We performed a comparison between Dell vSAN Ready Nodes and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."High Availability is the best feature of product."
"This software lets us maintain storage redundancy across both of our Hyper-V hosts, so if one goes down the environment fails over to the other and we have minimal to no downtime."
"StarWind support has been great in helping resolve other issues not caused by their software."
"We like their high availability. It reduces the downtime for our entire organization's environment."
"It includes every feature that a traditional SAN offers and so much more."
"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."
"It has reduced our overall maintenance and overhead by having to only maintain physical boxes for one cluster instead of having to manage physical boxes for two clusters."
"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."
"If I consider the overall product, I would say that it is an excellent solution that offers very good performance and stability."
"It is easy to install."
"The product is useful for DR and other things."
"The tool's most valuable feature is high availability."
"I have found the most important features of Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes are the capacity to manage the storage because the storage is built in the servers. The type of profiles you can attribute to the storage is a benefit. You can manage the storage by profiles. Overall the solution is a good speed and performance."
"The most valuable feature of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is file sharing."
"The solution immediately expands storage area when you add nodes."
"The most valuable feature of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is the flexibility of the nodes. Additionally, if there are any critical issues they update us through emails. The issues are taken care of remotely on the system."
"The implementation is simple, it was very straightforward. It took us approximately three weeks because it was installed in four locations."
"It's completely hyper-converged, so it's very convenient."
"High availability is a valuable aspect of this solution."
"When we do to do more scaled load testing, we can run more dense workloads and still have the same results across all specific nodes"
"The solution is quite stable."
"While we haven't made major changes to our disaster recovery and business continuity processes yet, moving towards stretch vSAN across sites will simplify and expedite our DR processes in the future."
"The installation is very easy."
"The solution has high performance."
"We don't really have any issues with this product."
"There should be publicly available tutorials on YouTube or other platforms that help the users to integrate this solution with other platforms, for example."
"Maybe in the future, the replication will be supported in more cloud providers."
"The software monitoring should be web-based to be reachable from any VLAN workstation."
"The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us."
"While we had no problems setting the system up, and service technicians from StarWind could assist us very well, they could provide some form of in-depth documentation."
"In all areas the product could be made faster."
"While it is possible to implement disk encryption in StarWind using Windows Bitlocker, such a solution can be a little tricky to manage."
"There is room for improvement in the maintenance pricing. Maintenance isn't difficult, but the prices are high and ridiculous. Some customers feel it is better to go with a new solution rather than renew this one."
"Scalability is an area that could be improved. We are looking at a maximum of 32 nodes now in a cluster, but going to 64 or 128 would be a major advantage."
"Compatibility with other hardware nodes needs to be improved."
"Dell vSAN Ready Nodes must be flexible since it is complex in designing concepts. It needs to improve stability. The product should integrate with the public cloud."
"The solution should provide daily task alerts for data recovery maintenance, usage, and other instructions to ensure the systems are in a good status."
"Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes is a great hyper-converged system that is a perfect platform for supporting any kind of workload. The only workload that it's not designed to support is big data."
"The Dell VxRail solution is based on vSAN Ready Nodes, but the Dell VxRail is fully automated. It would be helpful if this automation feature could be added to the Dell vSAN Ready Nodes. For example, we need to install VMware ESXi, and manually expand the cluster."
"The deployment is done by doing it one by one and could be simplified."
"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."
"This product is very expensive."
"The biggest room for improvement I see in vSAN is the lack of SAN connectivity. I've kind of joked around that there is no "SAN" in vSAN. And it's something that we've worked to try and introduce some options for, and we're going to continue to work towards that."
"There is always a challenge with their firmware."
"The interface is a little complicated, it could be simplified with more graphical gadgets. We have many servers, and the built-in functions, such as rate configuration, are a bit complex."
"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."
"I would love to see vSAN integrate Persistent Memory and NVDIMMs. I know they're supposed to be working on an elastic tier so that we don't have the issues with destaging from the cache to the capacity. Those are the things that I'm interested in."
"On the DevOps side, if there could be more automation it would be more helpful."
Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is ranked 11th in HCI with 14 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is rated 8.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes writes "Offers good performance and is easy to use". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is most compared with VxRail, Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series, Dell PowerFlex, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Dell vSAN Ready Nodes vs. VMware vSAN report.
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