We performed a comparison between StarWind HyperConverged Appliance 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."As the client had acquired another company some distance away, they were concerned about having a single SAN in one location or the other. StarWind vSAN allowed us to keep a copy of the data local to each site without asking the client to pay for two SANs in addition to the two new servers they needed."
"The features that I found most valuable are ease of use of the software that StarWind offers - with the first setup being a bit painful."
"Integration with Microsoft clustering has been perfect, allowing us to leverage our investment in MS server licensing to the fullest."
"The ease of reaching the support team and their promptness for support is great."
"It provided the much-needed HA on an extremely low budget."
"I save both physical and virtual space."
"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 top-notch support before, during, and after deployments are better than any other vendor I have come across."
"The easy way everything can be configured and ready to run in less than a day is great."
"Having this all backed up by pro-active support gives us good peace of mind."
"The high-quality hardware options, directly affecting performance, have significantly improved the user experience and are well worth the cost."
"The hardware footprint is great. We've got two 2U servers which replaced four 2U servers. Granted, they were about three years old at that point, but we actually increased our processing capacity by about 50 percent while keeping our storage capacity about the same. We've actually been able to downgrade to a half rack from a full rack because we've gotten rid of some of our network equipment and some of our additional storage arrays."
"Reliability and overall uptime are key as we're also hosting client environments in addition to our own."
"The biggest thing we were looking for was redundancy, with both the compute and the storage, so that way we could lose a full node and still keep everything up and running, and not have to worry about it... StarWind was able to provide a solution for what we wanted, - to provide for redundancy."
"Repair efforts have been reduced to nearly nothing."
"The low cost of this solution has also made a big difference in our budget, which has been very helpful."
"I have found the solution to be scalable."
"Allows us to implement more quickly, and to ease the maintenance."
"We have found the solution to be very scalable."
"I like that we could choose whatever hardware we wanted, rather than having to use one particular vendor."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to continue our business needs and have higher visibility. It has definitely increased our business productivity levels."
"We didn't only choose vSAN; we chose VMware because of SR-IOV, which is more on the hypervisor level and not on the vSAN storage. It's part of the whole system."
"The product’s ecosystem is better than Nutanix’s."
"VMware vSAN is an easy to use and easy to manage storage solution. Deploying and upgrading are easy. Technical support is very good."
"When StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere nodes go offline unexpectedly, the nodes have to re-sync disks fully which takes a long time. We had a power failure and when both nodes came online, VMware vSphere didn't see StarWind disks before I manually re-scanned them form ESXi administration console even though it should happen automatically"
"Currently, the StarWind management console is a bit clunky to navigate and isn't the most user-intuitive interface."
"I'd prefer it if a remote console was provided."
"A great feature would be a wizard and to include a new disk in the SAN. At the moment, including a new disk requires several steps - some that must be done at the OS level and others in each node."
"The reconnection of the attached drives upon a reboot could be improved."
"The gathering of monthly consumption and performance reports for future dissemination to concerned parties is very important. Unfortunately, StarWinds vSAN doesn't offer this functionality."
"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."
"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."
"A desired feature or service is the ability to have a hardware subscription plan that ensures routine hardware updates in conjunction with the hyper-converged software."
"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."
"We ran into some issues with going from Hyper-V 2012 R2 to Hyper-V 2019."
"The monitoring and report software is a bit hit and miss."
"I honestly cannot think of anything else to be improved, as I rarely have to interact with the Starwind product."
"The only issue we have seen is with the StarWind Server Manager. We have had to continually reboot the server in order to use it."
"The monitoring and reporting console can be improved in the sense that it can have more information on it."
"I had some initial difficulties understanding the solution which could have been solved via additional documentation aimed at newcomers."
"Because of virtual storage, the system reaches reserve storage for its functions. It also consumes a certain amount of storage, which then results in the creation of a fault tolerance for the system. All of this adds to a lot of capacity being consumed in terms of storage for each drive for vSan. I find this to be one drawback of using vSan."
"One thing in vSAN that I would like to improve is using vSAN as a repository for files or other things. For example, with Horizon, maybe we can save profiles with UEM on there. That would be a good feature that I would like."
"The only thing I can think of at this time is to improve the performance monitoring and performance visibility within the GUI."
"Licensing costs are a little too high for smaller sized companies."
"There is a room for improvement on the latest version of compatibility with the VMware product, especially for vSAN and with other vendors on their motherboards and driver configurations."
"One area that could be improved is the management feature."
"Enterprise customers get discounts on the solution's licensing pricing, but it is too expensive for SMB customers."
"This product is very expensive."
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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 226 reviews. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex, VxRail, StorMagic SvSAN and HPE SimpliVity, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. VMware vSAN report.
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