Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance comparison

Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

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Review summaries and opinions

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

Categories and Ranking

Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series

Ranking in HCI

20th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

8.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

StarWind HyperConverged App...

Ranking in HCI

14th

Average Rating

9.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Software Defined Storage (SDS) (9th)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the HCI category, the mindshare of Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series is 1.3%, down from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is 0.8%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

HCI

Featured Reviews

Genesis Dapoza

Email Administrator at Technopaq, Inc.

simplifies management for clients familiar with VMware, and offers a user-friendly management and configuration experience

With the VX machines, the clients often confuse the hardware itself with the services and resources. VMs are configured according to resources - memory, hard disk capacity, and network. These resources, including memory and processor, are actually shared on the VX Series. So, if the server's processor is underpowered or unreliable for the VMs, many of the VMs will encounter issues. Ideally, the physical server configuration should align more closely with the needs of the virtual servers. The drawback is that the hardware resources (CPU, memory, storage) are shared among all the VMs running on the VX Series. If the server's processor is underpowered for the VMs, many of the VMs might have performance issues. An improvement could be to have more granular control over resource allocation to VMs.

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Russ Le Puill

IT Manager at St Peter's Church of England Aided School

Proactive support with improved speed and resilience

There was a long delay with shipping, which we weren't expecting, but we were kept updated throughout. It wasn't made clear to us that we needed to provide our own SFP modules to connect to our infrastructure, so that could have been a bit clearer. It would be amazing if there was, perhaps, a more automated process for updating the hosts themselves, although the maintenance mode works well. Our StarWind command center doesn't seem to have all the options available currently, which support is investigating for us.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series' deployment is easy. We are a tier-one platinum partner who is into multiple implementations."

"The clients like the solution’s simplicity."

"Installation is straightforward because it's a vSAN. It only took one or two days."

"We find the setup quite straightforward and very easy."

"The VX machines are scalable."

"The product runs wonderfully and has already gone through several failure tests."

"The option to deploy a hyper-converged system without an expensive storage switch was a benefit."

"We opted for 24-hour monitoring and support, which has already paid for itself."

"The most valuable feature is the high-availability. We have three nodes, and all data will be synched instantly through all the nodes. Even if we had a disaster where two nodes failed, containing dozens of critical machines, almost automatically, all the loads would be run on the remaining node."

"However, StarWind HCA won us over in two areas: price and support. We were actually able to install an all-flash StarWind HCA for less than other vendors' spinning rust solutions! We were able to roll five years of warranty and support into the purchase price and still save thousands of dollars upfront."

"Live migration between nodes was quick and simple."

"We also substantially reduced network complexity by eliminating that standalone SAN. That reduced complexity has allowed us to concentrate on improving other areas of our network."

"StarWind is very resilient and built off of quality vendor hardware."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pros

Cons

"Support could be better."

"With the VX machines, the clients often confuse the hardware itself with the services and resources. VMs are configured according to resources - memory, hard disk capacity, and network. These resources, including memory and processor, are actually shared on the VX Series. So, if the server's processor is underpowered or unreliable for the VMs, many of the VMs will encounter issues. Ideally, the physical server configuration should align more closely with the needs of the virtual servers."

"The user management could be a bit better. It's something they could improve upon in future releases."

"Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series needs to improve its stability. Its resolution should be faster."

"The product must provide AI features."

"I had some initial difficulties understanding the solution which could have been solved via additional documentation aimed at newcomers."

"The web-managed interface (a separate VM) could be better."

"Multi cluster support for their Command Console would be very beneficial. Currently, you can only work with a single cluster at a time. The console is new so I expect much growth in this area in the near future. The other area that could be improved is the tech support locale."

"I think that the pre-installation questionnaire was a little confusing and ambiguous."

"We were slightly disappointed with the hardware footprint. We were led to believe, and all the pre-sales tech information requirements pointed to the fact, that it was coming on Dell hardware. Then it came on bulk servers."

"I think some performance metrics would be nice to see, especially on the storage side."

"The only thing my team has recommended improving on is possibly a StarWind-customized GUI to monitor the overall system health, similar to 5nine Manager."

"We need to be very cautious in following every step when updating the physical host. We must move over each VM and drain roles from the servers to ensure everything goes smoothly without interruptions. If this were a more automated process, this would be less taxing each time an upgrade is needed."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"You need to pay a license for additional features. If we need to monitor hardware for the automatic alert notification, we need to pay them."

"There is room for improvement in the licensing structure, maybe. Regarding sizing the resources, sometimes it's difficult to calculate/compute them based on the client's requirements."

"The tool is expensive."

"The tool's pricing is competitive."

"When I researched they came the most cost-effective."

"We didn't have any issue with pricing or any of the sales process."

"A desired feature or service would be the ability to have a hardware subscription plan that ensures routine hardware updates in conjunction with hyper-converged software."

"The HCA price is all-inclusive (setup, hardware, support, warranty), except for your standard Microsoft Server licensing."

"It's an all in one package, making it very easy."

"There is a bit of a start-up cost. Having never used HCAs before, I was reluctant to buy it. I would suggest that you jump in and do it, as I wish I hadn't wasted so much time."

"I honestly feel that there's no one else in the market doing what they're doing for the price point that they're doing it at. That's why I asked them about investing in their company. I think that the options they're providing and the software that they have is sort of revolutionary for the price point... The total cost was $24,400."

"I was able to bring the price per year down by going out to a five-year plan."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Healthcare Company

Computer Software Company

17%

Educational Organization

13%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series?

The VX machines are scalable.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series?

The licensing model is moderately complex. The tool is expensive. It is VMware’s fault, though.

What needs improvement with Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series?

The product must provide AI features. It depends on VMware since the core is software. The solution must provide a more detailed plan to enable simplicity of use.

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

It's not the cheapest, however, the solution works incredibly well and is so simple to licence and maintain.

What needs improvement with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

What is your primary use case for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

We desperately needed to update yet downsize our data centre. We had six hosts for only approximately 14 or so Virtual machines and two old SANs. All of this was running on 10+ year-old refurbished...

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Comparisons

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HPE Hyper Converged vs Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series

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Product Reports

HCI

Download Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series product report

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Download StarWind HyperConverged Appliance product report

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report

Also Known As

Lenovo VX Series, ThinkAgile VX Series

No data available

Overview

Differentiating yourself from the competition is vital in today’s fast-moving business environment. To support your business, IT systems must be simple, agile, and cost-effective so you can meet your customers’ requirements to be ever online. Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series enables you to meet these requirements by focusing on the business outcome you require, rather than on building your infrastructure.

ThinkAgile VX Series, powered by VMware vSAN, is available in several models. Each is preconfigured, pretested, and optimized to provide the simplest way to bring a new VMware hyperconverged environment online. If you have an existing VMware environment, the VX Series can integrate into it easily.

Designed for any size business from SMBs through large enterprises, VX Series can be used as infrastructure for remote office/branch office (ROBO) and retail stores as well as virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and enterprise applications.

Lenovo

For SMB, ROBO and Enterprises, who look to bring in quick deployment and operation simplicity to virtualization workloads and reduce related expenses, our solution is StarWind HyperConverged Appliance (HCA). It unifies commodity servers, disks and flash, hypervisor of choice, StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN and associated software into a single manageable layer. The HCA supports scale-up by adding disks and flash, and scale-out by adding extra nodes.

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance consists of StarWind Virtual SAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or VMware Virtual SAN “Ready Nodes”, targeting those, who are building their virtualization infrastructure from scratch. In case there is an existing set of servers, we offer a “software only version”, which is essentially our years proven StarWind Virtual SAN. Basically, it’s the fuel powering StarWind HCA.

StarWind

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Sears Home and Franchise Business

Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance