We performed a comparison between Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series 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.
"Active-active work mode leads to true redundancy of storage and allows us to distribute the load between multiple nodes."
"A typical system administrator with minimal experience in Hyper-V, VMware, or Windows can do VSAN configuration and maintain VSAN operations."
"The product's core feature of virtualizing our storage is by far the most valuable."
"StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere is a software-defined storage solution that has reduced administration time for storage. It's pretty straightforward to install and setup it and so far it has been robust and worked as advertised from StarWind."
"Speed and high availability have been the most valuable for us."
"I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"Their support staff is comprised of true experts who can also communicate clearly."
"For those basic uses, it's simple to set up and manage, and it seems to do a fine job."
"Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series' deployment is easy. We are a tier-one platinum partner who is into multiple implementations."
"The VX machines are scalable."
"We find the setup quite straightforward and very easy."
"Installation is straightforward because it's a vSAN. It only took one or two days."
"Allows us to implement more quickly, and to ease the maintenance."
"VMware comes with different stacks like VMware Cloud Foundation, which is integrated with different VMware modules. There's interoperability between VMware products."
"The product's initial setup phase was very straightforward."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"It is simple to manage, very easy to implement and troubleshoot in case of any failures."
"It's completely hyper-converged, so it's very convenient."
"The product’s most valuable features are performance and expandability."
"The most valuable features are the encryption, deduplication, compression, and the ability to manage all of your storage within your server rack."
"It would help if the manufacturer provided clearer and more detailed documentation, with explanations of how the application can be installed in various HA configurations."
"For improvement, I would like to see how the software determines which networks to use for which purpose. It seems like the naming terminology changes a bit from here to there."
"I struggled when bit figuring out how to go about doing the evaluation."
"The documentation can be better for the free tier."
"When you will cease your contract with StarWind (for support) your product won't be updated and that is a big selling point, especially for us, as we have loads of products from StarWind."
"High availability for direct attached hardware drives could be useful for increasing the performance of a storage appliance."
"A better overall view of the different deployments could be beneficial, although this is difficult due to how flexible the solution is."
"It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers."
"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."
"Support could be better."
"Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series needs to improve its stability. Its resolution should be faster."
"The UI could certainly be better. The inside into what's actually going on with vSAN would be nice to know."
"vSAN does not have online dedup. When opening the inline dedupe, the performance will be lower than off inline."
"I would like for the next release to be a bit cheaper."
"There's already a concern with VMware with ransomware and security issues. VMware could focus on improving security."
"There is a lot that VMware could improve from a marketing perspective. The cloud is still new for many people, so extending storage should be effortless. It shouldn't be so complicated to extend the storage so workloads can access it no matter where they go."
"I would like to see the availability of more template based VMware systems. Combined with the ability to check and measure multiple and converging data segments. Another issue I've seen is that the tool seems to be slow when first starting up."
"I would love to see vSAN integrate Persistent Memory and NVDIMMs. I know they're supposed to be working on an elastic tier so that we don't have the issues with destaging from the cache to the capacity. Those are the things that I'm interested in."
"Hackers are able to manage to leak information or data from the product using some corrupt files, making it an area of major concern where improvements are required."
Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series is ranked 15th in HCI with 4 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series is rated 8.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series writes "simplifies management for clients familiar with VMware, and offers a user-friendly management and configuration experience". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series is most compared with VxRail, Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series, HPE Alletra dHCI and 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 Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series vs. VMware vSAN report.
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