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StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs Sunlight 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

StarWind HyperConverged App...
Ranking in HCI
14th
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.6
Number of Reviews
67
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (13th)
Sunlight
Ranking in HCI
28th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2026, in the HCI category, the mindshare of StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is 1.9%, up from 1.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Sunlight is 1.4%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
HCI Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
StarWind HyperConverged Appliance1.9%
Sunlight1.4%
Other96.7%
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2865906 - PeerSpot reviewer
System Admin at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
High availability server failover has provided reliable on‑premises hardware redundancy
The best features StarWind HyperConverged Appliance offers are easy and simple setup. Support did a lot of the work during the setup process, which made it easy for me. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance has positively impacted my organization by giving us high availability. High availability has benefited my team and organization by providing redundancy for hardware failure.
RajeshKANUMURY - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Executive Officer at GniYes Inc.
Performs well, effective, and has responsive remote technical support
Sunlight is a scalable solution. It supports on-premises and distributed deployments, as well as public deployments. It has a single pane of management so I can manage all of my VM installations in a distributed manner. It also has a footprint, that allows me to operate on Edge. If for example, you have a retail shop with 2,000 locations and they use a networked point of sale system, or if you are Chipotle and they have so many locations and they have to use a backend system at each location. At the moment, these are all standalone systems that operate with very little connection to the central. We could, however, connect and create a network using Sunlight. We can virtualize and run with Edge thanks to Sunlight. This allows us to operate and obtain high-end computing on Edge for retail. Sunlight is a startup. I am not sure how many users they have, but we have been using it constantly and using the technology to bring in customers.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The solution has provided our company with a fully redundant virtual environment at half the cost of a traditional SAN implementation."
"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 solution provides hyper-converged storage for cluster virtualization hosts and is used alongside Hyper-V for a highly secure, robust, resilient storage solution, allowing me to expand my virtualization footprint while reducing my overall physical server footprint."
"The HCA appliance replaced aging hardware, formerly cluster-in-a-box solutions, at a savings of over $20,000.00 and provided increased performance and more redundancy."
"This solution improved our environment from an increased user experience and administrative experience."
"It seems like a great product; it does what it's supposed to do and it does it very quickly."
"On the cost side, StarWind is a really cost-effective solution, costing a fraction of what the big name HCI solutions cost yet providing similar performance and capability."
"The full suite of redundancy gives a nice sense of security for the whole environment."
"If I had to use VMware or Nutanix, the same application would take three nodes and provide 400,000 IOPS, or input-output operations, but with Sunlight, I can get four million IOPS for the same price, allowing me to run an application on much less hardware."
"The performance and small footprint of this solution are its most valuable features. I am able to obtain and use more than 90 percent of the physical hardware capacity."
"It supports the latest technology of NVMe SSD, which is PCIe-based SSD. It has a very good IOPS performance as compared to vSAN. For the same system, I get 1,000 IOPS with vSAN, and with Sunlight, I am able to get almost 10,000 IOPS. In terms of features, it has almost all the features, such as HA and centralized dashboards. It can be managed centrally, and the visibility of the system is very good. They also have very good technical support and customer or partner training."
 

Cons

"We'd like an easier setup for Windows updates on the Hyper-V servers so you don't have to use a script to ensure auto-updating is done."
"At the moment, the initial configuration is very technical and error-prone."
"We ran into some issues with going from Hyper-V 2012 R2 to Hyper-V 2019."
"Better overall monitoring software. Maybe integration with Windows Admin Center was a good direction to go with on monitoring software."
"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."
"The web-managed interface (a separate VM) could be better."
"The proactive monitoring is nice. However, the response time is usually several hours after the issue occurred."
"Its reporting and dashboards need to be improved. It currently has very basic reporting options. It should also be made easier to deploy on Unix operating systems. It is easy to deploy on Windows and Linux, but it is currently not easy to deploy on Unix."
"It lacks the bells and whistles that are typically associated with Amazon Services or Nutanix."
"My recommendation would be to add this technology to Azure, Microsoft Azure so that we can bring it to the market, or deploy it on public clouds such as Microsoft Azure and Google. It is currently only available on Amazon's public cloud."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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 was able to bring the price per year down by going out to a five-year plan."
"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."
"This was all completed at an affordable price point for an SMB, which was also a key element for an NPO."
"In terms of cost, a storage array is more expensive... For half the cost of Compellent, I got two hosts, more storage, and redundancy."
"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."
"Our entire package was around $35,000 for everything, including three years of support."
"Its cost was reasonable."
"There is an operating cost for the VDIs, which is an additional cost. However, the licensing fee is half that of VMware or Nutanix."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
19%
Outsourcing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Marketing Services Firm
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business51
Midsize Enterprise23
Large Enterprise8
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
I think nothing needs improvement in StarWind HyperConverged Appliance.
What is your primary use case for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
My main use case for StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is server failover. I use StarWind HyperConverged Appliance for server failover to ensure high availability for the server.
What advice do you have for others considering StarWind HyperConverged Appliance?
Regarding StarWind HyperConverged Appliance's AI capabilities, I think it does not have any. I think it does not have any AI regarding its accuracy and reliability of output. My advice to others lo...
Ask a question
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Overview

 

Sample Customers

Sears Home and Franchise Business
Lavazza, Infraspace
Find out what your peers are saying about StarWind HyperConverged Appliance vs. Sunlight and other solutions. Updated: September 2026.
920,769 professionals have used our research since 2012.