StarWind Virtual SAN vs VMware vSAN comparison

StarWind and VMware are both solutions in the HCI category. StarWind is ranked #4 with an average rating of 9.6, while VMware is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.8. StarWind holds a 2.3% mindshare in HCI, compared to VMware’s 16.4% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of StarWind users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of VMware users who would recommend it.

StarWind Virtual SAN

Read 189 StarWind Virtual SAN reviews

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1,463 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

VMware vSAN

Read 229 VMware vSAN reviews

18,927 Views
13,554 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

StarWind Virtual SAN

VMware vSAN

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 2024

VMware vSAN and StarWind Virtual SAN compete in the virtual storage solutions arena. VMware vSAN has the upper hand due to its seamless integration within the VMware ecosystem.

Features: VMware vSAN features tight integration with VMware products, supporting operations like vMotion and Distributed Resource Scheduler for effective resource management. It provides strong performance by moving storage closer to the CPU, offers policy-based storage management, and seamless scalability. StarWind Virtual SAN offers affordability and ease of use with features like fast deployment on off-the-shelf hardware, efficient data replication, and high availability, making it flexible for various deployments.

Room for Improvement: VMware vSAN could improve its encryption, deduplication, and compatibility with diverse hardware. Users seek better monitoring and integration with different platforms. StarWind Virtual SAN needs enhanced documentation, more intuitive management interfaces, and improved automation capabilities to extend its user-friendliness and reporting features.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware vSAN is favored for integrating well within VMware environments, though it requires expert handling. Its technical support is highly rated. StarWind Virtual SAN offers straightforward deployment across various infrastructures and is known for responsive, knowledgeable support, enhancing user experience with a customer-focused approach.

Pricing and ROI: VMware vSAN is considered expensive due to its licensing costs but provides significant operational savings over traditional SANs, justifying its cost with robust features. StarWind Virtual SAN offers a more competitive pricing model, appealing to SMBs with cost-effectiveness and transparent licensing. It delivers similar benefits in functionality leading to a positive return on investment.

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

Buyer's Guide

StarWind Virtual SAN vs. VMware vSAN

January 2025

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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

StarWind Virtual SAN

Ranking in HCI

4th

Average Rating

9.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

189

Ranking in other categories

Software Defined Storage (SDS) (1st)

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 Virtual SAN is 2.3%, up from 1.7% 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

MIT

IT System Administrator at Ludwig Meyer GmbH & Co. KG

Easy to set up and maintain with good performance capabilities

Feature-wise we are only waiting for the release of a "planned disaster" feature that would allow us to patch a hypervisor node without having to take the full storage offline. ATM (20220609) is still necessary, since taking a node offline without properly activating the maintenance mode on the vSAN would trigger a full sync of the vSAN nodes. This is fine and a good thing since it ensures data integrity. However, there is something in the making that would ensure integrity without a full sync after a node goes down, which, as stated above, one could "abuse" to patch (and boot = take down) the hypervisors during business hours 😁 Other than that, the thing is rock stable and chugging along without issues. We are an SMB so we "only" have around 50 VMs on our FO cluster, which is a medium load for SSDs. If you plan to go more to the "max" side of performance use, do proper testing!

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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.

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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

"We like their high availability. It reduces the downtime for our entire organization's environment."

"I've had to open a few support cases over the years due to administrator errors, and the support received was top-notch."

"The ability to run a two-node cluster without a dedicated witness has made this an excellent product for small deployments, which is right on target for our needs in regional offices."

"This product now allows us to migrate virtual machines between nodes as if we had a dedicated $100,000 SAN in the mix without the additional cost and management of the SAN."

"As the client had acquired another company some distance away, they were concerned about having a single SAN in one location or the other. StarWind vSAN allowed us to keep a copy of the data local to each site without asking the client to pay for two SANs in addition to the two new servers they needed."

"It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combines flash and disks of the cluster and forms a virtual shared storage “pool” accessible by all hosts. StarWind cuts down virtualization cost and complexity by eliminating the need for a physical shared storage (SAN). -StarWind offers the Enterprise-level high availability (HA), deployed and easily configured . we get technical support from star wind team when implementation software and after setup if we face any issue."

"Their support goes above and beyond with the integration of their software."

"It is extremely stable."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pros

"High availability is a valuable aspect of this solution."

"It is simple to manage, very easy to implement and troubleshoot in case of any failures."

"As a function of our core business, it's a sought after tool that helps us provide analytical support across a wide spectrum of client needs. It's allowed us to test out in our connected restaurant - "TheWorks" - a fully-functional restaurant experience center that allows our clients to discover the value of our connected solutions firsthand. We deploy vSAN in this customer-like environment within a hyperconvergent infrastruction (HCI) to give our clients a better understanding and help optimize data and the end-users' experience."

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

"VMware vSAN is easy to configure, with basic functionality and the customer can maintain the solution."

"The migration of servers feature makes server rack maintenance easy."

"Very good VCG notification feature."

"Overall the solution is very good."

More VMware vSAN pros

Cons

"They need to invest more in the support documents for real issues happening when integrating the solution with the hypervisor."

"This solution should be more self-sufficient, running without creating domains or failover clusters."

"The cluster configuration is time-consuming and tedious."

"I'd love to see native export of metrics (via Prometheus or something of that nature) to allow us to get more metrics available on our existing dashboard software."

"If there was one thing we could request, it would be the ability to shrink volumes. For example, we want to be able to decrease in the size of the volume."

"They need to improve the speed of the interfaces, thus allowing for better traffic on the network."

"The management console of StarWind Virtual SAN is pretty complex."

"There is no Italian-language version of the software available."

More StarWind Virtual SAN cons

"The updating process could be easier."

"Hardware load balancing is available on the enterprise version of the solution, however, it's extremely expensive and therefore out of our budget."

"We want see a better monitoring tool in vSAN. Monitoring is not that great as of now because it shows us false alarms in the Health status. We would like that to be improved."

"It could have some automation. We haven't involved ourselves in a lot of automation around the vSAN environment capabilities. We're still running it using a very traditional setup. So, there could be some plugins to automate it using third-party environments, such as Jenkins."

"This solution could be improved by having more than one controller for the environment. VMware depends on one controller for the whole environment, whereas Nutanix has one controller for each node. Because there is only one controller with VMware, if there was any drop, then the whole environment would stop working. In Nutanix, I have five nodes—there is one controller for each node and it depends on a virtual controller—so if the controller of any node is down, the whole environment will still work."

"The server files are larger than before."

"It is a memory intensive app."

"Because of virtual storage, the system reaches reserve storage for its functions. It also consumes a certain amount of storage, which then results in the creation of a fault tolerance for the system. All of this adds to a lot of capacity being consumed in terms of storage for each drive for vSan. I find this to be one drawback of using vSan."

More VMware vSAN cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The setup cost, pricing, and licensing are very straightforward. They are exactly what you expect."

"I think the bang for the buck is much better with StarWind Virtual SAN."

"We evaluated other options and this one was the most cost-effective."

"The cost was ultimately low to implement, which allowed us to be 3-2-1 complaint."

"Their pricing seems pretty good, and their licensing structure is pretty straightforward."

"The cost, including OPEX, is lower compared to other solutions."

"The StarWind VSAN business model is very cost-effective."

"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."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pricing and cost advice

"It is fairly cost-effective for entry to mid-level performance based on the underlying hardware components."

"The solution is relatively expensive compared to similar products."

"VMware vSAN is an expensive platform. We purchase its yearly license."

"The vSAN is somewhat expensive to license."

"VMware vSAN is a little bit expensive and we pay annually. We have an educational institute where we receive discount prices from VMware. We do receive a reasonable discount but it's still expensive."

"The product is quite expensive, regarding the open source solution."

"The cost is expensive. I purchased two servers. The hardware cost was $19,000. The software cost for these two servers, including the vSAN, was $30,000, which is $11,000 more than the hardware. Then I had to pay another $5,000 for installation and implementation for professional services. In total, it was $54,000 for two vSAN Servers."

"We are using the VMware vSAN ROBO which allows us to have a maximum of 25 virtual machines. The approximate cost is €10,000 for a perpetual license."

More VMware vSAN 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

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 Virtual SAN?

It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combines flash and disks of the cluster and forms a virtual shared storage “pool” acce...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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 strict project in which we were looking for a solution that would satisfy a str...

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

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

DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 7% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 6% of the time

More StarWind Virtual SAN 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

Pure Storage FlashArray vs VMware vSAN

Compared 3% of the time

More VMware vSAN Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

StarWind Virtual SAN

December 2024

Download StarWind Virtual SAN product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware vSAN

December 2024

Download VMware vSAN product report

Also Known As

StarWind SAN & NAS

vSAN

Learn More

StarWind

VMware

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.

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

Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School

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Buyer's Guide

StarWind Virtual SAN vs. VMware vSAN

January 2025

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