We performed a comparison between Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."With an uptime of 384 days, StarWind has improved overall server reliability."
"It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it."
"We are running Hyper-V on twin servers in failover, and being able to manage servers from anywhere I need to, virtually, has been a game changer."
"The Windows-based StarWind GUI is easy to use and understand and integrates seamlessly with VMware's vSphere portal as well."
"The management interface on the software is very simple. It is insanely simple compared to most SANs. The interface is also powerful when used to complete tasks that an IT administrator needs to complete."
"The ability for us to manage all of our nodes from the same console makes systems administration very easy."
"We have been able to use more on-prem hardware to reduce cost and also use old disks that we do not trust enough for ordinary RAID or usage."
"The biggest benefit was that it allowed us to provide SAN services on a limited hardware budget."
"Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series' deployment is easy. We are a tier-one platinum partner who is into multiple implementations."
"Installation is straightforward because it's a vSAN. It only took one or two days."
"We find the setup quite straightforward and very easy."
"You get the benefit of local storage, but you have the protection of shared storage."
"The product’s most valuable features are performance and expandability."
"One of the valuable features for us is the ability to restrict the performance capacity per client. Other solutions don't have this feature."
"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."
"Technical support has been very good. They respond pretty fast, especially if we have a critical issue. Their responses have been great."
"The migration of servers feature makes server rack maintenance easy."
"vSAN can help customers save on storage system costs, and also save on the human cost."
"Storage policies are used to perform operations in the VMs. This feature allows you to create storage policies for VMs to get performance, high availability, I/O policies, etc."
"It runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear."
"I am expecting to see it more user-friendly in the future."
"An update caused a syncing issue and it took over a month to resolve it"
"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."
"I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues."
"Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer."
"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."
"There should be some kind of active monitoring connected to StarWind vSAN, so you will be able to act when needed."
"Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series needs to improve its stability. Its resolution should be faster."
"The user management could be a bit better. It's something they could improve upon in future releases."
"Support could be better."
"vSAN itself is a great storage platform, but one of the issues with it is that you have to be fully locked into the VMware package to use it. We're going to be deploying 72 Kubernetes nodes, and we're not going to buy VMware licenses for 72 of them, just so they can access vSAN. That's what we're using the Pure for. Opening it up so you could have vSAN as a data store, use it as a data lake, hit it with an NFS, S3 from outside the VMware ecosystem, would be great."
"The solution functions as the marketing says, as long as you follow certain rules."
"The platform's cost affects the business. This particular area needs improvement."
"There is a lot that VMware could improve from a marketing perspective. The cloud is still new for many people, so extending storage should be effortless. It shouldn't be so complicated to extend the storage so workloads can access it no matter where they go."
"Dedupe in non flash drives can be improved."
"The monitoring feature in VMware vSAN could be better."
"I would rate the stability a seven out of ten."
"It would be much improved if we could somehow integrate a better backup with it. Right now, we're using Veeam and it's okay, but I would like more of a VDP vSAN solution. That would be excellent. The VDP, at least the last time we looked at, it was just not quite there."
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Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series is ranked 16th in HCI with 3 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 219 reviews. Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series is rated 8.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series writes "A stable solution that needs to improve stability and resolution". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series is most compared with VxRail, Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series and HPE Alletra dHCI, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series vs. VMware vSAN report.
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