is software-defined networking. Similar to Azure where you create virtual networks and software load balancing, Azure Stack HCI lets you configure them with a drag-and-drop experience on the on-premises cluster. That's one of the good feature."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its ability to manage VMs."
"The solution has the latest processor."
"I like that we could choose whatever hardware we wanted, rather than having to use one particular vendor."
"Adding new nodes and expanding vSAN forward is simple and non-disruptive for a lot of our customers."
"The most valuable feature for our customers is vMotion. It allows them to shut down virtual machines and migrate them to others servers."
"Very good VCG notification feature."
"We can scale it very easily for a test environment. We were able to segment our DMZ so it wasn't connected to anything, which we really liked."
"It completely removes the need for a storage network and for a storage administrator and all of that infrastructure and the costs that are involved with them."
"I have used VMware for 15 years and I never had any problems with stability."
"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."
"They recommend RAID10 for HDD, which reduces the usable storage capacity."
"Currently, the StarWind management console is a bit clunky to navigate and isn't the most user-intuitive interface."
"We have, in rare cases, received conflicting guidance between different support folks within StarWind."
"The console is something that I feel could be improved. There is nothing technically wrong with it, but it can be jazzed up and/or made to be a little more intuitive."
"Being able to run StarWind vSAN on top of any free UNIX operating system to build a resilient iSCSI/FTP/SMB storage system would be useful."
"The software monitoring should be web-based to be reachable from any VLAN workstation."
"Geolocation could be better, for example, for site mirroring for DR purposes."
"The only way I can see this product needing improvement is the consultation level of the StarWind sales and engineers."
"We faced multiple problems with the product’s stability."
"There are a lot of areas for improvement. Since I've been working very closely with this product, there are many areas, especially in software-defined networking. We had to improve multiple areas because we depended on the service fabric cluster to manage the software-defined network. That means we're already running a hypervisor inside a VM, and we're managing the control plane of the software-defined network. That's another cluster. So, multiple layers make the complexity more. So, from an operational perspective, it's very difficult to manage."
"The product's initial setup phase can be a bit complex, making it an area where improvements are required."
"The main problem we had was hardware compatibility, finding the right hardware that was certified."
"It would be much improved if we could somehow integrate a better backup with it. Right now, we're using Veeam and it's okay, but I would like more of a VDP vSAN solution. That would be excellent. The VDP, at least the last time we looked at, it was just not quite there."
"I would like to see more comprehensive lifecycle management. The current path and process for upgrading or updating the firmware, as well as the storage controller software to interact with that firmware, is fairly manual and not very well documented. A little more time and effort spent on the documentation of the lifecycle management for vSan would be really great."
"The solution could maybe improve failure protection."
"More focus has to be put on deduplication and compression with a hybrid architecture."
"It doesn't seem like it gives the performance that an actual SAN would give for heavy IOPS, read/writes."
"This is quite an expensive solution."
"It would be ideal if the solution offered some intelligent monitoring."
Azure Stack HCI is ranked 17th in HCI with 3 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 226 reviews. Azure Stack HCI is rated 8.4, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Azure Stack HCI writes "Performs well, provides good features, and has the latest processor". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Azure Stack HCI is most compared with VxRail, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray.
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