We performed a comparison between Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and StarWind Virtual SAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."It's mainly about the storage expansion, like in hyper-converged solutions."
"Its technical support is excellent."
"The most valuable feature is that there is no single point of failure."
"The most valuable feature are the caching capabilities using the storage class memory."
"The performance, reliability, and affordability has been most valuable."
"The flash ability, in terms of tiering and caching, is amazing"
"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"
"This solution has a very good user interface, with simple administration/management."
"Training is also easy as it is just one system to learn."
"StarWind vSAN was very easy to integrate into our system and ran flawlessly during our entire use time."
"It has allowed me to effectively and confidently manage the maintenance of hosts where I can power off a host and have its VMs migrate to another one."
"We are able to do maintenance by bringing down one node at a time, rather than having to schedule a complete shutdown."
"When we need additional storage but want to keep the size of the SANs manageable, the StarWind Virtual SAN has allowed me to do everything needed."
"The biggest benefit was that it allowed us to provide SAN services on a limited hardware budget."
"It is difficult to get a hardware compatibility certification for the solution."
"Documentation management could be improved"
"I think the online documentation needs a lot of work and so do the sizing tools."
"More optimization could be done in terms of mirroring."
"The management tool within this solution could be improved. We would also like to be able to access services like Azure when using this solution."
"It is scalable, but only beyond two nodes. If I go for two nodes it's not scalable. I need to build a complete cluster from the beginning if I'm going for two nodes."
"Diagnostics information or alerts on the state of systems could also be implemented to give more visibility."
"New versions of this solution should be tested more thoroughly before the release as we had a few problems with one version due to a bug."
"They need to invest more in the support documents for real issues happening when integrating the solution with the hypervisor."
"If there was a way to automatically put disks in maintenance mode when shutting the host down and exit maintenance mode automatically, that would simplify things."
"I would like them to invest time in reducing the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure."
"Besides not being able to use any filesystem, I do not have any additional cons."
"It is not very clear within the StarWind Management Console or the StarWind support documentation how to perform maintenance on a single node in a two-node HA cluster."
"I had to buy upgraded support, which was not a problem, but it wasn't a prorated amount, so I paid for the support, the full upgrade, but I only got a couple of months out of it because it was only good until renewal time."
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Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is ranked 9th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 7 reviews while StarWind Virtual SAN is ranked 1st in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 182 reviews. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is rated 7.6, while StarWind Virtual SAN is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct writes "Stable solution with an easy initial setup process". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind Virtual SAN writes "Excellent support, great performance, and good redundancy". Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is most compared with VMware vSAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), DataCore SANsymphony and NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, whereas StarWind Virtual SAN is most compared with VMware vSAN, StorMagic SvSAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage, DataCore SANsymphony and HPE SimpliVity. See our Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs. StarWind Virtual SAN report.
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