"StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere is a software-defined storage solution that has reduced administration time for storage. It's pretty straightforward to install and setup it and so far it has been robust and worked as advertised from StarWind."
"Recovery and maintenance are now less stressful and most importantly, it allows our users to keep working."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to leverage our server infrastructure more completely without the need to add more hardware."
"VSAN works great; it's very easy to install, configure, and manage."
"The top-notch support before, during, and after deployments are better than any other vendor I have come across."
"It's quite easy to install."
"Training is also easy as it is just one system to learn."
"A great feature is that I basically set it and forget it, as everything is automatic."
"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."
"Low-maintenance solution with hyperscale feature so it has the ability to utilize the resources for the VMware cluster setup on which Citrix VDA runs."
"This is a good solution if you want to deploy an ACI Environment but don't have all the necessary resources."
"t's a very good solution with multiple options with VxRail series like based on customer requirements whether they're focused on compute, storage, scalability and high performance, etc. Whether a customer you are going to start your IT Infrastructure footprint with a limited budget, you have freedom of choice and non-disruptive expansion in the future, whether in the main data center or branches. Any idea coming in system admins mind to run this setup continuously and keep service 100% 24/7 is possible in this product line. Hyper-converged appliances allow a datacenter in a box approach, with G, E P, Vand P series."
"The most valuable features are ease of management and ease of applying updates."
"VxRail has high performance and has great efficiency. There is a single place for us to manage all of our virtual machines. The ability to right-size instead of overcommit VMs is a large benefit."
"The stability of VxRail is good, we have not had any issues."
"Valuable features for us are the VDI, UCC, and HCI."
"This is a good solution for medium-sized installations especially when it will be coupled with VMware."
"The console is something that I feel could be improved. There is nothing technically wrong with it, but it can be jazzed up and/or made to be a little more intuitive."
"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."
"Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer."
"Management tools could be improved, sometimes the usage seems to be slowed down and confusing. A native web interface could also be an option. I love to see in the future port of the software on a general Linux distribution like RedHat or Ubuntu in order to avoid windows license costs. I would also like to see features like erasure coding implemented. On the VSAN software, I would like to see some improvements in the storage pools (eliminate the usage of the file as a data container and use the raw partition)."
"We would like the documentation to be more complete. Most items are covered, but if you don't know something, you may need to contact their support."
"If there was a way to automatically put disks in maintenance mode when shutting the host down and exit maintenance mode automatically, that would simplify things."
"Currently, the StarWind management console is a bit clunky to navigate and isn't the most user-intuitive interface."
"There needs to be more visibility on how long the cloud replication will take as there is no current ETA."
"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."
"It would be an improvement if VxRail could be integrated with some other hypervisors and not just with VMware."
"Sometimes during the upgrade process of VxRail, we experience errors that have nothing to do with reality and I cannot troubleshoot them without calling Dell and bringing in an engineer to figure it out."
"The solution could improve by having more storage performance because in some other solutions you can have a file system that can be mounted at several places at one time."
"We have some issues, but they are possibly out-of-the-box issues. There was a host that was dead on arrival, and there were some file issues on other hosts. We're currently working actively with Dell to resolve all these issues. Once they are resolved, the product should be stable."
"Dell wants to implement the disaster site in the new year, but they haven't decided yet. I hope we will have the opportunity to sell VxRail with this disaster site. It is not really clear at the moment, but hopefully, we will get some good news from the customers in the new year."
"What I find very valuable is VxRail's life cycle management. The life cycle management takes care of everything from firmware to the actual upgrading of the hypervisor and keeps everything up to level."
"It would be nice if the update process was shortened and that patching would be simpler."
"VxRail could improve by having domain protection."
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NetApp HCI is ranked 18th in Hyper-Converged (HCI) with 4 reviews while VxRail is ranked 3rd in Hyper-Converged (HCI) with 84 reviews. NetApp HCI is rated 6.6, while VxRail is rated 8.6. 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 VxRail writes "Good automation makes this solution practical". NetApp HCI is most compared with VMware vSAN, Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, HPE Nimble Storage dHCI and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance, whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Dell PowerFlex and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series. See our NetApp HCI vs. VxRail report.
See our list of best Hyper-Converged (HCI) vendors.
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