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."It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it."
"It also provides a high degree of mobility, as the virtual SAN can be moved relatively painlessly between on-site devices and the cloud."
"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."
"The Windows-based StarWind GUI is easy to use and understand and integrates seamlessly with VMware's vSphere portal as well."
"When we need additional storage but want to keep the size of the SANs manageable, the StarWind Virtual SAN has allowed me to do everything needed."
"The most valuable feature is the managed service, which has been an important part of monitoring our critical infrastructure."
"It has improved our organization in terms of its uptime as our main cluster has never been offline due to a SAN failure."
"The failover redundancy is why we bought this product and it has never let us down."
"The initial setup is straightforward once you know what you're doing."
"The easy way everything can be configured and ready to run in less than a day is great."
"We have the ProActive Premium Support and it has reduced our monitoring efforts. It has been very useful. They have been able to detect things such as when there's an issue with the cluster or they're getting some kind of weird reading that I have no idea about. They're really quick to let me know about it and even set up a schedule to address it. I've been very happy with their level of support on that."
"With proactive support, StarWind deploys and configures the solution for you."
"The initial setup seems to be very straightforward."
"I do like that I can manage StarWind with a console running on my local desktop."
"Servers came pre-configured for our environment and as soon as they were in the rack, Starwind got them up and running."
"Their support team is extremely helpful, and they are pretty friendly and knowledgeable."
"It is very well known in the industry, and there are a lot of technical resources around it. This is a big thing for me because, at the end of the day, when you implement it, you need to support it."
"It is easy to use. It is easy to implement for us, and it is also easy to maintain for the customers. It is not necessary to buy some extra devices and talk with other vendors."
"We've found the solution to be scalable."
"Technical support is good."
"The high availability is very good."
"It is simple to manage, very easy to implement and troubleshoot in case of any failures."
"VMware vSAN is compatible with the legacy hypervisor solutions and most of the features are good."
"The most valuable features are Erasure Coding, Deduplication and Compression, and the advancement in stretching regarding replication."
"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."
"Maybe in the future, the replication will be supported in more cloud providers."
"StarWind really needs to market its product more."
"This is a great product."
"The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us."
"This product would benefit from having automated alerting functionality."
"An extended trial period would serve as a way to get clean insights into the technology's adaptability and alignment with their specific needs before committing to long-term integration."
"The main thing I would like to see improved is the level of documentation."
"I think that the pre-installation questionnaire was a little confusing and ambiguous."
"I would request that the terms and conditions be reviewed and made more acceptable to corporate security so that we could finally turn on the proactive support feature, as it is included with our support agreement."
"The web-managed interface (a separate VM) could be better."
"We need to be very cautious in following every step when updating the physical host. We must move over each VM and drain roles from the servers to ensure everything goes smoothly without interruptions. If this were a more automated process, this would be less taxing each time an upgrade is needed."
"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."
"An emphasis on security can be improved."
"We have to pay for support, which is high-end support. That can be expensive, at least for us."
"A possible thing is perhaps a customer portal to schedule a time with support online via a calendar."
"Hackers are able to manage to leak information or data from the product using some corrupt files, making it an area of major concern where improvements are required."
"I would like to see some of the more traditional SAN functions that are out the now. I can list them: being able to Snapshot on the back-end, better de-dupe, and better compression. Those are the major ones."
"The integration could be improved. I would like to see integration with other platforms."
"It can be very expensive."
"Based on my testing, I would like to expand deduplication to include hybrid deployments and not just for all-flash deployments."
"There's a lot that can be done to segregate. That may be available now in vSAN 7, I suppose, however, the deduplication and compression can be segregated."
"The updating process could be easier."
"It should be easier to use."
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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th 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, VxRail, StorMagic SvSAN 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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