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."Besides being 80% cheaper than the other alternatives, the simplicity makes reconfiguration and support much easier."
"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."
"It provides shared storage to multiple hypervisor hosts. Times had changed, however. StarWind Virtual SAN is the “software replaces hardware” for SAN. We have access control and CCTV systems up and running using Microsoft clustering and shared storage"
"It has improved our organization in terms of its uptime as our main cluster has never been offline due to a SAN failure."
"We have experienced multiple hardware failures at one site and the fault-tolerant volume worked exactly as expected with zero downtime."
"The most important feature is the ability to experience the loss of one node or one storage device, and not lose the entire cluster."
"StarWind is very easy to use, even if you have had no experience using a SAN before."
"The StarWind VSAN is always up and allows us to move VMS to other nodes for maintenance, without interruption to service."
"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 solution has the latest processor."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its ability to manage VMs."
"vSAN is integrated into VMware."
"Storage is expandable with no extra cost."
"The most valuable feature for our customers is vMotion. It allows them to shut down virtual machines and migrate them to others servers."
"The most important functionality is the ability to extend cluster storage and cluster computing power securely without loss of data."
"VMware comes with different stacks like VMware Cloud Foundation, which is integrated with different VMware modules. There's interoperability between VMware products."
"The most valuable features for us are the ability to scale out the nodes independently, and the flexibility of the nodes. We can put almost any type of server in there with our connectivity and everything works great."
"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."
"VMware vSAN is an easy to use and easy to manage storage solution. Deploying and upgrading are easy. Technical support is very good."
"The initial setup got a little confusing at a few points with differences between the VMware version in documentation vs the latest, etc."
"I would definitely like to see quite a bit more on the monitoring side of things."
"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."
"I would love to see more vendor selection to be available for the HCA/vSAN appliances."
"You have to do a "full" sync on write-back cache disks instead of a quick sync if there is an issue."
"Some configuration options still demand service restarting."
"Maybe in the future, the replication will be supported in more cloud providers."
"Currently, the StarWind management console is a bit clunky to navigate and isn't the most user-intuitive interface."
"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."
"vSAN does not have online dedup. When opening the inline dedupe, the performance will be lower than off inline."
"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."
"Hardware load balancing is available on the enterprise version of the solution, however, it's extremely expensive and therefore out of our budget."
"It should be easier to use."
"I would like to see replication as part of it. I would also like to see direct file access, being able to run SIF shares and NFS and the like. I think that would be critical to continuing the use of it going forward."
"I would like more integration with the hardware when it comes to disc types and supporting the newer types of storage."
"The UI could certainly be better. The inside into what's actually going on with vSAN would be nice to know."
"The price can be reduced. Small businesses cannot afford this solution."
Azure Stack HCI is ranked 18th 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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