We performed a comparison between Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance 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."It's very easy to resize disks and they show up in VMware almost instantly."
"In our case, the cost and high availability are the two most important factors which we were looking for in a solution."
"It also provides a high degree of mobility, as the virtual SAN can be moved relatively painlessly between on-site devices and the cloud."
"Starwind made it easy to deploy fully redundant, highly available storage at a low cost."
"The software is easy to setup and manage, and the support is excellent."
"The StarWind Virtual SAN provides a clever and unique solution to the Computing Split Brain problem."
"Having the ability to scale horizontally if needed is a huge plus for future growth."
"The Windows-based StarWind GUI is easy to use and understand and integrates seamlessly with VMware's vSphere portal as well."
"Their GUI interface is a bit easier than VMware's."
"Sangfor HCI's best features are the ability to scale to a bigger size and the roadmap, whereby if they need to replicate their production to disaster recovery, they can do so on the same platform."
"I would rate the user-friendliness an eight out of ten."
"The manageability feature is the most important aspect of the solution."
"It is a smart solution for virtualization"
"It was not expensive at all."
"We find the topology feature of Sangfor HCI particularly valuable."
"The interface is very user-friendly."
"High-availability is what I bought it for."
"Product functionality and performance are wonderful."
"We were able to set it up via the documentation and only needed their support a handful of times."
"The pricing and discounts given by Starwind on the hardware were unmatched."
"StarWind's proactive support is my favorite feature."
"The solution has easily deployed instances for multiple fast-paced projects."
"We run probably 16 virtual machines, and all of them are now highly available, and highly redundant."
"What makes it valuable is the high-availability. In the education field, when you've got students in classrooms, any loss of service disrupts the lessons to a point that the whole lesson is affected. For part of the business which isn't business-critical, to have a little bit of a hiccup wouldn't be such a big thing, but here, it's the high availability of service that is important."
"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."
"If there was one feature I would like to see it would be a built-in subsystem for managing UPS backups shutdown procedures providing a way to initiate VM shutdown on all host servers, shut down the host servers, then put the fault-tolerant mirroring in standby, and finally shut down the StarWind SANs."
"The software could benefit from more tooling to help with initial deployment."
"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)."
"It would be great to have more automated tooling around managing the iSCSI connections in Windows"
"I had issues locating the documentation that applied to my version of StarWind vSAN."
"It would be great if the Linux version of the management console offered the same features as Windows."
"There should be some kind of active monitoring connected to StarWind vSAN, so you will be able to act when needed."
"There is a feature to upgrade multiple VMs simultaneously, but it crashes."
"The cost must be improved."
"I would want the product to include Continuous Data Protection (CDP) which can help to easily retrieve the data."
"Sangfor’s hypervisor is not mature enough to handle all the flavors related to industrial needs."
"The processing speed and cost should be improved."
"The initialization is not fully automated and has room for improvement."
"It should have object storage. It already has network virtualization and micro-segmentation, but it is missing object storage. It does not have object storage. vSAN also does not have object storage, but Nutanix has object storage, and it is natively integrated into its HCI. So, if you pay for the object storage license, you have that module pre-built."
"My company faced some issues with the product, as our virtual machines crashed, and we had to face some security issues."
"Perhaps the initial configuration and documentation could be a little clearer and simpler to follow."
"The only thing that can use improvement is the StarWind Management Console and Command Center."
"An emphasis on security can be improved."
"The only real flaw that I have seen so far is this hard drive that was accidentally ejected because when it was received and added back into the RAID. There was an error there. It was not added back into the RAID correctly, so I have an outstanding hard disk. Apparently, a guy just knocked it with his hand as he was in my office, so it was just a small eject. He said that he didn't crash into anything. That is the only thing that has reared its head."
"Most meetings are done via Zoom, and I'm sure you could switch to a text based conversation if needed as they seem like a very accommodating team. It's not something I would worry about if you are a potential client."
"I'd like a better UI and some limitations on "breaking it.""
"The StarWind Command Center web portal could use some work."
"We'd like an easier setup for Windows updates on the Hyper-V servers so you don't have to use a script to ensure auto-updating is done."
More Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure Pricing and Cost Advice →
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Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is ranked 10th in HCI with 28 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews. Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is rated 8.0, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6. The top reviewer of Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure writes "The solution offers straightforward setup, scalability, and manageability". On the other hand, the top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is most compared with VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail, HPE SimpliVity and StorMagic SvSAN, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, VxRail and StorMagic SvSAN. See our Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
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