We performed a comparison between StarWind Virtual Tape Library 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."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."
"One of the most valuable features is the way it sets up the virtual SAN, because we don't have to buy a separate appliance for storage. It uses the existing storage on the servers, which is definitely a cost savings for us."
"You can turn your local disk storage into high-availability iSCSI storage."
"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."
"Quick setup, great support, stability is great"
"The failover redundancy is why we bought this product and it has never let us down."
"I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"Starwind made it easy to deploy fully redundant, highly available storage at a low cost."
"The most valuable feature of the StarWind Virtual Tape Library is the archiving to the AWS cloud."
"StarWind VTL allowed us to back up to virtual tape that was created within Veeam and upload the tape to the cloud."
"The solution made our backups way more reliable."
"It is a stable solution."
"I like the fact that we can simultaneously upload the virtual tapes to different cloud providers, and the settings can be adjusted to speed up the upload times even further."
"It allows us to put our infrastructure in remote locations and still get the same performance we get from our onsite SAN solutions."
"The solutions best feature is that it is easy to use."
"The main advantage is that it's all in the box, with VMware vCenter Server product."
"The most valuable feature is the simplification of storage. We no longer need to deal with Fibre Channel and the external storage arrays."
"The performance of VMware vSAN is very good."
"Easy to deploy and manage."
"We don't have to order a storage system, we can just use whatever we have on hand and roll it into our virtualization system."
"I like the scalability and the fact that it reduces your total cost for storage over several years."
"The reconnection of the attached drives upon a reboot could be improved."
"The product can include a more simple way of synchronization after a forced shutdown as the current process has a few more steps to check that hosts have synchronized and this can be automated."
"Besides not being able to use any filesystem, I do not have any additional cons."
"I'm sure it needs bug fixes..."
"Scaling the product is fairly easy except for the computing aspect. It would entail another appliance. While not a show stopper, it isn't as easy as dropping in a few extra SSDs."
"The documentation is good yet is still lacking in a few areas."
"It would be nice to see a new UI for the windows client, as it is not the easiest to find settings."
"The platform needs to improve user management and the web console."
"The initial installation can be complex and should be simplified."
"The solution's training process and online documentation could be more thorough."
"The main thing that I felt could be improved was having an estimated time of completion for the virtual tape uploads to the cloud."
"I am not sure if this is a limitation of my physical hardware or if it is the software itself. However, I would like the throughput to be faster."
"I would like for the next release to be a bit cheaper."
"Licensing costs are a little too high for smaller sized companies."
"Hardware load balancing is available on the enterprise version of the solution, however, it's extremely expensive and therefore out of our budget."
"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."
"The technical support, it's not satisfactory. Whenever we raise a ticket it takes a lot of time to have an engineer get involved sometimes, or we receive a less experienced engineer. We then have to repeat the situation to the next engineer which all takes time."
"The upgrading process could be simplified."
"The pricing model is sometimes a challenge for us because their licenses are very costly."
"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."
More StarWind Virtual Tape Library Pricing and Cost Advice →
StarWind Virtual Tape Library is ranked 15th in HCI with 6 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 226 reviews. StarWind Virtual Tape Library is rated 10.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of StarWind Virtual Tape Library writes "Flexible and reliable with helpful support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". StarWind Virtual Tape Library is most compared with Red Hat Ceph Storage and HPE StoreVirtual, 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 Virtual Tape Library vs. VMware vSAN report.
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