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Maxta Hyperconvergence Software vs VMware vSAN comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

StarWind Virtual SAN
Sponsored
Ranking in HCI
4th
Average Rating
9.6
Number of Reviews
187
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (1st)
Maxta Hyperconvergence Soft...
Ranking in HCI
35th
Average Rating
7.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware vSAN
Ranking in HCI
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
229
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of October 2024, in the HCI category, the mindshare of StarWind Virtual SAN is 2.2%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Maxta Hyperconvergence Software is 0.1%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware vSAN is 17.1%, down from 17.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

Ahmed Hosni - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 24, 2024
Provides a cost-effective way to run an HCI storage platform for almost any hypervisor
You can maintain and update it with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings the cost of a Highly Available HCI solution down to a very cost-effective point. Having used Starwind Virtual SAN for many years both for clients and for internal systems, it has always done exactly what it set out to do. It provides a cost-effective way to run an HCI storage platform for almost any hypervisor, but it is most effective with Hyper-V. It's simple and easy to use, The software monitoring should be web-based to be reachable from any VLAN workstation.
LC
Feb 20, 2020
Has the ability to have a single-pane-of-glass using the VMware interface but it needs better support
The product helped improve the way our organization functions starting with our hiring practices. We do not have to have a storage engineer or other engineering specialists. So, for example, I had a budget to get someone for a security engineer position of $120,000 a year. In the end, after talking to several local people in my industry, they just told me that security guys will come in and then somebody will offer them $5,000 more and they will just go where the money is. So I went with a third party called the Arctic Wolf Networks to do all my monitoring of my Office 365 environments, all of our servers, collect all the logs, and get all the services I needed from one source that would be consistent. This way, I can hire just general networking engineers and they can run everything. I do not have to have special employees and the benefits of that flexibility are pretty great. With the solution, you can swap out a drive for a larger capacity drive. You can lose a couple of drives and everything still runs. You can lose the server and it is self-healing and you can schedule maintenance around events. But I do not have to have staffing 24-hours a day because we do not have outages. That is probably the biggest thing. Meanwhile, in another part of the network that I am currently taking over from the global holding company, they have outages all the time. Sometimes it is due to a network failure or sometimes it is just poor engineering practices and standards. Over there we just set up to large servers and a couple of data centers using the VxRail system, which is like vSAN, so it is pretty similar stuff to our current setups but just uses other products.
Lipaz Hessel - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 16, 2022
Expensive solution that requires professional services for installation and implementation
I'm still using a different solution. I only took two servers with vSAN to support one application that needs one feature that only VMware has. If not for that feature, I wouldn't touch VMware. Now, I'm looking at products like Nutanix, Silver Peak, Flexione, and FortiGate. For products that I choose, I don't need a specialist of that vendor. In VMware, I need a specialist in VMware. That's the issue I have with VMware. It's not like I can take any IT person, and they will know what to do. I need to make sure he will do the call, get the certificate and time to practice.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Besides being 80% cheaper than the other alternatives, the simplicity makes reconfiguration and support much easier."
"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"
"The StarWind Virtual SAN management console is intuitive and easy to use."
"The most valuable feature is the managed service, which has been an important part of monitoring our critical infrastructure."
"The management interface on the software is very simple. It is insanely simple compared to most SANs. The interface is also powerful when used to complete tasks that an IT administrator needs to complete."
"We test live failovers every week, and so far, everything has been running smoothly without anything unexpected."
"StarWind vSAN is a great solution to create a redundant two-node-only Hyper-V cluster, both for domain or workgroup scenarios."
"It has reduced the amount of switching, network connections, etc., because the converged StarWind Virtual SAN allows us to connect high-speed network interfaces between different boxes instead of having to connect SANs via the network, then connect those two clusters together."
"The single-pane-of-glass VMware interface makes configuration and management easy so you do not need IT specialists."
"Easy to deploy and manage."
"While we haven't made major changes to our disaster recovery and business continuity processes yet, moving towards stretch vSAN across sites will simplify and expedite our DR processes in the future."
"This solution has a dashboard that you can log into and control if you need too while the VM is getting created."
"All orchestration and monitoring are routed to the cloud."
"The migration of servers feature makes server rack maintenance easy."
"The performance of VMware vSAN is very good."
"I like that we could choose whatever hardware we wanted, rather than having to use one particular vendor."
"vSAN provides default HA configurations, where if any host goes down, the VM moves around within the host. Even though the disks are local, the VMs moves around with the vSAN disk and vSAN provides a high availability on its own."
 

Cons

"The most disappointing side of the application is the free edition. There used to be GUI attached. That has recently changed to only CLI management of the application."
"I want to suggest that the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure needs to be reduced."
"I would like an automated installation/configuration despite the fact that their service is very collaborative, a customer should be able to deploy the solution by themselves."
"I would love to see more vendor selection to be available for the HCA/vSAN appliances."
"Pricing is a bit high."
"The management console of StarWind Virtual SAN is pretty complex."
"Geolocation could be better, for example, for site mirroring for DR purposes."
"If there was a way to automatically put disks in maintenance mode when shutting the host down and exit maintenance mode automatically, that would simplify things."
"A new company took over the product and now the support for Maxta has gone way downhill."
"They can improve the manageability of the solution to make it more simple. It is not that complicated, but it will be good if they can make it more simple."
"Integration could be better."
"Improvements can be made with respect to scalability."
"The UI falls short compared to other solutions. It needs some development to make it more user-friendly."
"The updating process could be easier."
"We would like to see even more storage capacity."
"The usability is pretty good but it could use a little tweaking on the UI, with a clearer definition of exactly what some of the things do."
"vSAN itself is a great storage platform, but one of the issues with it is that you have to be fully locked into the VMware package to use it. We're going to be deploying 72 Kubernetes nodes, and we're not going to buy VMware licenses for 72 of them, just so they can access vSAN. That's what we're using the Pure for. Opening it up so you could have vSAN as a data store, use it as a data lake, hit it with an NFS, S3 from outside the VMware ecosystem, would be great."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are two tiers of support and in my opinion, support is worth the cost."
"For two nodes, it cost us $10,000, and we spend $2,000 a year on support."
"Licensing is easy and the whole package is cost-effective."
"The pricing is more than reasonable."
"When we did all the analysis for StarWind, it was approximately 20 percent less than any of the other solutions that we looked at."
"The support contract is well worth it. The price for it was very reasonable and their team has been very engaged whenever we reach out."
"The licensing is straightforward, with free and trial versions available."
"This is a good, economical solution compared to data storage systems."
Information not available
"The cost of VMware vSAN is reasonable."
"It is cheap. It is $0.02 a gig."
"Users may also start off with the demo version of the tool. After you learn to use the solution, you can buy it if it is beneficial."
"With the new pricing model, it's expensive for the customer."
"The product is quite expensive, regarding the open source solution."
"I feel the pricing to be reasonable."
"ROI from an administrative perspective is clearly much better because I only have to deal with one user interface."
"The product’s pricing is a bit higher than other solutions."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
18%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
No data available
Educational Organization
50%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about StarWind Virtual SAN?
It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combin...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?
If you are comfortable with the solution and you feel that you don't need support, you can begin with the free licenc...
What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?
Areas for improvement in StarWind Virtual SAN include simplifying the setup process, especially for users with limite...
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Also Known As

StarWind SAN & NAS
No data available
vSAN
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
Information Not Available
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