StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs Sunlight comparison

StarWind and Sunlight.io are both solutions in the HCI category. StarWind is ranked #14 with an average rating of 10.0, while Sunlight.io is ranked #30. StarWind holds a 1.0% mindshare in HCI, compared to Sunlight.io’s 0.2% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of StarWind users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Sunlight.io users who would recommend it.

StarWind HyperConverged App...

Read 66 StarWind HyperConverged Appliance reviews

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1,136 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

Sunlight

Read 2 Sunlight reviews

208 Views
208 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

StarWind HyperConverged App...

Sunlight

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 2024

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and Sunlight compete in enhancing IT infrastructure. Sunlight appears to have an advantage with its high-performance features.

Features: StarWind HyperConverged Appliance offers virtual machine performance optimization, simplified management, and extensive support for virtualization. Sunlight features micro-footprint architecture, superior efficiency, and faster processing speeds, emphasizing high performance in edge settings.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: StarWind provides a straightforward deployment process, easy integration into existing systems, and responsive customer support. Sunlight focuses on rapid deployment with minimal setup times but has slightly slower customer support responsiveness.

Pricing and ROI: StarWind HyperConverged Appliance provides competitive pricing with attractive ROI due to lower initial costs and ongoing support benefits. Sunlight, despite a higher upfront cost, offers robust ROI over time through efficiency gains and advanced features providing significant long-term value.

To learn more, read our detailed StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. Sunlight Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. Sunlight

July 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

StarWind HyperConverged App...

Ranking in HCI

14th

Average Rating

9.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Software Defined Storage (SDS) (11th)

Sunlight

Ranking in HCI

30th

Average Rating

8.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the HCI category, the mindshare of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is 1.0%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Sunlight is 0.2%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

HCI

Featured Reviews

Russ Le Puill

IT Manager at St Peter's Church of England Aided School

Proactive support with improved speed and resilience

There was a long delay with shipping, which we weren't expecting, but we were kept updated throughout. It wasn't made clear to us that we needed to provide our own SFP modules to connect to our infrastructure, so that could have been a bit clearer. It would be amazing if there was, perhaps, a more automated process for updating the hosts themselves, although the maintenance mode works well. Our StarWind command center doesn't seem to have all the options available currently, which support is investigating for us.

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RajeshKANUMURY

Chief Executive Officer at GniYes Inc.

Performs well, effective, and has responsive remote technical support

Sunlight is a scalable solution. It supports on-premises and distributed deployments, as well as public deployments. It has a single pane of management so I can manage all of my VM installations in a distributed manner. It also has a footprint, that allows me to operate on Edge. If for example, you have a retail shop with 2,000 locations and they use a networked point of sale system, or if you are Chipotle and they have so many locations and they have to use a backend system at each location. At the moment, these are all standalone systems that operate with very little connection to the central. We could, however, connect and create a network using Sunlight. We can virtualize and run with Edge thanks to Sunlight. This allows us to operate and obtain high-end computing on Edge for retail. Sunlight is a startup. I am not sure how many users they have, but we have been using it constantly and using the technology to bring in customers.

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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

"UI Options are simple and easy to find."

"We also opted for 24-hour support monitoring for any issues. They are extremely quick to respond on issues we even cause ourselves such as bumping a network cable."

"The most valuable features of the solution are the redundancy and its cost. I used to have a SAN, a Dell EMC EqualLogic. Unfortunately, it was they call an "inverted pyramid of doom." It was two or three hosts, two switches, and one storage array at the very bottom. But the SAN, the storage array at the very bottom, is a single point of failure..."

"With StarWind's Proactive monitoring we can go about our day helping our customers and not have to worry about our cluster's health."

"The most valuable aspect of StarWind is the all-in-one solution that they provide."

"StarWind's proactive support is my favorite feature."

"Product functionality and performance are wonderful."

"Reliability and overall uptime are key as we're also hosting client environments in addition to our own."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pros

"It supports the latest technology of NVMe SSD, which is PCIe-based SSD. It has a very good IOPS performance as compared to vSAN. For the same system, I get 1,000 IOPS with vSAN, and with Sunlight, I am able to get almost 10,000 IOPS. In terms of features, it has almost all the features, such as HA and centralized dashboards. It can be managed centrally, and the visibility of the system is very good. They also have very good technical support and customer or partner training."

"The performance and small footprint of this solution are its most valuable features. I am able to obtain and use more than 90 percent of the physical hardware capacity."

Cons

"I would request that the terms and conditions be reviewed and made more acceptable to corporate security so that we could finally turn on the proactive support feature, as it is included with our support agreement."

"It would be amazing if there was, perhaps, a more automated process for updating the hosts themselves, although the maintenance mode works well."

"An emphasis on security can be improved."

"We ran into some issues with going from Hyper-V 2012 R2 to Hyper-V 2019."

"We need to be very cautious in following every step when updating the physical host. We must move over each VM and drain roles from the servers to ensure everything goes smoothly without interruptions. If this were a more automated process, this would be less taxing each time an upgrade is needed."

"The only area that surprised me had to do with the fact that each host runs a StarWind virtual machine used to maintain the health of the vSAN, which individually uses 24GB of memory per host. You should keep this in mind when determining the resources you will need when selecting hardware and components for your specific setup. If I knew that, I would have chosen to add more memory per host to make up for the use."

"At times there has been a language barrier when communicating issues."

"One area for improvement of the solution is that I had to get Windows, which I really didn't want because of the extra maintenance or overhead, as well as viruses, etc. It's going to take time for them to get their Linux to that point. They already have Linux but it's not as mature and they don't really support it on HCAs. They have it for individuals who want to use it on their servers, but not on HCAs."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance cons

"My recommendation would be to add this technology to Azure, Microsoft Azure so that we can bring it to the market, or deploy it on public clouds such as Microsoft Azure and Google. It is currently only available on Amazon's public cloud."

"Its reporting and dashboards need to be improved. It currently has very basic reporting options. It should also be made easier to deploy on Unix operating systems. It is easy to deploy on Windows and Linux, but it is currently not easy to deploy on Unix."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"When I researched they came the most cost-effective."

"The Nutanix piece was about $45,000, getting close to $50,000 with all the licensing involved, whereas the StarWind was less than half of that, after Microsoft licensing and such."

"We looked at Nutanix and found it did almost the same thing but for more money. In fact, StarWind was nearly one-third of the price; it cost us £36,000. That includes five years of monitoring... The Nutanix was near enough £110,000 for relatively the same amount of performance and storage."

"A desired feature or service would be the ability to have a hardware subscription plan that ensures routine hardware updates in conjunction with hyper-converged software."

"The HCA price is all-inclusive (setup, hardware, support, warranty), except for your standard Microsoft Server licensing."

"In terms of cost, a storage array is more expensive... For half the cost of Compellent, I got two hosts, more storage, and redundancy."

"Its cost was reasonable."

"The other solutions we were looking at were priced much higher than this and they didn't necessarily have full redundancy... Nutanix and VxRail were in the final running... but it came down to our price point."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pricing and cost advice

"There is an operating cost for the VDIs, which is an additional cost. However, the licensing fee is half that of VMware or Nutanix."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

17%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Non Profit

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

It's not the cheapest, however, the solution works incredibly well and is so simple to licence and maintain.

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What needs improvement with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

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What is your primary use case for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

We desperately needed to update yet downsize our data centre. We had six hosts for only approximately 14 or so Virtual machines and two old SANs. All of this was running on 10+ year-old refurbished...

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Comparisons

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 27% of the time

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 20% of the time

Azure Stack HCI vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 18% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 13% of the time

VxRail vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 13% of the time

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Compared 100% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

July 2025

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report

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Buyer's Guide

HCI

August 2025

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Overview

For SMB, ROBO and Enterprises, who look to bring in quick deployment and operation simplicity to virtualization workloads and reduce related expenses, our solution is StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA). It unifies commodity servers, disks and flash, hypervisor of choice, StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN and associated software into a single manageable layer. The HCA supports scale-up by adding disks and flash, and scale-out by adding extra nodes.

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance consists of StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN “Ready Nodes”, targeting those, who are building their virtualization infrastructure from scratch. In case there is an existing set of servers, we offer a “software only version”, which is essentially our years proven StarWind Virtual SAN. Basically, it’s the fuel powering StarWind HCA.

StarWind

Sunlight is a complete HCI stack that can be deployed on-premise on standard data center hardware, in AWS and on resource-constrained far-edge devices.

Sunlight.io

Sample Customers

Sears Home and Franchise Business

Lavazza, Infraspace

Buyer's Guide

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. Sunlight

July 2025

Free Report: StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. Sunlight

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