We performed a comparison between Sunlight 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 support has been great in helping resolve other issues not caused by their software."
"It's quite easy to install."
"The management and monitoring have been very easy since the solution's dashboard is very simple and user-friendly."
"This solution enables us to make better cost-effective use of our existing hardware and leverage the current infrastructure at a higher level than we could before."
"This was a great implementation for a small to mid-size business."
"The instant failover, with vSAN copying data to the second node, allowed for the continuous availability of our applications."
"It includes every feature that a traditional SAN offers and so much more."
"The StarWind tech support is extremely helpful, especially during the initial setup."
"It supports the latest technology of NVMe SSD, which is PCIe-based SSD. It has a very good IOPS performance as compared to vSAN. For the same system, I get 1,000 IOPS with vSAN, and with Sunlight, I am able to get almost 10,000 IOPS. In terms of features, it has almost all the features, such as HA and centralized dashboards. It can be managed centrally, and the visibility of the system is very good. They also have very good technical support and customer or partner training."
"The performance and small footprint of this solution are its most valuable features. I am able to obtain and use more than 90 percent of the physical hardware capacity."
"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 most valuable features of vSAN are its simplicity to deploy and that we can use commodity disks in our servers without complexity or need for external storage arrays or storage specialists on our teams."
"vSAN is scalable for us. If any additional capacity needs to be included, we just add to the host and configure the vSAN cluster."
"The ability to have an HA cluster in the absence of a shared storage device or SAN."
"Adding new nodes and expanding vSAN forward is simple and non-disruptive for a lot of our customers."
"The solutions best feature is that it is easy to use."
"It is scalable, overall. If you need to add storage, it makes it easy to scale by adding additional hard drives into the existing servers or you can add storage by just adding more servers."
"The most valuable feature is the fast performance."
"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."
"I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues."
"Other vendors such as VMware vSAN have a bigger community of users, so it is easier to find more pre-sale or post-sale information from users."
"I had to buy upgraded support, which was not a problem, but it wasn't a prorated amount, so I paid for the support, the full upgrade, but I only got a couple of months out of it because it was only good until renewal time."
"It would be nice to see a new UI for the windows client, as it is not the easiest to find settings."
"It is hard to find adequate technical documentation on their support website."
"There is no Italian-language version of the software available."
"To enable the proactive support capability that is part of our support agreement, I would ask that the terms and conditions be revised and made acceptable to corporate security."
"Its reporting and dashboards need to be improved. It currently has very basic reporting options. It should also be made easier to deploy on Unix operating systems. It is easy to deploy on Windows and Linux, but it is currently not easy to deploy on Unix."
"My recommendation would be to add this technology to Azure, Microsoft Azure so that we can bring it to the market, or deploy it on public clouds such as Microsoft Azure and Google. It is currently only available on Amazon's public cloud."
"Hardware load balancing is available on the enterprise version of the solution, however, it's extremely expensive and therefore out of our budget."
"The product's high price is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The platform’s pricing needs improvement. Additionally, there should be an appliance module included in it."
"More focus has to be put on deduplication and compression with a hybrid architecture."
"Lacks sufficient storage terabytes."
"VMware vSAN needs to improve its features because other solutions have more advanced features."
"I'd like to see better integration with the Update Manager, with respect to firmware updates for hardware."
"The server files are larger than before."
Sunlight is ranked 28th in HCI with 2 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Sunlight is rated 8.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Sunlight writes "Performs well, effective, and has responsive remote technical support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Sunlight is most compared with , whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Sunlight vs. VMware vSAN report.
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