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Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes vs StarWind Virtual SAN 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
27th
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
StarWind Virtual SAN
Ranking in HCI
4th
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
213
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the HCI category, the mindshare of Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is 1.4%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind Virtual SAN is 2.3%, up from 1.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
HCI Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
StarWind Virtual SAN2.3%
Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes1.4%
Other96.3%
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

Al Vasek - PeerSpot reviewer
Executive Business Development Manager, Cloud and Managed Services at Presidio Networked Solutions
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.
Jccerong Heron - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Support team has guided us through deploying virtual storage on legacy hardware and reducing operational costs
The reason I chose StarWind Virtual SAN for this particular scenario is really the features, the ease of use, and most importantly, the price. In my opinion, the best features StarWind Virtual SAN offers are easy integration with the system installed in the data center. The integration with my existing systems in the data center works well, especially with VMware, as we already have a big cluster in VMware, and the easy integration with that is helpful to solve some problems with the platform. StarWind Virtual SAN has positively impacted my organization by reducing OPEX costs. My OPEX costs have gone down as we reutilize some old servers, and this reduces the CAPEX of hardware in the data center.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"If you're going to buy Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes, it is good if you need something that's easy to deploy, and you're not going to be extending it into the public cloud, it's a great entry-level solution."
"The most valuable features of Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes are the ease of acquisition."
"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."
"This solution is ideal for commercial to enterprise customers looking for a single platform to manage all their different applications."
"StarWind was a great price to performance ratio and it had a great support team behind it that helped me configure the solution and also size it to the customer's needs for them not to overpay for it and not get something that was not useful for them."
"We are operational 24/7, every day of the year, so prior to having a clustered system, our users were faced with downtime anytime we applied patches or upgrades to the system, and with the StarWind VSAN software and Hyper-V Guest Cluster, we are able to create an environment where we can perform system updates without any downtime to the users."
"The features that I found most valuable are ease of use of the software that StarWind offers - with the first setup being a bit painful."
"The support team is available to solve any problem efficiently."
"We can lose a site or even two of our three, and we would lose no data and have no outage."
"It's quite easy to install."
"Overall, we have saved many thousands of dollars by going this way."
"We like their high availability. It reduces the downtime for our entire organization's environment."
 

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."
"It would be helpful to have a little more insight into what kind of performance the VSAN cluster is utilizing; something that would be more proactive on our side, versus their ProActive Support."
"Geolocation could be better, for example, for site mirroring for DR purposes."
"Server-side snapshots are one thing the Linux appliance can't do yet."
"We just need more integration with Veeam."
"For me, the product could be improved by it being made cheaper."
"High availability for direct attached hardware drives (without virtual disk layer) could be useful to increase the performance of StarWind virtual storage cluster."
"For someone entering the IT sector with little knowledge of storage, iSCSI, and virtual disks, they might not find the GUI immediately obvious."
"The software monitoring should be web-based to be reachable from any VLAN workstation."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is a cheaper solution than Nutanix and HyperFlex."
"The pricing is more than reasonable."
"The setup cost, pricing, and licensing are very straightforward. They are exactly what you expect."
"If you are looking at a traditional SAN for a small cluster, give StarWind vSAN because you will save thousands without any compromise."
"The pricing is fine for the work that it does."
"We are happy with the price."
"The cost, including OPEX, is lower compared to other solutions."
"It's priced fairly. It was definitely cheaper than the competition. The licensing terms are straightforward and reasonable."
"This solution has a great price for the functionality."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Financial Services Firm
12%
Computer Software Company
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business170
Midsize Enterprise57
Large Enterprise34
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is acceptable for now, but I hope in the future we can find a better offer.
What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?
StarWind Virtual SAN can be improved by adding a certificate with the virtual switch in Hyper-V, reducing the license cost, and not having a minimum of 3 TB requirement.
What is your primary use case for StarWind Virtual SAN?
My main use case for StarWind Virtual SAN is for clustering in our store, specifically using Windows OS and Hyper-V for the virtual machine. In our store, we have services for our customers, and I ...
 

Also Known As

VxFlex Ready Nodes
StarWind SAN & NAS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Boys Town
Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes vs. StarWind Virtual SAN and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.