StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs VxRail comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and VxRail 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.
To learn more, read our detailed StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. VxRail Report (Updated: September 2023).
735,226 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
"It has great free trials that allow end users to test a large variety of their products before deciding to buy the full product.""Immediately we noticed huge performance gains, even on older hardware and once we implemented a 10GB link between both servers, the sync was near-instant after the initial sync was complete.""The solution offers easy one-click PowerShell scripts that are ready to run.""I've had to open a few support cases over the years due to administrator errors, and the support received was top-notch.""It provided the much-needed HA on an extremely low budget.""Having the ability to migrate machines live in our environment was made possible by this software.""It has allowed us to save a lot of time and money by letting us create a vSAN within a Windows VM on the environment it controls.""StarWind vSAN is easy to deploy and administer."

More StarWind Virtual SAN Pros →

"Product functionality and performance are wonderful.""It is the perfect solution for hyper-convergence at a fair price. Our customers have Hyper-V and VMware environments, with Windows servers and Linux.""The product runs wonderfully and has already gone through several failure tests.""We run probably 16 virtual machines, and all of them are now highly available, and highly redundant.""It did not hurt that the price for the hardware and three years of support cost less than the disparate hardware the cluster used to run on.""The high-quality hardware options, directly affecting performance, have significantly improved the user experience and are well worth the cost.""The solution has easily deployed instances for multiple fast-paced projects.""The customer service has been the most valuable feature of the product to me."

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"It improved from an operations standpoint as we have reduced failures compared to a previous vendor. The hardware that we previously used had a lot of issues with components failing regularly.""It's a good product based on the features. You can upgrade the solution with only one click.""Our clients value being able to upgrade with one click or a few clicks.""It has a valuable deduplication feature.""We deploy VxRail systems to provide our customers with a distributed information solution. The customer was impressed because we delivered a serious data reduction. For example, we showed them that 10 terabytes on their traditional storage solution could be reduced to 1.5 terabytes in the VxRail systems. That's why the customers also like it so much,""Low-maintenance solution with hyperscale feature so it has the ability to utilize the resources for the VMware cluster setup on which Citrix VDA runs.""We like the design and that it meets data storage needs.""Enterprise is a complete solution that includes performance, backups and disaster recovery."

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Cons
"The logs can also become very noisy when there is an issue, which is very infrequent.""For someone entering the IT sector with little knowledge of storage, iSCSI, and virtual disks, they might not find the GUI immediately obvious.""There is no IPv6 support. That is our only issue at this time.""The configuration can a bit cumbersome.""A central management console may be nice to see all nodes.""I would like an automated installation/configuration despite the fact that their service is very collaborative, a customer should be able to deploy the solution by themselves.""I'd love to see more clarification for us folks who are smart enough to do some damage yet not smart enough to use CLI.""Android app for monitoring and receiving push notifications as alarms or monitoring I/O from any mobile device could be a good feature and nice to have as we are not always on our desk."

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"The overall product documentation and knowledgebase articles could use some rewriting and clarification.""I had some initial difficulties understanding the solution which could have been solved via additional documentation aimed at newcomers.""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.""An emphasis on security can be improved.""The only area that the product could improve would be user training.""The StarWind Command Center web portal could use some work.""It would be nice if it were possible to do the ISCSI setup that you do on Windows directly in the management GUI of StarWind.""Not much can be improved, to be honest."

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"The tool needs to improve its price.""This solution needs to have the capability where even older versions of hardware can be seamlessly utilized and additional expansion becomes so much easier.""VxRail could improve by having domain protection.""When it comes to maintenance, it takes 16 hours to upgrade a 12 node VxRail plus. This could be improved in the system.""What I find very valuable is VxRail's life cycle management. The life cycle management takes care of everything from firmware to the actual upgrading of the hypervisor and keeps everything up to level.""You have to buy a new server if you want to scale up.""They're getting better with their one-click upgrade. The success factor is now between 85% to 87% with the latest release. They should just continuously improve on that one-click factor and make it more seamless.""If VxRail could also offer file services in addition to virtualization, that would be nice because sometimes people want to complement their environment with file services, and you don't have that in VxRail."

More VxRail 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 →

    Information Not Available
  • "VxRail is quite expensive and could be cheaper. I would say that the main difference between VxRail and the competition is cost. There may be some differences in features, but I would say that it's mainly the costs."
  • "The VMware licenses are included and we do not have to worry about the license, everything is integrated."
  • "The price could be lower."
  • "Price is a bit of a challenge, particularly if you want extra features or higher performance."
  • "It varies. It could be $100,000 at the smaller end and millions and millions of dollars at the higher end."
  • "More cost-effective than Nutanix."
  • "VxRail is an expensive solution."
  • "Fees vary by license type."
  • More VxRail 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:StarWind's proactive support is my favorite feature.
    Top Answer:Keep in mind that StarWind VMs for the vSAN will take up 24GB of memory per host. If you do decide to go with StarWind… more »
    Top Answer:I honestly don't have anything to complain about. Nothing is perfect, though, over the past three years, there were two… more »
    Top Answer:HPE Nimble Storage dHCI Vs. VxRail One of the best things about the HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is the three, two, one,… 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:VxRail vs. Dell EMC PowerFlex VxRail provides stable solutions for technical problems while at the same time not being… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    VCE VxRail
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    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.

    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. 

    VxRail is a hyper-converged appliance based on VMware virtual SAN Software and is jointly engineered and built with VMware, for VMware, to enhance Vmware. VxRail software-defined architecture simplifies compute, storage, virtualization, and management. It will safeguard performance, reliability, and flexibility across your organization with a broad range of workloads and applications from business-critical to next-gen. With VxRail, you are covered.

    VxRail is a single turn-key appliance that is a validated, fully integrated, pre-configured,  pre-tested solution and offers non-disruptive scaling. Every node includes compute storage and IO. All-flash configurations can contain between 12-28 cores per node. The storage capacity options run from 7.6 TB to 19TB with either 256 GB or 512GB of memory. Hybrid appliances may have 6-20 cores per node, 3.6 TB to 10 TB of storage capacity, and 24GB to 256 GB of memory. 

    VxRail offers high availability fail-over, an active/active stretch cluster, and VSan Kernal integration. VxRail is a power-edged server with APIs built on automation. There are over 15 million different combinations of hardware available with VxRail. VxRail provides a simple, cost-effective solution that solves a large range of use cases. Additionally, you also get a mixed workloads automated system that is backed with fully automated system updates, and complete end-to-end lifecycle management all in a single two-rack appliance. 

    VxRail is a value-added suitable solution for distributed small to mid-sized enterprises, remote offices, private clouds, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). You choose the deployment option that best suits your organizational needs, from appliance to integrated rack offerings, with or without networking, and it will be delivered to you, ready to deploy out-of-box. 

    If you know VMware, you know VxRail.

    VxRail Features and Benefits

    • Seamlessly accelerate deployment to a hybrid cloud 
    • Fast data center modernization
    • Create developer-ready Kubernetes platforms
    • Powerful performance and reliability
    • Improve and simplify operational efficiency
    • Excellent integration 
    • Save time
    • Reduce costs

    Reviews from Real Users

    VxRail is an all-in-one solution: "You don't have to worry too much about the hardware and you don't have to work on integrating a storage device. We instead have this as an all-in-one solution and everything is available as a box."

    VxRail is remarkable: “The cover points feature in VxRail is remarkable. It's unique. It has an intervention failover system as well as an automatic failover system, reaching clusters existing in VxRail…

    VxRail is a powerful performer: “...VxRail 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.” 

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    Sample Customers
    Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
    Sears Home and Franchise Business
    World Wide Technology Inc, Renault Sport Formula One Team, 8x8 Inc, Brownes, Canadian Pacific, Canopy, Denton, EDF, Unilin, Xerox
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Construction Company9%
    Educational Organization8%
    Computer Software Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company19%
    Government9%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Financial Services Firm7%
    REVIEWERS
    Construction Company12%
    Computer Software Company10%
    Transportation Company8%
    Real Estate/Law Firm7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company22%
    Financial Services Firm7%
    Retailer6%
    Educational Organization5%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company20%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    Insurance Company8%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company15%
    Government9%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    Financial Services Firm7%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business63%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise15%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise58%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business65%
    Midsize Enterprise27%
    Large Enterprise8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business38%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise46%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business28%
    Midsize Enterprise32%
    Large Enterprise39%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business24%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise60%
    Buyer's Guide
    StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. VxRail
    September 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. VxRail and other solutions. Updated: September 2023.
    735,226 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 38 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 43 reviews. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.8, while VxRail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Excellent support and documentation with flexible pricing". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VxRail writes "It's built on platforms that have been in the industry for more than 15 years, so it's very stable". StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), StorMagic SvSAN, Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity and VMware vSAN, whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Dell PowerFlex, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI). See our StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. VxRail 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.