"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."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to leverage our server infrastructure more completely without the need to add more hardware."
"StarWind allows us to move virtual machines from one physical host to another, which greatly reduces the downtime required for maintenance."
"The most valuable features are high availability and real-time replication between two servers."
"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."
"The solution is also quite flexible. As an example, other vSAN solutions that we looked at had more stringent requirements regarding mixed HDD/SSD storage which wouldn't have worked in our environment."
"The features that I found most valuable are ease of use of the software that StarWind offers - with the first setup being a bit painful."
"Immediately we noticed huge performance gains, even on older hardware and once we implemented a 10GB link between both servers, the sync was near-instant after the initial sync was complete."
"It is highly scalable. Their support is also extremely good."
"The ability to size the available space in a way that matches our company's needs is most valuable. For instance, you can decide if you want 80/20, 70/30, or 60/40 space. Redundancy depends on your needs without changing the appliance. You just add space and decide the percentage of space that you need free and the percentage of space that you need for backup. It is all automatic, and you don't have to do anything. You just add space, and the system automatically configures itself with the chosen option."
"It is scalable, and NetApp Deployment Engine (NDE) makes its deployment easier."
"NetApp HCI is a stable solution."
"The technical support is good. We are always thankful for the technical support from VMware. They are very supportive when we have a technical problem."
"It is user-friendly, and its performance is good."
"The simplicity, as well as the integration with virtualization."
"The solution fits well with my requirements."
"The performance of VMware vSAN is very good."
"It is easy to work with, easy to handle, and easy to manage."
"There is not a lot of maintenance required."
"I like the tolerance of VMware vSAN."
"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."
"I would definitely like to see quite a bit more on the monitoring side of things."
"I found that certain browsers are not fully compatible with the administration web access portal."
"There is no Italian-language version of the software available."
"It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers."
"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."
"Security on the ISCSI protocol could be improved by adding features like OS-type control access, especially for the data center environment."
"Its stability is very bad. It has been crashing continuously. In one year, we got three crashes, which is unbelievable for an appliance that is guaranteed for 10 years without any crash."
"At the moment, I am not looking for new features. Quality of Service (QoS) and capacity efficiency are the two things that I want to resolve in my customer's environment. QoS improves the performance of each tenancy, and with capacity efficiency, the customer can achieve more capacity as compared to the normal capacity."
"The administration side of it needs to be improved. We expect an easier interface and a single upgrade for updating the infrastructure."
"They should make the software updates easier. We should be able to upgrade it more easily."
"One area that could be improved is the management feature."
"Licensing costs are a little too high for smaller sized companies."
"We are facing some problems with updates with the VMware vSAN. When we upgraded from version 6.5 to 7, we have been faced with many problems. They have been deploying many hotfixes for this version, and they need to continue to improve this version."
"We would like to see additional backup and recovery options added. In particular, integration with popular applications like databases."
"Ease of administration is one area where vSAN could be improved."
"Its installation should be easier, and its price should be cheaper. It would be good for the product if they can include the data locality feature."
"The technical support, it's not satisfactory. Whenever we raise a ticket it takes a lot of time to have an engineer get involved sometimes, or we receive a less experienced engineer. We then have to repeat the situation to the next engineer which all takes time."
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NetApp HCI is ranked 18th in Hyper-Converged (HCI) with 4 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in Hyper-Converged (HCI) with 87 reviews. NetApp HCI is rated 6.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of NetApp HCI writes "Crashes continuously, complex to deploy, and bad after-sales support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources". NetApp HCI is most compared with VxRail, Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, HPE Nimble Storage dHCI and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our NetApp HCI vs. VMware vSAN report.
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