Sponsored
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 21, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

StarWind Virtual SAN
Sponsored
Ranking in HCI
4th
Average Rating
9.6
Number of Reviews
185
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (1st)
VMware vSAN
Ranking in HCI
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
228
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VxRail
Ranking in HCI
1st
Average Rating
8.6
Number of Reviews
126
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2024, in the HCI category, the mindshare of StarWind Virtual SAN is 2.1%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware vSAN is 16.2%, down from 18.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VxRail is 21.5%, down from 22.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
HCI
Unique Categories:
Software Defined Storage (SDS)
9.2%
No other categories found
No other categories found
 

Q&A Highlights

Miriam Tover - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 28, 2021
 

Featured Reviews

NisarAhmad - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 12, 2023
Affordable, reliable, and fast
We use StarWind Virtual SAN to create a reliable, scalable, and cost-effective solution for storage requirements. We used it to store data in a VMware environment.  We have a small setup of servers where we use Starwind Virtual SAN as our primary storage solution to store critical data and…
SS
Mar 18, 2024
Offers features to monitor the health and performance of vSAN environment but could have more user-friendly GUI
A more user-friendly GUI for troubleshooting and resolving issues would be beneficial. Now, addressing problems often requires opening support tickets and command-line interventions, which can be cumbersome for customers and partners alike. For example, a server might disconnect from vSAN because we didn't realize we needed the command line to check certain things. Ideally, they should develop a web portal that allows users to diagnose and fix errors on their own. So, I would like to see a tool in the web portal to address vSAN issues. A tool to fix recent issues. There are some additional features I would like to see but it's not directly related to vSAN, but I'd like to touch on the vCLS feature. In the past, there was no such feature, but they're planning to develop this feature and integrate it. This creates challenges for our sales team and sometimes even difficulties in maintaining service on other servers. Ideally, they could develop something that allows authorized users to check out a server, essentially take it offline for maintenance, before doing so and notifying others. The VCLS feature is confusing for your customers. It would be better to develop a feature that helps authorized users check out and disable this feature before taking a server offline for maintenance.
AD
Jan 5, 2022
It's a simple, decent solution for customers with a small footprint
It's somewhat hard to speak about specific features, but I like VxRail's simplicity and ease of use. It's a decent solution for customers with a small footprint. If you're operating a big data center, it's not easy to position VxRail or HCI solutions, but when you have a small customer managing…

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution."
"The install itself is easy as pie."
"The fact that I can now count on a true failover solution is what is most appealing."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support. They are excellent and you can learn a lot from the support team."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a very easy-to-use solution that can be quickly and easily deployed and configured without intimate and specific knowledge in the virtualization sphere."
"The license price is one of the cheapest in the market."
"StarWind Virtual SAN can improve an organization's storage infrastructure by providing high availability, scalability, cost-effectiveness, performance, and ease of use."
"StarWind support has been great in helping resolve other issues not caused by their software."
"There is not a lot of maintenance required."
"vSAN has just one datastore. so customers do not need to think where to put their VMs, how to design the physical disk RAID, the LUN size, the LUN mapping, etc. when they use NetApp/EMC/HDS or other storage systems."
"VMware vSAN is a global solution, so we can manage all the storage solutions in one place. It's embedded in VCI solutions."
"One of the valuable features for us is the ability to restrict the performance capacity per client. Other solutions don't have this feature."
"It is easy to work with, easy to handle, and 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 most valuable feature is the simplification of storage. We no longer need to deal with Fibre Channel and the external storage arrays."
"The solution is quite stable."
"This is a good solution if you want to deploy an ACI Environment but don't have all the necessary resources."
"The ease of deployment and management of the solution are the most valuable aspects of the product."
"The cover points feature in VxRail is remarkable. It's unique. It has an intervention failover system as well as an automatic failover system, reaching clusters existing in VxRail. This makes all files act as a single file with a large and huge resource, and, of course, with customized administration, configuration, and resources. It provides automatic failover for redundancy and data recovery."
"The most valuable feature in the VxRail solution is the software that binds the management portal and its ease of use of managing the environment. The guys don't have to worry about getting multiple solutions specialist. You can have one person looking at and managing the whole environment."
"The scalability of VxRail is very good."
"This is a good solution for medium-sized installations especially when it will be coupled with VMware."
"I would recommend VxRail, it works for most of the use cases."
"One of VxRail's most valuable features is its small footprint in the data center. Additionally, the solution's simplicity is a significant advantage. You don’t have to configure or learn about storage software and administer many things separately. You can do all the administration jobs in one pane, bringing agility and simplicity."
 

Cons

"The Command Center, a free guest VM for management and monitoring, leaves something to be desired. It could have more accurate real-time information and better reporting visuals, which seem to be an afterthought."
"Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer."
"The software monitoring should be web-based to be reachable from any VLAN workstation."
"Some configuration options still demand service restarting."
"The product can include a more simple way of synchronization after a forced shutdown as the current process has a few more steps to check that hosts have synchronized and this can be automated."
"The documentation could be clearer in terms of explaining the installation."
"It would help us if the vendor continues to release software updates for earlier versions of the Windows operating systems."
"I think the setup could be streamlined a bit."
"I would like to see it be more hardware-agnostic. Other than that, the only other complication is - and it has gotten better with the newer versions - that lately, once you're running an all-flash, if you need to grow or scale down your infrastructure, it's a long process. You need to evacuate all data and make sure you have enough space on the host, then add more hosts or take out hosts. That process is a little bit complex. You cannot scale as needed or shrink as needed."
"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."
"Enterprise customers get discounts on the solution's licensing pricing, but it is too expensive for SMB customers."
"It would be much improved if we could somehow integrate a better backup with it. Right now, we're using Veeam and it's okay, but I would like more of a VDP vSAN solution. That would be excellent. The VDP, at least the last time we looked at, it was just not quite there."
"This solution would benefit from better collaboration with Cisco for driver updates."
"It doesn't seem like it gives the performance that an actual SAN would give for heavy IOPS, read/writes."
"It would be ideal if the solution offered some intelligent monitoring."
"Hardware load balancing is available on the enterprise version of the solution, however, it's extremely expensive and therefore out of our budget."
"We have issues at times with the one-click upgrade, which is bugging us. At times, the one-click upgrade does not work or does not work well."
"I can't speak to any missing features or weak aspects of the system just yet. We haven't had a chance to really dig in."
"You cannot install another operating system such as Microsoft or Hyperflex or Nutanix. We have also had a hardware problem."
"if we're looking at costs, Nutanix will win because it allows flexibility in the type of hardware you can use."
"The cost is quite high. It's a very expensive solution to run."
"There are still some features which aren't built into Cisco, like virtualized networking, that use its applications. However, these can be purchased through another product as an additional licensing cost to us."
"The solution should facilitate the separate expansion of computing and storage."
"I would love to see license migration from one host to another."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is more than reasonable."
"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."
"I think that purchasing StarWind Virtual SAN Professional Edition would be optimal for most."
"The free version is great to use for labs or test environments."
"When we did all the analysis for StarWind, it was approximately 20 percent less than any of the other solutions that we looked at."
"We are happy with the price."
"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."
"I think the bang for the buck is much better with StarWind Virtual SAN."
"We did consider other hyperconverged solutions. It usually came down to price. vSan was the most cost effective thing."
"Perhaps a bundle, like Essentials, would allow more businesses to make the leap to the product."
"Basically, vSAN is a license in addition to that of the classic VMware Vsphere, which is also mandatory."
"ROI from an administrative perspective is clearly much better because I only have to deal with one user interface."
"The licenses are very expensive. The renewal of licenses has extra costs attached to it."
"We have increased our user productivity."
"The solution requires a license. The payment is on a yearly basis and It is not overly expensive."
"The product’s pricing is a bit higher than other solutions."
"It varies. It could be $100,000 at the smaller end and millions and millions of dollars at the higher end."
"It is just as cheap to move over to an HCI solution as it is to maintain a legacy system."
"The real ROI is the benefit of being able to do a true hybrid cloud, not having to move from CAPEX to OPEX in a pure break."
"The solution is very expensive."
"A typical node that I would sell to a customer has a list price be between $80,000 and $100,000 per node. Organizations typically start with four nodes. That's the hardware, software, VMware licensing, everything. Customers typically pay about half of that - approximately $45,000 to $50,000 a node. On average, it costs about $200,000 to get your foot in the door."
"We were expecting Dell EMC to bring us something that would work very quickly and easily, but also be at a reasonable price point, and they did."
"The price of VxRail highly depends on your design and your configuration. For example, if I connect Pure Storage directly to ESXi hosts and bypass Fiber Channel switches and I will save on money. However, it reduces my redundancy and makes it not as robust of deployment and easy to manage. An HCI environment, it's more cost-effective than utilizing a traditional SAN. With storage and computing altogether, you don't necessarily have to involve the networking team as much. I don't necessarily need somebody that understands Brocade's or Cisco Fiber Channel Switches, because I have it all right there."
"The price is good."
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Answers from the Community

Miriam Tover - PeerSpot reviewer
Sep 28, 2021
Sep 28, 2021
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 factors – • Skillsets available internally for validating, testing and roll out. • The time available for an organization to roll out the infrastructure. Given the above two criteria, if an organization ...
2 out of 20 answers
it_user849069 - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 6, 2019
VxRail is an complett and Automatiatet Solutions and is Build on vSAN Vmware and is a part from the Solution , This Solution will build your complet VMware Infrastruktur incl. Hardware. and iDRAC. This is the Software defined Datacenter. You ned special Hardware from DellEMC vSAN is just the Software defined Storage Solution from VMware, this can build with vSAN Ready Hardware nodes.
SP
Feb 6, 2019
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 factors – • Skillsets available internally for validating, testing and roll out. • The time available for an organization to roll out the infrastructure. Given the above two criteria, if an organization has lot of internal skillsets within the organization and enough time to choose the relevant hardware and test/validate each in terms of type of processor, memory, hard drives, HBA, NIC etc and have the relevant drivers and patches, then vSAN would be a more economical options. The advantages with vSAN is that you have more flexibility in choosing your brand and hardware and more economical compared to a pre-engineered system. The disadvantages are time to roll out will be more as lot of testing and validation needs to be done. Secondly, upgrade to future vSpehre versions might involve lot of complexities and time consuming forcing many customers to stick with the current version. Of course, there are exceptions to this where customers have also migrated successfully but the journey was not an easy one. On the other hand, VxRail comes as an pre-engineered system that is plug and play. Few clicks and input of IP address gets you up and running in few minutes. Roll of the infrastructure is fast as no testing and validation from a hardware perspective is needed as it is already done by Dell EMC at the factory. Management and upgradation to new vSphere versions are very easy and not complicated. Disadvantages will be the flexibility to choose your brand or choice of hardware is very limited and would be slightly more costlier than building your own vSAN nodes. In conclusion, if you have the budget and want less headache in management, automation and up-gradation, choose VxRail. If you have limited budget and is ready to spend long time in solving complexities - you can opt for vSAN.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
19%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Educational Organization
48%
Computer Software Company
9%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
5%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
10%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

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) combin...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?
Make the most of your 30-day trial license, and if needed, you should contact the sales department of StarWind to ext...
What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?
The dashboard is functional, but it could benefit from a more modern and visually appealing design. A facelift would ...
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 e...
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 interfa...
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 resea...
How does HPE Nimble Storage compare to VxRail?
HPE Nimble Storage dHCI Vs. VxRail One of the best things about the HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is the three, two, one, z...
What are the major differences between VxRail and Dell EMC PowerFlex?
VxRail vs. Dell EMC PowerFlex VxRail provides stable solutions for technical problems while at the same time not bein...
How does VxRail compare with Cisco HyperFlex HX Series?
VxRail provides stable solutions for technical problems while at the same time not being too expensive for a company ...
 

Also Known As

StarWind SAN & NAS
vSAN
VCE VxRail
 

Overview

 

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
World Wide Technology Inc, Renault Sport Formula One Team, 8x8 Inc, Brownes, Canadian Pacific, Canopy, Denton, EDF, Unilin, Xerox
Find out what your peers are saying about VMware vSAN vs. VxRail and other solutions. Updated: July 2024.
793,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.