We performed a comparison between Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure 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."Support keeps track of alerts of the system and verifies with us if we need help to fix any issues. They have great and quick technical support."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to grow rapidly while still providing flexibility and reliability."
"The fact that we can expand our storage and add on to our compute nodes easily and how amazing the StarWind technical support team is really adding value to our purchase."
"Immediately we noticed huge performance gains, even on older hardware and once we implemented a 10GB link between both servers, the sync was near-instant after the initial sync was complete."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to leverage our server infrastructure more completely without the need to add more hardware."
"The ability to run the software virtually on every virtualization platform and the ability to eliminate all storage vendor locking are the most valuable features."
"StarWind vSAN was very easy to integrate into our system and ran flawlessly during our entire use time."
"The primary purpose of this software is to create a virtual SAN between local storage on Hyper-V hosts. I find this feature most valuable since it accomplishes this quite well."
"Both the scalability and stability of this solution are excellent."
"The size of the hardware is what we need because it is very good for small configurations."
"It is stable and scalable."
"The consolidation of the management in one control point is the most valuable. The whole infrastructure management is consolidated in just one console point. The documentation is also pretty good."
"I like that you can add other types of services."
"The most useful feature is the solution's automation in terms of how we are able to spin up a certain workload in real-time when we are doing R&D."
"The installation is very easy."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to continue our business needs and have higher visibility. It has definitely increased our business productivity levels."
"The most valuable features are ease of deployment, and ease of management. If you compare it to other software-defined storage products, it's much easier. It's a checkbox. It's lot easier to manage."
"vSAN is one of the easiest implementations of any VMware product. It's almost like click it to enable it, then you're almost done."
"VMware vSAN is easy to implement in a VMware environment and it is not expensive."
"The solutions best feature is that it is easy to use."
"vSAN is integrated into VMware."
"The deduplication and compression are excellent."
"I found that certain browsers are not fully compatible with the administration web access portal."
"For someone entering the IT sector with little knowledge of storage, iSCSI, and virtual disks, they might not find the GUI immediately obvious."
"It is difficult to control all of the hardware components."
"Perhaps more reporting features on the utilization, usage, and performance of the configured high-availability images and underlying physical disks would be helpful."
"I see no need for major improvements but there could be some improvements in the form of notifications and the simplifying of maintenance mode."
"For me, the product could be improved by it being made cheaper."
"I would like to see more advanced free versions."
"A central management console may be nice to see all nodes."
"It is not user-friendly, and it is very difficult to operate. You have to have a deep understanding of the technical details of the infrastructure to implement it. When you compare it with VMware, it is totally different because the graphical user interface is not that easy to understand. It is not intuitive. To use it, you have to read a lot of documentation and even understand what is going on behind the solution. It is not for someone who has a little bit of knowledge. Currently, it is too complex. I need something that is easy to implement. It should have a basic configuration as well as a complex configuration."
"The licensing policy needs to be improved. They have a licensing policy based on the number of CPU sockets. Nowadays what has happened is that the license they are trying to move is based on the number of CPU cores. With the advancement in technology there are now more cores in a single CPU. It's been very challenging in terms of managing the license around everything. Today we have a processor with 24 and 32 cores on the same physical CPU."
"This product is not so stable. Maybe it is just not mature enough in its development."
"It should be more user-friendly, in my opinion."
"The cloud deployment could be improved."
"The main issue is the initial investment. It is an expensive product, and it should be cheaper. It should also be easier to use and manage. The professional service for this solution is quite complex and expensive."
"Pricing is something of a concern."
"There is a lot that VMware could improve from a marketing perspective. The cloud is still new for many people, so extending storage should be effortless. It shouldn't be so complicated to extend the storage so workloads can access it no matter where they go."
"I would like to see a little bit more documentation on the initial setup, and a little bit more explanation on the expandability: How to extend out your vSAN much more simply through the console because, a lot of the time, you have to do it through the command line."
"Reporting currently depends on third party applications and that could be improved."
"A vSAN cluster must have compression and deduplication to be an all-flash array, but it's not supported with a hybrid array. Deduplication and compression work better with an all-flash array, so I think that VMware should give customers the option to activate and support this feature for hybrid arrays. Other products like Nutanix support this."
"The UI could certainly be better. The inside into what's actually going on with vSAN would be nice to know."
"The price can be reduced. Small businesses cannot afford this solution."
"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."
More Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure Pricing and Cost Advice →
Earn 20 points
Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is ranked 22nd in HCI while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is rated 8.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure writes "Comes in a small, compact model that does not have any separate management but it is not so stable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is most compared with VxRail, Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure vs. VMware vSAN report.
See our list of best HCI vendors.
We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
