We performed a comparison between NetApp HCI [EOL] and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, VMware and others in HCI."StarWind is very easy to use, even if you have had no experience using a SAN before."
"VSAN works great; it's very easy to install, configure, and manage."
"Given the high availability of the server cluster, we were able to reduce separate physical servers onto one hyper-converged cluster - this saved in OPEX and CAPEX costs immediately, along with licensing costs of the Windows Server licenses."
"The most valuable feature is the managed service, which has been an important part of monitoring our critical infrastructure."
"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"
"The main benefit is that StarWind is almost maintenance-free."
"This was a great implementation for a small to mid-size business."
"It allows me to configure High Availability and failover clustering with some fault tolerance, at a cost point that doesn’t break the bank for a small business budget."
"Simple setup and having the storage and compute right on one deployment is the most valuable aspect of this solution. They're able to get set up and ready to go and start having their DevOp team deploy to that environment."
"It is easy to administrate the solution, and the company handles its technical support well."
"This is a strong product and it works very well, and the processes around it continue to grow and mature."
"Scalability was another thing I was looking at. The solution, by its very nature, is designed to be expandable and flexible, so you don't have to buy performance you don't need today, but you're also not stuck with something you can't expand."
"When you are doing lifecycles for your equipment, you can just swap out pieces of equipment. We used to do one big iron to another big iron, and that's a major migration hassle. Whereas, with this environment, you can go with small nodes, one at a time, and do a refresh."
"It has automated a lot of workloads. It has automated us from ticketing a large number to a very small number."
"It's an all-flash solution. NetApp guarantees 3-to-1 or more than 3-to-1. It has guaranteed performance, like 15K IOPS per node."
"The ability to size the available space in a way that matches our company's needs is most valuable. For instance, you can decide if you want 80/20, 70/30, or 60/40 space. Redundancy depends on your needs without changing the appliance. You just add space and decide the percentage of space that you need free and the percentage of space that you need for backup. It is all automatic, and you don't have to do anything. You just add space, and the system automatically configures itself with the chosen option."
"The solution has high performance."
"Everyone uses virtualization to more efficiently utilize hardware resources. That's the main point of vSAN and VMware."
"vSAN can help customers save on storage system costs, and also save on the human cost."
"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 has been around for a long time are are doing a decent job at catching up with the latest technologies i.e. bringing in kubernetes and containerization. Overall, this is a great tool for virtualization."
"The most valuable features are secure IOPs and LAN security."
"IOPS is comparatively best to run VDI solution."
"VMware vSAN is an easy to use and easy to manage storage solution. Deploying and upgrading are easy. Technical support is very good."
"There is one issue as far as licensing goes and that is a lack of documentation online for users when transitioning from the free version to the paid version, or vice versa."
"StarWind really needs to market its product more."
"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."
"We don't really have any issues with this product."
"I would like them to invest time in reducing the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure."
"It would help if the manufacturer provided clearer and more detailed documentation, with explanations of how the application can be installed in various HA configurations."
"I would definitely like to see quite a bit more on the monitoring side of things."
"Improvements in documentation and support resources could enhance the user experience."
"The vCenter keeps crashing, meaning that there is no stability in our environment."
"I would like to see the implementation process improved."
"To improve the product, they should make it more flexible."
"I would like to have the ability to replicate to multiple sites."
"If you want to have a really dense data center then it's hard to have a big chunk of cabling going through everything."
"The product needs better support for installing the operating system on the machine."
"HCI has not enabled us to consolidate workloads or break down silos and has not increased application performance. It has also not resulted in more efficient use of compute resources."
"The price should be lowered. It's a little expensive."
"This product is very expensive."
"The product's high price is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"VMware vSAN could improve by having faster reload time and a single point of failure. Resynchronization of many hardware could be better. If you have an outage of a disc or a full system, the replication time is too slow. This has room for improvement."
"I would like a better Hardware Certification List (HCL). The HCL should a little easier to deal with."
"The stability needs to be improved."
"I am looking for more of a software-defined storage platform that uses different protocols, such as iSCSI, NFS, and CIS, and maybe also has an object as part of that. They should 100% make it more of a storage-based product where it is not linked just to VMware, and it also has NFS and iSCSI built-in at a scalable level. They should turn it more into a dedicated storage-as-a-service platform instead of just being built into the VMware kernel. Their level one and level two support is not at all good, and it should be improved."
"Ease of administration is one area where vSAN could be improved."
"It could be cheaper."
Earn 20 points
NetApp HCI [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in HCI with 32 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 226 reviews. NetApp HCI [EOL] is rated 8.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of NetApp HCI [EOL] writes "Ease of provisioning has allowed us to implement large installations in a very short time frame". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". NetApp HCI [EOL] 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.
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