We performed a comparison between StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and VxRail 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."We can lose a site or even two of our three, and we would lose no data and have no outage."
"Their support staff is comprised of true experts who can also communicate clearly."
"It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a very mature software that supersedes its capabilities with my use cases."
"I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"This solution made it possible to deploy a new infrastructure in the shortest amount of time, at a low cost without purchasing expensive hardware storage, and use unused servers."
"Integration with virtualization platforms helped us to resolve many issues we were facing while using the physical storage."
"StarWind has provided us with a top-notch, well-supported, robust vSAN offering when other vendors have moved to hyper-converged solutions that are outside of our average clients' reach from a financial and resource perspective."
"The added speed of using standard HDD and SSD meant we could increase what services are stored on the servers without having to have additional servers."
"What makes it valuable is the high-availability. In the education field, when you've got students in classrooms, any loss of service disrupts the lessons to a point that the whole lesson is affected. For part of the business which isn't business-critical, to have a little bit of a hiccup wouldn't be such a big thing, but here, it's the high availability of service that is important."
"With StarWind's Proactive monitoring we can go about our day helping our customers and not have to worry about our cluster's health."
"High-availability is what I bought it for."
"Their support team is extremely helpful, and they are pretty friendly and knowledgeable."
"We also opted for 24-hour support monitoring for any issues. They are extremely quick to respond on issues we even cause ourselves such as bumping a network cable."
"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."
"I do like that I can manage StarWind with a console running on my local desktop."
"t's a very good solution with multiple options with VxRail series like based on customer requirements whether they're focused on compute, storage, scalability and high performance, etc. Whether a customer you are going to start your IT Infrastructure footprint with a limited budget, you have freedom of choice and non-disruptive expansion in the future, whether in the main data center or branches. Any idea coming in system admins mind to run this setup continuously and keep service 100% 24/7 is possible in this product line. Hyper-converged appliances allow a datacenter in a box approach, with G, E P, Vand P series."
"Enterprise is a complete solution that includes performance, backups and disaster recovery."
"like VxRail because it's fully integrated. The other hyperconverged solutions are also well integrated. They are all highly similar to each other in that regard. But we prefer VxRail for its physical integrations or lifecycle management. It also has vCenter, which integrates the hardware lifecycle management."
"The stability is very nice. We haven't had any issues with the cluster. The cluster is very stable. No problems with slowness. Everything has been stable. It was well-architectured."
"It's somewhat hard to speak about specific features, but I like VxRail's simplicity and ease of use. It's a decent solution for customers with a small footprint. If you're operating a big data center, it's not easy to position VxRail or HCI solutions, but when you have a small customer managing many different components, it's easier to work only with one solution."
"Updating the product has been very easy."
"VxRail's technical support is very good."
"The most valuable features are ease of management and ease of applying updates."
"With data verification, I would like to know how does the solution perform validation of data being synced between two VSANs."
"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."
"While we had little to no issues in setting up StarWind and received excellent support from the StarWind technicians, we would have appreciated a clearer guideline for a setup with the free version of StarWind Management Console or, in other words - for the setup with the PowerShell."
"It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers."
"I would definitely like to see quite a bit more on the monitoring side of things."
"Updating the software can be a bit tricky."
"I would like to see an extensive set of cmdlets that could allow for easier automation as well as status management."
"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..."
"In the future, it would be nice to be able to migrate from the Windows vSAN to the Linux vSAN without having to do a full restore from backups."
"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."
"One area for improvement of the solution is that I had to get Windows, which I really didn't want because of the extra maintenance or overhead, as well as viruses, etc. It's going to take time for them to get their Linux to that point. They already have Linux but it's not as mature and they don't really support it on HCAs. They have it for individuals who want to use it on their servers, but not on HCAs."
"The only thing I have run into is that I did want to add more hard drives into the host, so that we could look at doing a RAID 10, and the hard drive prices were pretty expensive... that's pretty nit-picky and I don't think it has anything to do with StarWind itself. I think it's more on whomever they work with for their hardware."
"The only area that the product could improve would be user training."
"There is room for improvement in the setup and installation phase. We had massive problems connecting the StarWind appliances to our network infrastructure. That wasn't necessarily a StarWind problem. I don't know if their business partner in the UK wasn't used to having to deal with the supply of the cabling infrastructure, but that's where the problems started."
"I'd like a better UI and some limitations on "breaking it.""
"It would be nice if the update process was shortened and that patching would be simpler."
"The licensing is a bit too costly."
"My customers want more storage for university databases."
"The agility of the support team to provide you with better solutions should be improved. VxRail also has to be improved in terms of simplicity. Adding a simple node seemed like quite a project."
"From a hardware and software perspective, there could be an improvement in the sales cycle, as there is a lot of hoops to go through to get pricing on a solution."
"There is limited support for SAP HANA with this solution."
"Pricing could be improved."
"The initial setup is very complex."
More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Pricing and Cost Advice →
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 119 reviews. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6, while VxRail is rated 8.6. 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 VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, StorMagic SvSAN and Red Hat Ceph Storage, whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and HPE Hyper Converged. See our StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. VxRail report.
See our list of best HCI vendors.
We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
