Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance comparison

Lenovo and StarWind are both solutions in the HCI category. Lenovo is ranked #18 with an average rating of 8.0, while StarWind is ranked #14 with an average rating of 10.0. Lenovo holds a 0.9% mindshare in HCI, compared to StarWind’s 1.0% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Lenovo users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 98% of StarWind users who would recommend it.

Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series

Read 3 Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series reviews

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100% willing to recommend

StarWind HyperConverged App...

Read 66 StarWind HyperConverged Appliance reviews

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98% willing to recommend

Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series

StarWind HyperConverged App...

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 2024

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series compete in the hyper-converged infrastructure market. Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series seems to have the upper hand with advanced features and performance capabilities, making it worth the investment despite higher costs.

Features: StarWind HyperConverged Appliance offers efficient storage optimization, simplified management, and robust disaster recovery solutions. Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series provides superior scalability, integrated automation, and extensive workload support. Its flexibility and integration capabilities offer a distinct advantage in feature offerings.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is noted for straightforward deployment and responsive customer service. Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series presents a comprehensive deployment model with extensive documentation and knowledgeable support teams. StarWind emphasizes simplicity and quick setup, while Lenovo provides a structured and guided deployment for larger installations.

Pricing and ROI: StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is recognized for competitive pricing and quick ROI, attracting budget-conscious organizations. Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series, although more expensive initially, offers long-term value with reduced operational costs and enhanced productivity, beneficial for those seeking in-depth performance returns.

To learn more, read our detailed Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

July 2025

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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

Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series

Ranking in HCI

18th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

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

Ranking in other categories

Software Defined Storage (SDS) (11th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the HCI category, the mindshare of Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series is 0.9%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is 1.0%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

HCI

Featured Reviews

Adeel Hashmi

IT Technical Advisor at a construction company with 501-1,000 employees

With an easy deployment phase, the tool offers good scalability and stability

Suppose you don't compare Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series with the newest features available in the other variants of the product, then everything is pretty standard, so I cannot pinpoint any areas of issue in particular. With Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series, the firmware from VMware or Nutanix takes time to be made available compared to other products that we use in our company's IT environment. If you want to go to a certain version of VMware and check what Nutanix offers, you see that both the offerings don't go hand in hand, and you have to wait for a quarter or two quarters until you see the same versions of both being made available for the other products, like Dell or HPE. There is a delay in the availability of similar versions of firmware from both the products, which are VMware and Nutanix for Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series, due to the delayed releases from both products, maybe by a quarter or so. The aforementioned area can be considered for improvement in a solution. In future releases of the product, I may want some improvements to be made in the products from Nutanix and VMware.

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Russ Le Puill

IT Manager at St Peter's Church of England Aided School

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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable features of the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series are the ease of use and simple configuration."

"The initial setup is simple. We were able to deliver the hyper-convergence solution in a very good time."

"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that the product's deployment phase is pretty easy."

"The most valuable features of the solution are the redundancy and its cost. I used to have a SAN, a Dell EMC EqualLogic. Unfortunately, it was they call an "inverted pyramid of doom." It was two or three hosts, two switches, and one storage array at the very bottom. But the SAN, the storage array at the very bottom, is a single point of failure..."

"It is a safe, fast, and cost-effective storage system that improved our systems to have zero downtime."

"We run probably 16 virtual machines, and all of them are now highly available, and highly redundant."

"With proactive support, StarWind deploys and configures the solution for you."

"Overall, the solution has improved our system's performance. I was concerned about the physical-to-virtual conversion of our database server. It's actually much faster now, as a virtualized host on this Hyper-V cluster."

"The sales process is easy."

"The option to deploy a hyper-converged system without an expensive storage switch was a benefit."

"StarWind is very resilient and built off of quality vendor hardware."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pros

Cons

"Here in Nigeria, the only challenge that we have, which I think is also experienced globally is the delay in bringing in the spare parts. This is a challenge facing our country, such as the Forex market. However, this is beyond the control of Lenovo themselves."

"There is a delay in the availability of similar versions of firmware from both the products, which are VMware and Nutanix for Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series, due to the delayed releases from both products, maybe by a quarter or so."

"Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series could improve by having better integration with the solutions from VMware and vCenter"

"Multi cluster support for their Command Console would be very beneficial. Currently, you can only work with a single cluster at a time. The console is new so I expect much growth in this area in the near future. The other area that could be improved is the tech support locale."

"I honestly cannot think of anything else to be improved, as I rarely have to interact with the Starwind product."

"We ran into some issues with going from Hyper-V 2012 R2 to Hyper-V 2019."

"The only thing I have run into is that I did want to add more hard drives into the host, so that we could look at doing a RAID 10, and the hard drive prices were pretty expensive... that's pretty nit-picky and I don't think it has anything to do with StarWind itself. I think it's more on whomever they work with for their hardware."

"I wish I understood what goes into the StarWind software a little bit better. To me, it's kind of magic the way some of it works. As an IT professional, you don't really want things to be magic. I do wish there was a little more "Here's how it works." There could be more documentation given to administrators..."

"Over the past three years, there were two instances where our cluster had an issue, yet StarWind proactively notified me of those issues and effortlessly guided me through the process of correcting the issue with minimal effort on my part."

"It would be amazing if there was, perhaps, a more automated process for updating the hosts themselves, although the maintenance mode works well."

"The only area that the product could improve would be user training."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"When comparing this solution to other OEM solutions it is relatively inexpensive."

"Price-wise, it is a pretty good product. The product's price was one of the main criteria that made my company choose it over the other products in the market."

"The other solutions we were looking at were priced much higher than this and they didn't necessarily have full redundancy... Nutanix and VxRail were in the final running... but it came down to our price point."

"We didn't have any issue with pricing or any of the sales process."

"This was all completed at an affordable price point for an SMB, which was also a key element for an NPO."

"Its cost was reasonable."

"In terms of cost, a storage array is more expensive... For half the cost of Compellent, I got two hosts, more storage, and redundancy."

"It's an all in one package, making it very easy."

"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."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Retailer

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Construction Company

Educational Organization

17%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Non Profit

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series?

The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that the product's deployment phase is pretty easy.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series?

Price-wise, it is a pretty good product. The product's price was one of the main criteria that made my company choose it over the other products in the market.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series?

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What needs improvement with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

See all answers

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...

See all answers

Comparisons

Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series vs Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series

Compared 40% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series

Compared 14% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series

Compared 14% of the time

Lenovo ThinkAgile MX Certified Node vs Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series

Compared 13% of the time

VxRail vs Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series

Compared 10% of the time

More Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series Competitors

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 27% of the time

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 20% of the time

Azure Stack HCI vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 18% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 13% of the time

VxRail vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 13% of the time

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

HCI

August 2025

Download Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series product report

Buyer's Guide

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

July 2025

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report

Download StarWind HyperConverged Appliance product report

Also Known As

Lenovo HX Series, ThinkAgile HX Series

No data available

Overview

Designed for easy deployment and manageability in scale-out clusters, the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series combines Nutanix software with Lenovo’s highly reliable and scalable servers. These appliances ship fully integrated, tested, and configured so that you can dramatically accelerate your time to value and reduce your infrastructure maintenance.

Lenovo

For SMB, ROBO and Enterprises, who look to bring in quick deployment and operation simplicity to virtualization workloads and reduce related expenses, our solution is StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA). It unifies commodity servers, disks and flash, hypervisor of choice, StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN and associated software into a single manageable layer. The HCA supports scale-up by adding disks and flash, and scale-out by adding extra nodes.

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance consists of StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN “Ready Nodes”, targeting those, who are building their virtualization infrastructure from scratch. In case there is an existing set of servers, we offer a “software only version”, which is essentially our years proven StarWind Virtual SAN. Basically, it’s the fuel powering StarWind HCA.

StarWind

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Sears Home and Franchise Business

Buyer's Guide

Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

July 2025

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