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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
25th
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
205
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the HCI category, the mindshare of Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is 1.1%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind Virtual SAN is 2.1%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
HCI Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
StarWind Virtual SAN2.1%
Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes1.1%
Other96.8%
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."
"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."
"The most valuable features of Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes are the ease of acquisition."
"We were able to build an entirely new SAN with much greater performance and more capacity for less than the cost of just upgrading our previous SAN, so the ROI was immediate."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a very easy-to-use solution that can be quickly and easily deployed and configured without intimate and specific knowledge in the virtualization sphere."
"It has a nice, simple control panel. You can clearly see the state and health of storage along with the synchronization."
"Failover happens smoothly, recovery and maintenance are less stressful, and we no longer need to worry about downtime."
"It includes every feature that a traditional SAN offers and so much more."
"All we really wanted was a system that once it was set up just worked, and that's exactly what we have found to be the case in StarWind's Virtual SAN."
"We are able to execute maintenance on one server while the other is still running."
"The fact we have a DR strategy is priceless."
 

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."
"Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is a little less sophisticated than some of the other solutions out there."
"I would say the only area for improvement is around its price."
"The gathering of monthly consumption and performance reports for future dissemination to concerned parties is also very important. Unfortunately, StarWinds vSAN doesn't offer this functionality, however, it is something that would be greatly welcomed should they choose to develop it."
"Sometimes documentation on their site can be out of date."
"Ongoing improvements in read and write performance would help meet increasingly demanding workloads."
"I did not see any indication that StarWinds vSAN is a usable solution with non-GUI instances of Hyper-V."
"It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers."
"For improvement, I would like to see how the software determines which networks to use for which purpose."
"When you will cease your contract with StarWind (for support) your product won't be updated and that is a big selling point, especially for us, as we have loads of products from StarWind."
"Initially, when we first started, the sync was horrible."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is a cheaper solution than Nutanix and HyperFlex."
"I would suggest that you download the free version, deploy in your lab, and play with it."
"The free version is great to use for labs or test environments."
"This solution is very accessible and the pro-level for support is well worth the cost."
"When we did all the analysis for StarWind, it was approximately 20 percent less than any of the other solutions that we looked at."
"Licensing is easy and the whole package is cost-effective."
"We found that the pricing was perfect; simple and clear."
"The support contract is well worth it. The price for it was very reasonable and their team has been very engaged whenever we reach out."
"Once you buy the license, you are free to build your own hardware solution based on your needs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business165
Midsize Enterprise54
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 was very good. We were able to get the software at a good cost. I did most of the setup, so there wasn't really any cost there. The professiona...
What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?
The only thing that I would say about documentation is there are some aspects of the documentation that are a little bit unclear. However, when I worked through those issues with their professional...
What is your primary use case for StarWind Virtual SAN?
Our main use case for StarWind Virtual SAN is hyper-convergence of a two-node cluster. We have multiple servers up and running at all times for our operations, and we were able to use StarWind Virt...
 

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: March 2026.
885,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.