We performed a comparison between Azure Stack HCI 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 product creates opportunities with hybrid on-premise solutions."
"It allows you to use ANY consumer or enterprise HDDs and SSDs, and that's a really great thing!"
"StarWind Virtual SAN offers high availability and data resilience features to prevent data loss if hardware fails."
"The virtual tapes can be uploaded to the object storage of your choice with object locking/governance which gives you an extra layer of protection."
"The installation of StarWind Virtual SAN was pretty easy, and the configuration was done in no time."
"StarWind is very easy to use, even if you have had no experience using a SAN before."
"For those basic uses, it's simple to set up and manage, and it seems to do a fine job."
"We are able to do maintenance by bringing down one node at a time, rather than having to schedule a complete shutdown."
"The solution has the latest processor."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its ability to manage VMs."
"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."
"It is scalable, overall. If you need to add storage, it makes it easy to scale by adding additional hard drives into the existing servers or you can add storage by just adding more servers."
"I like the orchestration feature."
"It's completely hyper-converged, so it's very convenient."
"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."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is fhe flexibility, the ability to move the machines around without hesitation."
"I like that we could choose whatever hardware we wanted, rather than having to use one particular vendor."
"Allows us to implement more quickly, and to ease the maintenance."
"It would be helpful if StarWind provided more precise and detailed documentation explaining how to configure the solution in various scenarios, including the advantages and disadvantages of each."
"I think the setup could be streamlined a bit."
"It would be good to have a little more access to control certain aspects within the UI."
"The product can include a more simple way of synchronization after a forced shutdown as the current process has a few more steps to check that hosts have synchronized and this can be automated."
"The StarWind Management Console is available only for Microsoft Windows/Windows Server, and should also be available for Linux and macOS, as it would reduce implementation costs."
"The software could benefit from more tooling to help with initial deployment."
"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."
"Our company was hoping for deduplication and encryption across HCI. That is currently not supported."
"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."
"We faced multiple problems with the product’s stability."
"In a future release, they could add micro-segmentation or security level features integrated into vSAN."
"There are certain shortcomings in the stability of the product where improvements are required."
"The pricing model is sometimes a challenge for us because their licenses are very costly."
"It is an expensive solution."
"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."
"The platform's cost affects the business. This particular area needs improvement."
"When designing the implementation for vSAN, I have noticed that it requires a minimum of six nodes, and this creates a problem when it comes to maintenance. If, out of the six nodes, I put one node in maintenance mode, then vSAN does not create other VM components."
"I would like to be able to limit IOPS."
Azure Stack HCI is ranked 17th in HCI with 3 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 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 and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Azure Stack HCI vs. VMware vSAN report.
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