We performed a comparison between IBM Spectrum Virtualize and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Software Defined Storage (SDS) solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The ability to add the virtual machine on the Spectrum environment to sort out the data movers(DMs) and their schedules is a valuable feature. You are able to have, for example, four data movers to balance them so you do not have too much work on one data mover."
"It is a single pane of glass management interface, so once the storage is allocated to SVC, they only have one place to go to manage it for everything."
"One of the main features of Spectrum Virtualize is it virtualizes the servers from the storage. We have a very large infrastructure. A major advantage is when you get the aged storage arrays and you have to replace all of those."
"It lowers cost. It does so by getting more efficient use out of the technology behind it."
"The SVC gives excellent performance with tiered storage behind it."
"It has the ability to seamlessly move hardware in and out as we refresh technology."
"It provides transparency, because of its advanced copy features."
"When we add storage behind it, the product is good for the customers because their customers do not notice that anything is happening due to the virtualization."
"I have used VMware for 15 years and I never had any problems with stability."
"All orchestration and monitoring are routed to the cloud."
"We can scale it very easily for a test environment. We were able to segment our DMZ so it wasn't connected to anything, which we really liked."
"Flexibility, growth, and expansion are probably the more important features for us. As our environment grows, the more users come on, the more VDI workstations that we need, we can easily expand either horizontally or vertically with the environment"
"The newer versions of this solution are much more stable and easier to manage."
"Technical support is very helpful and very good at resolving issues."
"Provides good performance as well as integration with deployment tools."
"The most valuable features are its price point and that you can use existing storage; no specific storage requirements are needed."
"For improvement considerations, I would probably say multiple sites."
"They are actually working on one bug we found, which was with flash restore. This was the user interface design for virtual environments."
"Anything which improves performance and the ability of our systems would be a nice."
"In general, the migration is complicated. Though, it is case-by-case."
"Level 1 technical support needs improvement."
"I hate I/O groups. If you start swapping I/O groups, they can be potentially risky. If they could get rid of the whole I/O group principle, the risk is not there anymore. I understand the fundamental thing about I/O groups, but they are risky."
"The only errors I find sometimes is the solution tells me I cannot operate it because a service has turned off, you can just go back to the VM, go to services, and turn back the services. However, this should improve."
"The Storwize port is not so stable."
"It could be cheaper."
"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."
"Based on my testing, I would like to expand deduplication to include hybrid deployments and not just for all-flash deployments."
"Currently, one of the available features is shareable VMBKs. You can create the VMBK disc and you can make them shareable between the ends. But as soon as you start using this feature, you lose the ability to create snapshots."
"One area that could be improved is the management feature."
"The solution must provide better customization."
"It would be much improved if we could somehow integrate a better backup with it. Right now, we're using Veeam and it's okay, but I would like more of a VDP vSAN solution. That would be excellent. The VDP, at least the last time we looked at, it was just not quite there."
"The only negative point relates to the licensing. If you want multiple, different servers, it costs money, but you have all the capacity for vSAN. You do not reach the data, but the processor arrays and the current architecture."
IBM Spectrum Virtualize is ranked 14th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 36 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 226 reviews. IBM Spectrum Virtualize is rated 8.8, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of IBM Spectrum Virtualize writes "A highly scalable product that is relatively easy to use and set up". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". IBM Spectrum Virtualize is most compared with Dell VPLEX, VxRail, IBM Spectrum Scale, DataCore SANsymphony and NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Dell PowerFlex. See our IBM Spectrum Virtualize vs. VMware vSAN report.
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