We performed a comparison between Sangfor HCI and VMware vSAN based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Sangfor HCI and VMware vSAN come out about equal in this comparison. Sangfor HCI has an edge when it comes to pricing, but VMware vSAN has an edge when it comes to ease of deployment.
"Without the need for any downtime, enterprises can simply grow their storage infrastructure using StarWind Virtual SAN by adding new servers or disks to the current infrastructure."
"The main benefit is that StarWind is almost maintenance-free."
"The software is easy to setup and manage, and the support is excellent."
"The ability to run a two-node cluster without a dedicated witness has made this an excellent product for small deployments, which is right on target for our needs in regional offices."
"When using new (warranty) servers, you can forget about the storage service for several years. The users will not even notice the failure of two servers out of three."
"It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it."
"This has helped to improve the reliability of service and operation in all departments, without having to stop in case of emergency situations."
"PowerShell library is pretty good feature as I created with APC PowerChute a script to put volumes on maintenance mode then turning off the StarWind nodes together with the VM and Hosts when UPS reaches 15 percent, this way after a blackout or electrical problems when turning servers on again, there is no issues for syncing or data loss due to energy interrupts."
"It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten... Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"Sangfor HCI is a one-stop solution that enables you to store and centrally manage your VMs."
"Sangfor is user-friendly and simple to upgrade."
"I find the simplicity of Sangfor very valuable. It is easy to configure and user-friendly. The overall user experience as well as the usability of Sangfor is outstanding."
"The Continuous Data Protection (CDP) feature is one of the good features."
"Sangfor HCI's best features are the ability to scale to a bigger size and the roadmap, whereby if they need to replicate their production to disaster recovery, they can do so on the same platform."
"It is flexible like a hyper-convergence system. You can add nodes, and you can scale to have better performance and stability. I also like the backup feature, the recovery system, and the web interface GUI to handle everything."
"The product provides a single management console for managing everything."
"The valuable features of vSAN are that you can get it up and running quickly, you get redundancy built-in, and it's pretty much the perfect solution for a cluster."
"We are finding that vSAN is a lot more scalable and adaptable, because we can go in with hybrid arrays for our lower-end storage needs or with all-flash versions of vSAN for places where we need more performance, and it's coming in at a lower cost point than an actual traditional array."
"vSAN can help customers save on storage system costs, and also save on the human cost."
"All the features are working great."
"I like the orchestration feature."
"It is very well known in the industry, and there are a lot of technical resources around it. This is a big thing for me because, at the end of the day, when you implement it, you need to support it."
"Allows us to implement more quickly, and to ease the maintenance."
"The most valuable features are productivity and data storage."
"The documentation can be better for the free tier."
"This is a great product."
"One main thing this product needs to work on is reporting."
"While we had little to no issues in setting up StarWind and received excellent support from the StarWind technicians, we would have appreciated a clearer guideline for a setup with the free version of StarWind Management Console or, in other words - for the setup with the PowerShell."
"I would like an automated installation/configuration despite the fact that their service is very collaborative, a customer should be able to deploy the solution by themselves."
"Server-side snapshots are one thing the Linux appliance can't do yet."
"The documentation could be a little more concise, but, for the most part, it just works."
"Regular updates to the software are required, and subtle design changes would be welcome."
"The documentation and support from the community are not as good or as mature as VMware or Hyper-V."
"Sangfor HCI could be improved with certification and the right ecosystem for ISVs like Oracle and SAP."
"Support may be an issue for customers in some industries. For example, financial institutions may require 24/7 support."
"Sangfor HCI has room for improvement in terms of integration. So, the integration with Sangfor HCI is not as extensive as in Nutanix."
"The migration process could be easier."
"The solution could improve by including backup capabilities."
"Lacks network support."
"It can have more compatibility and new features. I would also like to see better performance. Some of the other HCI solutions already provide the SSD and flash storage and much higher Intel processors. Sangfor HCI can improve on that."
"I would have liked it to have been more scalable. It's scalable but not as much as, for example, the ScaleIO systems were or the Kaminario"
"We do see weird things crop up every now and again. It will say that a drive gets kicked off even though it's fine, and we have to re-add it."
"If we have some complicated issues, you have to use the command lines interface. Not everything is possible to be fixed in the GUI. This is a drawback, that some things have to be fixed via command-line interface and should be able to be done in the GUI."
"I would like for the next release to be a bit cheaper."
"The ability to access SAN environments with fiber channels (or even NVMe) would be a good addition."
"The main problem we had was hardware compatibility, finding the right hardware that was certified."
"It could be more robust. The latency is also an issue for us, and the reliability. I would like it to be faster and a little more flexible."
"I would like to see the availability of more template based VMware systems. Combined with the ability to check and measure multiple and converging data segments. Another issue I've seen is that the tool seems to be slow when first starting up."
More Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure Pricing and Cost Advice →
Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is ranked 9th in HCI with 28 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is rated 8.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure writes "The solution offers straightforward setup, scalability, and manageability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, HPE Hyper Converged and StorMagic SvSAN, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs. VMware vSAN report.
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