We performed a comparison between Sangfor HCI and VMware vSAN based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Sangfor HCI and VMware vSAN come out about equal in this comparison. Sangfor HCI has an edge when it comes to pricing, but VMware vSAN has an edge when it comes to ease of deployment.
"It's quite easy to manage."
"It's quite easy to install."
"StarWind vSAN has a lot of great features and is a perfect solution for mirroring internal disks and flash between servers."
"It eliminates the use of expensive physical shared storage."
"The instant failover, with vSAN copying data to the second node, allowed for the continuous availability of our applications."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to grow rapidly while still providing flexibility and reliability."
"VSAN works great; it's very easy to install, configure, and manage."
"The most useful aspect is the hyper-converged SD SAN and the ease to expand it by just adding cheap SSD or NVME disks."
"Their GUI interface is a bit easier than VMware's."
"The solution provides a single management console."
"The product provides a single management console for managing everything."
"The interface is very user-friendly."
"We find the topology feature of Sangfor HCI particularly valuable."
"I find the simplicity of Sangfor very valuable. It is easy to configure and user-friendly. The overall user experience as well as the usability of Sangfor is outstanding."
"The initial setup isn't hard."
"I am impressed with the product's firewall and virtualization."
"It is very well known in the industry, and there are a lot of technical resources around it. This is a big thing for me because, at the end of the day, when you implement it, you need to support it."
"vSAN has just one datastore. so customers do not need to think where to put their VMs, how to design the physical disk RAID, the LUN size, the LUN mapping, etc. when they use NetApp/EMC/HDS or other storage systems."
"Technical support is very helpful and very good at resolving issues."
"Very easy to implement in any existing environment."
"It's stable and scalable. Also, you can virtualize SAN so that you don't have to have a separate storage area network and can have your computer and storage on the same box or computer."
"One of the valuable features for us is the ability to restrict the performance capacity per client. Other solutions don't have this feature."
"The main advantage is that it's all in the box, with VMware vCenter Server product."
"I like that we could choose whatever hardware we wanted, rather than having to use one particular vendor."
"It runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear."
"There should be some kind of active monitoring connected to StarWind vSAN, so you will be able to act when needed."
"Regular updates to the software are required, and subtle design changes would be welcome."
"It would help us if the vendor continues to release software updates for earlier versions of the Windows operating systems."
"The software monitoring should be web-based to be reachable from any VLAN workstation."
"A web management interface would be good, especially for those coming from other solutions that have one."
"When you will cease your contract with StarWind (for support) your product won't be updated and that is a big selling point, especially for us, as we have loads of products from StarWind."
"I'd love to see more clarification for us folks who are smart enough to do some damage yet not smart enough to use CLI."
"We have had issues while integrating VMware with Sangfor HCI. The tool should be also faster in terms of customization."
"There is a feature to upgrade multiple VMs simultaneously, but it crashes."
"The cost must be improved."
"One question that has come up frequently in the last week is whether or not the renewal cost for Sangfor's HCI solution is too high."
"Currently, when we need to do capacity planning, we have to rely on Sangfor's support team for assistance. However, if there were dedicated tools available, we could handle it ourselves and increase efficiency."
"I would want the product to include Continuous Data Protection (CDP) which can help to easily retrieve the data."
"Its virtual machine tools can be improved. These tools should be enhanced for use in other applications and operating systems, such as Linux."
"Sangfor does not support a SAS configuration, which is something that we would like."
"The price can be reduced. Small businesses cannot afford this solution."
"It is an expensive solution."
"Based on my testing, I would like to expand deduplication to include hybrid deployments and not just for all-flash deployments."
"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."
"Some intelligence can be added to the newest version to provide more flexibility between storage tiers."
"In a future release, they can bring in the object storage capabilities to this solution. Currently, there is not any compatibility."
"Virtual machines disk size cannot cap more than a single node. For a VDI user, it may not save enough to hold a file server or exchange server on a single node storage space."
"We are facing some problems with updates with the VMware vSAN. When we upgraded from version 6.5 to 7, we have been faced with many problems. They have been deploying many hotfixes for this version, and they need to continue to improve this version."
More Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure Pricing and Cost Advice →
Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is ranked 9th in HCI with 28 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is rated 8.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure writes "The solution offers straightforward setup, scalability, and manageability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, HPE Hyper Converged and StorMagic SvSAN, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs. VMware vSAN report.
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