We performed a comparison between StarWind HyperConverged Appliance 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."Ten gigabit Ethernet compatibility, support, ease of use, and management are some positive features."
"This solution has a very good user interface, with simple administration/management."
"One of the standout features of StarWind.com is its remarkable ability to seamlessly integrate with Dell systems. This integration provides users with an unmatched level of convenience and compatibility, allowing for streamlined operations within a Dell environment. This compatibility factor alone can save significant time and effort for IT professionals, ensuring a smooth integration process and optimized performance."
"The instant failover, with vSAN copying data to the second node, allowed for the continuous availability of our applications."
"The software is easy to setup and manage, and the support is excellent."
"The main benefit is that StarWind is almost maintenance-free."
"The control panel is nice. It gives you a lot of good feedback as to the status and health of the VSAN."
"It integrates (fully) with VMware and Veeam, my hypervisor, and backup vendors, so for me, all the puzzle pieces simply fit and work smoothly."
"Product functionality and performance are wonderful."
"We were able to set it up via the documentation and only needed their support a handful of times."
"The low cost of this solution has also made a big difference in our budget, which has been very helpful."
"Reliability and overall uptime are key as we're also hosting client environments in addition to our own."
"The support is the most valuable feature. The support has been amazing. It's around the clock. One of our hard disks accidentally ejected without me knowing or being onsite. They called and told me about it before I had a chance to see it myself."
"The easy way everything can be configured and ready to run in less than a day is great."
"The sales process is easy."
"The hardware footprint is perfect. It fits in our rack perfectly, and we were able to condense a lot of physical servers we had. It has greatly eliminated the excess stuff in our server rack..."
"It is easier to deploy than the traditional SAN."
"The high availability is very good."
"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 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 integrated into VMware."
"The technical support is good. We are always thankful for the technical support from VMware. They are very supportive when we have a technical problem."
"The scalability of the solution is most valuable."
"It's very scalable. I like that. Adding a node is easy. Adding a disk group is easy."
"You have to do a "full" sync on write-back cache disks instead of a quick sync if there is an issue."
"I would love to see more vendor selection to be available for the HCA/vSAN appliances."
"This is a great product."
"It would be great to have more automated tooling around managing the iSCSI connections in Windows"
"While it is possible to implement disk encryption in StarWind using Windows Bitlocker, such a solution can be a little tricky to manage."
"There is no Italian-language version of the software available."
"Some of the documentation seems to be a bit older and refers to deprecated items."
"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."
"Shipping options should be explained in detail and offer more white glove delivery options even if it comes at an additional cost for some SMBs without docks."
"The response time is usually several hours after the issue occurred."
"Product shipments did have a few bumps along the way, but that's to be expected when using any shipping company."
"Although the setup documentation was very complete and succinct, I found StarWind documentation to be a bit sparse."
"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."
"We have to pay for support, which is high-end support. That can be expensive, at least for us."
"Over the past three years, there were two instances where our cluster had an issue, yet StarWind proactively notified me of those issues and effortlessly guided me through the process of correcting the issue with minimal effort on my part."
"We'd like an easier setup for Windows updates on the Hyper-V servers so you don't have to use a script to ensure auto-updating is done."
"The integration could be improved. I would like to see integration with other platforms."
"The only thing I can think of at this time is to improve the performance monitoring and performance visibility within the GUI."
"I would like compression and deduplication to be offered for offloading hardware, instead of doing it with software. That would be nice."
"I would love to see vSAN integrate Persistent Memory and NVDIMMs. I know they're supposed to be working on an elastic tier so that we don't have the issues with destaging from the cache to the capacity. Those are the things that I'm interested in."
"VMware vSAN could improve by adding NAS and object storage."
"I would like for the next release to be a bit cheaper."
"The product can be improved in a couple of ways. One of those would be that they have a lot of hidden features, that are through the CLI, that would be great to have in the GUI, or just be more open about those features. It's something called RVC. It's a tool in the back end. It's a really great tool, but I had to find it through Reddit. So more information on stuff like that would be great. Also, in the user interface, giving us more features and more reporting that we can do from vSphere itself would be helpful."
"The monitoring feature in VMware vSAN could be better."
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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 7th in HCI with 65 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. 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 VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex, StorMagic SvSAN, VxRail and Red Hat Ceph Storage, 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 HyperConverged Appliance vs. VMware vSAN report.
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