StarWind Virtual SAN vs Sunlight comparison

StarWind and Sunlight.io are both solutions in the HCI category. StarWind is ranked #5 with an average rating of 9.4, while Sunlight.io is ranked #30. StarWind holds a 1.9% mindshare in HCI, compared to Sunlight.io’s 0.2% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of StarWind users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Sunlight.io users who would recommend it.

StarWind Virtual SAN

Read 198 StarWind Virtual SAN reviews

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3,136 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Sunlight

Read 2 Sunlight reviews

208 Views
208 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

StarWind Virtual SAN

Sunlight

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 2024

StarWind Virtual SAN and Sunlight compete in the virtual storage solution market. StarWind is noted for its cost-effectiveness and stellar customer support, whereas Sunlight provides superior scalability and performance, targeting high-efficiency needs.

Features: StarWind Virtual SAN offers simplicity, flexibility, and robust performance, making integration with existing infrastructure seamless. It is a cost-effective solution for businesses seeking enhanced storage options without complexity. Sunlight is marked by its high efficiency and lightweight architecture, which delivers remarkable performance. Its feature set improves infrastructure speed, making it ideal for enterprises prioritizing optimized performance.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: StarWind is appreciated for its easy deployment process, backed by solid customer support, facilitating effortless implementation and maintenance. In contrast, Sunlight's deployment requires more initial effort due to its novel architecture, though it achieves exceptional operational efficiency once set up. Its customer service, while effective, is less readily accessible compared to StarWind's comprehensive support.

Pricing and ROI: StarWind's pricing is competitive, providing cost-effective solutions that offer a strong ROI, particularly attractive for small and medium-sized businesses with budget constraints. Sunlight entails a higher upfront cost but demonstrates significant long-term value through reduced infrastructure expenses and performance benefits. Its pricing is justified by the improved ROI for organizations emphasizing scalability and top-tier performance.

To learn more, read our detailed StarWind Virtual SAN vs. Sunlight Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

StarWind Virtual SAN vs. Sunlight

July 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

StarWind Virtual SAN

Ranking in HCI

5th

Average Rating

9.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

198

Ranking in other categories

Software Defined Storage (SDS) (1st)

Sunlight

Ranking in HCI

30th

Average Rating

8.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the HCI category, the mindshare of StarWind Virtual SAN is 1.9%, down from 2.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Sunlight is 0.2%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

HCI

Featured Reviews

Vladimir Simion

Pre Post Sales Engineer at Logiccomputer

Achieving seamless cost-saving implementation with exceptional support

The best features that StarWind Virtual SAN offers include the price because comparing to other virtual SAN solutions, this one is the best, and it also has a great support team behind it. My experience with their support has been positive, as their guides regarding the integration are very useful. They have some awesome guides online that show you exactly how to configure the product, how to do the initial setup, and you can speak with them directly. They will be able to connect and verify your setup, run its parameters and see exactly what's working and what is not, and they really help you with that. StarWind Virtual SAN has positively impacted my organization and my customer through initial cost saving. They use this product in a dark site, so I'm not able to provide any additional details about this, but they were really glad about it, they're still using it, and they asked for extending the capacity for it and the support. They really want to use it and are enjoying using it.

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RajeshKANUMURY

Chief Executive Officer at GniYes Inc.

Performs well, effective, and has responsive remote technical support

Sunlight is a scalable solution. It supports on-premises and distributed deployments, as well as public deployments. It has a single pane of management so I can manage all of my VM installations in a distributed manner. It also has a footprint, that allows me to operate on Edge. If for example, you have a retail shop with 2,000 locations and they use a networked point of sale system, or if you are Chipotle and they have so many locations and they have to use a backend system at each location. At the moment, these are all standalone systems that operate with very little connection to the central. We could, however, connect and create a network using Sunlight. We can virtualize and run with Edge thanks to Sunlight. This allows us to operate and obtain high-end computing on Edge for retail. Sunlight is a startup. I am not sure how many users they have, but we have been using it constantly and using the technology to bring in customers.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The failover redundancy is why we bought this product and it has never let us down."

"It includes every feature that a traditional SAN offers and so much more."

"It eliminates the use of expensive physical shared storage."

"StarWind Virtual SAN can improve an organization's storage infrastructure by providing high availability, scalability, cost-effectiveness, performance, and ease of use."

"The ROI is great on this product."

"StarWind Virtual SAN has positively impacted my organization by saving money in skill set development, and certainly minimal downtime across all of our installations, where they maintain almost zero downtime in their 24/7 operations."

"Active-active work mode leads to true redundancy of storage and allows us to distribute the load between multiple nodes."

"vSAN we found was simple to set up, easy to configure and manage and allows us to achieve storage redundancy."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pros

"The performance and small footprint of this solution are its most valuable features. I am able to obtain and use more than 90 percent of the physical hardware capacity."

"It supports the latest technology of NVMe SSD, which is PCIe-based SSD. It has a very good IOPS performance as compared to vSAN. For the same system, I get 1,000 IOPS with vSAN, and with Sunlight, I am able to get almost 10,000 IOPS. In terms of features, it has almost all the features, such as HA and centralized dashboards. It can be managed centrally, and the visibility of the system is very good. They also have very good technical support and customer or partner training."

Cons

"We just need more integration with Veeam."

"They need to invest more in the support documents for real issues happening when integrating the solution with the hypervisor."

"They recommend RAID10 for HDD, which reduces the usable storage capacity."

"This solution should be more self-sufficient, running without creating domains or failover clusters."

"High availability for direct attached hardware drives could be useful for increasing the performance of a storage appliance."

"This product would benefit from having automated alerting functionality."

"A great feature would be a wizard and to include a new disk in the SAN. At the moment, including a new disk requires several steps - some that must be done at the OS level and others in each node."

"I would like them to invest time in reducing the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure."

More StarWind Virtual SAN cons

"My recommendation would be to add this technology to Azure, Microsoft Azure so that we can bring it to the market, or deploy it on public clouds such as Microsoft Azure and Google. It is currently only available on Amazon's public cloud."

"Its reporting and dashboards need to be improved. It currently has very basic reporting options. It should also be made easier to deploy on Unix operating systems. It is easy to deploy on Windows and Linux, but it is currently not easy to deploy on Unix."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would suggest that you download the free version, deploy in your lab, and play with it."

"The setup cost, pricing, and licensing are very straightforward. They are exactly what you expect."

"The premium support from StarWinds is a must have. The ability to have access to a storage engineer 24/7 is a must for a production environment."

"We found that the pricing was perfect; simple and clear."

"The Price/Performance ratio for this solution is outstanding!"

"This is the best priced solution for an SMB."

"The StarWind VSAN business model is very cost-effective."

"The pricing is fine for the work that it does."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pricing and cost advice

"There is an operating cost for the VDIs, which is an additional cost. However, the licensing fee is half that of VMware or Nutanix."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about StarWind Virtual SAN?

It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combines flash and disks of the cluster and forms a virtual shared storage “pool” acce...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?

I had experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing through using the free version of StarWind Virtual SAN for testing purposes, so there was no cost involved during my evaluation. That made i...

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What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?

One area for improvement regarding StarWind Virtual SAN is the lack of a full-feature trial. At the time I tested it, I had access only to the free version, which required using PowerShell scripts ...

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Compared 100% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

StarWind Virtual SAN

July 2025

Download StarWind Virtual SAN product report

Buyer's Guide

HCI

August 2025

Download Sunlight product report

Also Known As

StarWind SAN & NAS

No data available

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.

StarWind

Sunlight is a complete HCI stack that can be deployed on-premise on standard data center hardware, in AWS and on resource-constrained far-edge devices.

Sunlight.io

Sample Customers

Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School

Lavazza, Infraspace

Buyer's Guide

StarWind Virtual SAN vs. Sunlight

July 2025

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