We performed a comparison between StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and VMware vSAN 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."High Availability is the best feature of product."
"The solution offers easy one-click PowerShell scripts that are ready to run."
"The product's core feature of virtualizing our storage is by far the most valuable."
"You can turn your local disk storage into high-availability iSCSI storage."
"Being hardware agnostic is a must and definitely scored points for us."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements."
"This solution enables us to make better cost-effective use of our existing hardware and leverage the current infrastructure at a higher level than we could before."
"Starwind made it easy to deploy fully redundant, highly available storage at a low cost."
"Customer service has been excellent. Any questions we have had have been answered quickly."
"With proactive support, StarWind deploys and configures the solution for you."
"The solution has easily deployed instances for multiple fast-paced projects."
"It is a safe, fast, and cost-effective storage system that improved our systems to have zero downtime."
"The initial setup is straightforward once you know what you're doing."
"We were able to set it up via the documentation and only needed their support a handful of times."
"The low cost of this solution has also made a big difference in our budget, which has been very helpful."
"We opted for 24-hour monitoring and support, which has already paid for itself."
"It uncoupled the idea of proprietary technology and component capabilities. It is basically a proprietary technology for a cost-effective infrastructure."
"The high availability is very good."
"Easy to deploy and manage."
"It is very easy to set up and very easy to use. It is very useful."
"The technical support is good. We are always thankful for the technical support from VMware. They are very supportive when we have a technical problem."
"The valuable features of vSAN are that you can get it up and running quickly, you get redundancy built-in, and it's pretty much the perfect solution for a cluster."
"The solution is easy to use."
"We are finding that vSAN is a lot more scalable and adaptable, because we can go in with hybrid arrays for our lower-end storage needs or with all-flash versions of vSAN for places where we need more performance, and it's coming in at a lower cost point than an actual traditional array."
"Perhaps more reporting features on the utilization, usage, and performance of the configured high-availability images and underlying physical disks would be helpful."
"The management console of StarWind Virtual SAN is pretty complex."
"I would like to see more advanced free versions."
"New versions of this solution should be tested more thoroughly before the release as we had a few problems with one version due to a bug."
"I would definitely like to see quite a bit more on the monitoring side of things."
"I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit."
"The gathering of monthly consumption and performance reports for future dissemination to concerned parties is very important. Unfortunately, StarWinds vSAN doesn't offer this functionality."
"It should be improved in the way it detects the right filesystem image after a complete shutdown of the system or in the case of disaster recovery."
"It would be nice if the software told you a new version was available and prompted you to do the upgrade to keep everything up to date."
"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."
"I'd like a better UI and some limitations on "breaking it.""
"Over the past three years, there were two instances where our cluster had an issue, yet StarWind proactively notified me of those issues and effortlessly guided me through the process of correcting the issue with minimal effort on my part."
"We ran into some issues with going from Hyper-V 2012 R2 to Hyper-V 2019."
"We struggle a little with capacity management with the StarWind Hyperconverged appliance."
"The overall product documentation and knowledgebase articles could use some rewriting and clarification."
"Shipping options should be explained in detail and offer more white glove delivery options even if it comes at an additional cost for some SMBs without docks."
"I would like to see a little bit more documentation on the initial setup, and a little bit more explanation on the expandability: How to extend out your vSAN much more simply through the console because, a lot of the time, you have to do it through the command line."
"The interface is a little complicated, it could be simplified with more graphical gadgets. We have many servers, and the built-in functions, such as rate configuration, are a bit complex."
"Enterprise customers get discounts on the solution's licensing pricing, but it is too expensive for SMB customers."
"It could be cheaper."
"I would like compression and deduplication to be offered for offloading hardware, instead of doing it with software. That would be nice."
"We would like to see additional backup and recovery options added. In particular, integration with popular applications like databases."
"I am looking for more of a software-defined storage platform that uses different protocols, such as iSCSI, NFS, and CIS, and maybe also has an object as part of that. They should 100% make it more of a storage-based product where it is not linked just to VMware, and it also has NFS and iSCSI built-in at a scalable level. They should turn it more into a dedicated storage-as-a-service platform instead of just being built into the VMware kernel. Their level one and level two support is not at all good, and it should be improved."
"I would like to see better integration between the cloud and our VMware virtual environment. We only have one virtual environment, which is VMware vSAN. Right now, there is little interoperability with the cloud solution at the moment."
More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Pricing and Cost Advice →
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 226 reviews. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex, VxRail, StorMagic SvSAN and HPE SimpliVity, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. VMware vSAN report.
See our list of best HCI vendors.
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.