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."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 Virtual SAN is a highly flexible solution, as it can be deployed on physical servers or on top of virtual machines running on hypervisors such as VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V."
"Having the ability to scale horizontally if needed is a huge plus for future growth."
"The StarWind Virtual SAN provides a clever and unique solution to the Computing Split Brain problem."
"The most useful aspect is the hyper-converged SD SAN and the ease to expand it by just adding cheap SSD or NVME disks."
"Besides being 80% cheaper than the other alternatives, the simplicity makes reconfiguration and support much easier."
"StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution."
"In the three years that we have been using StarWind, the product has yet to cause us any problems."
"Having this all backed up by pro-active support gives us good peace of mind."
"The solution has provided our company with a fully redundant virtual environment at half the cost of a traditional SAN implementation."
"UI Options are simple and easy to find."
"We opted for 24-hour monitoring and support, which has already paid for itself."
"The pricing and discounts given by Starwind on the hardware were unmatched."
"We also substantially reduced network complexity by eliminating that standalone SAN. That reduced complexity has allowed us to concentrate on improving other areas of our network."
"Their service is top-notch and if a node goes down they immediately are following up with us to make sure that everything is working smoothly."
"We run probably 16 virtual machines, and all of them are now highly available, and highly redundant."
"Allows us to implement more quickly, and to ease the maintenance."
"Storage virtualization software with a good storage management feature. It's a scalable and stable software."
"It easily integrates with all types of storage."
"The scalability is very good and the solution is stable and reliable."
"It is easy to work with, easy to handle, and easy to manage."
"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."
"The solution is stable."
"The implementation is simple, it was very straightforward. It took us approximately three weeks because it was installed in four locations."
"The most disappointing side of the application is the free edition. There used to be GUI attached. That has recently changed to only CLI management of the application."
"Currently, the StarWind management console is a bit clunky to navigate and isn't the most user-intuitive interface."
"I would like to see more advanced free versions."
"Feature-wise we are only waiting for the release of a "planned disaster" feature that would allow us to patch a hypervisor node without having to take the full storage offline."
"The documentation is good yet is still lacking in a few areas."
"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."
"They need to invest more in the support documents for real issues happening when integrating the solution with the hypervisor."
"StarWind Virtual SAN architecture is slightly complex and requires the team to carefully identify and study how the solution integrates with VMware vSphere."
"At times there has been a language barrier when communicating issues."
"The overall product documentation and knowledgebase articles could use some rewriting and clarification."
"CSVs require the storage to be configured through iSCSI, even though the storage is local."
"I think that the pre-installation questionnaire was a little confusing and ambiguous."
"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."
"The monitoring and report software is a bit hit and miss."
"Not much can be improved, to be honest."
"The only thing that can use improvement is the StarWind Management Console and Command Center."
"I would like to see more support for applications. I think currently it only supports applications between two vSAN clusters."
"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."
"When designing the implementation for vSAN, I have noticed that it requires a minimum of six nodes, and this creates a problem when it comes to maintenance. If, out of the six nodes, I put one node in maintenance mode, then vSAN does not create other VM components."
"I would like for the next release to be a bit cheaper."
"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."
"Hardware load balancing is available on the enterprise version of the solution, however, it's extremely expensive and therefore out of our budget."
"On the DevOps side, if there could be more automation it would be more helpful."
"The only thing that can be improved is the cost."
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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 42 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 77 reviews. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.8, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Flexible and easy to set up with excellent support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources". StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail, StorMagic SvSAN, Dell PowerFlex and HPE SimpliVity, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and HPE Hyper Converged. See our StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. VMware vSAN report.
See our list of best HCI vendors and best Cloud Software Defined Storage vendors.
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