Try our new research platform with insights from 80,000+ expert users

Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes
Ranking in HCI
26th
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
StarWind HyperConverged App...
Ranking in HCI
14th
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
66
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (11th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the HCI category, the mindshare of Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is 0.6%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is 1.1%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
HCI Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance1.1%
Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes0.6%
Other98.3%
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

Al Vasek - PeerSpot reviewer
Ease of acquisition, simple deployment, and priced well
The support from Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is okay. It could be better, they have to work on their approach. The approach they have I call "pass the baton". Every manufacturer does this, such as Cisco, Dell, and Microsoft. You call in, receive a call handler, and give them your problem. The first person you talk to can never fix your problem. They just collect information. There's probably a 5 percent chance that they could fix your problem. Then they pass it off to the next person, there is a lot of passing. That's why I call it "pass the baton". The company I work for the maintenance services is at 98 percent, we receive over 50,000 incidents a month, for those customers who have support through Dell, Cisco, or someone else, 98 percent of our incidents or ticket requests get resolved by your first point of contact. We try to take out that frustration. Knowing that it's possible to fix that model. I don't think it saves them much money, because they're tying up too many resources where if they could route those incidents to the person that could fix them the first time, it would just save a lot of frustration on the customer's behalf. It would make everything a lot more efficient, and a better overall customer support image. It is a bad model that many vendors use.
Russ Le Puill - PeerSpot reviewer
Proactive support with improved speed and resilience
There was a long delay with shipping, which we weren't expecting, but we were kept updated throughout. It wasn't made clear to us that we needed to provide our own SFP modules to connect to our infrastructure, so that could have been a bit clearer. It would be amazing if there was, perhaps, a more automated process for updating the hosts themselves, although the maintenance mode works well. Our StarWind command center doesn't seem to have all the options available currently, which support is investigating for us.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Dell EMC VxFlex Ready Nodes can support what we call a heterogeneous environment. So you can have VMware workloads, Hyper-V workloads, bare metal Red Hat workloads, Kubernetes workloads all on the same cluster. You're not pigeonholed into either all bare metal or all virtualized. So it supports basically any platform."
"The most valuable features of Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes are the ease of acquisition."
"The customer service has been the most valuable feature of the product to me."
"We no longer need multiple staff members performing small, mundane tasks."
"Their support team is extremely helpful, and they are pretty friendly and knowledgeable."
"It improved all services running on the new cluster and took up less space and less energy."
"StarWind is very resilient and built off of quality vendor hardware."
"The solution has provided our company with a fully redundant virtual environment at half the cost of a traditional SAN implementation."
"It is the perfect solution for hyper-convergence at a fair price. Our customers have Hyper-V and VMware environments, with Windows servers and Linux."
"We also opted for 24-hour support monitoring for any issues. They are extremely quick to respond on issues we even cause ourselves such as bumping a network cable."
 

Cons

"Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is a little less sophisticated than some of the other solutions out there. A full-blown cloud foundation has a lot more to it."
"From a technical perspective, it's a pretty rock solid solution. I would say the only area for improvement is around its price."
"This product is not one hundred percent enterprise-ready, so it is more suitable for SMB."
"It would be nice if the software told you a new version was available and prompted you to do the upgrade to keep everything up to date."
"The only thing my team has recommended improving on is possibly a StarWind-customized GUI to monitor the overall system health, similar to 5nine Manager."
"I had some initial difficulties understanding the solution which could have been solved via additional documentation aimed at newcomers."
"I think that the pre-installation questionnaire was a little confusing and ambiguous."
"Not much can be improved, to be honest."
"The only critique I might have is that the support is overseas in Eastern Europe and, on occasion, there has been a language issue. But in general, they're as good as can be..."
"It would be nice to have some kind of GUI interface implemented to give you an overall view of the system's health at a glance."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is a cheaper solution than Nutanix and HyperFlex."
"I honestly feel that there's no one else in the market doing what they're doing for the price point that they're doing it at. That's why I asked them about investing in their company. I think that the options they're providing and the software that they have is sort of revolutionary for the price point... The total cost was $24,400."
"The Nutanix piece was about $45,000, getting close to $50,000 with all the licensing involved, whereas the StarWind was less than half of that, after Microsoft licensing and such."
"Its cost was reasonable."
"This was all completed at an affordable price point for an SMB, which was also a key element for an NPO."
"In terms of cost, a storage array is more expensive... For half the cost of Compellent, I got two hosts, more storage, and redundancy."
"We looked at Nutanix and found it did almost the same thing but for more money. In fact, StarWind was nearly one-third of the price; it cost us £36,000. That includes five years of monitoring... The Nutanix was near enough £110,000 for relatively the same amount of performance and storage."
"I was able to bring the price per year down by going out to a five-year plan."
"There is a bit of a start-up cost. Having never used HCAs before, I was reluctant to buy it. I would suggest that you jump in and do it, as I wish I hadn't wasted so much time."
report
Use our free recommendation engine to learn which HCI solutions are best for your needs.
869,566 professionals have used our research since 2012.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Educational Organization
16%
Computer Software Company
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Hospitality Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business50
Midsize Enterprise22
Large Enterprise8
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
Earn 20 points
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
It's not the cheapest, however, the solution works incredibly well and is so simple to licence and maintain.
What needs improvement with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
There was a long delay with shipping, which we weren't expecting, but we were kept updated throughout. It wasn't made clear to us that we needed to provide our own SFP modules to connect to our inf...
What is your primary use case for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
We desperately needed to update yet downsize our data centre. We had six hosts for only approximately 14 or so Virtual machines and two old SANs. All of this was running on 10+ year-old refurbished...
 

Also Known As

VxFlex Ready Nodes
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Boys Town
Sears Home and Franchise Business
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and other solutions. Updated: September 2025.
869,566 professionals have used our research since 2012.