StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs VxRail comparison

StarWind and Dell Technologies are both solutions in the HCI category. StarWind is ranked #13 with an average rating of 10.0, while Dell Technologies is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.4. StarWind holds a 0.8% mindshare in HCI, compared to Dell Technologies’s 21.0% mindshare. Additionally, 98% of StarWind users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Dell Technologies users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 2024

VxRail and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance compete in the hyper-converged infrastructure sector. VxRail seems to have the upper hand with its integration capabilities and single-vendor support, while StarWind is praised for its cost-effectiveness and proactive support.

Features: VxRail integrates robustly with VMware, offering VxRail Manager for comprehensive system checks and updates. Its vSAN delivers efficient software-defined storage, and RecoverPoint ensures swift recovery from disruptions. StarWind focuses on high availability and redundancy, using pre-configured appliances to provide seamless storage solutions. It ensures system consistency with fault tolerance and real-time VM synchronization while offering proactive support to address potential issues before escalation.

Room for Improvement: VxRail could benefit from faster patching processes and a simplified setup. Enhancements in integration with other Dell EMC products and improved cloud tiering would be advantageous. StarWind users desire more comprehensive interfaces and documentation for installation. Greater pricing transparency and integrated storage expansion options are suggested for improved configurations.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VxRail is recognized for its straightforward on-premises deployment, although initial setup may involve multiple Dell departments. The customer service is notable for its proactive approach, aided by CloudIQ insights. StarWind emphasizes ease of deployment with pre-configured hardware that facilitates on-premises integration. Its customer service provides 24/7 proactive support, promptly addressing user issues for swift resolution.

Pricing and ROI: VxRail is viewed as a premium-priced solution, offering considerable ROI through reduced operational costs and efficiencies, though licensing fees for VMware components can be heavy. StarWind is more cost-effective, delivering strong performance at a lower entry price ideal for SMBs. Its all-inclusive pricing model ensures transparency and no hidden costs, making it attractive to budget-conscious organizations while still yielding substantial ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. VxRail Report (Updated: October 2024).

Buyer's Guide

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. VxRail

October 2024

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Categories and Ranking

StarWind Virtual SAN

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the HCI category, the mindshare of StarWind Virtual SAN is 2.3%, up from 1.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is 0.8%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VxRail is 21.0%, down from 21.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

HCI

Featured Reviews

Ahmed Hosni

Senior System Engineer at Giza Systems

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.

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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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Sushil MIshra

AG at SIS.

Trouble-free architecture, we don't have to juggle multiple components like in a traditional three-tier architecture

I like the caching mechanism. Frequently used data is stored, so it definitely improves performance. VxRail's integration with VMware environments is very good. Our VxRail is built on VMware, and the integration is seamless. We haven't faced any challenges. We can migrate VMs between servers in real-time and replicate them to our DR site without any problems.

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

"Besides being 80% cheaper than the other alternatives, the simplicity makes reconfiguration and support much easier."

"It eliminates the use of expensive physical shared storage."

"StarWind Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements."

"The virtual tapes can be uploaded to the object storage of your choice with object locking/governance which gives you an extra layer of protection."

"Recovery and maintenance are now less stressful and most importantly, it allows our users to keep working."

"The StarWind tech support is extremely helpful, especially during the initial setup."

"We are able to execute maintenance on one server while the other is still running."

"The biggest benefit was that it allowed us to provide SAN services on a limited hardware budget."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pros

"With StarWind's Proactive monitoring we can go about our day helping our customers and not have to worry about our cluster's health."

"Product functionality and performance are wonderful."

"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 hardware footprint is great. We've got two 2U servers which replaced four 2U servers. Granted, they were about three years old at that point, but we actually increased our processing capacity by about 50 percent while keeping our storage capacity about the same. We've actually been able to downgrade to a half rack from a full rack because we've gotten rid of some of our network equipment and some of our additional storage arrays."

"StarWind's proactive support is my favorite feature."

"The hardware footprint is perfect. It fits in our rack perfectly, and we were able to condense a lot of physical servers we had. It has greatly eliminated the excess stuff in our server rack..."

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

"The solution has provided our company with a fully redundant virtual environment at half the cost of a traditional SAN implementation."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pros

"VxRail is very cost-effective and affordable in the long term. It is more recommended when it comes to financial life, but it may depend upon the license. VxRail comes with VMware licensing, which may not be that cost-effective as compared to others. With VMware, it's an auto check competition. VMware is an expensive solution, especially for Nutanix. Nutanix have their own hypervisor called Acronis, which is very cost-effective against the VMware. Nutanix is cheaper for the hardware but not for the software. If you ask the Nutanix partners to deploy Nutanix over Cisco servers or Dell EMC servers, the cost will be higher. Nutanix wants to compete financially. Therefore, they propose their software over the Supermicro server, which is a very cheap Chinese server. In fact, I don't like their terms of service. HyperFlex has the highest price, and it is very expensive. I don't know why. It may be because this is a UCS system, which comes from Cisco and is already expensive. When it comes to HyperFlex, they need the labor to deploy Hyper-V, Citrix, or any other hypervisor."

"Being able to perform upgrades and check the system through the VxRail Manager has been very helpful."

"Cost-effective and easy to install."

"VxRail alleviates the operational constraints within an organization."

"I like the managed updates. They are really nice in VxRail. Everything comes packaged and the updates are much easier than with other solutions that I've had to work with."

"t's a very good solution with multiple options with VxRail series like based on customer requirements whether they're focused on compute, storage, scalability and high performance, etc. Whether a customer you are going to start your IT Infrastructure footprint with a limited budget, you have freedom of choice and non-disruptive expansion in the future, whether in the main data center or branches. Any idea coming in system admins mind to run this setup continuously and keep service 100% 24/7 is possible in this product line. Hyper-converged appliances allow a datacenter in a box approach, with G, E P, Vand P series."

"What I like the most in terms of features is the fact that the VxRail update can be done in one week. It takes much less time to do a whole server upgrade and an infrastructure update as well."

"It's very easy to upgrade."

More VxRail pros

Cons

"The documentation could be better."

"Updating the software can be a bit tricky."

"You have to do a "full" sync on write-back cache disks instead of a quick sync if there is an issue."

"This is a great product."

"I'd prefer it if a remote console was provided."

"An extended trial period would serve as a way to get clean insights into the technology's adaptability and alignment with their specific needs before committing to long-term integration."

"A great feature would be a wizard and to include a new disk in the SAN. At the moment, including a new disk requires several steps - some that must be done at the OS level and others in each node."

"One point for improvement is to increase the performance capabilities of the Windows-based executable as compared to its Linux Controller Virtual Machine (CVM) equivalent."

More StarWind Virtual SAN 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."

"The only area that the product could improve would be user training."

"If I had to pick something to add to the product, it would be nice if you could have more than one user account on their command center VM."

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

"The only thing I have run into is that I did want to add more hard drives into the host, so that we could look at doing a RAID 10, and the hard drive prices were pretty expensive... that's pretty nit-picky and I don't think it has anything to do with StarWind itself. I think it's more on whomever they work with for their hardware."

"The only issue we have had was the issue of performance, however, that is only due to the fact that we purchased a mix of SSD and regular spindle drives, and restoring databases was slow as it was trying to restore the database using the spindle drives."

"We have to pay for support, which is high-end support. That can be expensive, at least for us."

"What would have to be done urgently is the adaptation of the hardware to the configuration."

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance cons

"The SCL database sends out a warning and you have to download the adjacent file from the Dell website. You have to upload it and retest it. We cannot always connect our systems to the internet which means we sometimes miss these important updates."

"You cannot install another operating system such as Microsoft or Hyperflex or Nutanix. We have also had a hardware problem."

"Its price could be better."

"The cost is quite high. It's a very expensive solution to run."

"I can't speak to any missing features or weak aspects of the system just yet. We haven't had a chance to really dig in."

"The initial setup was not that easy, it was a medium difficulty level."

"In the next release, maybe they could add in integration with the hyper-cloud so it will be easier to do the movement up and back to the cloud in order to scale in and scale out."

"There is limited support for SAP HANA with this solution."

More VxRail cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Once you buy the license, you are free to build your own hardware solution based on your needs."

"The scalability limitation for us is its licensing. At some point in the fairly near future, we will probably have to upgrade our license so we can store eight terabytes instead of four. We are currently at four terabytes, but we're starting to knock on the door of that capacity."

"If you are looking at a traditional SAN for a small cluster, give StarWind vSAN because you will save thousands without any compromise."

"It's priced fairly. It was definitely cheaper than the competition. The licensing terms are straightforward and reasonable."

"The free version is great to use for labs or test environments."

"We are happy with the price."

"The setup cost is very low. The pricing is great."

"For two nodes, it cost us $10,000, and we spend $2,000 a year on support."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pricing and cost advice

"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."

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

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

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

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

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

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance pricing and cost advice

"The price could be lower."

"The pricing is very accurate, and we haven't had any problems with the licensing costs."

"This is an expensive product and that should be considered a point to be improved."

"It is expensive as compared to other products in the same category."

"The price is good."

"The licensing of vSAN and VMware for different editions of VxRail is not easy."

"There is an advantage for those who have a good deal with Dell. Its price is good. From a company's perspective, it is always too expensive, but it is about value for money."

More VxRail pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Computer Software Company

16%

Educational Organization

14%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

10%

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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...

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?

Choose StarWind Virtual SAN, it is the most flexible, reliable and cheap solution.

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What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?

While using StarWind Virtual SAN so far, I have not found anything missing. It is true that we are using it in a very...

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What do you like most about StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?

StarWind's proactive support is my favorite feature.

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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?

There was a long delay with shipping, which we weren't expecting, but we were kept updated throughout. It wasn't made...

See all answers

How does HPE Nimble Storage compare to VxRail?

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI Vs. VxRail One of the best things about the HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is the three, two, one, z...

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 e...

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What are the major differences between VxRail and Dell EMC PowerFlex?

VxRail vs. Dell EMC PowerFlex VxRail provides stable solutions for technical problems while at the same time not bein...

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Comparisons

VMware vSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 27% of the time

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 19% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 17% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 13% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 2% of the time

More StarWind Virtual SAN Competitors

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 39% of the time

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 16% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 15% of the time

Azure Stack HCI vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 11% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

Compared 8% of the time

More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Competitors

Dell PowerFlex vs VxRail

Compared 33% of the time

VMware vSAN vs VxRail

Compared 21% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VxRail

Compared 14% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs VxRail

Compared 7% of the time

HPE Hyper Converged vs VxRail

Compared 6% of the time

More VxRail Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

StarWind Virtual SAN

November 2024

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Buyer's Guide

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance

November 2024

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report

Download StarWind HyperConverged Appliance product report

Buyer's Guide

VxRail

November 2024

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Also Known As

StarWind SAN & NAS

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VCE VxRail

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StarWind

Dell Technologies

Overview

StarWind Virtual SAN provides high availability and fault tolerance for virtualized environments without the need for dedicated SAN hardware. It allows for real-time replication between servers, shared storage for Hyper-V clusters, and enables vMotion and High Availability features for VMware vSphere. The solution reduces costs and leverages existing hardware while providing a scalable and reliable infrastructure. Valuable features include ease of use, scalability, top-tier support, hardware agnosticism, and the ability to use off-the-shelf standard servers to increase storage space. StarWind VSAN has helped organizations improve performance, data availability, and data security while reducing downtime and providing cost-saving storage options.

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.

VxRail is a hyper-converged appliance based on VMware virtual SAN Software and is jointly engineered and built with VMware, for VMware, to enhance Vmware. VxRail software-defined architecture simplifies compute, storage, virtualization, and management. It will safeguard performance, reliability, and flexibility across your organization with a broad range of workloads and applications from business-critical to next-gen. With VxRail, you are covered.

VxRail is a single turn-key appliance that is a validated, fully integrated, pre-configured, pre-tested solution and offers non-disruptive scaling. Every node includes compute storage and IO. All-flash configurations can contain between 12-28 cores per node. The storage capacity options run from 7.6 TB to 19TB with either 256 GB or 512GB of memory. Hybrid appliances may have 6-20 cores per node, 3.6 TB to 10 TB of storage capacity, and 24GB to 256 GB of memory.

VxRail offers high availability fail-over, an active/active stretch cluster, and VSan Kernal integration. VxRail is a power-edged server with APIs built on automation. There are over 15 million different combinations of hardware available with VxRail. VxRail provides a simple, cost-effective solution that solves a large range of use cases. Additionally, you also get a mixed workloads automated system that is backed with fully automated system updates, and complete end-to-end lifecycle management all in a single two-rack appliance.

VxRail is a value-added suitable solution for distributed small to mid-sized enterprises, remote offices, private clouds, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). You choose the deployment option that best suits your organizational needs, from appliance to integrated rack offerings, with or without networking, and it will be delivered to you, ready to deploy out-of-box.

If you know VMware, you know VxRail.

VxRail Features and Benefits

Seamlessly accelerate deployment to a hybrid cloud
Fast data center modernization
Create developer-ready Kubernetes platforms

Powerful performance and reliability
Improve and simplify operational efficiency
Excellent integration
Save time
Reduce costs

Reviews from Real Users

VxRail is an all-in-one solution: "You don't have to worry too much about the hardware and you don't have to work on integrating a storage device. We instead have this as an all-in-one solution and everything is available as a box."

VxRail is remarkable: “The cover points feature in VxRail is remarkable. It's unique. It has an intervention failover system as well as an automatic failover system, reaching clusters existing in VxRail…”

VxRail is a powerful performer: “...VxRail delivers a very high number of IOPS for a hybrid configuration or an all-flash configuration. The processors that are available in the Xeon family are very powerful. They are multi-core with typically 2 gigahertz, 2.4 gigahertz, or higher frequency, so the performance is very much appreciated.”

Sample Customers

Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School

Sears Home and Franchise Business

World Wide Technology Inc, Renault Sport Formula One Team, 8x8 Inc, Brownes, Canadian Pacific, Canopy, Denton, EDF, Unilin, Xerox

Buyer's Guide

StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. VxRail

October 2024

Free Report: StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. VxRail

Find out what your peers are saying about StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. VxRail and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.

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