We performed a comparison between HPE Hyper Converged and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance 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."StarWind Virtual SAN is a very mature software that supersedes its capabilities with my use cases."
"Highly available storage is the most valuable feature. The entire rollout is hyper-converged and requires no extra storage further than the hosts in which Hyper-V is running. Another feature that has been great is the support from StarWind in general. We have their proactive support package on the main cluster that employs Starwind Virtual SAN."
"I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"In our case, the cost and high availability are the two most important factors which we were looking for in a solution."
"The iSCSI protocol is quite simple to configure."
"The installation of StarWind Virtual SAN was pretty easy, and the configuration was done in no time."
"We have been able to use more on-prem hardware to reduce cost and also use old disks that we do not trust enough for ordinary RAID or usage."
"This was a great implementation for a small to mid-size business."
"It is a scalable solution."
"Hyper Converge is easier to manage and performs better than traditional infrastructure."
"It is a scalable solution."
"One of the solution's strong points is the deduplication capabilities of SimpliVity."
"It is easy to manage; the administration is simpler. It saves a lot of rack space in the data center because you can consolidate 20 servers into three to five nodes. The client will be able to benefit from power savings and cost savings as well."
"The solution has good backup resolution updates."
"We like the fact that the hyper-converged infrastructure provides a simple to grow, easy to configure platform."
"What I really like about this program, is that it needs little space and it works really fast, so it saves us time."
"We have found the live migration to be the most valuable feature. It allows us to seamlessly maintain our servers, as well as have peace of mind if something goes wrong."
"We also substantially reduced network complexity by eliminating that standalone SAN. That reduced complexity has allowed us to concentrate on improving other areas of our network."
"The hardware footprint is perfect. It fits in our rack perfectly, and we were able to condense a lot of physical servers we had. It has greatly eliminated the excess stuff in our server rack..."
"Their support team is extremely helpful, and they are pretty friendly and knowledgeable."
"Product functionality and performance are wonderful."
"The software is great. It's very easy to understand. I've not delved into any of the command-line stuff, but there's no real need to script it. Since it went in, pretty much the only thing that I have needed to do is increase device image sizes and that process is very straightforward."
"The easy way everything can be configured and ready to run in less than a day is great."
"We no longer need multiple staff members performing small, mundane tasks."
"Perhaps more reporting features on the utilization, usage, and performance of the configured high-availability images and underlying physical disks would be helpful."
"It runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear."
"Geolocation could be better, for example, for site mirroring for DR purposes."
"The documentation could be clearer in terms of explaining the installation."
"There is no IPv6 support. That is our only issue at this time."
"For me, the product could be improved by it being made cheaper."
"It should be improved in the way it detects the right filesystem image after a complete shutdown of the system or in the case of disaster recovery."
"I had issues locating the documentation that applied to my version of StarWind vSAN."
"One problem I've had is that I was trying to do a move and it was not working. I was given an error and a message asking me to shut down the machine first and then move it to another host."
"Scalability requires using additional nodes."
"One of the things that can be improved is that today, is supporting VMware, maybe as a hypervisor. But it would be good to have an open kind of platform for other hypervisors, maybe. Like Nutanix is doing, it's very open."
"The price can be improved. We would like to see support for some open source virtualization technology like for example KVM."
"We've had to do a power cycle to bring it all the way down, bring it back up for power outages, A/C shut-downs of our DC office, but it hasn't presented a problem."
"The solution is not very stable."
"Its technical support services could be faster."
"Installation and setup could be easier."
"Multi cluster support for their Command Console would be very beneficial. Currently, you can only work with a single cluster at a time. The console is new so I expect much growth in this area in the near future. The other area that could be improved is the tech support locale."
"If I had to pick something to add to the product, it would be nice if you could have more than one user account on their command center VM."
"The only critique I might have is that the support is overseas in Eastern Europe and, on occasion, there has been a language issue. But in general, they're as good as can be..."
"At the moment, the initial configuration is very technical and error-prone. That is the reason Starwind does it for you as a service, which is a great thing. But it would be nice if we could change or rearrange storage assignments ourselves."
"I think some performance metrics would be nice to see, especially on the storage side."
"We ran into some issues with going from Hyper-V 2012 R2 to Hyper-V 2019."
"Possible new features could be CSV-level snapshot capability, Veeam integration, and maybe a more straightforward setup. Granted, you don't have to worry about setups with the HCA, but if you want to implement StarWind vSAN in a lab to test it is a tedious setup process."
"The only issues are when Hyper V itself has limitations and I'd love to see support or enhancement in the area of direct-attached GPU cards."
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HPE Hyper Converged is ranked 10th in HCI with 33 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews. HPE Hyper Converged is rated 8.2, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of HPE Hyper Converged writes " Ensures end-to-end data security with redundancy measures and provides visibility into the system but node expansion challenges". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". HPE Hyper Converged is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Dell PowerFlex and HPE Alletra dHCI, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex, VMware vSAN, VxRail and StorMagic SvSAN. See our HPE Hyper Converged vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
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