Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance comparison

Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

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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

19th

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 October 2025, in the HCI category, the mindshare of Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series is 0.9%, up from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is 1.1%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

HCI Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance	1.1%
Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series	0.9%
Other	98.0%

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

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

"We were able to set it up via the documentation and only needed their support a handful of times."

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

"The low cost of this solution has also made a big difference in our budget, which has been very helpful."

"The most valuable feature is the high-availability. We have three nodes, and all data will be synched instantly through all the nodes. Even if we had a disaster where two nodes failed, containing dozens of critical machines, almost automatically, all the loads would be run on the remaining node."

"The initial setup seems to be very straightforward."

"UI Options are simple and easy to find."

"Customer service has been excellent. Any questions we have had have been answered quickly."

"This solution came preconfigured. All we needed to do was plug it in and move our VMs."

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"

"I think that the pre-installation questionnaire was a little confusing and ambiguous."

"CSVs require the storage to be configured through iSCSI, even though the storage is local."

"The only issue we have had was the issue of performance, however, that is only due to the fact that we purchased a mix of SSD and regular spindle drives, and restoring databases was slow as it was trying to restore the database using the spindle drives."

"It would be nice to have some kind of GUI interface implemented to give you an overall view of the system's health at a glance."

"It would be nice if it were possible to do the ISCSI setup that you do on Windows directly in the management GUI of StarWind."

"I had some initial difficulties understanding the solution which could have been solved via additional documentation aimed at newcomers."

"Although the setup documentation was very complete and succinct, I found StarWind documentation to be a bit sparse."

"The StarWind Command Center web portal could use some work."

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."

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

"I honestly feel that there's no one else in the market doing what they're doing for the price point that they're doing it at. That's why I asked them about investing in their company. I think that the options they're providing and the software that they have is sort of revolutionary for the price point... The total cost was $24,400."

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

"There is a bit of a start-up cost. Having never used HCAs before, I was reluctant to buy it. I would suggest that you jump in and do it, as I wish I hadn't wasted so much time."

"I was able to bring the price per year down by going out to a five-year plan."

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

"The Nutanix piece was about $45,000, getting close to $50,000 with all the licensing involved, whereas the StarWind was less than half of that, after Microsoft licensing and such."

"A desired feature or service would be the ability to have a hardware subscription plan that ensures routine hardware updates in conjunction with hyper-converged software."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Comms Service Provider

10%

Retailer

Manufacturing Company

Construction Company

Educational Organization

16%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Hospitality Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	50
Midsize Enterprise	22
Large Enterprise	8

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.

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.

What needs improvement with Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series?

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.

What needs improvement with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

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...

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Product Reports

HCI

Download Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series product report

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Download StarWind HyperConverged Appliance product report

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance 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

Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance