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."I like that it can virtualize more than three hundred storage providers."
"Although the GUI from the XIV was used (in my view), IBM has polished and refined the GUI providing a pleasant and easy to navigate GUI experience."
"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."
"The most valuable features are the simplicity of use, the flexibility, and the options included. I mean, it's just a big time saver."
"The SVC gives excellent performance with tiered storage behind it."
"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 has the ability to seamlessly move hardware in and out as we refresh technology."
"The scalability is very good. It can handle anywhere from very small to large enterprise class."
"Very good VCG notification feature."
"it's easy to scale, it's easy to predict IOP needs, and you can design for low latency using all-flash... Also, for setting up new clusters for VDI quickly, it's nice. You don't have to wait on an order for a storage vendor to ship you a system and help you configure it, you do it all yourself. And the sizing guides are pretty straightforward."
"Scalability in vSAN has been really good. It's very easy to add nodes in, to automatically generate the drives and the disk groups. It has been a piece of cake, surprisingly so."
"vSAN provides default HA configurations, where if any host goes down, the VM moves around within the host. Even though the disks are local, the VMs moves around with the vSAN disk and vSAN provides a high availability on its own."
"To me, VMware is a leader of the visualizations. I think everyone just follow VMware."
"The implementation is simple, it was very straightforward. It took us approximately three weeks because it was installed in four locations."
"You get the benefit of local storage, but you have the protection of shared storage."
"One of the most valuable features of this solution is that it is stable."
"Anything which improves performance and the ability of our systems would be a nice."
"I would like to see more baseline replication and integration with the operating system between Vmware and IBMI."
"There are big arrays now, and if a customer wants add more disks to it, you have to have another array. Adding disks to existing arrays is one of the most demanded things from our customers."
"NBME support and support for a higher Fibre Channel lengths could be improved, but those are already on the roadmap."
"GUI should be developed in HTML5 as opposed to Java."
"I already discussed possible improvements with some of the guys from Hearnsley. One of our frustrations is when you go to expand volumes in a global mirror environment, you have to stop everything in order to expand. So that's one of the things."
"For improvement considerations, I would probably say multiple sites."
"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."
"It needs to be vanilla. There shouldn't be any custom drivers, any custom anything. It should just be, "Hey, you know what? These drivers are going to work for this version, the next version, and the following version after that." That's the difficulty in this. It takes too much upkeep... The main issue is drivers. Every time we move to a new vSAN version, we're having problems finding the correct drivers for the vendor."
"The server files are larger than before."
"I would have liked it to have been more scalable. It's scalable but not as much as, for example, the ScaleIO systems were or the Kaminario"
"vSAN does not have online dedup. When opening the inline dedupe, the performance will be lower than off inline."
"Improvements can be made with respect to scalability."
"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."
"It would be ideal if clients didn't need to monitor the solution on a daily basis."
"Pricing is something of a concern."
IBM Spectrum Virtualize is ranked 14th in Software Defined Storage (SDS) with 35 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. IBM Spectrum Virtualize is rated 8.8, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of IBM Spectrum Virtualize writes "Robust, stable, with good performance, and easy to implement". 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 Red Hat Ceph Storage, 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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