We performed a comparison between Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure and Sunlight 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."It provides shared storage to multiple hypervisor hosts. Times had changed, however. StarWind Virtual SAN is the “software replaces hardware” for SAN. We have access control and CCTV systems up and running using Microsoft clustering and shared storage"
"The fact that I can now count on a true failover solution is what is most appealing."
"Given the high availability of the server cluster, we were able to reduce separate physical servers onto one hyper-converged cluster - this saved in OPEX and CAPEX costs immediately, along with licensing costs of the Windows Server licenses."
"User friendly interface and straight forward implementation."
"I save both physical and virtual space."
"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."
"In our case, the cost and high availability are the two most important factors which we were looking for in a solution."
"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."
"Sangfor HCI has a bundle of security features that are easy to monitor on the HCI dashboard."
"The interface is very user-friendly."
"We find the topology feature of Sangfor HCI particularly valuable."
"It is a smart solution for virtualization"
"Sangfor HCI's best features are the ability to scale to a bigger size and the roadmap, whereby if they need to replicate their production to disaster recovery, they can do so on the same platform."
"The most valuable feature of Sangfor HCI is the built-in recovery functionality. The migration is simple to do from other solutions, such as VMware."
"Sangfor HCI has a really good GUI. It allows us to monitor the temperature of the server and many other things."
"You can get almost all the features of the tool at a low cost. The tool also has built-in backup mechanisms. It also has a physical firewall for internet management which other competitors lack."
"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."
"Pricing is a bit high."
"Currently, the StarWind management console is a bit clunky to navigate and isn't the most user-intuitive interface."
"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."
"The software monitoring should be web-based to be reachable from any VLAN workstation."
"The system failovers properly on its own without too much worry."
"I wish there was online support because email return takes a long time and a faster solution should be found."
"It would be nice to see a new UI for the windows client, as it is not the easiest to find settings."
"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"
"Sangfor does not support a SAS configuration, which is something that we would like."
"The initialization is not fully automated and has room for improvement."
"Sangfor could improve its built-in CAP system. Right now, we need to use an external tool for CAP."
"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."
"As far as I know, no hyper-convergence solution includes security, so you have to buy security from another brand. For example, you buy SimpliVity or Nutanix. They don't really have a security solution inside the product. It would be good if there is a security solution inside this solution so that it is not only for the virtualization of CPU, RAM, disk, and network but also for security."
"The solution could improve by including backup capabilities."
"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."
"Sangfor’s hypervisor is not mature enough to handle all the flavors related to industrial needs."
"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."
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Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is ranked 9th in HCI with 28 reviews while Sunlight is ranked 28th in HCI with 2 reviews. Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is rated 8.0, while Sunlight is rated 8.0. 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 Sunlight writes "Performs well, effective, and has responsive remote technical support". Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is most compared with VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail, HPE SimpliVity and StorMagic SvSAN, whereas Sunlight is most compared with VMware vSAN. See our Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs. Sunlight report.
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