Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure vs StarWind Virtual SAN comparison

Red Hat and StarWind are both solutions in the HCI category. Red Hat is ranked #25, while StarWind is ranked #5 with an average rating of 9.3. Red Hat holds a 0.9% mindshare in HCI, compared to StarWind’s 2.0% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Red Hat users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of StarWind users who would recommend it.

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infr...

Read 6 Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure reviews

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100% willing to recommend

StarWind Virtual SAN

Read 198 StarWind Virtual SAN reviews

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2,998 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infr...

StarWind Virtual SAN

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 2024

StarWind Virtual SAN and Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure compete in the virtualization storage solutions category. StarWind has an edge in pricing with its low-cost structure, while Red Hat offers more comprehensive features, justifying its higher cost.

Features: StarWind Virtual SAN offers streamlined management, high availability, and flexibility, ideal for small to medium businesses. Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is known for its scalability, integration capabilities, and support for enterprise applications.

Room for Improvement: StarWind could enhance scalability, widen enterprise integration options, and expand its feature set. Red Hat could improve affordability, simplify its deployment process, and make customer documentation more accessible.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: StarWind is favored for its straightforward deployment and responsive customer support, ideal for businesses with limited IT resources. Red Hat, although more complex to deploy, provides robust support for enterprises with advanced needs.

Pricing and ROI: StarWind Virtual SAN offers a lower setup cost, making it attractive for smaller organizations with efficient resource use. Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure, despite higher initial costs, promises greater ROI for larger deployments due to its expansive capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure vs. StarWind Virtual SAN Report (Updated: September 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure vs. StarWind Virtual SAN

September 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

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infr...

Ranking in HCI

25th

Average Rating

8.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

StarWind Virtual SAN

Ranking in HCI

5th

Average Rating

9.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.6

Number of Reviews

198

Ranking in other categories

Software Defined Storage (SDS) (1st)

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2025, in the HCI category, the mindshare of Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is 0.9%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind Virtual SAN is 2.0%, down from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

HCI Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
StarWind Virtual SAN	2.0%
Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure	0.9%
Other	97.1%

HCI

Featured Reviews

PaulSorelli

IBM Data & IA Technology Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Consolidated management and good documentation but very complex and difficult to operate

It is not user-friendly, and it is very difficult to operate. You have to have a deep understanding of the technical details of the infrastructure to implement it. When you compare it with VMware, it is totally different because the graphical user interface is not that easy to understand. It is not intuitive. To use it, you have to read a lot of documentation and even understand what is going on behind the solution. It is not for someone who has a little bit of knowledge. Currently, it is too complex. I need something that is easy to implement. It should have a basic configuration as well as a complex configuration.

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Vladimir Simion

Pre Post Sales Engineer at Logiccomputer

Achieving seamless cost-saving implementation with exceptional support

The best features that StarWind Virtual SAN offers include the price because comparing to other virtual SAN solutions, this one is the best, and it also has a great support team behind it. My experience with their support has been positive, as their guides regarding the integration are very useful. They have some awesome guides online that show you exactly how to configure the product, how to do the initial setup, and you can speak with them directly. They will be able to connect and verify your setup, run its parameters and see exactly what's working and what is not, and they really help you with that. StarWind Virtual SAN has positively impacted my organization and my customer through initial cost saving. They use this product in a dark site, so I'm not able to provide any additional details about this, but they were really glad about it, they're still using it, and they asked for extending the capacity for it and the support. They really want to use it and are enjoying using it.

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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 useful feature is the solution's automation in terms of how we are able to spin up a certain workload in real-time when we are doing R&D."

"It is stable and scalable."

"The consolidation of the management in one control point is the most valuable. The whole infrastructure management is consolidated in just one console point. The documentation is also pretty good."

"Both the scalability and stability of this solution are excellent."

"I like that you can add other types of services."

"The size of the hardware is what we need because it is very good for small configurations."

"StarWind Virtual SAN has positively impacted my organization by saving money in skill set development, and certainly minimal downtime across all of our installations, where they maintain almost zero downtime in their 24/7 operations."

"Active-active HA provides top performance and redundancy."

"The most valuable feature for us is having the ability to configure our local storage using a limited number of disks and using the StarWind VSAN software to keep the cluster nodes in perfect sync."

"The StarWind tech support is extremely helpful, especially during the initial setup."

"Having the ability to scale horizontally if needed is a huge plus for future growth."

"Quick setup, great support, stability is great"

"The ease of reaching the support team and their promptness for support is great."

"The product's core feature of virtualizing our storage is by far the most valuable."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pros

Cons

"The main issue is the initial investment. It is an expensive product, and it should be cheaper. It should also be easier to use and manage. The professional service for this solution is quite complex and expensive."

"The licensing policy needs to be improved. They have a licensing policy based on the number of CPU sockets. Nowadays what has happened is that the license they are trying to move is based on the number of CPU cores. With the advancement in technology there are now more cores in a single CPU. It's been very challenging in terms of managing the license around everything. Today we have a processor with 24 and 32 cores on the same physical CPU."

"It is not user-friendly, and it is very difficult to operate. You have to have a deep understanding of the technical details of the infrastructure to implement it. When you compare it with VMware, it is totally different because the graphical user interface is not that easy to understand. It is not intuitive. To use it, you have to read a lot of documentation and even understand what is going on behind the solution. It is not for someone who has a little bit of knowledge. Currently, it is too complex. I need something that is easy to implement. It should have a basic configuration as well as a complex configuration."

"The cloud deployment could be improved."

"This product is not so stable. Maybe it is just not mature enough in its development."

"It should be more user-friendly, in my opinion."

"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."

"This product would benefit from having automated alerting functionality."

"When you will cease your contract with StarWind (for support) your product won't be updated and that is a big selling point, especially for us, as we have loads of products from StarWind."

"We ran into an issue with alerts."

"I'd love to see native export of metrics (via Prometheus or something of that nature) to allow us to get more metrics available on our existing dashboard software."

"I want to suggest that the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure needs to be reduced."

"StarWind relies on the underlying OS to manage the "SAN files" whether that would be a RAID volume, software RAID (such as LVM), etc. It would be useful if StarWind could incorporate the actual physical drive management inside of the solution, similar to Storage Spaces Direct."

"The dashboard is functional, but it could benefit from a more modern and visually appealing design."

More StarWind Virtual SAN cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is an open-sourced, low-cost solution with full features."

"It is quite pricey."

"Licensing is based on nodes rather than TBs, which means that the users are free to increase storage capacity without putting thought into licensing."

"Once you buy the license, you are free to build your own hardware solution based on your needs."

"I think that purchasing StarWind Virtual SAN Professional Edition would be optimal for most."

"It's priced fairly. It was definitely cheaper than the competition. The licensing terms are straightforward and reasonable."

"We are happy with the price."

"This is the best priced solution for an SMB."

"The Price/Performance ratio for this solution is outstanding!"

"The scalability limitation for us is its licensing. At some point in the fairly near future, we will probably have to upgrade our license so we can store eight terabytes instead of four. We are currently at four terabytes, but we're starting to knock on the door of that capacity."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

21%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	1
Large Enterprise	6

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	161
Midsize Enterprise	54
Large Enterprise	33

Questions from the Community

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What do you like most about StarWind Virtual SAN?

It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combines flash and disks of the cluster and forms a virtual shared storage “pool” acce...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for StarWind Virtual SAN was okay.

See all answers

What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?

Currently, StarWind Virtual SAN is working perfectly fine, so there are no changes I would suggest.

See all answers

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Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 13% of the time

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Compared 11% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

HCI

September 2025

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure report

Download Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure product report

Buyer's Guide

StarWind Virtual SAN

September 2025

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Also Known As

Red Hat HCI, Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Virtualization

StarWind SAN & NAS

Overview

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure - based on our leading OpenStack and virtualization platforms - provides co-located, scalable, software-defined compute and storage, driven by Red Hat Ansible Automation on economical, industry-standard hardware.

Red Hat

StarWind Virtual SAN provides high availability and fault tolerance for virtualized environments without the need for dedicated SAN hardware. It allows for real-time replication between servers, shared storage for Hyper-V clusters, and enables vMotion and High Availability features for VMware vSphere. The solution reduces costs and leverages existing hardware while providing a scalable and reliable infrastructure. Valuable features include ease of use, scalability, top-tier support, hardware agnosticism, and the ability to use off-the-shelf standard servers to increase storage space. StarWind VSAN has helped organizations improve performance, data availability, and data security while reducing downtime and providing cost-saving storage options.

StarWind

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure vs. StarWind Virtual SAN

September 2025

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