We performed a comparison between StarWind Virtual SAN 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."StarWind Virtual SAN is a very easy-to-use solution that can be quickly and easily deployed and configured without intimate and specific knowledge in the virtualization sphere."
"vSAN we found was simple to set up, easy to configure and manage and allows us to achieve storage redundancy."
"The main benefit is that StarWind is almost maintenance-free."
"The available GUI is excellent for monitoring and operating the system in an easy and direct way."
"StarWind vSAN was very easy to integrate into our system and ran flawlessly during our entire use time."
"This software lets us maintain storage redundancy across both of our Hyper-V hosts, so if one goes down the environment fails over to the other and we have minimal to no downtime."
"In the three years that we have been using StarWind, the product has yet to cause us any problems."
"The solution is also quite flexible. As an example, other vSAN solutions that we looked at had more stringent requirements regarding mixed HDD/SSD storage which wouldn't have worked in our environment."
"There is not a lot of maintenance required."
"It is easy to use. It is easy to implement for us, and it is also easy to maintain for the customers. It is not necessary to buy some extra devices and talk with other vendors."
"VMware vSAN is compatible with the legacy hypervisor solutions and most of the features are good."
"The performance has exceeded our expectations and exceeded our traditional converged infrastructure."
"I like vSAN because they release features incrementally, every year, and you don't have to upgrade your hardware to get those features. If you bought a traditional SAN, you would have to upgrade your hardware constantly, every three years: You would get it, and it is how it is for three years. But on vSAN, you upgrade when you have to, when your hardware gets old or when you need more capacity. It's great, you get new features constantly."
"Scalability in vSAN has been really good. It's very easy to add nodes in, to automatically generate the drives and the disk groups. It has been a piece of cake, surprisingly so."
"It is very easy to set up and very easy to use. It is very useful."
"The most valuable feature of VMware vSAN is the ease of management. VMware vSAN it's a part of VMware ESXi and when you do patching for VMware ESXi, VMware vSAN receives the patches too."
"The StarWind Management Console is available only for Microsoft Windows/Windows Server, and should also be available for Linux and macOS, as it would reduce implementation costs."
"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."
"Being able to run StarWind vSAN on top of any free UNIX operating system to build a resilient iSCSI/FTP/SMB storage system would be useful."
"They recommend RAID10 for HDD, which reduces the usable storage capacity."
"I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues."
"Server-side snapshots are one thing the Linux appliance can't do yet."
"A web management interface would be good, especially for those coming from other solutions that have one."
"The documentation could be better."
"The updating process could be easier."
"Ease of administration is one area where vSAN could be improved."
"They can package it in a way that is specific to the hardware infrastructure and the hardware platform. It should stay fairly up to date with the drivers and the manufacturer issues. The problem with uncoupling the proprietary technology and component capabilities is that by uncoupling them, you run into some concerns or challenges over the poor performance model. These concerns really come when you start talking about high performance, high bandwidth, and high availability types of environments. While vSAN is a leader, in a critical view, it is not about being cost-effective. It is more about the immediate impact of money loss to the business in critical applications where we want to maintain a continuous operational 59 model. It is, however, good for QA/QC tasks. I don't necessarily know how it works in regards to VDI or virtual desktop infrastructure."
"The only thing I can think of at this time is to improve the performance monitoring and performance visibility within the GUI."
"Only the stretched cluster requires a minor improvement."
"I would like compression and deduplication to be offered for offloading hardware, instead of doing it with software. That would be nice."
"They can improve the manageability of the solution to make it more simple. It is not that complicated, but it will be good if they can make it more simple."
"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."
StarWind Virtual SAN is ranked 4th in HCI with 182 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 226 reviews. StarWind Virtual SAN is rated 9.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of StarWind Virtual SAN writes "Excellent support, great performance, and good redundancy". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". StarWind Virtual SAN is most compared with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, StorMagic SvSAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage, DataCore SANsymphony 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 Virtual SAN vs. VMware vSAN 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.
