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."Using our own choice of HW allowed us to price our service to answer our customers' needs."
"This solution made it possible to deploy a new infrastructure in the shortest amount of time, at a low cost without purchasing expensive hardware storage, and use unused servers."
"The failover redundancy is why we bought this product and it has never let us down."
"The best feature is its ease of installation and integration within a current infrastructure."
"It has a nice, simple control panel. You can clearly see the state and health of storage along with the synchronization."
"The StarWind products have enabled our organization to modernize stations where larger and more expensive equipment was not an option."
"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."
"Active-active work mode leads to true redundancy of storage and allows us to distribute the load between multiple nodes."
"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."
"I like that you can add other types of services."
"It is stable and scalable."
"The size of the hardware is what we need because it is very good for small configurations."
"Both the scalability and stability of this solution are excellent."
"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."
"The most important functionality is the ability to extend cluster storage and cluster computing power securely without loss of data."
"It's very scalable. I like that. Adding a node is easy. Adding a disk group is easy."
"I think vSAN's stability is good. It's an underlying solution for both on-prem and in the cloud, especially the VMC on AWS stuff too. VMware has been around for a long time, so it's pretty stable."
"Adding new nodes and expanding vSAN forward is simple and non-disruptive for a lot of our customers."
"All orchestration and monitoring are routed to the cloud."
"Technical support has been very good. They respond pretty fast, especially if we have a critical issue. Their responses have been great."
"The product’s ecosystem is better than Nutanix’s."
"The solution's unified administration is its most valuable aspect."
"I did not see any indication that StarWinds vSAN is a usable solution with non-GUI instances of Hyper-V."
"Security on the ISCSI protocol could be improved by adding features like OS-type control access, especially for the data center environment."
"There is no Italian-language version of the software available."
"I am expecting to see it more user-friendly in the future."
"The documentation is good. However, if compared with competitors, it could be enhanced and made more professional."
"The initial setup got a little confusing at a few points with differences between the VMware version in documentation vs the latest, etc."
"An update caused a syncing issue and it took over a month to resolve it"
"Sometimes documentation on their site can be out of date."
"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."
"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."
"It should be more user-friendly, in my opinion."
"This product is not so stable. Maybe it is just not mature enough in its development."
"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 cloud deployment could be improved."
"I think it needs to be more cost-effective. I would also say that even though the capacity is good, there is also room for improvement there. Also, they could improve the security of the system."
"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."
"There could be more features with the automatic backup."
"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 like more integration with the hardware when it comes to disc types and supporting the newer types of storage."
"Better options would be clustered nodes, or even cloud configuration. There is room for improvement in cloud configuration, we typically do web browsing for management."
"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."
"I would like to see more comprehensive lifecycle management. The current path and process for upgrading or updating the firmware, as well as the storage controller software to interact with that firmware, is fairly manual and not very well documented. A little more time and effort spent on the documentation of the lifecycle management for vSan would be really great."
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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, 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 Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure vs. VMware vSAN report.
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