We performed a comparison between StarWind Virtual SAN 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.
"The management was very easy and I was able to find all that I need in the software dashboard."
"It also provides a high degree of mobility, as the virtual SAN can be moved relatively painlessly between on-site devices and the cloud."
"StarWind SANs come with outstanding support."
"The fact that the solution is vendor-agnostic allows it to be used with any virtualization vendor while remaining a powerful abstraction over storage."
"Their support goes above and beyond with the integration of their software."
"This solution has a very good user interface, with simple administration/management."
"The ease of reaching the support team and their promptness for support is great."
"The available GUI is excellent for monitoring and operating the system in an easy and direct way."
"While we haven't made major changes to our disaster recovery and business continuity processes yet, moving towards stretch vSAN across sites will simplify and expedite our DR processes in the future."
"Stretched Cluster is one of the big features that we use across multiple data centers."
"As a function of our core business, it's a sought after tool that helps us provide analytical support across a wide spectrum of client needs. It's allowed us to test out in our connected restaurant - "TheWorks" - a fully-functional restaurant experience center that allows our clients to discover the value of our connected solutions firsthand. We deploy vSAN in this customer-like environment within a hyperconvergent infrastruction (HCI) to give our clients a better understanding and help optimize data and the end-users' experience."
"It is easy to find information out there, not only from searching the web, but even the times I have engaged VMware support."
"The solution has high performance."
"it's easy to scale, it's easy to predict IOP needs, and you can design for low latency using all-flash... Also, for setting up new clusters for VDI quickly, it's nice. You don't have to wait on an order for a storage vendor to ship you a system and help you configure it, you do it all yourself. And the sizing guides are pretty straightforward."
"It's stable and scalable. Also, you can virtualize SAN so that you don't have to have a separate storage area network and can have your computer and storage on the same box or computer."
"Technical support has been very good. They respond pretty fast, especially if we have a critical issue. Their responses have been great."
"I'd prefer it if a remote console was provided."
"For improvement, I would like to see how the software determines which networks to use for which purpose. It seems like the naming terminology changes a bit from here to there."
"It could have a dashboard so that you can check all servers' SAN health and performance."
"If there was a way to automatically put disks in maintenance mode when shutting the host down and exit maintenance mode automatically, that would simplify things."
"Perhaps more reporting features on the utilization, usage, and performance of the configured high-availability images and underlying physical disks would be helpful."
"It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers."
"For someone entering the IT sector with little knowledge of storage, iSCSI, and virtual disks, they might not find the GUI immediately obvious."
"Updating the software can be a bit tricky."
"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."
"The stability needs to be improved."
"I would like to see some of the more traditional SAN functions that are out the now. I can list them: being able to Snapshot on the back-end, better de-dupe, and better compression. Those are the major ones."
"The usability is pretty good but it could use a little tweaking on the UI, with a clearer definition of exactly what some of the things do."
"It doesn't seem like it gives the performance that an actual SAN would give for heavy IOPS, read/writes."
"It would be ideal if the solution offered some intelligent monitoring."
"Improvements can be made with respect to scalability."
"It should be easier to use."
StarWind Virtual SAN is ranked 4th in HCI with 182 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 226 reviews. StarWind Virtual SAN is rated 9.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of StarWind Virtual SAN writes "Excellent support, great performance, and good redundancy". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". StarWind Virtual SAN is most compared with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, StorMagic SvSAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage, DataCore SANsymphony and HPE SimpliVity, 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 Virtual SAN vs. VMware vSAN report.
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