We performed a comparison between DataCore SANsymphony 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 great free trials that allow end users to test a large variety of their products before deciding to buy the full product."
"Highly available storage is the most valuable feature. The entire rollout is hyper-converged and requires no extra storage further than the hosts in which Hyper-V is running. Another feature that has been great is the support from StarWind in general. We have their proactive support package on the main cluster that employs Starwind Virtual SAN."
"A great feature is that I basically set it and forget it, as everything is automatic."
"The available GUI is excellent for monitoring and operating the system in an easy and direct way."
"I like the asynchronous replication and failover features. They are what I'm primarily using it for. The asynchronous replication is helpful because our servers are backed up continuously throughout the day. If anything goes wrong we just fail over immediately. That is a very nice feature to have."
"The most valuable feature is the reliable storage replication, which enables me to create a robust infrastructure to run our business."
"The license price is one of the cheapest in the market."
"We have been able to use more on-prem hardware to reduce cost and also use old disks that we do not trust enough for ordinary RAID or usage."
"The interface is user-friendly."
"I found the solution to be very stable."
"SANsymphony is flexible, with many potential options for implementation. SANsymphony's can be used with VMware, Hyper-V, or even with a hypervisor agnostic approach. It can also be used for strictly physical non-virtualized solutions."
"During the maintenance periods, on any part of the storage or VMware migration, we have had no downtime."
"The dashboard is very intuitive, and there are a lot of counters to diagnose what happens during a short period (like when a backup is in progress)."
"I am very happy with this product's ability to adapt, increase, and modify existing infrastructures."
"Good security with this solution."
"Mirroring is the most valuable feature because I can provide a high-level of service and optimize the use of obsolete storage."
"The most valuable features of VMware vSAN are that it receives updates frequently, has good compression, optimized storage, and they provide webinars on what is new. Additionally, the integration with third-party products is good and it is easy to manage."
"Technical support has been fantastic. We always get answers quickly whenever we call."
"The implementation is simple, it was very straightforward. It took us approximately three weeks because it was installed in four locations."
"Technical support has been very good. They respond pretty fast, especially if we have a critical issue. Their responses have been great."
"The most valuable feature of VMware vSAN is you do not have to use additional hardware for storage. The operation of VMware vSAN does not take a lot of effort. If you have VMware technology on your site, then it's easy for the operational support of the system."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The feature we have found most valuable is the compatibility of VMware products with VCF and VMware Cloud Foundation."
"The performance of VMware vSAN is very good."
"Performance when in storage-separate configuration needs to be improved."
"Our company was hoping for deduplication and encryption across HCI. That is currently not supported."
"Geolocation could be better, for example, for site mirroring for DR purposes."
"There should be publicly available tutorials on YouTube or other platforms that help the users to integrate this solution with other platforms, for example."
"We have, in rare cases, received conflicting guidance between different support folks within StarWind."
"I struggled when bit figuring out how to go about doing the evaluation."
"The documentation could be better."
"If there are domain controllers inside the cluster, there needs to be some sort of logic allowing them to boot independently so all the rest of the domain clients can gain the authority they need to come online."
"For customers or technicians who don't speak and understand English, it would be great to have other language support, all the more so given the number of countries in which SanSymphony is used."
"The cloud reporting interface is quite poor compared to other vendors."
"I still see room for improvement with DataCore SANsymphony in the area of alarm and task management."
"One limitation of this solution is that it's Windows-based, e.g. one requirement to install DataCore SANsymphony SDS is putting it on a Windows server machine. It relies on Windows and that is a limitation because there are some customers who are looking for non Windows systems."
"When I sometimes reboot for maintenance, the connectivity from the iSCSI initiator host could be improved."
"DataCore should integrate its own file server into SANsymphony."
"We'd like to manage the raid on the disk directly in SanSymphony."
"Datacore is developing a new WebUI with new dashboards. It is a good idea as the classic GUI is lacking dashboards."
"They can improve the manageability of the solution to make it more simple. It is not that complicated, but it will be good if they can make it more simple."
"The platform’s pricing needs improvement. Additionally, there should be an appliance module included in it."
"It doesn't seem like it gives the performance that an actual SAN would give for heavy IOPS, read/writes."
"More focus has to be put on deduplication and compression with a hybrid architecture."
"This is quite an expensive solution."
"Ease of administration is one area where vSAN could be improved."
"The solution could be improved by having more filtered and multiple view volumes instead of a single view."
"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."
DataCore SANsymphony is ranked 7th in HCI with 54 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 226 reviews. DataCore SANsymphony is rated 9.2, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of DataCore SANsymphony writes "Robust with good replication and access protection ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". DataCore SANsymphony is most compared with HPE SimpliVity, StorMagic SvSAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage, NetApp ONTAP and VxRail, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and HPE Nimble Storage. See our DataCore SANsymphony vs. VMware vSAN report.
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