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StarWind Storage Appliance vs VMware vSAN comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

ROI

Sentiment score
6.0
StarWind Storage Appliance users saw reduced costs, improved performance, and increased efficiency, with easy scalability and high reliability.
Sentiment score
3.2
VMware vSAN reduces hardware costs, increases efficiency, and boosts ROI despite high operational expenses and upfront costs.
Starting with a smaller infrastructure and scaling as required allows us to save costs initially.
Sr Service Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I have seen a return on investment; it's satisfactory in the long run.
Deputy Manager at Mannai
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
9.0
StarWind Storage Appliance customer service is praised for 24x7 troubleshooting, professionalism, high technical support ratings, and helpful videos.
Sentiment score
4.9
VMware vSAN support is knowledgeable but response times vary, with resources helping reduce direct contact needs for clients.
I would rate their support nine points.
Sr Service Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I am not satisfied with VMware support, particularly with the reaction times, SLAs, and those kinds of issues.
private cloud team at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
If we consider technical support from Broadcom, I would rate them an eight or nine now.
Senior Infrastructure Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
7.5
StarWind Storage Appliance is scalable, adaptable, hardware-independent, supports unlimited storage, and is effective in standalone and hyperconverged environments.
Sentiment score
4.8
VMware vSAN offers seamless scalability, enabling efficient node addition and storage expansion to meet evolving business capacity demands.
It supports up to 64 nodes in a cluster, allowing us to add nodes and expand the cluster as needed.
Sr Service Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
If you have already bought it, you need specific servers, and it is easier with a SAN.
Senior Infrastructure Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.9
StarWind Storage Appliance is praised for stability, robust performance, and high user ratings, especially on well-maintained Windows OS.
Sentiment score
5.9
VMware vSAN reliability improves with updates, strong support, and adherence to hardware compatibility lists, ensuring stable performance.
From my perspective, I would rate VMware vSAN's stability as extremely high, perhaps a nine.
Senior Infrastructure Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
In terms of stability, I give VMware vSAN nine points.
Sr Service Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Room For Improvement

StarWind Storage Appliance requires improved integration, easier setup, better insights, and feature parity between demo and paid versions.
VMware vSAN requires better management tools, integration, and hardware support, with improved stability, scalability, and enhanced disaster recovery features.
I have recently used Nutanix, and I observed that Nutanix provides better performance than VMware vSAN due to its data locality features.
Associate Tech Specialists at Seatrium
Discussing the pricing model is significant as Broadcom creates many discussions worldwide regarding pricing.
Senior Infrastructure Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
A proper monitoring tool that encompasses both applications and infrastructure would help in quickly resolving issues.
Sr Service Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Setup Cost

StarWind Storage Appliance is praised for its affordability, straightforward licensing, and excellent value compared to competitors for SMEs.
VMware vSAN offers long-term savings, but initial costs and licensing complexity concern small businesses, especially post-Broadcom acquisition.
This has resulted in a slight cost increase.
Sr Service Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Valuable Features

StarWind Storage Appliance is praised for its user-friendly interface, high performance, reliability, excellent support, affordability, and robust data protection.
VMware vSAN provides high-performance, scalable storage with cost-effective integration, using existing hardware and offering advanced features.
Hot add features are available by default in vSphere, allowing us to immediately increase memory, CPU, and hard drive without any downtime.
Sr Service Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The performance is excellent, handling workloads better than direct-attached or legacy storage solutions.
Associate Tech Specialists at Seatrium
Everything is integrated, allowing for more automation and ease of use.
Senior Infrastructure Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

StarWind Storage Appliance
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
10
Ranking in other categories
NAS (16th), All-Flash Storage (31st)
VMware vSAN
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
234
Ranking in other categories
HCI (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

While both are Storage Solutions solutions, they serve different purposes. StarWind Storage Appliance is designed for NAS and holds a mindshare of 1.2%, up 0.8% compared to last year.
VMware vSAN, on the other hand, focuses on HCI, holds 11.4% mindshare, down 16.4% since last year.
NAS Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
StarWind Storage Appliance1.2%
Dell PowerScale (Isilon)15.1%
Dell PowerStore10.4%
Other73.3%
NAS
HCI Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
VMware vSAN11.4%
VxRail13.8%
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)8.8%
Other66.0%
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

Kishore CA - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Engineering Assistant at Bharat Electronics Limited
Offers stable performance even with a single node failure and manages everything with just two nodes.
The only drawback is that it takes a bit of time during initial synchronization, especially after restarting the environment. This is a potential area of improvement. There's a synchronization time, but it takes time. Initially, when we start the first environment deployment, it starts synchronizing between the storage. So, it is taking time. One thing is that even when you restart. Let's assume that the synchronization is completed and the storage is synchronized. Both storages are fully synchronized, and it is in sync mode. Now, if we want to restart both nodes, there is a case for maintenance purposes. You took both nodes for maintenance, and we rebooted it. Then, it should not synchronize again. It should be a checksum. And if there is a checksum match, there should be no synchronization again. So, one thing that should be taken care of. Another thing is that I used freeware- the community version, free license, which we deployed using PowerShare. In that case, it was very difficult to bring back another node when one node was faulty. Let's assume that both the nodes are working fine. And we found one node faulty. And we destroyed all the volumes in that and tried to bring it back. So that was a difficult factor. The final solution is that we were not able to bring back the failed node. So, we reconstructed a new data source for that. That is another drawback. In future releases, I would like to see the integration with VMware or some other things as a plugin model for VMware.
ShyamikaThamel - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Tech Specialists at Seatrium
Managing mixed RAID workloads has improved data protection and delivers strong performance
VMware vSAN can be improved in certain areas. In cases involving our large data stores with large VMs, we experience some latency, not during normal operation, but during database backup operations. We observed latency due to buffer issues from the top-of-the-rack switches. These issues are mostly network-related because all storage data traffic travels through the network. I have recently used Nutanix, and I observed that Nutanix provides better performance than VMware vSAN due to its data locality features. VMware vSAN is now providing data locality, but we did not use that option. If VMware vSAN provides additional features in the next release, such as the VM balancing feature called DRS on the cluster that VMware previously had, it would be beneficial. With DRS, VMs can move easily from one node to another within the same cluster. Nutanix does not provide that flexibility. When placing a VM on a cluster in Nutanix, the placement uses a balancing component. After that, the VM remains on the same host. If any contention occurs on the CPU or memory side, the VM stays in place until contention happens. If issues occur, the VM migrates to another host while transferring all objects to the same host. This is how their data locality is maintained. When a VM moves to any host, it moves with all VM objects. VMware vSAN does not currently offer this option. If a VM moves to another host, it accesses the disk object through the network, which increases latency. VMware vSAN now offers an option to select data locality, but it does not function like Nutanix. This is why some latency remains. If VMware vSAN can improve this feature, it would be very helpful and VMware would regain its top position.
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
12%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise2
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business100
Midsize Enterprise58
Large Enterprise129
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with StarWind Storage Appliance?
StarWind Storage Appliance's demo version should be similar to the paid one.
What advice do you have for others considering StarWind Storage Appliance?
The tool is mostly for medium companies and requires no maintenance. It has a good price and performance. I rate the overall solution an eight out of ten.
What Is The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail?
While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an engineered system. The choice to choose which technology depends on two major fac...
How does HPE Simplivity compare with VMware vSAN?
HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We researched VMware vSAN but found HPE was a better option for us. HPE SimpliVity has ...
How does VMware vSAN compare with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?
We found VMware’s vSAN was easy to set up, configure, and manage compared to other solutions we considered. It is best suited for small- to medium-sized organizations. It is easy to create load bal...
 

Also Known As

No data available
vSAN
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Bosch, EC2 IT, Solid Earth Inc., Canon
Read Some Case Studies At Home Cloud CaribCINgroupDiscovery Check out the Rest of our Customer Stories Here
Find out what your peers are saying about StarWind Storage Appliance vs. VMware vSAN and other solutions. Updated: December 2025.
881,082 professionals have used our research since 2012.