We performed a comparison between Azure Stack HCI and StarWind Virtual SAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI."In my hybrid cloud setup, there are three features I've found very efficient. The first is software-defined networking. Similar to Azure where you create virtual networks and software load balancing, Azure Stack HCI lets you configure them with a drag-and-drop experience on the on-premises cluster. That's one of the good feature."
"The solution has the latest processor."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its ability to manage VMs."
"The performance of the solution is accurate and concise."
"When using new (warranty) servers, you can forget about the storage service for several years. The users will not even notice the failure of two servers out of three."
"I like StarWind's high availability. The failover is almost immediate, so the end users have no idea the guest VM moved at all. We can failover all guest VMs onto a single hypervisor, place it into maintenance mode, install updates, and reboot a hypervisor all during the daytime and remotely, with confidence the process will be successful."
"I save both physical and virtual space."
"The StarWind products have enabled our organization to modernize stations where larger and more expensive equipment was not an option."
"You can build cheap, reliable, replicated virtual machines clusters using simple servers with an all flash disk or SAS\SATA hybrid tiered by performance storage."
"StarWind vSAN has a lot of great features and is a perfect solution for mirroring internal disks and flash between servers."
"In our case, the cost and high availability are the two most important factors which we were looking for in a solution."
"There are a lot of areas for improvement. Since I've been working very closely with this product, there are many areas, especially in software-defined networking. We had to improve multiple areas because we depended on the service fabric cluster to manage the software-defined network. That means we're already running a hypervisor inside a VM, and we're managing the control plane of the software-defined network. That's another cluster. So, multiple layers make the complexity more. So, from an operational perspective, it's very difficult to manage."
"We faced multiple problems with the product’s stability."
"The product's initial setup phase can be a bit complex, making it an area where improvements are required."
"The only point they should improve is the amount of documentation available for the user, especially in the first preliminary phase in which we were testing the product on our own."
"The gathering of monthly consumption and performance reports for future dissemination to concerned parties is very important. Unfortunately, StarWinds vSAN doesn't offer this functionality."
"Android app for monitoring and receiving push notifications as alarms or monitoring I/O from any mobile device could be a good feature and nice to have as we are not always on our desk."
"Initially, when we first started, the sync was horrible."
"StarWind really needs to market its product more."
"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."
"I found that certain browsers are not fully compatible with the administration web access portal."
"The documentation could be a little more concise, but, for the most part, it just works."
Azure Stack HCI is ranked 17th in HCI with 3 reviews while StarWind Virtual SAN is ranked 4th in HCI with 182 reviews. Azure Stack HCI is rated 8.4, while StarWind Virtual SAN is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of Azure Stack HCI writes "Performs well, provides good features, and has the latest processor". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind Virtual SAN writes "Excellent support, great performance, and good redundancy". Azure Stack HCI is most compared with VMware vSAN, VxRail and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, whereas StarWind Virtual SAN is most compared with VMware vSAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, StorMagic SvSAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage and DataCore SANsymphony.
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We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
