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."We have experienced multiple hardware failures at one site and the fault-tolerant volume worked exactly as expected with zero downtime."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a very mature software that supersedes its capabilities with my use cases."
"We can lose a site or even two of our three, and we would lose no data and have no outage."
"StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere is a software-defined storage solution that has reduced administration time for storage. It's pretty straightforward to install and setup it and so far it has been robust and worked as advertised from StarWind."
"It integrates (fully) with VMware and Veeam, my hypervisor, and backup vendors, so for me, all the puzzle pieces simply fit and work smoothly."
"The ability to choose our own hardware and our own vendors for this was hugely beneficial, as we had pre-existing relationships with vendors we wanted to maintain."
"PowerShell library is pretty good feature as I created with APC PowerChute a script to put volumes on maintenance mode then turning off the StarWind nodes together with the VM and Hosts when UPS reaches 15 percent, this way after a blackout or electrical problems when turning servers on again, there is no issues for syncing or data loss due to energy interrupts."
"The best part is the easy way it operates with a very clear GUI without any unnecessary items."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The most valuable features are the encryption, deduplication, compression, and the ability to manage all of your storage within your server rack."
"Storage virtualization software with a good storage management feature. It's a scalable and stable software."
"It is user-friendly, and its performance is good."
"Good performance, reliable and agile."
"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."
"One of the valuable features of vSAN is it has a universal type of technology that allows you to deploy it on any server or hardware. Competitors, such as Nutanix, provides the AOS and can be deployed only on certified hardware. For vSAN, it does not require any kind of certified hardware."
"The most important thing is the simplicity of the product. It is a well-established product with good stability."
"Geolocation could be better, for example, for site mirroring for DR purposes."
"For someone entering the IT sector with little knowledge of storage, iSCSI, and virtual disks, they might not find the GUI immediately obvious."
"I struggled when bit figuring out how to go about doing the evaluation."
"The system failovers properly on its own without too much worry."
"There is no Italian-language version of the software available."
"The Command Center, a free guest VM for management and monitoring, leaves something to be desired. It could have more accurate real-time information and better reporting visuals, which seem to be an afterthought."
"It would be great if it provided thin provisioned virtual disks."
"Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer."
"Because of virtual storage, the system reaches reserve storage for its functions. It also consumes a certain amount of storage, which then results in the creation of a fault tolerance for the system. All of this adds to a lot of capacity being consumed in terms of storage for each drive for vSan. I find this to be one drawback of using vSan."
"The server files are larger than before."
"The solution functions as the marketing says, as long as you follow certain rules."
"In a future release, they can bring in the object storage capabilities to this solution. Currently, there is not any compatibility."
"Integration could be better."
"vSAN does not have online dedup. When opening the inline dedupe, the performance will be lower than off inline."
"This solution could be improved by having more than one controller for the environment. VMware depends on one controller for the whole environment, whereas Nutanix has one controller for each node. Because there is only one controller with VMware, if there was any drop, then the whole environment would stop working. In Nutanix, I have five nodes—there is one controller for each node and it depends on a virtual controller—so if the controller of any node is down, the whole environment will still work."
"The product's complex setup phase is an area of concern where improvements are required."
StarWind Virtual SAN is ranked 4th in HCI with 182 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 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.
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