We performed a comparison between FlexPod XCS and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others in Converged Infrastructure."It has simplified our support."
"The Cisco Validated Designs are the most valuable feature along with the Industry-leading technology, put together; and the fact that it just works."
"From the integration standpoint, it is a lot easier to integrate than a lot of people initially felt. Being able to leverage either block or file capabilities of the storage is something that has been beneficial."
"You can add more boxes and you can have more IOPS available if you want. It's very easy to add new hardware to the cluster."
"Our footprint is lower than it used to be."
"Large and small companies do not have time to design the compute, the amount of storage, and how it works together. They are buying pre-proven, pretested solutions with reference architectures already in place."
"Our previous solution used to take 24 hours and now we're down to seven hours. It has really good performance."
"The data is available, compressed, and deduped."
"The most valuable feature is the fast performance."
"It's very scalable. I like that. Adding a node is easy. Adding a disk group is easy."
"The ease of use is great."
"VMware comes with different stacks like VMware Cloud Foundation, which is integrated with different VMware modules. There's interoperability between VMware products."
"Technical support has been very good. They respond pretty fast, especially if we have a critical issue. Their responses have been great."
"The most valuable features are its performance, simplicity, and synchronicity with vSphere."
"vSAN has just one datastore. so customers do not need to think where to put their VMs, how to design the physical disk RAID, the LUN size, the LUN mapping, etc. when they use NetApp/EMC/HDS or other storage systems."
"The scalability is very good and the solution is stable and reliable."
"As we do much of the Tier-I support ourselves, and thus don't normally need it, there is time wasted in moving up to the next level."
"They should cram more space in there and find a way to compress things more; dedupe better."
"On the NetApp side, there are definitely things to improve in terms of software updates."
"The integration between both companies, Cisco and NetApp, is very good but it still needs to be enhanced in terms of visibility and observability."
"It would be nice to have something like an automated, upgrade solution The tasks needed to upgrade the hardware within FlexPod are still quite behind compared to some of its other aspects. That's more on the Cisco side."
"I would like to see more orchestration tools in FlexPod because we virtually end up with integrating the v-orchestration tool within FlexPod. I would like to see something like that included within FlexPod."
"We would like more integration with some other HCI solutions so we can take advantage of other opportunities."
"We don't see the much DR capability within the FlexPod so for that, we have to maintain our own DR capability with DSRM."
"This solution would benefit from better collaboration with Cisco for driver updates."
"When designing the implementation for vSAN, I have noticed that it requires a minimum of six nodes, and this creates a problem when it comes to maintenance. If, out of the six nodes, I put one node in maintenance mode, then vSAN does not create other VM components."
"There is always a challenge with their firmware."
"We would like to see even more storage capacity."
"I would like for the next release to be a bit cheaper."
"We do see weird things crop up every now and again. It will say that a drive gets kicked off even though it's fine, and we have to re-add it."
"I'd like to see better integration with the Update Manager, with respect to firmware updates for hardware."
"More focus has to be put on deduplication and compression with a hybrid architecture."
FlexPod XCS is ranked 2nd in Converged Infrastructure with 295 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. FlexPod XCS is rated 8.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of FlexPod XCS writes "Integrates everything so you are using fewer tools". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". FlexPod XCS is most compared with Dell PowerFlex, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail, Oracle Exadata and HPE ConvergedSystem, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Dell PowerFlex.
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