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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
26th
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
StarWind Virtual SAN
Ranking in HCI
5th
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
193
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2025, in the HCI category, the mindshare of Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is 0.5%, down from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind Virtual SAN is 2.0%, down from 2.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
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.
WJHG - PeerSpot reviewer
Seamless integrations, high availability, and offers a free version
Although I am generally satisfied with VSAN and its performance, there are some areas that could be improved to enhance its effectiveness even further. One area that could benefit from improvement is scalability. While the tool works well in its current configuration, allowing for greater ease and flexibility in adding new nodes to the cluster without complications would be very beneficial, especially in growing environments. Additionally, I would like to see additional features in the next version, such as better support for automated resource management. This could include proactive suggestions for optimizing storage and memory usage, as well as preventive alerts about the health status of the servers. A more intuitive interface or an improved dashboard for monitoring the cluster would also be helpful, as it would facilitate performance tracking and help identify potential issues before they affect services.

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."
"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."
"The management was very easy and I was able to find all that I need in the software dashboard."
"A typical system administrator with minimal experience in Hyper-V, VMware, or Windows can do VSAN configuration and maintain VSAN operations."
"Having the ability to migrate machines live in our environment was made possible by this software."
"We have experienced multiple hardware failures at one site and the fault-tolerant volume worked exactly as expected with zero downtime."
"Implementing Starwind in our organization has been a game-changer, particularly in terms of cost savings. By leveraging Starwind's virtual tape library (VTL) solution, we have been able to use virtual tapes for our backups, which are then saved in Azure Blob storage."
"Virtual SAN runs on iSCSI, which is free and easy to configure. It's easy to manage from StarWind's GUI console, and it only required a few extra switch ports."
"Having the ability to scale horizontally if needed is a huge plus for future growth."
 

Cons

"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. A full-blown cloud foundation has a lot more to it."
"The documentation is good. However, if compared with competitors, it could be enhanced and made more professional."
"The software monitoring should be web-based to be reachable from any VLAN workstation."
"We would like the documentation to be more complete. Most items are covered, but if you don't know something, you may need to contact their support."
"If it's possible to make a driver/solution that does not make use of the iSCSI targets of Windows, that would be great. I don't know if that's possible, however, it could make the configuration a little easier."
"While using StarWind Virtual SAN so far, I have not found anything missing."
"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."
"The only point they should improve is the amount of documentation available for the user, especially in the first preliminary phase in which we were testing the product on our own."
"Maybe in the future, the replication will be supported in more cloud providers."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is a cheaper solution than Nutanix and HyperFlex."
"We found that the pricing was perfect; simple and clear."
"When we did all the analysis for StarWind, it was approximately 20 percent less than any of the other solutions that we looked at."
"The licensing is straightforward, with free and trial versions available."
"The scalability limitation for us is its licensing. At some point in the fairly near future, we will probably have to upgrade our license so we can store eight terabytes instead of four. We are currently at four terabytes, but we're starting to knock on the door of that capacity."
"StarWind is a low-cost, full-featured alternative to the traditional SAN environment, and their support will guide you every step of the setup."
"There are two tiers of support and in my opinion, support is worth the cost."
"For two nodes, it cost us $10,000, and we spend $2,000 a year on support."
"The premium support from StarWinds is a must have. The ability to have access to a storage engineer 24/7 is a must for a production environment."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Retailer
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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What do you like most about StarWind Virtual SAN?
It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combines flash and disks of the cluster and forms a virtual shared storage “pool” acce...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?
I have had no setup costs and no challenges with setup and installation for StarWind Virtual SAN. The costs are acceptable and very competitive compared to other hardware-only HCI solutions.
What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?
There are times when the feedback in the event of an impending issue or an actual failure can be limited. The remediation steps are usually fairly simple to resolve the issue, but the management GU...
 

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: June 2025.
857,162 professionals have used our research since 2012.