"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."
"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."
"The biggest benefit was that it allowed us to provide SAN services on a limited hardware budget."
"Speed and high availability have been the most valuable for us."
"Highly available storage is the most valuable feature. The entire rollout is hyper-converged and requires no extra storage further than the hosts in which Hyper-V is running. Another feature that has been great is the support from StarWind in general. We have their proactive support package on the main cluster that employs Starwind Virtual SAN."
"Support keeps track of alerts of the system and verifies with us if we need help to fix any issues. They have great and quick technical support."
"High Availability is the best feature of product."
"The iSCSI protocol is quite simple to configure."
"It is easier to manage compared to the other vendors."
"We have the ability to increase the storage without any additional costs."
"Nimble DHCI is really user friendly and not complex"
"I love InfoSite. That gets you a lot of good detailed information."
"Nimble Storage is a capable platform with high availability."
"Very good in-line compression."
"The nice thing about it is that it truly integrates with the cloud, so I can move my volumes bi-directionally in and out of the cloud."
"HPE's InfoSight software, which does the comparative analysis and artificial intelligence built-in in the box, and with Nimble they do well against the competition. Additionally, the dashboards are good."
"VMware vSAN is easy to implement in a VMware environment and it is not expensive."
"Being able to deploy multiple applications with virtual servers is the most valuable for us. The capacity of the system is quite constant so it's got some of the good features."
"In my opinion, vSAN is the most natural way to migrate to a fully hyperconverged solution. If a customer needs a more scalable solution with consolidated management, vSAN is excellent."
"The vSAN features we've found most helpful are live application migrations and storage policies. It has storage, policies, application, and DRS policies. Automation is there."
"The most valuable feature of VMware vSAN is the ease of management. VMware vSAN it's a part of VMware ESXi and when you do patching for VMware ESXi, VMware vSAN receives the patches too."
"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."
"Storage is expandable with no extra cost."
"The most valuable feature is the fast performance."
"I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues."
"Feature-wise we are only waiting for the release of a "planned disaster" feature that would allow us to patch a hypervisor node without having to take the full storage offline."
"I see no need for major improvements but there could be some improvements in the form of notifications and the simplifying of maintenance mode."
"The StarWind Management Console is available only for Microsoft Windows/Windows Server, and should also be available for Linux and macOS, as it would reduce implementation costs."
"The main thing I would like to see improved is the level of documentation."
"It would be nice to see a new UI for the windows client, as it is not the easiest to find settings."
"A great feature would be a wizard and to include a new disk in the SAN. At the moment, including a new disk requires several steps - some that must be done at the OS level and others in each node."
"Management of VSAN itself could be improved. A Web UI for management would be great rather than an application installation. StarWind is testing a command center virtual appliance that I have installed in my environment."
"Sometimes the technical support would get back to us in two hours, but other times it would take them two or even three days to respond."
"Lacking integration to the cloud."
"This year 2022, we have the possibility to include new kinds of storage with a high disk availability, such as Alletra 6000 and Alletra 9000. Those are the new storage available. If we would like to improve the quality and the capability and the high availability of these products, we can choose between different costs. This is another benefit from this HPE Nimble Storage dHCI solution of hyper-converged."
"The initial setup is a little bit complicated."
"The solution could improve by providing better file-level restoration and DVX system options."
"The only issue I'm really running into is we have a SQL server that we're having a lot of high IO latency on one of my drives and it's my data drive from my SQL server. It's not really giving me any good information as to where that latency is coming from, so that's what I'm trying to track down and troubleshoot."
"I'm not sure if there are features lacking."
"HPE Nimble Storage dHCI currently is promoting only VMware as a hypervisor, whereas if they can look into other OSs, such as KVM or Red Hat, it would be an improvement."
"The pricing could be better when it comes to renewing the licenses."
"Its price could be improved. It is too expensive for our clients."
"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 only negative point relates to the licensing. If you want multiple, different servers, it costs money, but you have all the capacity for vSAN. You do not reach the data, but the processor arrays and the current architecture."
"I think it needs to be more cost-effective. I would also say that even though the capacity is good, there is also room for improvement there. Also, they could improve the security of the system."
"We plan to switch products since the hardware nowadays is a little bit outdated and we need to scale up a bit."
"The interface is a little complicated, it could be simplified with more graphical gadgets. We have many servers, and the built-in functions, such as rate configuration, are a bit complex."
"This solution could be improved by having more than one controller for the environment. VMware depends on one controller for the whole environment, whereas Nutanix has one controller for each node. Because there is only one controller with VMware, if there was any drop, then the whole environment would stop working. In Nutanix, I have five nodes—there is one controller for each node and it depends on a virtual controller—so if the controller of any node is down, the whole environment will still work."
Try it today
HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is ranked 9th in Hyper-Converged (HCI) with 10 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in Hyper-Converged (HCI) with 87 reviews. HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is rated 8.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of HPE Nimble Storage dHCI writes "Provides the flexibility needed to scale storage and compute independently". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources". HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is most compared with HPE SimpliVity, VxRail, Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes and Huawei FusionCube Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity and Red Hat Gluster Storage. See our HPE Nimble Storage dHCI vs. VMware vSAN report.
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