"The install itself is easy as pie."
"StarWind support has been great in helping resolve other issues not caused by their software."
"The most valuable features are high availability and real-time replication between two servers."
"Recovery and maintenance are now less stressful and most importantly, it allows our users to keep working."
"They offer top-tier support."
"The fact that I can now count on a true failover solution is what is most appealing."
"The iSCSI protocol is quite simple to configure."
"The most useful aspect is the hyper-converged SD SAN and the ease to expand it by just adding cheap SSD or NVME disks."
"The redundancy of two identical nodes that can run alone allows us to have truly "no single point of failure" in our computing and primary storage infrastructure."
"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."
"The sales process is easy."
"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 full suite of redundancy gives a nice sense of security for the whole environment."
"It improved all services running on the new cluster and took up less space and less energy."
"We opted for 24-hour monitoring and support, which has already paid for itself."
"The solution has provided our company with a fully redundant virtual environment at half the cost of a traditional SAN implementation."
"There are so many features, but if I have to choose, I would go for scale-out upgrades and performance. Scale-out upgrades are very valuable. Typically, when customers engage in virtualization, they're committing themselves to run many virtual machines on a fewer number of hosts. They'll have five or six hosts, and they will run all their virtualization on vSphere. They could be having anywhere from 50 to 100 or even more virtual machines. Once all these go into production, getting downtime or getting planned maintenance windows is extremely difficult. It is something that typically businesses will frown upon. With VxRail, you can just go ahead and add a node without disrupting the existing environment, which works very well. That's why scale-out upgrades are a key feature. Its performance is also valuable. It delivers a very high number of IOPS for a hybrid configuration or an all-flash configuration. The processors that are available in the Xeon family are very powerful. They are multi-core with typically 2 gigahertz, 2.4 gigahertz, or higher frequency, so the performance is very much appreciated."
"I like that there is a dependency on the storage controller."
"We enjoy the ease of management since all of the resources are located on one box — one single point of support."
"Updating the product has been very easy."
"The stability is very nice. We haven't had any issues with the cluster. The cluster is very stable. No problems with slowness. Everything has been stable. It was well-architectured."
"Depending on your architecture type, it's simple to manage and implement VxRail compared to other solutions. That's why most of our customers use it."
"My customers use it for VDI. It has been very usable and very fast to use with VDI. On the VxRail side also, it has been very fast."
"The compute is good and we have not had any issues with the vSAN."
"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 gathering of monthly consumption and performance reports for future dissemination to concerned parties is very important. Unfortunately, StarWinds vSAN doesn't offer this functionality."
"I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues."
"Updating the software can be a bit tricky."
"There is no Italian-language version of the software available."
"A central management console may be nice to see all nodes."
"It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers."
"The StarWind Management Console is available only for Microsoft Windows/Windows Server, and should also be available for Linux and macOS, as it would reduce implementation costs."
"The only issue we have seen is with the StarWind Server Manager. We have had to continually reboot the server in order to use it."
"The truth is that the operation and support offered is good, but we consider that the product's usability could improve, as well as the data resynchronization time after an unexpected closure."
"Updates need improvement."
"The only area that the product could improve would be user training."
"Perhaps the initial configuration and documentation could be a little clearer and simpler to follow."
"An emphasis on security can be improved."
"The only thing that can use improvement is the StarWind Management Console and Command Center."
"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."
"There could be better documentation and they should allow everyone to access the simulator."
"The full solution is not completely included as a bundle, such as we see with SimpliVity."
"Dell wants to implement the disaster site in the new year, but they haven't decided yet. I hope we will have the opportunity to sell VxRail with this disaster site. It is not really clear at the moment, but hopefully, we will get some good news from the customers in the new year."
"The scalability is limited to a single cluster with 64 nodes."
"The licensing needs to be improved upon."
"The most important thing that I want to be included in this solution is the VMware license. Its deployment time can be quicker so that instead of 40 minutes, it takes 10 minutes."
"if we're looking at costs, Nutanix will win because it allows flexibility in the type of hardware you can use."
"The configurations of VxRail can be difficult. However, it has improved in the newer version. From version 6 to 7, there has been a lot of changes."
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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 37 reviews while VxRail is ranked 3rd in HCI with 79 reviews. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.8, while VxRail is rated 8.6. 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 VxRail writes "Good automation makes this solution practical". StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, NetApp HCI, DataCore SANsymphony and StorMagic SvSAN, whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex and Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series. See our StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. VxRail report.
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