"Having the ability to scale horizontally if needed is a huge plus for future growth."
"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."
"The solution is also quite flexible. As an example, other vSAN solutions that we looked at had more stringent requirements regarding mixed HDD/SSD storage which wouldn't have worked in our environment."
"vSAN we found was simple to set up, easy to configure and manage and allows us to achieve storage redundancy."
"It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it."
"The vSAN provides full redundancy for storage while reclaiming some rack space."
"This software lets us maintain storage redundancy across both of our Hyper-V hosts, so if one goes down the environment fails over to the other and we have minimal to no downtime."
"High Availability is the best feature of product."
"The most valuable feature of DataCore SANsymphony SDS is its high availability. This solution also exhibits good performance and has high stability."
"The ability to pool the storage to leverage thin-provisioning is a huge saving in space and costs."
"The documentation repository is really useful and kept updated."
"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."
"The most useful feature of SANsymphony is that it's able to manage any brand of block storage."
"The DataCore system has been rock solid since we have been using it - from 2007 on."
"It's a software storage solution that can scale as we like. There is also has a parallel feature that enhances the performance of the storage solution. We can separate storage and computing, and we can scale these two parts of the platform to meet business needs efficiently."
"Storage is always available."
"I think vSAN's stability is good. It's an underlying solution for both on-prem and in the cloud, especially the VMC on AWS stuff too. VMware has been around for a long time, so it's pretty stable."
"The flexibility is most valuable. Being able to manage things quickly if something goes wrong is also valuable. Very recently, we had one node that went down due to a power problem, but there was really no major impact on the systems running on top of it."
"vSAN is very integrated."
"The solution has high performance."
"The technical support is good. We are always thankful for the technical support from VMware. They are very supportive when we have a technical problem."
"We find it easy to deliver this solution."
"We can also create test cases. We can even throttle down performance or release more performance. So, we can run more precise test scenarios."
"If we decide to expand, vSAN could offer us some flexibility. We are researching ways to set this up from a new data center, which is located somewhere different from the current location right now."
"I see no need for major improvements but there could be some improvements in the form of notifications and the simplifying of maintenance mode."
"It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers."
"I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues."
"I would like to see different levels of support offered."
"The system failovers properly on its own without too much worry."
"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)."
"I wish the sync after a failure, such as hardware failure or power-related issues, for example, was faster."
"When StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere nodes go offline unexpectedly, the nodes have to re-sync disks fully which takes a long time. We had a power failure and when both nodes came online, VMware vSphere didn't see StarWind disks before I manually re-scanned them form ESXi administration console even though it should happen automatically"
"Having an enterprise "Storage Dashboard" that can show capacity, usage, performance, and any issues would be very beneficial."
"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."
"It would be ideal if they were providing archive licensing with the ability to create a second pool on existing storage nodes."
"Datacore is developing a new WebUI with new dashboards. It is a good idea as the classic GUI is lacking dashboards."
"The cloud reporting interface is quite poor compared to other vendors."
"SANsymphony is missing some features that vSAN has. For example, vSAN has a special feature called continuous data protection. It provides the ability to go back in time to a given moment. You can see what was on your disk in the past up to two weeks. That's a great feature because ransomware attacks are increasingly common, and that provides you some kind of protection."
"The solution could be better packaged and marketed."
"Problem detection could be easier. It should help customers identify problems very quickly because it's not easy to analyze on the platform today."
"More focus has to be put on deduplication and compression with a hybrid architecture."
"The stability needs to be improved."
"The technical support, it's not satisfactory. Whenever we raise a ticket it takes a lot of time to have an engineer get involved sometimes, or we receive a less experienced engineer. We then have to repeat the situation to the next engineer which all takes time."
"VMware vSAN could improve by adding NAS and object storage."
"Upgradability could be a bit easier sometimes. We are now where vSAN can be updated without ESXi, but there is still enough dependency. So that would be good if that actually would uncoupled even more."
"Because of virtual storage, the system reaches reserve storage for its functions. It also consumes a certain amount of storage, which then results in the creation of a fault tolerance for the system. All of this adds to a lot of capacity being consumed in terms of storage for each drive for vSan. I find this to be one drawback of using vSan."
"The ability to access SAN environments with fiber channels (or even NVMe) would be a good addition."
"While I like the replication and compression features, there is a problem with them running too slowly."
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DataCore SANsymphony is ranked 7th in Hyper-Converged (HCI) with 12 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in Hyper-Converged (HCI) with 87 reviews. DataCore SANsymphony is rated 9.4, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of DataCore SANsymphony writes "Provides HA virtualized storage independent of storage type or vendor". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources". DataCore SANsymphony is most compared with HPE SimpliVity, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, Nutanix Acropolis AOS, StorMagic SvSAN and Pure Storage FlashArray, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity and HPE Nimble Storage dHCI. See our DataCore SANsymphony vs. VMware vSAN report.
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