StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs VMware vSAN comparison

StarWind and VMware are both solutions in the HCI category. StarWind is ranked #13 with an average rating of 10.0, while VMware is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.8. StarWind holds a 0.8% mindshare in HCI, compared to VMware’s 16.4% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of StarWind users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of VMware users who would recommend it.

StarWind HyperConverged App...

Read 66 StarWind HyperConverged Appliance reviews

1,238 Views
444 Comparison Views

98% willing to recommend

VMware vSAN

Read 229 VMware vSAN reviews

18,927 Views
13,554 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

StarWind HyperConverged App...

VMware vSAN

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 2024

VMware vSAN and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance are competitive products in the hyperconverged infrastructure category. VMware vSAN seems to have the upper hand in integration and scalability, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance excels in flexibility and cost-effectiveness.

Features: VMware vSAN offers strong integration with VMware products, high availability, and impressive speed. It provides centralized management and the ability to scale by simply adding servers. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is noted for its high availability features, cost-effectiveness, and ease of management, along with proactive support and flexibility in hardware choices.

Room for Improvement: VMware vSAN could improve its management console and deduplication capabilities, and offer better hardware compatibility and more flexible configurations. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance could benefit from a more comprehensive user interface, enhanced real-time monitoring, and improvements in technical support.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware vSAN requires careful planning for deployment, which can be complex depending on the environment. Despite its reliable customer service, some feedback points to slow response times. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is praised for its straightforward and fast deployment process, often completed with vendor assistance. It is commended for its prompt and effective customer support.

Pricing and ROI: VMware vSAN is seen as expensive, potentially deterring smaller businesses, though it offers significant value for larger enterprises by reducing storage network costs and complexities. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is viewed as cost-effective with competitive pricing and transparent costs, offering high ROI with its turnkey solutions and appealing to enterprises mindful of their budgets.

To learn more, read our detailed StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. VMware vSAN Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. VMware vSAN

January 2025

Download the complete report

Helped 831,158 peers since 2012

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

StarWind HyperConverged App...

Ranking in HCI

13th

Average Rating

9.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Software Defined Storage (SDS) (9th)

VMware vSAN

Ranking in HCI

2nd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

229

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the HCI category, the mindshare of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is 0.8%, up from 0.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware vSAN is 16.4%, down from 18.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

HCI

Featured Reviews

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.

Read full review

Lipaz Hessel

Integration Manager at Gilat Satellite Networks

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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The hosts came preconfigured, and it was plug-and-play."

"The low cost of this solution has also made a big difference in our budget, which has been very helpful."

"Repair efforts have been reduced to nearly nothing."

"It improved all services running on the new cluster and took up less space and less energy."

"The high-quality hardware options, directly affecting performance, have significantly improved the user experience and are well worth the cost."

"The biggest thing we were looking for was redundancy, with both the compute and the storage, so that way we could lose a full node and still keep everything up and running, and not have to worry about it... StarWind was able to provide a solution for what we wanted, - to provide for redundancy."

"The sales process is easy."

"The full suite of redundancy gives a nice sense of security for the whole environment."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pros

"I have used VMware for 15 years and I never had any problems with stability."

"The most valuable features are productivity and data storage."

"Storage policies are used to perform operations in the VMs. This feature allows you to create storage policies for VMs to get performance, high availability, I/O policies, etc."

"It is easy to find information out there, not only from searching the web, but even the times I have engaged VMware support."

"vSAN has just one datastore. so customers do not need to think where to put their VMs, how to design the physical disk RAID, the LUN size, the LUN mapping, etc. when they use NetApp/EMC/HDS or other storage systems."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to continue our business needs and have higher visibility. It has definitely increased our business productivity levels."

"The ability to have an HA cluster in the absence of a shared storage device or SAN."

"The solution is simple to use compared to other solutions, such as Hyperflex, VxRail, and Nutanix"

More VMware vSAN pros

Cons

"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."

"An emphasis on security can be improved."

"At times there has been a language barrier when communicating issues."

"We struggle a little with capacity management with the StarWind Hyperconverged appliance."

"At the moment, the initial configuration is very technical and error-prone. That is the reason Starwind does it for you as a service, which is a great thing. But it would be nice if we could change or rearrange storage assignments ourselves."

"The management console could use a facelift."

"Maybe they could have a support portal that you can have direct access to a current support representative."

"The overall product documentation and knowledgebase articles could use some rewriting and clarification."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance cons

"Based on my testing, I would like to expand deduplication to include hybrid deployments and not just for all-flash deployments."

"Licensing costs are a little too high for smaller sized companies."

"I think it needs to be more cost-effective. I would also say that even though the capacity is good, there is also room for improvement there. Also, they could improve the security of the system."

"I would like to see replication as part of it. I would also like to see direct file access, being able to run SIF shares and NFS and the like. I think that would be critical to continuing the use of it going forward."

"The product's complex setup phase is an area of concern where improvements are required."

"The platform's cost affects the business. This particular area needs improvement."

"If the support could be provided more quickly, it would be very helpful."

"It should be easier to use."

More VMware vSAN cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"This was all completed at an affordable price point for an SMB, which was also a key element for an NPO."

"The Nutanix piece was about $45,000, getting close to $50,000 with all the licensing involved, whereas the StarWind was less than half of that, after Microsoft licensing and such."

"The other solutions we were looking at were priced much higher than this and they didn't necessarily have full redundancy... Nutanix and VxRail were in the final running... but it came down to our price point."

"We looked at Nutanix and found it did almost the same thing but for more money. In fact, StarWind was nearly one-third of the price; it cost us £36,000. That includes five years of monitoring... The Nutanix was near enough £110,000 for relatively the same amount of performance and storage."

"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."

"In terms of cost, a storage array is more expensive... For half the cost of Compellent, I got two hosts, more storage, and redundancy."

"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."

"Our entire package was around $35,000 for everything, including three years of support."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pricing and cost advice

"ROI from an administrative perspective is clearly much better because I only have to deal with one user interface."

"There is a license required for this solution, it is a one-time payment. However, if they want support for the solution, it can be paid annually or for three years."

"It is not that expensive, and it is not even cheap. If it is designed in a proper way, it has good pricing, but if you do oversizing, the price will be high. There are different licensing models."

"Clients have to pay for VMware vSAN licensing based on the number of CPUs. The purchases would be lifetime or perpetual, but you need to have support, e.g. the support is negotiated from one, two, three, or four years."

"The product's price has been increasing lately...VMware vSAN is expensive."

"The product’s pricing is a bit higher than other solutions."

"It is an expensive solution. There should be more flexible with licensing to allow small businesses the essentials of the solution's features."

"It is slightly expensive. They can be more competitive in terms of pricing."

More VMware vSAN pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which HCI solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Educational Organization

13%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Retailer

Educational Organization

52%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

StarWind's proactive support is my favorite feature.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What needs improvement with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

See all answers

What Is The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail?

While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an engineered system. The choice to choose which technology depends on two major fac...

See all answers

Which would you choose - Nutanix Acropolis AOS or VMware vSAN?

We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface that allows you to talk directly to your VM from the present software. We fou...

See all answers

How does HPE Simplivity compare with VMware vSAN?

HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We researched VMware vSAN but found HPE was a better option for us. HPE SimpliVity has ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 38% of the time

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 17% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 14% of the time

VxRail vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 12% of the time

Azure Stack HCI vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 11% of the time

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Competitors

VxRail vs VMware vSAN

Compared 17% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs VMware vSAN

Compared 15% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VMware vSAN

Compared 9% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs VMware vSAN

Compared 8% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs VMware vSAN

Compared 7% of the time

More VMware vSAN Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

December 2024

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report

Download StarWind HyperConverged Appliance product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware vSAN

December 2024

Download VMware vSAN product report

Also Known As

No data available

vSAN

Learn More

StarWind

VMware

Overview

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.

VMware vSAN is a software-defined storage product that is used in collaboration with VMware ESXi hypervisor and that provisions and manages storage based on policies, regardless of the underlying hardware. The solution enables you to prime your business for growth through its seamless evolution (it is integrated with vSphere and requires no new tools), its flexibility, and its multi-cloud capabilities. As an industry-leading software, VMware vSAN provides high levels of performance with minimal impact on CPU and memory.

VMware vSAN Features

VMware vSAN has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Storage policy-based management (SPBM): VMware vSAN supports storage policy-based management for automated management of storage profiles.

Software-defined data-at-rest encryption: With this VMware vSAN feature, you can prevent unauthorized access of data at rest.

Multiple nodes: VMware vSAN provides clusters that can include as few as 2 nodes or as many as 64 nodes.

High security and availability: VMware vSAN offers stretched clusters, allowing more than one virtualization host server to be used in the same setup, promoting higher security as well as availability.

Deduplication: VMware vSAN’s deduplication compresses data to ensure efficient storage management and security.

HCI mesh updates: VMware vSAN clusters can share storage capacity with non-HCI Sphere clusters and can adopt HCI without having to scale computing resources and storage or replace existing servers.

Simplified file services: With VMware vSAN’s file services, backup of file shares is simplified. You can use APIs that allow backup and recovery software vendors to integrate with your VMware vSAN file services, which enables backup software to track new data and add scalability enhancements to files.

VMware vSAN Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing VMware vSAN. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO): VMware vSAN helps you reduce upfront costs for businesses because it can be easily deployed on inexpensive x86 servers. In addition, its highly scalable infrastructure and quick deployment also save organizations time and money, making it an efficient storage solution.

Good manageability: VMWare vSAN is easy to set up, manage, and provision, without sacrificing performance.

Scalability: VMware vSAN is agile and allows administrators to scale storage on demand, quickly, and efficiently via policies and rules.

Simplicity: VMWare vSAN is simple to configure since it is embedded in the vSphere hypervisor. Installing it using the vSphere Web Client can be done quickly.

Reduced risk: VMWare vSAN reduces the risk associated with digital transformations by utilizing existing tools, skill sets, and solutions.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the VMware vSAN solution.

PeerSpot user Yves S., CEO, Cloud Evangelist at Comdivision Consulting GmbH, says, “vSAN gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources. We have an overall larger host infrastructure, and we split that up for specific customer test and use cases. In that specific scenario, we can easily add more hosts or reduce the number of hosts in the environment.”

A reviewer who works in Infrastructure Security explains, “The ease of use is great. The initial setup and upgrade process was pretty straightforward. And, technical support is great.”

Laurent N., Director at Softlogic, comments, "The feature that I have found most valuable is that it is easy to deploy. It is easy to create and delete virtual servers. It is easy to create the load balancing and the clustering."

Sample Customers

Sears Home and Franchise Business

Read Some Case Studies At Home Cloud CaribCINgroupDiscovery Check out the Rest of our Customer Stories Here

Buyer's Guide

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. VMware vSAN

January 2025

Free Report: StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. VMware vSAN

Find out what your peers are saying about StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. VMware vSAN and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.

DOWNLOAD NOW

831,158 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. VMware vSAN report.

See our list of best HCI vendors.

We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.