Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs VMware vSAN comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Sep 7, 2022

We performed a comparison between Sangfor HCI and VMware vSAN based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

  • Ease of Deployment: Sangfor HCI users mostly feel that its set up is straightforward to moderately complex. VMware vSAN users mostly feel its setup is straightforward and easy.
  • Features: Users of both products are generally happy with their stability and scalability.

    Sangfor HCI users are particularly satisfied with its simplicity and ease of use. Some say that the Continuous Data Protection (CDP) feature is one of its best features. A few users mention that the product’s migration and error reporting could be improved.

    VMware vSAN users say they’re impressed with the solution’s storage virtualization software and good storage management. Some users mention that the product could have more intelligent monitoring.
  • Pricing: Sangfor HCI users mostly note the solution is affordable and fairly priced. VMware vSAN users mostly note dissatisfaction with the price and say that they wish it could be cheaper.
  • Service and Support: Users of both products are generally happy with the level of service and support they receive.

Comparison Results: Sangfor HCI and VMware vSAN come out about equal in this comparison. Sangfor HCI has an edge when it comes to pricing, but VMware vSAN has an edge when it comes to ease of deployment.

To learn more, read our detailed Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs. VMware vSAN Report (Updated: September 2023).
745,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"We went from "no way DB applications would have good performance" to "Wow! We can now actually have a DB running and have some VMs running at the same time."""I like StarWind's high availability. The failover is almost immediate, so the end users have no idea the guest VM moved at all. We can failover all guest VMs onto a single hypervisor, place it into maintenance mode, install updates, and reboot a hypervisor all during the daytime and remotely, with confidence the process will be successful.""StarWind support has been great in helping resolve other issues not caused by their software.""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 management and monitoring have been very easy since the solution's dashboard is very simple and user-friendly.""Starwind made it easy to deploy fully redundant, highly available storage at a low cost.""StarWind is very easy to use, even if you have had no experience using a SAN before.""StarWind allows us to move virtual machines from one physical host to another, which greatly reduces the downtime required for maintenance."

More StarWind Virtual SAN Pros →

"It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten... Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.""We find the topology feature of Sangfor HCI particularly valuable.""The product provides a single management console for managing everything.""I find the simplicity of Sangfor very valuable. It is easy to configure and user-friendly. The overall user experience as well as the usability of Sangfor is outstanding.""You can get almost all the features of the tool at a low cost. The tool also has built-in backup mechanisms. It also has a physical firewall for internet management which other competitors lack.""Sangfor HCI has a really good GUI. It allows us to monitor the temperature of the server and many other things.""The most valuable feature is the three nodes and the free hypervisor.""Very user-friendly and simple."

More Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure Pros →

"vSAN is integrated into VMware.""We didn't only choose vSAN; we chose VMware because of SR-IOV, which is more on the hypervisor level and not on the vSAN storage. It's part of the whole system.""VMware vSAN is easy to implement in a VMware environment and it is not expensive.""It is easy to use. It is easy to implement for us, and it is also easy to maintain for the customers. It is not necessary to buy some extra devices and talk with other vendors.""The performance of VMware vSAN is very good.""The most valuable thing about vSAN is that all of its features have been working well for us for the past two years. We haven't had an issue with them.""In my opinion, vSAN is the most natural way to migrate to a fully hyperconverged solution. If a customer needs a more scalable solution with consolidated management, vSAN is excellent.""The valuable feature of the solution is the total hyperconverged facility."

More VMware vSAN Pros →

Cons
"Management of VSAN itself could be improved. A Web UI for management would be great rather than an application installation. StarWind is testing a command center virtual appliance that I have installed in my environment.""I had issues locating the documentation that applied to my version of StarWind vSAN.""I want to suggest that the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure needs to be reduced.""The logs can also become very noisy when there is an issue, which is very infrequent.""I would like to see more user-friendly dashboards in future versions.""They need to invest more in the support documents for real issues happening when integrating the solution with the hypervisor.""Our company was hoping for deduplication and encryption across HCI. That is currently not supported.""This is a great product."

More StarWind Virtual SAN Cons →

"My company faced some issues with the product, as our virtual machines crashed, and we had to face some security issues.""I would want the product to include Continuous Data Protection (CDP) which can help to easily retrieve the data.""There is a feature to upgrade multiple VMs simultaneously, but it crashes.""Currently, when we need to do capacity planning, we have to rely on Sangfor's support team for assistance. However, if there were dedicated tools available, we could handle it ourselves and increase efficiency.""Sangfor HCI could be improved with certification and the right ecosystem for ISVs like Oracle and SAP.""The processing speed and cost should be improved.""The interface could be a little bit better.""The documentation and support from the community are not as good or as mature as VMware or Hyper-V."

More Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure Cons →

"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.""Pricing is something of a concern.""We would like to see additional backup and recovery options added. In particular, integration with popular applications like databases.""As no product is 100% perfect, the price for VMware vSAN could still be improved, though it is good when compared to some of its competitors.""Customers who are using Essentials Plus or even Essentials have to pay for technical support. However, they should not have to pay for support.""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.""It can be very expensive.""The upgrading process could be simplified."

More VMware vSAN Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "For two nodes, it cost us $10,000, and we spend $2,000 a year on support."
  • "If you are looking at a traditional SAN for a small cluster, give StarWind vSAN because you will save thousands without any compromise."
  • More StarWind Virtual SAN Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Sangfor needs to be more aggressive because this is a new market or territory for Sangfor. Nepal is a very price-sensitive market, so Sangfor needs to be a little more aggressive with its pricing. I would rate them 3.75 out of five in terms of the price."
  • "I would say its pricing is between cheap and reasonable and would rate it as three out of five."
  • "The solution has a good initial cost but a high renewal cost."
  • "The solution is very cheap."
  • "The tool’s pricing is better when compared to VMware or Nutanix. The product’s licensing is on a yearly basis."
  • "The solution is on-premise which does not have a subscription. However, there is a need to purchase support. The solution is on a perpetual license model. There is not any extra cost other than the standard licensing fees."
  • "The product's pricing is less expensive and competitive than other alternatives. I would rate the product's pricing an eight out of ten."
  • "From a business perspective, we use Sangfor HCI due to its competitive pricing compared to other competitors such as Nutanix."
  • More Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The product is quite expensive, regarding the open source solution."
  • "There is a license to use this solution and we pay approximately $30,000 annually. There were not any additional fees required other than the license. The solution is expensive."
  • "We pay a yearly licensing fee."
  • "I have been told that if I used VxRail it would be cheaper than the system we are using now with buying the products separately. The solution is expensive overall."
  • "The price of the solution package depends on the nodes and other factors. The cost some of our customers paid was $500,000. The licensing cost for the components is very good."
  • "The cost of the solution is high and if it could be reduced the customers would be very happy."
  • "There is a license required for this solution, it is a one-time payment. However, if they want support for the solution, it can be paid annually or for three years."
  • "Its price could be improved."
  • More VMware vSAN Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:We like their high availability. It reduces the downtime for our entire organization's environment.
    Top Answer:The Premium ProActive service price is a little high, yet worth the price.
    Top Answer:It is hard to find adequate technical documentation on their support website. However, they have a fantastic technical… more »
    Top Answer:It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten... Scalability-wise, I rate the solution a… more »
    Top Answer:Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is a reasonably priced product.
    Top Answer:My company faced some issues with the product, as our virtual machines crashed, and we had to face some security issues… more »
    Top Answer:While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an… more »
    Top Answer:We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface… more »
    Top Answer:HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    StarWind SAN & NAS
    vSAN
    Learn More
    Overview

    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.

    Sangfor HCI is an IT infrastructure platform built on converged architecture. It integrates server virtualization, distributed storage, and networking. Sangfor HCI provides a unified management platform that converges compute, storage, networking, and security on a single software stack. This approach delivers a simplified architecture, ease of use, and reliability for business-critical applications.

    Hyperconverged infrastructure is a unified system of data storage. HCI combines storage, computing, networking, and management, unlike traditional storage solutions. HCI systems enable you to build your private cloud, expand to a public cloud, or have your own true hybrid cloud. Sangfor HCI presents two product models: The Sangfor HCI server appliance is a hardware version that enables easy deployment. Sangfor HCI software is the digital version combined with a third-party server that enables flexible deployment.

    Sangfor HCI supports Windows systems on desktop and is web-based. Its range of use cases cover a wide spectrum of industries, from healthcare to manufacturing. It is applicable for mid- and large-sized businesses. The software is customizable. Users can customize the logo and contact information in the user interface.

    Benefits and Features

    • Stability: Sangfor HCI delivers high reliability and availability with 0 RPO and 99.99% availability. The infrastructure is fully redundant to ensure business continuity. This means no data is lost in the event of hardware failure.
    • Simplified infrastructure: The solution supports visual management, making it easier to use. The single platform provides a central control with access to resources.
    • High performance: One unit of HCI can support up to 100,000 IOPS. The solution supports data striping, data locality, SSD caching and AI-based DB optimization. It also supports linear expansion without bottlenecks.
    • Hyper-converged infrastructure that enables working with different scenarios. For instance, cloud transformation and data center consolidation. It is fully converged, which means it provides unified management, full resource visualization, and orchestration with SCP. The standardized HCI unit consolidates hardware appliances, a storage network, IP network, and server into a single unit.
    • Integration: Sangfor HCI offers deep integration with NFV components. Users can deploy complex SDN networks.
    • Pay-as-you-grow model: The pay-per-use model reduces operational expenses and total cost of ownership.

    Use Cases

    Sangfor HCI can be applied tin various scenarios:

    • Enterprise applications: Users can benefit from the reliability and performance of Sangfor HCI for business-critical processes. The system is optimized for enterprise applications to enhance their performance and stability.
    • Datacenter consolidation: The unified and software-defined technology simplifies the operational management and the architecture of data centers.
    • Cloud transformation: You can add a cloud management platform, transforming Sangfor HCI into a complete cloud computing solution. You can then run your cloud workloads and benefit from the automation features of Sangfor HCI.
    • Data protection and recovery: Sangfor HCI offers multiple data protection features, such as continuous data protection (CDP), which ensure the integrity of sensitive and user data. You can protect backup snapshots and take backups. It records virtual machine IO logs at frequent intervals. It offers disaster recovery capabilities that ensure business continuity.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Gabriele P., Senior Software and Systems Engineer at SAMU.IT, says "It is flexible like a hyper-convergence system. You can add nodes, and you can scale to have better performance and stability. I also like the backup feature, the recovery system, and the web interface GUI to handle everything."

    A Junior Solutions Engineer at a tech services company adds that "Sangfor has many solutions, and you can easily manage their machine servers with just one management. They're always striving for greatness, and they continuously update their products. For example, they have now built endpoint security within the firewall. They are continuously improving not only the security but also all other products."




    VMware vSAN is a software-defined storage product that is used in collaboration with VMware ESXi hypervisor and that provisions and manages storage based on policies, regardless of the underlying hardware. The solution enables you to prime your business for growth through its seamless evolution (it is integrated with vSphere and requires no new tools), its flexibility, and its multi-cloud capabilities. As an industry-leading software, VMware vSAN provides high levels of performance with minimal impact on CPU and memory.

    VMware vSAN Features

    VMware vSAN has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Storage policy-based management (SPBM): VMware vSAN supports storage policy-based management for automated management of storage profiles.
    • Software-defined data-at-rest encryption: With this VMware vSAN feature, you can prevent unauthorized access of data at rest.
    • Multiple nodes: VMware vSAN provides clusters that can include as few as 2 nodes or as many as 64 nodes.
    • High security and availability: VMware vSAN offers stretched clusters, allowing more than one virtualization host server to be used in the same setup, promoting higher security as well as availability.
    • Deduplication: VMware vSAN’s deduplication compresses data to ensure efficient storage management and security.
    • HCI mesh updates: VMware vSAN clusters can share storage capacity with non-HCI Sphere clusters and can adopt HCI without having to scale computing resources and storage or replace existing servers.
    • Simplified file services: With VMware vSAN’s file services, backup of file shares is simplified. You can use APIs that allow backup and recovery software vendors to integrate with your VMware vSAN file services, which enables backup software to track new data and add scalability enhancements to files.

    VMware vSAN Benefits

    There are many benefits to implementing VMware vSAN. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO): VMware vSAN helps you reduce upfront costs for businesses because it can be easily deployed on inexpensive x86 servers. In addition, its highly scalable infrastructure and quick deployment also save organizations time and money, making it an efficient storage solution. 
    • Good manageability: VMWare vSAN is easy to set up, manage, and provision, without sacrificing performance. 
    • Scalability: VMware vSAN is agile and allows administrators to scale storage on demand, quickly, and efficiently via policies and rules.
    • Simplicity: VMWare vSAN is simple to configure since it is embedded in the vSphere hypervisor. Installing it using the vSphere Web Client can be done quickly. 
    • Reduced risk: VMWare vSAN reduces the risk associated with digital transformations by utilizing existing tools, skill sets, and solutions.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the VMware vSAN solution.

    PeerSpot user Yves S., CEO, Cloud Evangelist at Comdivision Consulting GmbH, says, “vSAN gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources. We have an overall larger host infrastructure, and we split that up for specific customer test and use cases. In that specific scenario, we can easily add more hosts or reduce the number of hosts in the environment.”

    A reviewer who works in Infrastructure Security explains, “The ease of use is great. The initial setup and upgrade process was pretty straightforward. And, technical support is great.”

    Laurent N., Director at Softlogic, comments, "The feature that I have found most valuable is that it is easy to deploy. It is easy to create and delete virtual servers. It is easy to create the load balancing and the clustering."

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    Learn more about Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure
    Learn more about VMware vSAN
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    Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
    TOSHIBA TEC Singapore, J&T Express Indonesia, Crowne Plaza Vietnam, Hermina Hospital Indonesia
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    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Construction Company9%
    Educational Organization8%
    Computer Software Company7%
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    Computer Software Company18%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    Government9%
    Financial Services Firm8%
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    Manufacturing Company15%
    Construction Company8%
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    Computer Software Company15%
    Comms Service Provider11%
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    Healthcare Company10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization44%
    Computer Software Company10%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    Financial Services Firm5%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business63%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise14%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise58%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business70%
    Midsize Enterprise26%
    Large Enterprise4%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business29%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise53%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business32%
    Midsize Enterprise23%
    Large Enterprise45%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise52%
    Large Enterprise34%
    Buyer's Guide
    Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs. VMware vSAN
    September 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs. VMware vSAN and other solutions. Updated: September 2023.
    745,341 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is ranked 9th in HCI with 22 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 42 reviews. Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is rated 8.4, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure writes "Low cost, great GUI, and helpful support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources". Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure is most compared with VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Huawei FusionCube Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, HPE SimpliVity and Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and HPE Nimble Storage dHCI. See our Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs. VMware vSAN report.

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    We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.