We performed a comparison between Pivot3 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 fact that the solution is vendor-agnostic allows it to be used with any virtualization vendor while remaining a powerful abstraction over storage."
"The most valuable features are high availability and real-time replication between two servers."
"The product gave us a cost-effective way to deploy a highly available server environment."
"The StarWind Virtual SAN provides a clever and unique solution to the Computing Split Brain problem."
"For those basic uses, it's simple to set up and manage, and it seems to do a fine job."
"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 ability to keep data accessible even in the event of hardware failures is highly valued, as it ensures business continuity."
"We have experienced multiple hardware failures at one site and the fault-tolerant volume worked exactly as expected with zero downtime."
"The most valuable feature is the visual encoding."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of implementation."
"One feature we found useful was the product's complete ability to integrate with vCenter."
"The ability to have a disaster recovery option for our end-users by being able to use VDI and the vSANs, and the ability to do replication across multiple data centers, are valuable to us."
"VMware has been around for a long time are are doing a decent job at catching up with the latest technologies i.e. bringing in kubernetes and containerization. Overall, this is a great tool for virtualization."
"The implementation is simple, it was very straightforward. It took us approximately three weeks because it was installed in four locations."
"The scalability is very good and the solution is stable and reliable."
"The most valuable feature for our customers is vMotion. It allows them to shut down virtual machines and migrate them to others servers."
"There is not a lot of maintenance required."
"The most valuable features are Erasure Coding, Deduplication and Compression, and the advancement in stretching regarding replication."
"It's very scalable. I like that. Adding a node is easy. Adding a disk group is easy."
"I would love to see more vendor selection to be available for the HCA/vSAN appliances."
"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."
"I wish they would improve the documentation for the beginner level as it's not very clear on the web page."
"I am expecting to see it more user-friendly in the future."
"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."
"Proper training sessions should be included with the licensing."
"It could have a dashboard so that you can check all servers' SAN health and performance."
"It would be great to have more automated tooling around managing the iSCSI connections in Windows"
"One of the biggest problems with HCI vendors was the lack of flexibility for adding resources"
"Snapshot notification would be a good addition."
"In the next release, I would like to see compatibility and support for critical applications, like SAP."
"The product's complex setup phase is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The server files are larger than before."
"The product can be improved in a couple of ways. One of those would be that they have a lot of hidden features, that are through the CLI, that would be great to have in the GUI, or just be more open about those features. It's something called RVC. It's a tool in the back end. It's a really great tool, but I had to find it through Reddit. So more information on stuff like that would be great. Also, in the user interface, giving us more features and more reporting that we can do from vSphere itself would be helpful."
"It could be more robust. The latency is also an issue for us, and the reliability. I would like it to be faster and a little more flexible."
"I am looking for more of a software-defined storage platform that uses different protocols, such as iSCSI, NFS, and CIS, and maybe also has an object as part of that. They should 100% make it more of a storage-based product where it is not linked just to VMware, and it also has NFS and iSCSI built-in at a scalable level. They should turn it more into a dedicated storage-as-a-service platform instead of just being built into the VMware kernel. Their level one and level two support is not at all good, and it should be improved."
"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."
"Dedupe in non flash drives can be improved."
"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"
Earn 20 points
Pivot3 is ranked 25th in HCI while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Pivot3 is rated 8.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Pivot3 writes "One feature we found useful was the product's complete ability to integrate with vCenter". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Pivot3 is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Pivot3 vs. VMware vSAN report.
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