We performed a comparison between StarWind HyperConverged Appliance and VxRail 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 product gave us a cost-effective way to deploy a highly available server environment."
"We are able to execute maintenance on one server while the other is still running."
"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"
"It also provides a high degree of mobility, as the virtual SAN can be moved relatively painlessly between on-site devices and the cloud."
"The backup is readily available for use, and the restoration process is easy."
"When using new (warranty) servers, you can forget about the storage service for several years. The users will not even notice the failure of two servers out of three."
"I like the asynchronous replication and failover features. They are what I'm primarily using it for. The asynchronous replication is helpful because our servers are backed up continuously throughout the day. If anything goes wrong we just fail over immediately. That is a very nice feature to have."
"We like their high availability. It reduces the downtime for our entire organization's environment."
"The initial setup seems to be very straightforward."
"Being able to upgrade machines and software during business operations just by switching nodes has been a huge improvement. We"
"The pricing and discounts given by Starwind on the hardware were unmatched."
"The hardware footprint is great. We've got two 2U servers which replaced four 2U servers. Granted, they were about three years old at that point, but we actually increased our processing capacity by about 50 percent while keeping our storage capacity about the same. We've actually been able to downgrade to a half rack from a full rack because we've gotten rid of some of our network equipment and some of our additional storage arrays."
"It did not hurt that the price for the hardware and three years of support cost less than the disparate hardware the cluster used to run on."
"We have found the live migration to be the most valuable feature. It allows us to seamlessly maintain our servers, as well as have peace of mind if something goes wrong."
"It is the perfect solution for hyper-convergence at a fair price. Our customers have Hyper-V and VMware environments, with Windows servers and Linux."
"It is a safe, fast, and cost-effective storage system that improved our systems to have zero downtime."
"There are so many features, but if I have to choose, I would go for scale-out upgrades and performance. Scale-out upgrades are very valuable. Typically, when customers engage in virtualization, they're committing themselves to run many virtual machines on a fewer number of hosts. They'll have five or six hosts, and they will run all their virtualization on vSphere. They could be having anywhere from 50 to 100 or even more virtual machines. Once all these go into production, getting downtime or getting planned maintenance windows is extremely difficult. It is something that typically businesses will frown upon. With VxRail, you can just go ahead and add a node without disrupting the existing environment, which works very well. That's why scale-out upgrades are a key feature. Its performance is also valuable. It delivers a very high number of IOPS for a hybrid configuration or an all-flash configuration. The processors that are available in the Xeon family are very powerful. They are multi-core with typically 2 gigahertz, 2.4 gigahertz, or higher frequency, so the performance is very much appreciated."
"Depending on your architecture type, it's simple to manage and implement VxRail compared to other solutions. That's why most of our customers use it."
"The update process is very convenient."
"VxRail is very cost-effective and affordable in the long term. It is more recommended when it comes to financial life, but it may depend upon the license. VxRail comes with VMware licensing, which may not be that cost-effective as compared to others. With VMware, it's an auto check competition. VMware is an expensive solution, especially for Nutanix. Nutanix have their own hypervisor called Acronis, which is very cost-effective against the VMware. Nutanix is cheaper for the hardware but not for the software. If you ask the Nutanix partners to deploy Nutanix over Cisco servers or Dell EMC servers, the cost will be higher. Nutanix wants to compete financially. Therefore, they propose their software over the Supermicro server, which is a very cheap Chinese server. In fact, I don't like their terms of service. HyperFlex has the highest price, and it is very expensive. I don't know why. It may be because this is a UCS system, which comes from Cisco and is already expensive. When it comes to HyperFlex, they need the labor to deploy Hyper-V, Citrix, or any other hypervisor."
"This solution optimizes our clients' resources."
"It has a valuable deduplication feature."
"The solution is perfect for the lifecycle management of hardware."
"The update capability of VxRail is crucial for us."
"In the next release, they could make some graphs of the real-time loading, speed of storage, and interfaces. Of course, these can be viewed in other places. But, in the event of a malfunction or troubleshooting, this would be convenient."
"I wish the sync after a failure, such as hardware failure or power-related issues, for example, was faster."
"One main thing this product needs to work on is reporting."
"I would like to see more user-friendly dashboards in future versions."
"It would be great to have more automated tooling around managing the iSCSI connections in Windows"
"The cluster configuration is time-consuming and tedious."
"StarWind Command Center's single-pane management solution only works with Hyper-V."
"The setup and documentation for the installation with the free version could definitely be improved."
"Not much can be improved, to be honest."
"I had some initial difficulties understanding the solution which could have been solved via additional documentation aimed at newcomers."
"What would have to be done urgently is the adaptation of the hardware to the configuration."
"This product is not one hundred percent enterprise-ready, so it is more suitable for SMB."
"The only area that the product could improve would be user training."
"The only critique I might have is that the support is overseas in Eastern Europe and, on occasion, there has been a language issue. But in general, they're as good as can be..."
"It would be nice to have some kind of GUI interface implemented to give you an overall view of the system's health at a glance."
"Most meetings are done via Zoom, and I'm sure you could switch to a text based conversation if needed as they seem like a very accommodating team. It's not something I would worry about if you are a potential client."
"The configurations of VxRail can be difficult. However, it has improved in the newer version. From version 6 to 7, there has been a lot of changes."
"The support charges for VxRail should be optimized and made cheaper."
"Supply chain capabilities are certainly hurting us. We're in the process of placing a large order for more VxRail nodes right now."
"We used an integrator team for the implementation of the solution. The one person who takes care of the maintenance of VxRail, such as upgrading the software. The upgrading takes too long. We have many nodes which takes a long time, they need to improve the speed of the upgrades"
"I wish for the performance environment to be improved."
"The support protocols have changed after Broadcom acquired VMware."
"I would love to see license migration from one host to another."
"The solution should offer more integration with other virtual software. VxRail runs just with VMware, however, maybe it should integrate with Hyper-V or with KVM as well."
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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 120 reviews. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6, while VxRail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, StorMagic SvSAN and Red Hat Ceph Storage, whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and HPE Hyper Converged. See our StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. VxRail report.
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