We performed a comparison between StarWind Virtual SAN 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."The most valuable feature is the managed service, which has been an important part of monitoring our critical infrastructure."
"You can turn your local disk storage into high-availability iSCSI storage."
"The ProActive support gives me peace of mind because I am a one man shop, but with the technical support behind me, I feel like more than just one person. We spent two to three hours, depending on what we have to do, always on the phone, and they do not push to end the call."
"It includes every feature that a traditional SAN offers and so much more."
"VSAN works great; it's very easy to install, configure, and manage."
"It has given the company an almost zero possibility of downtime."
"It integrates (fully) with VMware and Veeam, my hypervisor, and backup vendors, so for me, all the puzzle pieces simply fit and work smoothly."
"vSAN we found was simple to set up, easy to configure and manage and allows us to achieve storage redundancy."
"The update capability of VxRail is crucial for us."
"VxRail does not require fiber switches or external storage. It's easy to replace and manage. It's centralized management through VxRail Manager."
"The most valuable feature is that it is VMware-embedded. VxRail HCI is on VMware, and we can use VMware vCenter and vSphere. Our infrastructure consists of servers and VMware, and by using VxRail, our experience and familiarity have not changed because VxRail HCI is on VMware."
"Our clients value being able to upgrade with one click or a few clicks."
"First and foremost, I would advise people to purchase this solution mainly for the simplicity of the system. And it's all managed in one place, which is nice compared to Nutanix where you had to administrate multiple places. And, the support now is so good."
"The solution is perfect for the lifecycle management of hardware."
"The most valuable features are ease of management and ease of applying updates."
"The stability continues to get better and better. It's pretty reliable."
"There is one issue as far as licensing goes and that is a lack of documentation online for users when transitioning from the free version to the paid version, or vice versa."
"I would like to see some additional, and possibly clearer, implementation videos with some slower and possibly more detailed descriptions of what the various steps of implementation are for someone who is unfamiliar with high availability and failover clustering in Windows."
"Currently, the StarWind management console is a bit clunky to navigate and isn't the most user-intuitive interface."
"The number of different ways you can set it up can make it a little daunting."
"Security on the ISCSI protocol could be improved by adding features like OS-type control access, especially for the data center environment."
"When StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere nodes go offline unexpectedly, the nodes have to re-sync disks fully which takes a long time. We had a power failure and when both nodes came online, VMware vSphere didn't see StarWind disks before I manually re-scanned them form ESXi administration console even though it should happen automatically"
"I'm sure it needs bug fixes..."
"A web management interface would be good, especially for those coming from other solutions that have one."
"In the version that I was working with, the integrations are in need of improvement."
"There are still some features which aren't built into Cisco, like virtualized networking, that use its applications. However, these can be purchased through another product as an additional licensing cost to us."
"A disadvantage is that the initial first deployment can be complicated."
"It can be a bit complex for engineers who are new to it. There's a learning curve involved. They have to learn to operate it."
"I would like them to include an easier solution to host its own DNS. When they changed to version 6.5, they took out the easy features of letting the rail be its own DNS. You can still trick the system and make the VxRail Manager another one of the rail-required VMs become the DNS, but it's a lot of extra work. I'd like to see it put back into the UI."
"Some of the features of the hyperconverged infrastructure could be integrated with external storage. Right now, for example, if I have surveillance going, I need to purchase very cheap storage. So, an integration between the hyperconverged infrastructure and external storage would be good."
"What I did not like so much was the amount of VMware that you have to put in your system related to the VxRail."
"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."
StarWind Virtual SAN is ranked 4th in HCI with 183 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 121 reviews. StarWind Virtual SAN is rated 9.6, while VxRail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of StarWind Virtual SAN writes "Excellent support, great performance, and good redundancy". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". StarWind Virtual SAN is most compared with VMware vSAN, StorMagic SvSAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), whereas VxRail is most compared with Dell PowerFlex, VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and HPE Hyper Converged. See our StarWind Virtual SAN vs. VxRail report.
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