"vSAN we found was simple to set up, easy to configure and manage and allows us to achieve storage redundancy."
"The most useful aspect is the hyper-converged SD SAN and the ease to expand it by just adding cheap SSD or NVME disks."
"Recovery and maintenance are now less stressful and most importantly, it allows our users to keep working."
"Having the ability to scale horizontally if needed is a huge plus for future growth."
"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."
"It is extremely stable."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to leverage our server infrastructure more completely without the need to add more hardware."
"Highly available storage is the most valuable feature. The entire rollout is hyper-converged and requires no extra storage further than the hosts in which Hyper-V is running. Another feature that has been great is the support from StarWind in general. We have their proactive support package on the main cluster that employs Starwind Virtual SAN."
"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."
"Overall the solution is very good."
"VMware vSAN is a global solution, so we can manage all the storage solutions in one place. It's embedded in VCI solutions."
"It is very easy to set up and very easy to use. It is very useful."
"Easy to deploy and manage."
"We've found the solution to be scalable."
"I like the orchestration feature."
"We can also create test cases. We can even throttle down performance or release more performance. So, we can run more precise test scenarios."
"VMware vSAN is easy to configure, with basic functionality and the customer can maintain the solution."
"I would like to see different levels of support offered."
"If there was one thing we could request, it would be the ability to shrink volumes. For example, we want to be able to decrease in the size of the volume."
"It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers."
"Maybe in the future, the replication will be supported in more cloud providers."
"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."
"StarWind relies on the underlying OS to manage the "SAN files" whether that would be a RAID volume, software RAID (such as LVM), etc. It would be useful if StarWind could incorporate the actual physical drive management inside of the solution, similar to Storage Spaces Direct."
"If there was a way to automatically put disks in maintenance mode when shutting the host down and exit maintenance mode automatically, that would simplify things."
"I see no need for major improvements but there could be some improvements in the form of notifications and the simplifying of maintenance mode."
"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."
"Integration could be better."
"VMware vSAN could improve by having better integration with other vendors and the storage is limited, I prefer it to the traditional storage."
"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."
"They should provide Deduplication and Compression over the hybrid drives."
"The customer service is good but there is a cost for it. It does not come free."
"In a future release, they can bring in the object storage capabilities to this solution. Currently, there is not any compatibility."
"VMware vSAN could improve by adding NAS and object storage."
"The pricing could be better when it comes to renewing the licenses."
Try it today
Sunlight is ranked 21st in Hyper-Converged (HCI) with 1 review while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in Hyper-Converged (HCI) with 65 reviews. Sunlight is rated 8.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Sunlight writes "A feature-rich solution that supports NVMe SSD and has centralized management, great performance, and good support and partner training". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources". Sunlight is most compared with Nutanix Acropolis AOS, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity and HPE Nimble Storage.
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