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."The solution is also quite flexible. As an example, other vSAN solutions that we looked at had more stringent requirements regarding mixed HDD/SSD storage which wouldn't have worked in our environment."
"This was a great implementation for a small to mid-size business."
"It provides shared storage to multiple hypervisor hosts. Times had changed, however. StarWind Virtual SAN is the “software replaces hardware” for SAN. We have access control and CCTV systems up and running using Microsoft clustering and shared storage"
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to leverage our server infrastructure more completely without the need to add more hardware."
"StarWind vSAN has a lot of great features and is a perfect solution for mirroring internal disks and flash between servers."
"PowerShell library is pretty good feature as I created with APC PowerChute a script to put volumes on maintenance mode then turning off the StarWind nodes together with the VM and Hosts when UPS reaches 15 percent, this way after a blackout or electrical problems when turning servers on again, there is no issues for syncing or data loss due to energy interrupts."
"We test live failovers every week, and so far, everything has been running smoothly without anything unexpected."
"StarWind vSAN is easy to deploy and administer."
"The most valuable feature of VMware vSAN is the ease of management. VMware vSAN it's a part of VMware ESXi and when you do patching for VMware ESXi, VMware vSAN receives the patches too."
"The ability to have an HA cluster in the absence of a shared storage device or SAN."
"It is easy to use. It is easy to implement for us, and it is also easy to maintain for the customers. It is not necessary to buy some extra devices and talk with other vendors."
"The scalability has been quite good."
"VMware comes with different stacks like VMware Cloud Foundation, which is integrated with different VMware modules. There's interoperability between VMware products."
"The most valuable thing about vSAN is that all of its features have been working well for us for the past two years. We haven't had an issue with them."
"The most valuable features are Erasure Coding, Deduplication and Compression, and the advancement in stretching regarding replication."
"One of the valuable features of vSAN is it has a universal type of technology that allows you to deploy it on any server or hardware. Competitors, such as Nutanix, provides the AOS and can be deployed only on certified hardware. For vSAN, it does not require any kind of certified hardware."
"It would be good to have a little more access to control certain aspects within the UI."
"Our company was hoping for deduplication and encryption across HCI. That is currently not supported."
"The main thing I would like to see improved is the level of documentation."
"I would like to see some additional, and possibly clearer, implementation videos with some slower and possibly more detailed descriptions of what the various steps of implementation are for someone who is unfamiliar with high availability and failover clustering in Windows."
"The interface of the management console of the StarWind Virtual SAN is complex, and it's difficult for the novice user to interact with the management having less knowledge or training in the product."
"The number of different ways you can set it up can make it a little daunting."
"This is a great product."
"The documentation can be better for the free tier."
"As a software-based product, it requires a lot of system resources."
"Hardware load balancing is available on the enterprise version of the solution, however, it's extremely expensive and therefore out of our budget."
"VMware vSAN needs to improve its features because other solutions have more advanced features."
"The price can be reduced. Small businesses cannot afford this solution."
"It could be cheaper."
"We want see a better monitoring tool in vSAN. Monitoring is not that great as of now because it shows us false alarms in the Health status. We would like that to be improved."
"The UI could certainly be better. The inside into what's actually going on with vSAN would be nice to know."
"In a future release, they could add micro-segmentation or security level features integrated into vSAN."
StarWind Virtual SAN is ranked 4th in HCI with 182 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 226 reviews. StarWind Virtual SAN is rated 9.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of StarWind Virtual SAN writes "Excellent support, great performance, and good redundancy". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". StarWind Virtual SAN is most compared with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, StorMagic SvSAN, Red Hat Ceph Storage, DataCore SANsymphony and HPE SimpliVity, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our StarWind Virtual SAN vs. VMware vSAN report.
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