We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Pure Storage and others in All-Flash Storage."The duplication algorithm allows us to get a lot more use out of less storage. We're running a five terabyte array right now and we're running probably about 30 terabytes on it. So the duplication rate is pretty phenomenal, without a cost to performance. It still runs pretty smoothly."
"Overall stability is very good. It is a very stable solution."
"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."
"The solution is very straightforward to set up."
"The standout features for us in Pure FlashArray X NVMe are its robust DDoS protection, seamless transparent failover, and failback capabilities ensuring high availability."
"The solution is scalable."
"The Pure1 component is most valuable at this point in time when comparing it with EMC. Pure1 is where you can have your diagnostics in the cloud, so you can look at things from your mobile phone."
"What I really like about this program, is that it is easy to use and easy to configurate."
"The Dell EMC unity interface is simple to manage. We manage it by ourselves. We create logs to store data."
"A lot of the Unisphere interfaces are greatly improved in terms of monitoring capabilities, alerting, and ease of use. Setting up the storage and the file system are all just a few clicks away."
"I like the integration into VirtualCenter. I used to have to add LUNs manually, then scan them in and format them. It does that all for you, all in one, immediate deployment of LUNs."
"Its main advantage over vSAN was the rebuild, the intelligence of the restoration in the event of a hardware drive failure and, of course, the all-flash solution."
"Stable data storage platform which promotes ease of management through its multi-cloud support. Remote support provided to users to address issues is very good."
"With all-flash it should be able to scale. You probably just need one 4U device and you have terabytes of space."
"The most valuable features of Dell Unity XT are the data compression for all of our VMs up to four times and the performance is good."
"It has improved the utilization of our own internal resources and performance across our managed service platform, meeting our customers SLAs."
"Everyone uses virtualization to more efficiently utilize hardware resources. That's the main point of vSAN and VMware."
"The main advantage is that it's all in the box, with VMware vCenter Server product."
"The product's initial setup phase was very straightforward."
"It allows us to put our infrastructure in remote locations and still get the same performance we get from our onsite SAN solutions."
"We didn't only choose vSAN; we chose VMware because of SR-IOV, which is more on the hypervisor level and not on the vSAN storage. It's part of the whole system."
"It is very well known in the industry, and there are a lot of technical resources around it. This is a big thing for me because, at the end of the day, when you implement it, you need to support it."
"It is easy to use. It is easy to implement for us, and it is also easy to maintain for the customers. It is not necessary to buy some extra devices and talk with other vendors."
"I have used VMware for 15 years and I never had any problems with stability."
"Our use cases require more multi-tenant capabilities and additional VLAN interfaces for separating different customers. We currently use it to provide storage, sometimes shared storage, to different customers, but it is less flexible in comparison to a dedicated solution."
"In the future, I would like to see integration with enterprise backup systems."
"We would like to see more visibility into garbage collection and CPU performance in the GUI."
"The tool's portfolio is minimal. It is expensive."
"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."
"I would like to see replication and DR features in the next release of this solution."
"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."
"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."
"The user interface could be improved. The Dell Compellent user interface is fantastic, but the Unity user interface is, in comparison, pretty lousy. It's functional, and I can do what I need, but the Dell Compellent user interface is so much more intuitive and user-friendly."
"We are running VMware, and with the VNXe it was possible to restore. We're using Veeam for VMware backups and with the predecessor, it was possible to mount a backup or restore a backup from a storage snapshot. With the Unity 300, this is not possible."
"Maybe deduplication would be something that would be better to have. Also, it's a fairly new management interface, so work is still being done on that. But compared to other vendors and previous EMC storage, the Unity is really good."
"I think there are a couple of things on the file side that we're lacking from the VNX world. It would be nice if we got some of those back. I think there are limitations on how many file systems you can back up at a time. Whereas you can do, I believe, eight continuous per data mover on the file side on the VNX, you can only do something like two or four on Unity. If they could step up to that, that would be good."
"It's very frustrating that it's not backward-compatible with the previous platforms, so it's a struggle for a lot of our customers."
"Thick provisioning of LUNs."
"We'd like to see a cheaper version of an all-flash array in that footprint."
"I miss storage groups. Now, if I have to add a LUN to a cluster, multiple host, I have to know which host is in that cluster. I have to write it down and that makes it hard. In VNX and earlier, I could simply put a LUN on a storage group and every host in the group had the LUN. This lack bothers me a lot because it takes a lot of time and mistakes are made. Sometimes, a Hyper-V host gets a VMware LUN and vice-versa. Not good."
"They can package it in a way that is specific to the hardware infrastructure and the hardware platform. It should stay fairly up to date with the drivers and the manufacturer issues. The problem with uncoupling the proprietary technology and component capabilities is that by uncoupling them, you run into some concerns or challenges over the poor performance model. These concerns really come when you start talking about high performance, high bandwidth, and high availability types of environments. While vSAN is a leader, in a critical view, it is not about being cost-effective. It is more about the immediate impact of money loss to the business in critical applications where we want to maintain a continuous operational 59 model. It is, however, good for QA/QC tasks. I don't necessarily know how it works in regards to VDI or virtual desktop infrastructure."
"Virtual machines disk size cannot cap more than a single node. For a VDI user, it may not save enough to hold a file server or exchange server on a single node storage space."
"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."
"Currently, one of the available features is shareable VMBKs. You can create the VMBK disc and you can make them shareable between the ends. But as soon as you start using this feature, you lose the ability to create snapshots."
"I lose a node in a cluster vSAN, which is also used as a cluster HA. I lose not only the storage part, which is not necessarily serious (depending on the configuration of the vSAN cluster), but on the other hand, I lose also a node of Compute, which can make things complicated quickly."
"Customers who are using Essentials Plus or even Essentials have to pay for technical support. However, they should not have to pay for support."
"What I would like to see, for the really small customers, is the ability to have two nodes."
"There needs to be an increase in the supported memory and hard disk space, as it is an area where the product currently has certain shortcomings."
Dell Unity XT is ranked 4th in All-Flash Storage with 189 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Dell Unity XT is rated 8.4, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Dell Unity XT writes "Easy to set up with good data compression technology and useful deduplication". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Dell Unity XT is most compared with Dell PowerStore, NetApp AFF, HPE Nimble Storage, Pure Storage FlashArray and HPE Primera, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity and Red Hat Ceph Storage.
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