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."The documentation alone that NetApp provides can guide anybody through the setup process."
"Our data center rack space collapsed and our manpower decreased."
"FlexPod is the primary solution we recommend for clients with high-availability server requirements. Our clients find FlexPod's management helpful. You can manage everything via plugins."
"The ability to converge a lot of different data and platforms into a single common platform, then scale horizontally and vertically."
"The solution makes our staff more efficient, enabling them to spend time on tasks that drive our business forward. The environment is more homogeneous, so there are not as many technologies to study and learn. People can focus on improving their knowledge in existing technologies."
"Integration is most valuable. This is a reference architecture. So, we don't have to design something from scratch and figure out how it is going to work."
"The overall versatility and validate designs are great. We previously used a different platform, but we gained a lot of utilization with FlexPod."
"It makes us more lateral and faster to production."
"The most valuable features of VMware vSAN are that it receives updates frequently, has good compression, optimized storage, and they provide webinars on what is new. Additionally, the integration with third-party products is good and it is easy to manage."
"The high availability is very good."
"The migration of servers feature makes server rack maintenance easy."
"Everyone uses virtualization to more efficiently utilize hardware resources. That's the main point of vSAN and VMware."
"Instead of going for SAN storage, customers can use the scale-up and scale-out features of VMware vSAN."
"Storage virtualization software with a good storage management feature. It's a scalable and stable software."
"Easy-to-use, and easy-to-scale product."
"Technical support has been very good. They respond pretty fast, especially if we have a critical issue. Their responses have been great."
"We would like to see the automation improved because there has been a learning curve having to create the workflows."
"They need to improve the user interface to make it easier to work in this environment. The older version is poor."
"I would like more orchestration and networking in-between the VMs, the virtualization layer for networking. I would like to see better tools for this."
"The tool is obsolete and we are migrating to HPE. It should improve the pricing."
"I'd like to see some more Ansible integration for automation purposes. We automate everything else with Ansible, so it would be great if we could automate our FlexPod with Ansible as well."
"This solution is very hard to maintain and keep up."
"Installation with FlexPod is a bit complex, but it can be upgraded easily. I think Flexpod is phasing out, but it is still the right solution."
"The initial setup is complex because it has to be done in a certain way."
"The solution could be improved by having more filtered and multiple view volumes instead of a single view."
"The upgrading process could be simplified."
"In a future release, they could add micro-segmentation or security level features integrated into vSAN."
"I would like to see it be more hardware-agnostic. Other than that, the only other complication is - and it has gotten better with the newer versions - that lately, once you're running an all-flash, if you need to grow or scale down your infrastructure, it's a long process. You need to evacuate all data and make sure you have enough space on the host, then add more hosts or take out hosts. That process is a little bit complex. You cannot scale as needed or shrink as needed."
"Because of virtual storage, the system reaches reserve storage for its functions. It also consumes a certain amount of storage, which then results in the creation of a fault tolerance for the system. All of this adds to a lot of capacity being consumed in terms of storage for each drive for vSan. I find this to be one drawback of using vSan."
"It would be ideal if the solution offered some intelligent monitoring."
"If one node out of your ten nodes fails, it takes a lot of time to replicate and rebalance VMware vSAN. This time can be reduced. When a node fails and the data is not accessible, vSAN has to be rebalanced to make the redundancy level of two again. However, if it is taking a lot of time and any other hardware fails during that time, then we have a problem. Two disk failures mean that all data will be lost, and we may have to recover it from the backup. So, the number of threads that run to do the rebalancing could be more so that the time taken to make it fully redundant again is not so much."
"I see room for improvement for vSAN just around general hardware compatibility and expanding that sort of matrix."
FlexPod XCS is ranked 2nd in Converged Infrastructure with 295 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 226 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, Oracle Exadata, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail and Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI).
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