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."We have significantly less latency now with our imagery."
"It's a kind of one-stop shop as far as support goes."
"Software flexibility. Everything is fully configurable. The reliability results from the design. Elements are well projected (disks, blade, network, etc.). No single point of failure is identifiable."
"Simplicity and integration with NetApp are its most valuable features."
"It is a very well-thought-out solution with great virtualization. A good option we have is mapping a storage LUN onto an ESX cluster. That way, in case a particular ESX is down, it can migrate (using vMotion) to another host in the cluster, resulting in high-availability."
"It is a complete solution."
"The most significant benefit is storage flexibility. FlexPod is a reference design to build on and add the appropriate resources you need for your workloads. That's what differentiates it from something like HCI, where you have to buy certain size pieces when you want to expand."
"NetApp is always coming up with features that I want before I know that I want them."
"The most valuable features are its performance, simplicity, and synchronicity with vSphere."
"It is easier to deploy than the traditional SAN."
"It is user-friendly, and its performance is good."
"It is scalable, overall. If you need to add storage, it makes it easy to scale by adding additional hard drives into the existing servers or you can add storage by just adding more servers."
"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"
"We had very good access to technical support."
"Its ease of use is most valuable. It is easy to configure, and there is a unified interface, which makes things slightly easier."
"The valuable feature of the solution is the total hyperconverged facility."
"Perhaps the automation interface could be improved."
"The biggest problem we have seen is, we were using the vStorage which comes with the NetApp environment, a kind of fiber connect. We were missing fibre channel connectivity and we got lots of I/O errors."
"It could be more innovative."
"The procedure for contacting technical support could be simplified."
"Upgrades are always scary because you just don't know. Nobody has six or seven different systems sitting around that you can test on before you go into production data."
"There are certain things that are just hard to do on a physical infrastructure, like for instance you need to make petabytes of data available at high speed."
"It would be helpful if they sold a pre-boxed option so that you can buy a rack and everything's already there, everything's connected."
"FlexPod was born to be used like building-block elements, to create large EDP premises. If used to create a single FlexPod CED, optional operational collaterals (backup, management, etc.) are missing, both in docs and in design."
"The platform’s pricing needs improvement. Additionally, there should be an appliance module included in it."
"They can improve the manageability of the solution to make it more simple. It is not that complicated, but it will be good if they can make it more simple."
"The biggest room for improvement I see in vSAN is the lack of SAN connectivity. I've kind of joked around that there is no "SAN" in vSAN. And it's something that we've worked to try and introduce some options for, and we're going to continue to work towards that."
"The integration could be improved. I would like to see integration with other platforms."
"Enterprise customers get discounts on the solution's licensing pricing, but it is too expensive for SMB customers."
"They should make the software updates easier. We should be able to upgrade it more easily."
"Some intelligence can be added to the newest version to provide more flexibility between storage tiers."
"The vSan product uses a software system called Vsphere to monitor the system. It is sometimes difficult to manage the PCs within the systems."
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, VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), 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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