We performed a comparison between Azure Stack HCI and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI."StarWind vSAN is a great solution to create a redundant two-node-only Hyper-V cluster, both for domain or workgroup scenarios."
"The main benefit is that StarWind is almost maintenance-free."
"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."
"It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it."
"StarWind Virtual SAN can improve an organization's storage infrastructure by providing high availability, scalability, cost-effectiveness, performance, and ease of use."
"The configuration is so much simpler than that of a traditional SAN with fewer points of failure to worry about."
"This has helped to improve the reliability of service and operation in all departments, without having to stop in case of emergency situations."
"The customer support provided by StarWind is excellent."
"The solution has the latest processor."
"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 most valuable feature of the solution is its ability to manage VMs."
"Provides good performance as well as integration with deployment tools."
"vSAN is scalable for us. If any additional capacity needs to be included, we just add to the host and configure the vSAN cluster."
"The most valuable feature is the fast performance."
"The ease of use is great."
"The installation is very easy."
"vSAN is integrated into VMware."
"Storage virtualization software with a good storage management feature. It's a scalable and stable software."
"vSAN is one of the easiest implementations of any VMware product. It's almost like click it to enable it, then you're almost done."
"vSAN's free version does not have a graphical user interface."
"It is hard to find adequate technical documentation on their support website."
"This product could be improved with the inclusion of new health check procedures."
"Pricing is a bit high."
"There is a general lack of documentation, especially up-to-date documentation to get started."
"It would be great if the Linux version of the management console offered the same features as Windows."
"Management tools could be improved, sometimes the usage seems to be slowed down and confusing. A native web interface could also be an option. I love to see in the future port of the software on a general Linux distribution like RedHat or Ubuntu in order to avoid windows license costs. I would also like to see features like erasure coding implemented. On the VSAN software, I would like to see some improvements in the storage pools (eliminate the usage of the file as a data container and use the raw partition)."
"Currently, the StarWind management console is a bit clunky to navigate and isn't the most user-intuitive interface."
"The product's initial setup phase can be a bit complex, making it an area where improvements are required."
"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."
"I would like to see the availability of more template based VMware systems. Combined with the ability to check and measure multiple and converging data segments. Another issue I've seen is that the tool seems to be slow when first starting up."
"External storage would be a good thing to have in the next release, something other than iSCZI, something a little more, not HA, a little more production-oriented, than iSCZI."
"The integration could be improved. I would like to see integration with other platforms."
"The only negative point relates to the licensing. If you want multiple, different servers, it costs money, but you have all the capacity for vSAN. You do not reach the data, but the processor arrays and the current architecture."
"Currently, one of the available features is shareable VMBKs. You can create the VMBK disc and you can make them shareable between the ends. But as soon as you start using this feature, you lose the ability to create snapshots."
"I would like for the next release to be a bit cheaper."
"The ability to access SAN environments with fiber channels (or even NVMe) would be a good addition."
"Its integration with a hybrid cloud can be improved. Its scalability can also be improved so that it can be integrated with more than 32 nodes. The maximum number of nodes is okay, but our use cases could probably do with more nodes, probably up to 64. In terms of new features, it should probably have the basic support for high-speed networking spaces."
Azure Stack HCI is ranked 18th in HCI with 3 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 226 reviews. Azure Stack HCI is rated 8.4, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. 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 VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Azure Stack HCI is most compared with VxRail, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray.
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