We performed a comparison between Sunlight 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 gave us a cost-effective way to deploy a highly available server environment."
"It's very easy to resize disks and they show up in VMware almost instantly."
"It has reduced the amount of switching, network connections, etc., because the converged StarWind Virtual SAN allows us to connect high-speed network interfaces between different boxes instead of having to connect SANs via the network, then connect those two clusters together."
"It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it."
"It includes every feature that a traditional SAN offers and so much more."
"The user interface for this application is amazing."
"We are able to do maintenance by bringing down one node at a time, rather than having to schedule a complete shutdown."
"Being hardware agnostic is a must and definitely scored points for us."
"It supports the latest technology of NVMe SSD, which is PCIe-based SSD. It has a very good IOPS performance as compared to vSAN. For the same system, I get 1,000 IOPS with vSAN, and with Sunlight, I am able to get almost 10,000 IOPS. In terms of features, it has almost all the features, such as HA and centralized dashboards. It can be managed centrally, and the visibility of the system is very good. They also have very good technical support and customer or partner training."
"The performance and small footprint of this solution are its most valuable features. I am able to obtain and use more than 90 percent of the physical hardware capacity."
"The most valuable feature of VMware vSAN is you do not have to use additional hardware for storage. The operation of VMware vSAN does not take a lot of effort. If you have VMware technology on your site, then it's easy for the operational support of the system."
"It is simple to manage, very easy to implement and troubleshoot in case of any failures."
"It is easy to find information out there, not only from searching the web, but even the times I have engaged VMware support."
"Scalability in vSAN has been really good. It's very easy to add nodes in, to automatically generate the drives and the disk groups. It has been a piece of cake, surprisingly so."
"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."
"The solution is quite stable."
"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."
"Technical support has been fantastic. We always get answers quickly whenever we call."
"The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us."
"StarWind really needs to market its product more."
"The only point they should improve is the amount of documentation available for the user, especially in the first preliminary phase in which we were testing the product on our own."
"It would be good to have a little more access to control certain aspects within the UI."
"I see no need for major improvements but there could be some improvements in the form of notifications and the simplifying of maintenance mode."
"I'd love to see native export of metrics (via Prometheus or something of that nature) to allow us to get more metrics available on our existing dashboard software."
"We just need more integration with Veeam."
"This solution should be more self-sufficient, running without creating domains or failover clusters."
"My recommendation would be to add this technology to Azure, Microsoft Azure so that we can bring it to the market, or deploy it on public clouds such as Microsoft Azure and Google. It is currently only available on Amazon's public cloud."
"Its reporting and dashboards need to be improved. It currently has very basic reporting options. It should also be made easier to deploy on Unix operating systems. It is easy to deploy on Windows and Linux, but it is currently not easy to deploy on Unix."
"Ease of administration is one area where vSAN could be improved."
"The only thing I can think of at this time is to improve the performance monitoring and performance visibility within the GUI."
"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."
"Lacks sufficient storage terabytes."
"They can improve the manageability of the solution to make it more simple. It is not that complicated, but it will be good if they can make it more simple."
"They should provide Deduplication and Compression over the hybrid drives."
"The stability needs to be improved."
"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."
Sunlight is ranked 28th in HCI with 2 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Sunlight is rated 8.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Sunlight writes "Performs well, effective, and has responsive remote technical support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Sunlight is most compared with , whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Sunlight vs. VMware vSAN report.
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