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Azure Local vs StarWind Virtual SAN comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 21, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
3.8
Azure Local boosts ROI by reducing costs and support reliance, integrating well with Microsoft, enhancing business efficiency and engagement.
Sentiment score
6.9
StarWind Virtual SAN offers cost-effective, flexible storage solutions reducing operational costs, downtime, and hardware needs, with rapid ROI.
There has been some return on investment in terms of just time usability and reduction of footprint.
Solution Architect DC at Natilik
We don't sell a lot of redundant servers, so it's not a massive ROI, but the ability to rely on their technical support and the software's ease of setup allows us to reduce labor costs and go to market competitively.
Manager, Field Support at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees
The cost benefits, as far as we consider, are much better with a StarWind VSAN solution, and the training requirements with the ease of administration simplify and reduce our administrator and professional services costs.
Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Regarding cost savings, for my client, it was about 20K USD for his specific use and as for extending capacity, StarWind made that process easy.
Pre Post Sales Engineer at Logiccomputer
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
4.8
Azure Local's customer service is praised for effectiveness, but delays occur with resellers; Premier Support recommended for best outcomes.
Sentiment score
7.8
StarWind Virtual SAN offers exceptional support with timely responses, expert staff, and 24/7 proactive monitoring for optimal performance.
Not every support team member is very knowledgeable about Azure Stack HCI, creating delays in resolution.
IT Solution Architect at a educational organization with 11-50 employees
They have more advantages than VMware, especially for containerization, and they provide good support as well.
Iinfrastructure Architect at Ministry Of Justice
Even in the instances where my technical team does not have the ability to manage or troubleshoot or resolve an issue, StarWind's technical team supports and resolves on our behalf very quickly.
Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
They have some awesome guides online that show you exactly how to configure the product, how to do the initial setup, and you can speak with them directly who will be able to connect, verify your setup, run its parameters, and see exactly what's working and what is not, and adjust it, and they really help you with that.
Pre Post Sales Engineer at Logiccomputer
The customer support from StarWind Virtual SAN is great, as the people are knowledgeable and have great knowledge about the product and the functionality we require in the system.
System Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
5.3
Azure Local provides scalable, reliable performance with effective cloud integration and seamless transitions, supporting numerous VMs and user demands effortlessly.
Sentiment score
7.6
StarWind Virtual SAN impresses users with seamless scalability, allowing effortless upgrades and configurations without downtime, supporting various setups.
If we want to expand our storage or add disks, it is easy to add them, configure the RAID, and then deploy it.
IT Support Engineer at a consultancy with 11-50 employees
I believe that scalability should be further improved, especially considering the possibility that environments may grow exponentially.
Soporte IT at Sildan Security
When you move from a two-node cluster to a three-node cluster, you have to completely redo the way that they are connected to each other with iSCSI.
Manager of Systems Administration at Monster Digital
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
5.9
Azure Local, stable and scalable with Hyper-V, has improved installation speed and matches VMware's performance despite minor issues.
Sentiment score
8.4
StarWind Virtual SAN offers stable, reliable performance with minimal issues, seamless updates, and efficient VM migrations, even during failures.
It does not feel like a well-oiled machine yet, with too many idiosyncrasies and insufficient documentation and integration, feeling more like software that is still in beta.
IT Solution Architect at a educational organization with 11-50 employees
After achieving good maturity, it became easier.
Iinfrastructure Architect at Ministry Of Justice
In my experience, StarWind Virtual SAN is very stable, and I have never had a single instability issue.
Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
It has been working for five years and the customer is still happy with it.
Pre Post Sales Engineer at Logiccomputer
I ran it on a two-node Hyper-V cluster setup, and I didn't experience any unexpected crashes or major issues.
Hosting Operations Senior Analyst at Equinix Brasil
 

Room For Improvement

Azure Local needs improvements in setup, management, integration, architecture, performance, disaster recovery, and competitive pricing.
StarWind Virtual SAN needs better documentation, automation, integration, setup simplification, monitoring, and feature enhancements like deduplication and encryption.
Hyper V seems to lag behind compared to VMware.
Solution Architect DC at Natilik
Microsoft has decided to discontinue stretched cluster technology completely, which is disappointing.
IT Solution Architect at a educational organization with 11-50 employees
There could be improvements with Azure Stack HCI regarding the license and price, as they have significantly higher prices compared to other competitors.
Iinfrastructure Architect at Ministry Of Justice
A more intuitive interface or an improved dashboard for monitoring the cluster would also be helpful, as it would facilitate performance tracking and help identify potential issues before they affect services.
Soporte IT at Sildan Security
There have been cases where not understanding exactly what's failing on the Virtual SAN has been an issue.
Manager, Field Support at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees
Limited feedback in the management GUI is the main area where I would like to see StarWind Virtual SAN get better.
Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
 

Setup Cost

Azure Local users find costs high but competitive, with potential savings on total stack via Windows Server Datacenter rental.
StarWind Virtual SAN is competitively priced, simple to license, easy to implement, and offers excellent value with flexible options.
The licensing is quite expensive because it's per call.
Solution Architect DC at Natilik
The costs are acceptable and very competitive compared to other hardware-only HCI solutions.
Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
I talked to the sales team, they gave me a quote with a perpetual license with the support and everything went through smoothly.
Pre Post Sales Engineer at Logiccomputer
This is a great product and good support even you are using free version!
Infrastructure Manager at Beacon Fronline Solutions Inc
 

Valuable Features

Azure Local offers robust features for efficient networking, container management, cost-effectiveness, and seamless integration with Azure services.
StarWind Virtual SAN offers cost-effective, high performance solutions with easy management, excellent support, and seamless integration for various platforms.
The integration with Azure using Azure Arc is excellent.
Solution Architect DC at Natilik
Azure Stack HCI has been very beneficial for disaster recovery operations.
Iinfrastructure Architect at Ministry Of Justice
Thanks to its seamless integration with Proxmox, the implementation of high availability servers has drastically reduced downtime, which is crucial for our security-focused company.
Soporte IT at Sildan Security
StarWind Virtual SAN helps us keep customer satisfaction and provides the solutions we need without having to hire many IT specialists.
Manager, Field Support at a outsourcing company with 10,001+ employees
StarWind's storage virtualization and failover capabilities have made a difference for my clusters through uptime improvements, with zero downtime specific to server host maintenance or even maintenance of the StarWind software itself.
Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

Azure Local
Ranking in HCI
13th
Average Rating
7.6
Reviews Sentiment
5.8
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
StarWind Virtual SAN
Ranking in HCI
4th
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
204
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2026, in the HCI category, the mindshare of Azure Local is 3.2%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind Virtual SAN is 2.1%, down from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
HCI Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
StarWind Virtual SAN2.1%
Azure Stack HCI3.2%
Other94.7%
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

MC
IT Solution Architect at a educational organization with 11-50 employees
Experience with seamless cost-saving capacity, though integration and support need refinement
An area that could be possibly improved with Azure Stack HCI is the stretched cluster functionality, which was included in version 23H2 for disaster recovery purposes. However, this functionality has been put on hold for the next release, and Microsoft has decided to discontinue stretched cluster technology completely, which is disappointing. They promise to bring back a significant or similar solution in a future release, but currently, there is no such functionality for stretched clusters between two sites in the latest versions of Azure Stack HCI, which poses a problem as we were looking forward to utilizing it. The integration with Azure Arc provides a unified management experience, but I find it to be fairly clunky. The integration exists, but it is not smooth or very easy to use. While they've started to integrate the two, the integration lacks maturity and makes it difficult to manage effectively. There are discrepancies between managing VMs through Azure Arc versus managing them directly, as changes made not using the Azure Arc integration are not easily reflected in Azure Arc. For instance, if I have an Arc-enabled VM and make changes to it outside the Arc interface, those changes may not be registered directly in Azure Arc, leading to issues in fully viewing the status and configuration of VMs depending on the management tool used. You either manage VMs fully through Arc or not at all because mixing the two methods results in incomplete visibility and inconsistencies.
Jccerong Heron - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Support team has guided us through deploying virtual storage on legacy hardware and reducing operational costs
The reason I chose StarWind Virtual SAN for this particular scenario is really the features, the ease of use, and most importantly, the price. In my opinion, the best features StarWind Virtual SAN offers are easy integration with the system installed in the data center. The integration with my existing systems in the data center works well, especially with VMware, as we already have a big cluster in VMware, and the easy integration with that is helpful to solve some problems with the platform. StarWind Virtual SAN has positively impacted my organization by reducing OPEX costs. My OPEX costs have gone down as we reutilize some old servers, and this reduces the CAPEX of hardware in the data center.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
9%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business4
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise3
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business165
Midsize Enterprise54
Large Enterprise34
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Azure Stack HCI?
This solution costs €10 per core per month. The whole stack is free if you are renting Windows Server Datacenter.
What needs improvement with Azure Stack HCI?
There could be improvements with Azure Stack HCI regarding the license and price, as they have significantly higher prices compared to other competitors. The end-to-end encryption provided by Azure...
What do you like most about StarWind Virtual SAN?
It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combines flash and disks of the cluster and forms a virtual shared storage “pool” acce...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing was very good. We were able to get the software at a good cost. I did most of the setup, so there wasn't really any cost there. The professiona...
What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?
The only thing that I would say about documentation is there are some aspects of the documentation that are a little bit unclear. However, when I worked through those issues with their professional...
 

Also Known As

No data available
StarWind SAN & NAS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure Local vs. StarWind Virtual SAN and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.