We performed a comparison between StarWind Virtual Tape Library 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."vSAN we found was simple to set up, easy to configure and manage and allows us to achieve storage redundancy."
"The performance of the solution is accurate and concise."
"Being hardware agnostic is a must and definitely scored points for us."
"The installation of StarWind Virtual SAN was pretty easy, and the configuration was done in no time."
"It provided the much-needed HA on an extremely low budget."
"The primary purpose of this software is to create a virtual SAN between local storage on Hyper-V hosts. I find this feature most valuable since it accomplishes this quite well."
"One of the most valuable features is the way it sets up the virtual SAN, because we don't have to buy a separate appliance for storage. It uses the existing storage on the servers, which is definitely a cost savings for us."
"The software is easy to setup and manage, and the support is excellent."
"It is a stable solution."
"StarWind VTL allowed us to back up to virtual tape that was created within Veeam and upload the tape to the cloud."
"I like the fact that we can simultaneously upload the virtual tapes to different cloud providers, and the settings can be adjusted to speed up the upload times even further."
"The most valuable feature of the StarWind Virtual Tape Library is the archiving to the AWS cloud."
"The solution made our backups way more reliable."
"I like the orchestration feature."
"You get the benefit of local storage, but you have the protection of shared storage."
"We can scale it very easily for a test environment. We were able to segment our DMZ so it wasn't connected to anything, which we really liked."
"When we do to do more scaled load testing, we can run more dense workloads and still have the same results across all specific nodes"
"It is easy to work with, easy to handle, and easy to manage."
"The deduplication and compression are excellent."
"vSAN that has been most effective in streamlining storage operations. For data recovery alerts, it uses tools like snapshots and vMotion."
"It is very easy to set up and very easy to use. It is very useful."
"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."
"It should reclaim white spaces after big files are deleted."
"This solution should be more self-sufficient, running without creating domains or failover clusters."
"I'd love to see native export of metrics (via Prometheus or something of that nature) to allow us to get more metrics available on our existing dashboard software."
"I wish there was online support because email return takes a long time and a faster solution should be found."
"Management tools could be improved, sometimes the usage seems to be slowed down and confusing. A native web interface could also be an option. I love to see in the future port of the software on a general Linux distribution like RedHat or Ubuntu in order to avoid windows license costs. I would also like to see features like erasure coding implemented. On the VSAN software, I would like to see some improvements in the storage pools (eliminate the usage of the file as a data container and use the raw partition)."
"Diagnostics information or alerts on the state of systems could also be implemented to give more visibility."
"Our company was hoping for deduplication and encryption across HCI. That is currently not supported."
"The solution's training process and online documentation could be more thorough."
"The initial installation can be complex and should be simplified."
"I am not sure if this is a limitation of my physical hardware or if it is the software itself. However, I would like the throughput to be faster."
"The main thing that I felt could be improved was having an estimated time of completion for the virtual tape uploads to the cloud."
"The monitoring feature in VMware vSAN could be better."
"The only thing that can be improved is the cost."
"One of the things that we've had challenges with are when we place hosts into maintenance mode. Sometimes doing so triggers large re-sync processes which can be time-consuming and which have, at times, pushed the capacity to the threshold. I definitely think making some changes in that area would provide some big improvements."
"I would like to be able to limit IOPS."
"The solution must provide better customization."
"We are facing some problems with updates with the VMware vSAN. When we upgraded from version 6.5 to 7, we have been faced with many problems. They have been deploying many hotfixes for this version, and they need to continue to improve this version."
"Lacks sufficient storage terabytes."
"There are certain shortcomings in the stability of the product where improvements are required."
More StarWind Virtual Tape Library Pricing and Cost Advice →
StarWind Virtual Tape Library is ranked 14th in HCI with 6 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. StarWind Virtual Tape Library is rated 10.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of StarWind Virtual Tape Library writes "Flexible and reliable with helpful support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". StarWind Virtual Tape Library is most compared with Red Hat Ceph Storage and HPE StoreVirtual, 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 Tape Library vs. VMware vSAN report.
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