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Dell XC Appliance vs StarWind Virtual SAN comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 2024

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

Dell XC Appliance
Ranking in HCI
16th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
8.5
Number of Reviews
8
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
StarWind Virtual SAN
Ranking in HCI
3rd
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
213
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the HCI category, the mindshare of Dell XC Appliance is 1.6%, up from 0.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind Virtual SAN is 2.3%, up from 2.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
HCI Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
StarWind Virtual SAN2.3%
Dell XC Appliance1.6%
Other96.1%
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

Enables seamless integration with multiple software and outstanding AI tools
The main issue with the DirectVXL appliance is that it only supports a single orchestrator or hypervisor. If multi-hypervisor support is required and VMware does not provide it, then Dell's appliance won't support it. I find it overly reliant on VMware. In cases of company mergers involving different platforms, software that can handle a multi-hypervisor environment would facilitate quicker integration.
Jccerong Heron - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
Support team has guided us through deploying virtual storage on legacy hardware and reducing operational costs
The reason I chose StarWind Virtual SAN for this particular scenario is really the features, the ease of use, and most importantly, the price. In my opinion, the best features StarWind Virtual SAN offers are easy integration with the system installed in the data center. The integration with my existing systems in the data center works well, especially with VMware, as we already have a big cluster in VMware, and the easy integration with that is helpful to solve some problems with the platform. StarWind Virtual SAN has positively impacted my organization by reducing OPEX costs. My OPEX costs have gone down as we reutilize some old servers, and this reduces the CAPEX of hardware in the data center.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"From a single screen, I can view VM details, performance, and hardware issues, such as power supply or fan malfunctions, along with RAM module problems."
"The solution's best feature is its simplicity. It's so simple to deploy it. You've got the VMware, and it's own appliance. It is really helpful. The system is online within half a day and saves so much time."
"To other customers who are looking to implement Dell XC, it's a very good hyper-converged solution."
"The most valuable feature is that you can assign a volume to an off-shore workload on the fly."
"What I like the most is that it is easy to implement, easy deployment and that it's easy to manage."
"Overall, the Dell XC Appliance is a very good product."
"We are getting time back to other things because we are not having to look after the infrastructure, as we have had to do in the past."
"The stability of the product is pretty good, as there have been no bugs, glitches, or crashes that I'm aware of."
"The most useful aspect is the hyper-converged SD SAN and the ease to expand it by just adding cheap SSD or NVME disks."
"It has allowed me to effectively and confidently manage the maintenance of hosts where I can power off a host and have its VMs migrate to another one."
"Given the high availability of the server cluster, we were able to reduce separate physical servers onto one hyper-converged cluster - this saved in OPEX and CAPEX costs immediately, along with licensing costs of the Windows Server licenses."
"Our day-to-day servers are all on StarWind and our backups went from nightly to every minute, improving disaster recovery time from hours to minutes and helping us maintain high performance and high availability on minimalistic resources while saving approximately 80 percent in costs."
"Failover happens smoothly, recovery and maintenance are less stressful, and we no longer need to worry about downtime."
"The Windows-based StarWind GUI is easy to use and understand and integrates seamlessly with VMware's vSphere portal as well."
"It is extremely stable."
"The most valuable feature is the fact that the nodes are Active/Active, and allow us to do upgrades on any node without any downtime."
 

Cons

"In the next release, I would like to see support for Docker and containers."
"The main issue with the DirectVXL appliance is that it only supports a single orchestrator or hypervisor. If multi-hypervisor support is required and VMware does not provide it, then Dell's appliance won't support it."
"The solution's storage size could be improved."
"The cost of using the public cloud deployment is astronomical."
"Currently, there is no support for the servers that are not in the cluster."
"We are not always advised of new features or updates, so we must research to stay up to date."
"The pricing for Dell EMC solutions is quite expensive and not really made for small or medium-sized businesses."
"To improve this product, I think there is a lot of work that is required by Dell to simplify the maintenance and life cycle upgrades."
"Management tools could be improved, sometimes the usage seems to be slowed down and confusing."
"Updates seem to be non-existent."
"It took a bit of knowledge and support to put in place but once installed it works fine. Migration (HyperV) from one server to another sometimes takes longer than expected but there is no data loss even if the host crashes."
"It is not very clear within the StarWind Management Console or the StarWind support documentation how to perform maintenance on a single node in a two-node HA cluster."
"With data verification, I would like to know how does the solution perform validation of data being synced between two VSANs."
"Performance when in storage-separate configuration needs to be improved."
"I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit."
"I think the setup could be streamlined a bit."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is dependent on the technology and is in direct relation to the manufacturer and the components."
"The pricing is good."
"The price point is very fair for a product in this category but can vary depending on the components selected within the family of products."
"The pricing for Dell EMC solutions is quite expensive and not really made for small or medium-sized businesses."
"We received a good price from Dell."
"The pricing is more than reasonable."
"The free version is great to use for labs or test environments."
"I think that purchasing StarWind Virtual SAN Professional Edition would be optimal for most."
"There are two tiers of support and in my opinion, support is worth the cost."
"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."
"This is a good, economical solution compared to data storage systems."
"Licensing is based on nodes rather than TBs, which means that the users are free to increase storage capacity without putting thought into licensing."
"The premium support from StarWinds is a must have. The ability to have access to a storage engineer 24/7 is a must for a production environment."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Outsourcing Company
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business5
Midsize Enterprise1
Large Enterprise2
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business170
Midsize Enterprise57
Large Enterprise34
 

Questions from the Community

What advice do you have for others considering Dell XC Appliance?
My advice for people who are selling this product is to first make sure that you educate the customers. The customer doesn't often know much about HCI and what the need to be using it for. If they ...
What needs improvement with Dell XC Appliance?
The main issue with the DirectVXL appliance is that it only supports a single orchestrator or hypervisor. If multi-hypervisor support is required and VMware does not provide it, then Dell's applian...
What is your primary use case for Dell XC Appliance?
Dell offers several benefits with its appliances. Primarily, I can combine them horizontally and vertically, reaching up to sixty-four nodes. Additionally, Dell employs its own artificial intellige...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?
My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing for StarWind Virtual SAN is very simple; that is another good thing about it, as the pricing is really straightforward. I got a quote, and it w...
What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?
StarWind Virtual SAN has latency that is not as good versus VMware vSAN, but I believe it is more of a Hyper-V limitation than it is StarWind Virtual SAN; it is not bad enough to be an issue, but i...
What is your primary use case for StarWind Virtual SAN?
My main use case for StarWind Virtual SAN is that it replaced our VMware vSAN. I transitioned from VMware vSAN to StarWind Virtual SAN due to the dramatic increase in VMware licensing costs followi...
 

Also Known As

No data available
StarWind SAN & NAS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Cardlytics, AEW Energie, Aubert, Zhongtong Information Service, Commune de Villepinte, Teikyo University Hospital
Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell XC Appliance vs. StarWind Virtual SAN and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.