StarWind Virtual SAN vs VMware vSAN comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between StarWind Virtual SAN and VMware vSAN 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 Virtual SAN vs. VMware vSAN Report (Updated: March 2023).
690,226 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
"StarWind is very easy to use, even if you have had no experience using a SAN before.""The StarWind Virtual SAN provides a clever and unique solution to the Computing Split Brain problem.""Virtual SAN runs on iSCSI, which is free and easy to configure. It's easy to manage from StarWind's GUI console, and it only required a few extra switch ports.""The management was very easy and I was able to find all that I need in the software dashboard.""The biggest benefit was that it allowed us to provide SAN services on a limited hardware budget.""Starwind made it easy to deploy fully redundant, highly available storage at a low cost.""The price was right.""It's quite easy to manage."

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"VMware vSAN is easy to configure, with basic functionality and the customer can maintain the solution.""We have found the solution to be very scalable.""When we do to do more scaled load testing, we can run more dense workloads and still have the same results across all specific nodes""The most valuable features of VMware vSAN are that it receives updates frequently, has good compression, optimized storage, and they provide webinars on what is new. Additionally, the integration with third-party products is good and it is easy to manage.""The flexibility is most valuable. Being able to manage things quickly if something goes wrong is also valuable. Very recently, we had one node that went down due to a power problem, but there was really no major impact on the systems running on top of it.""The solution is stable.""We find it easy to deliver this solution.""The scalability has been quite good."

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Cons
"For someone entering the IT sector with little knowledge of storage, iSCSI, and virtual disks, they might not find the GUI immediately obvious.""I found that certain browsers are not fully compatible with the administration web access portal.""The documentation is good yet is still lacking in a few areas.""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.""Some of the documentation seems to be a bit older and refers to deprecated items.""I wish the sync after a failure, such as hardware failure or power-related issues, for example, was faster.""The documentation is good. However, if compared with competitors, it could be enhanced and made more professional.""Security on the ISCSI protocol could be improved by adding features like OS-type control access, especially for the data center environment."

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"They can improve the manageability of the solution to make it more simple. It is not that complicated, but it will be good if they can make it more simple.""One area that could be improved is the management feature.""The only negative point relates to the licensing. If you want multiple, different servers, it costs money, but you have all the capacity for vSAN. You do not reach the data, but the processor arrays and the current architecture.""A vSAN cluster must have compression and deduplication to be an all-flash array, but it's not supported with a hybrid array. Deduplication and compression work better with an all-flash array, so I think that VMware should give customers the option to activate and support this feature for hybrid arrays. Other products like Nutanix support this.""There could be more features with the automatic backup.""The stability needs to be improved.""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.""I would like for the next release to be a bit cheaper."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The StarWind VSAN business model is very cost-effective."
  • "This solution has competitive prices and the implementation is very easy."
  • "StarWind is a low-cost, full-featured alternative to the traditional SAN environment, and their support will guide you every step of the setup."
  • "The support contract is well worth it. The price for it was very reasonable and their team has been very engaged whenever we reach out."
  • "This solution is very accessible and the pro-level for support is well worth the cost."
  • "We found that the pricing was perfect; simple and clear."
  • "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 →

  • "It is cheap. It is $0.02 a gig."
  • "The licensing cost is high and should be taken into account."
  • "I would like to use more advanced models of the solution but the price needs to be reduced. There are some extra costs for this solution including a license."
  • "Enterprise customers can customize their licenses according to their own needs and budget."
  • "This solution is expensive. Nutanix provides us with Acropolis Operating System (AOS) along with its hardware, while VMware provides vSAN, vCenter, and vSphere which all have separate licenses and costs."
  • "I feel the pricing to be reasonable."
  • "In comparison with other solutions, such as HP or Cisco, I find the solution to be quite pricey."
  • "The price of VMware vSAN is expensive and there is an annual license required."
  • More VMware vSAN Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The most valuable features are high availability and real-time replication between two servers.
    Top Answer: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.
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Top Answer: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 found… more »
    Top Answer: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… more »
    Ranking
    4th
    out of 38 in HCI
    Views
    9,444
    Comparisons
    3,247
    Reviews
    88
    Average Words per Review
    588
    Rating
    9.6
    2nd
    out of 38 in HCI
    Views
    41,695
    Comparisons
    33,213
    Reviews
    65
    Average Words per Review
    428
    Rating
    8.2
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    vSAN
    Learn More
    Overview

    For SMB, ROBO, Cloud and Hosting providers, who look to cut down virtualization expenses, our solution is StarWind VSAN. It is software that eliminates any need in physical shared storage by basically “mirroring” internal hard disks and flash between hypervisor servers. There is less hardware to buy in general, consequently less money is spent on purchase and maintenance. The existing hardware is used with maximum efficiency, so there is no money wasted at all.

    StarWind Virtual SAN targets those who already have servers, or are bound to a particular vendor list to buy from. In case there is a new virtualization infrastructure to be built from scratch, StarWind offers a much better way – StarWind HyperConverged Appliance. It is a turnkey solution complete with hardware and software, powered by StarWind Virtual SAN. Those who need to build and maintain virtualization infrastructure at little to no expense, may be interested in StarWind Virtual SAN Free.

    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."

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    Learn more about VMware vSAN
    Sample Customers
    Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
    Read Some Case Studies At Home Cloud CaribCINgroupDiscovery Check out the Rest of our Customer Stories Here
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company11%
    Construction Company9%
    Educational Organization9%
    Computer Software Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company19%
    Government9%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company13%
    Comms Service Provider12%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Healthcare Company10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company20%
    Comms Service Provider11%
    Government9%
    Educational Organization9%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business64%
    Midsize Enterprise21%
    Large Enterprise15%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise57%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business32%
    Midsize Enterprise23%
    Large Enterprise46%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business22%
    Midsize Enterprise21%
    Large Enterprise58%
    Buyer's Guide
    StarWind Virtual SAN vs. VMware vSAN
    March 2023
    Find out what your peers are saying about StarWind Virtual SAN vs. VMware vSAN and other solutions. Updated: March 2023.
    690,226 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    StarWind Virtual SAN is ranked 4th in HCI with 88 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 66 reviews. StarWind Virtual SAN is rated 9.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of StarWind Virtual SAN writes "Easy to set up and maintain with good performance capabilities". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources". StarWind Virtual SAN is most compared with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), DataCore SANsymphony and StorMagic SvSAN, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and HPE Nimble Storage. See our StarWind Virtual SAN vs. VMware vSAN report.

    See our list of best HCI vendors and best Cloud Software Defined Storage vendors.

    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.