StarWind Virtual SAN vs VMware vSAN comparison

StarWind and VMware are both solutions in the HCI category. StarWind is ranked #4 with an average rating of 9.6, while VMware is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.8. StarWind holds a 2.3% mindshare in HCI, compared to VMware’s 16.4% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of StarWind users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of VMware users who would recommend it.

StarWind Virtual SAN

Read 189 StarWind Virtual SAN reviews

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1,463 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

VMware vSAN

Read 229 VMware vSAN reviews

18,927 Views
13,554 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

StarWind Virtual SAN

VMware vSAN

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 2024

VMware vSAN and StarWind Virtual SAN compete in the virtual storage solutions arena. VMware vSAN has the upper hand due to its seamless integration within the VMware ecosystem.

Features: VMware vSAN features tight integration with VMware products, supporting operations like vMotion and Distributed Resource Scheduler for effective resource management. It provides strong performance by moving storage closer to the CPU, offers policy-based storage management, and seamless scalability. StarWind Virtual SAN offers affordability and ease of use with features like fast deployment on off-the-shelf hardware, efficient data replication, and high availability, making it flexible for various deployments.

Room for Improvement: VMware vSAN could improve its encryption, deduplication, and compatibility with diverse hardware. Users seek better monitoring and integration with different platforms. StarWind Virtual SAN needs enhanced documentation, more intuitive management interfaces, and improved automation capabilities to extend its user-friendliness and reporting features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware vSAN is favored for integrating well within VMware environments, though it requires expert handling. Its technical support is highly rated. StarWind Virtual SAN offers straightforward deployment across various infrastructures and is known for responsive, knowledgeable support, enhancing user experience with a customer-focused approach.

Pricing and ROI: VMware vSAN is considered expensive due to its licensing costs but provides significant operational savings over traditional SANs, justifying its cost with robust features. StarWind Virtual SAN offers a more competitive pricing model, appealing to SMBs with cost-effectiveness and transparent licensing. It delivers similar benefits in functionality leading to a positive return on investment.

To learn more, read our detailed StarWind Virtual SAN vs. VMware vSAN Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

StarWind Virtual SAN vs. VMware vSAN

January 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

4th

Average Rating

9.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

189

Ranking in other categories

Software Defined Storage (SDS) (1st)

VMware vSAN

Ranking in HCI

2nd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

229

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the HCI category, the mindshare of StarWind Virtual SAN is 2.3%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware vSAN is 16.4%, down from 18.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

HCI

Featured Reviews

MIT

IT System Administrator at Ludwig Meyer GmbH & Co. KG

Easy to set up and maintain with good performance capabilities

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. ATM (20220609) is still necessary, since taking a node offline without properly activating the maintenance mode on the vSAN would trigger a full sync of the vSAN nodes. This is fine and a good thing since it ensures data integrity. However, there is something in the making that would ensure integrity without a full sync after a node goes down, which, as stated above, one could "abuse" to patch (and boot = take down) the hypervisors during business hours 😁 Other than that, the thing is rock stable and chugging along without issues. We are an SMB so we "only" have around 50 VMs on our FO cluster, which is a medium load for SSDs. If you plan to go more to the "max" side of performance use, do proper testing!

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Lipaz Hessel

Integration Manager at Gilat Satellite Networks

Expensive solution that requires professional services for installation and implementation

I'm still using a different solution. I only took two servers with vSAN to support one application that needs one feature that only VMware has. If not for that feature, I wouldn't touch VMware. Now, I'm looking at products like Nutanix, Silver Peak, Flexione, and FortiGate. For products that I choose, I don't need a specialist of that vendor. In VMware, I need a specialist in VMware. That's the issue I have with VMware. It's not like I can take any IT person, and they will know what to do. I need to make sure he will do the call, get the certificate and time to practice.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"This was a great implementation for a small to mid-size business."

"The support team is available to solve any problem efficiently."

"The ProActive support gives me peace of mind because I am a one man shop, but with the technical support behind me, I feel like more than just one person. We spent two to three hours, depending on what we have to do, always on the phone, and they do not push to end the call."

"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."

"A typical system administrator with minimal experience in Hyper-V, VMware, or Windows can do VSAN configuration and maintain VSAN operations."

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

"We like their high availability. It reduces the downtime for our entire organization's environment."

"StarWind vSAN is easy to deploy and administer."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pros

"The most important functionality is the ability to extend cluster storage and cluster computing power securely without loss of data."

"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."

"Flexibility, growth, and expansion are probably the more important features for us. As our environment grows, the more users come on, the more VDI workstations that we need, we can easily expand either horizontally or vertically with the environment"

"Its ease of use is most valuable. It is easy to configure, and there is a unified interface, which makes things slightly easier."

"High availability is a valuable aspect of this solution."

"The solution is simple to use compared to other solutions, such as Hyperflex, VxRail, and Nutanix"

"The implementation is simple, it was very straightforward. It took us approximately three weeks because it was installed in four locations."

"It scales well. We have plenty of room to grow."

More VMware vSAN pros

Cons

"The console is something that I believe could be enhanced."

"Ongoing improvements in read and write performance would help meet increasingly demanding workloads."

"For the StarWind VSA vSphere solution, I would like to see a simpler and automated virtual machine installation process in terms of network settings."

"Management tools could be improved, sometimes the usage seems to be slowed down and confusing. A native web interface could also be an option. I love to see in the future port of the software on a general Linux distribution like RedHat or Ubuntu in order to avoid windows license costs. I would also like to see features like erasure coding implemented. On the VSAN software, I would like to see some improvements in the storage pools (eliminate the usage of the file as a data container and use the raw partition)."

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

"The documentation is good. However, if compared with competitors, it could be enhanced and made more professional."

"The dashboard is functional, but it could benefit from a more modern and visually appealing design."

"I want to suggest that the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure needs to be reduced."

More StarWind Virtual SAN cons

"VMware vSAN could improve by having faster reload time and a single point of failure. Resynchronization of many hardware could be better. If you have an outage of a disc or a full system, the replication time is too slow. This has room for improvement."

"The price for the hard drive, for vSAN, is very expensive."

"Pricing is something of a concern."

"I would have liked it to have been more scalable. It's scalable but not as much as, for example, the ScaleIO systems were or the Kaminario"

"It is a memory intensive app."

"The biggest room for improvement I see in vSAN is the lack of SAN connectivity. I've kind of joked around that there is no "SAN" in vSAN. And it's something that we've worked to try and introduce some options for, and we're going to continue to work towards that."

"The big thing is pricing, and the rest of it is mostly good. From a scalability point of view, scaling the storage from network or compute should be easier. It is again all around the cost, and it would be good if it was easier to scale your storage separately from your compute."

"There is room for improvement in vSAN's ability to debug. When it's not working well, debugging becomes quite challenging. Identifying issues when it's lagging or not functioning properly can be difficult."

More VMware vSAN cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If you are looking at a traditional SAN for a small cluster, give StarWind vSAN because you will save thousands without any compromise."

"This solution has a great price for the functionality."

"It's priced fairly. It was definitely cheaper than the competition. The licensing terms are straightforward and reasonable."

"I think the cost of this solution is quite fair."

"The cost, including OPEX, is lower compared to other solutions."

"The license is reusable. We can always rebuild it and apply the license. Then, boom, we get new servers, apply the license, and we're back up and running."

"The scalability limitation for us is its licensing. At some point in the fairly near future, we will probably have to upgrade our license so we can store eight terabytes instead of four. We are currently at four terabytes, but we're starting to knock on the door of that capacity."

"The cost seems a bit steep, and I wish it was less expensive."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pricing and cost advice

"Cost-wise, the Nutanix licenses were cheaper, but in terms of the hardware, there was some contention around it. So, in terms of implementation, the way Nutanix was projecting the implementation on their end was that there were a lot of open-source admin platforms. vSAN is a licensed product in VMware, and Nutanix was proposing a KVM solution, which is open source. That's why their pricing was a bit cheaper, but when we were trying to compare it with an enterprise version of their management platform, it boiled down to the VMware vSAN being most effective in the long run."

"There is a license to use this solution and we pay approximately $30,000 annually. There were not any additional fees required other than the license. The solution is expensive."

"There is a license required for this solution, it is a one-time payment. However, if they want support for the solution, it can be paid annually or for three years."

"If they could reduce the cost, it would be better. Licensing costs are something that they could take care of. If you are a smaller and strong IT team, then VMware vSAN is a very good product. If you want to expand in the service provider space, then you will have to go for an open-source solution like OpenStack. We are now looking at OpenStack because we sell licensing costs. We are a service provider, so the IT component data is a substantial component in our overall costing. We feel that OpenStack might help us to cut down the licensing cost. Therefore, we are looking at SAS storage instead of vSAN. SAS is open source, but it is not wise to have open source without having the backend support. We are using RedHat SAS, and it is an open-source solution. You can also have a free version, but we are using it with support from RedHat so that we have somebody to back us up in case we have a problem. If you do normal business, then IT expense is 1% or 2% of the total turnover. The higher licensing costs sometimes don't make difference to the big companies who are not service providers and are using it only for their internal use. For them, the IT cost is 1% or 2%, but for an IT service provider, the IT costs will go up to 15% to 16% of the total cost of the operations. This is where the licensing costs become irrelevant. For example, the licensing cost of using VMware, VC, and vSAN is 8% of my monthly revenue. Every month, I pay about $35,000, and, with the revised plan, it will be something like $50,000 or revenue of 600k per month, which means almost 8% of the revenue is going into VMware licensing. In a very competitive world, 8% as a cost element is huge. So, if I can bring it down to 2%, I save 6% in revenue expenditure. In terms of profit, 6% of 30% is something like another 25% increase in my profit. My profit can be almost 25%. It would be 20% to 25% in case I am able to handle the licensing costs and bring them to a very low level. Because these IT costs are substantial for us, that is why we are going with OpenStack. OpenStack has a limitation that it requires more hardware. There will be some increase in the hardware cost, but overall we will save 5% to 6% of our licensing cost by using OpenStack."

"It could be cheaper."

"It is too expensive."

"The cost is expensive. I purchased two servers. The hardware cost was $19,000. The software cost for these two servers, including the vSAN, was $30,000, which is $11,000 more than the hardware. Then I had to pay another $5,000 for installation and implementation for professional services. In total, it was $54,000 for two vSAN Servers."

"The product's price is not high. The tool is available at a normal price."

More VMware vSAN pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Educational Organization

52%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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?

Choose StarWind Virtual SAN, it is the most flexible, reliable and cheap solution.

See all answers

What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?

While using StarWind Virtual SAN so far, I have not found anything missing. It is true that we are using it in a very strict project in which we were looking for a solution that would satisfy a str...

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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...

See all answers

Which would you choose - Nutanix Acropolis AOS or VMware vSAN?

We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface that allows you to talk directly to your VM from the present software. We fou...

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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 ...

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Comparisons

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 19% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 17% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 13% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 7% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 6% of the time

More StarWind Virtual SAN Competitors

VxRail vs VMware vSAN

Compared 17% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs VMware vSAN

Compared 15% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VMware vSAN

Compared 9% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs VMware vSAN

Compared 8% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs VMware vSAN

Compared 3% of the time

More VMware vSAN Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

StarWind Virtual SAN

December 2024

Download StarWind Virtual SAN product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware vSAN

December 2024

Download VMware vSAN product report

Also Known As

StarWind SAN & NAS

vSAN

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

VMware vSAN is a software-defined storage product that is used in collaboration with VMware ESXi hypervisor and that provisions and manages storage based on policies, regardless of the underlying hardware. The solution enables you to prime your business for growth through its seamless evolution (it is integrated with vSphere and requires no new tools), its flexibility, and its multi-cloud capabilities. As an industry-leading software, VMware vSAN provides high levels of performance with minimal impact on CPU and memory.

VMware vSAN Features

VMware vSAN has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Storage policy-based management (SPBM): VMware vSAN supports storage policy-based management for automated management of storage profiles.

Software-defined data-at-rest encryption: With this VMware vSAN feature, you can prevent unauthorized access of data at rest.

Multiple nodes: VMware vSAN provides clusters that can include as few as 2 nodes or as many as 64 nodes.

High security and availability: VMware vSAN offers stretched clusters, allowing more than one virtualization host server to be used in the same setup, promoting higher security as well as availability.

Deduplication: VMware vSAN’s deduplication compresses data to ensure efficient storage management and security.

HCI mesh updates: VMware vSAN clusters can share storage capacity with non-HCI Sphere clusters and can adopt HCI without having to scale computing resources and storage or replace existing servers.

Simplified file services: With VMware vSAN’s file services, backup of file shares is simplified. You can use APIs that allow backup and recovery software vendors to integrate with your VMware vSAN file services, which enables backup software to track new data and add scalability enhancements to files.

VMware vSAN Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing VMware vSAN. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO): VMware vSAN helps you reduce upfront costs for businesses because it can be easily deployed on inexpensive x86 servers. In addition, its highly scalable infrastructure and quick deployment also save organizations time and money, making it an efficient storage solution.

Good manageability: VMWare vSAN is easy to set up, manage, and provision, without sacrificing performance.

Scalability: VMware vSAN is agile and allows administrators to scale storage on demand, quickly, and efficiently via policies and rules.

Simplicity: VMWare vSAN is simple to configure since it is embedded in the vSphere hypervisor. Installing it using the vSphere Web Client can be done quickly.

Reduced risk: VMWare vSAN reduces the risk associated with digital transformations by utilizing existing tools, skill sets, and solutions.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the VMware vSAN solution.

PeerSpot user Yves S., CEO, Cloud Evangelist at Comdivision Consulting GmbH, says, “vSAN gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources. We have an overall larger host infrastructure, and we split that up for specific customer test and use cases. In that specific scenario, we can easily add more hosts or reduce the number of hosts in the environment.”

A reviewer who works in Infrastructure Security explains, “The ease of use is great. The initial setup and upgrade process was pretty straightforward. And, technical support is great.”

Laurent N., Director at Softlogic, comments, "The feature that I have found most valuable is that it is easy to deploy. It is easy to create and delete virtual servers. It is easy to create the load balancing and the clustering."

VMware

Sample Customers

Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School

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Buyer's Guide

StarWind Virtual SAN vs. VMware vSAN

January 2025

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