We performed a comparison between Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI.
"I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"StarWind Virtual SAN can improve an organization's storage infrastructure by providing high availability, scalability, cost-effectiveness, performance, and ease of use."
"When using new (warranty) servers, you can forget about the storage service for several years. The users will not even notice the failure of two servers out of three."
"It has reduced our overall maintenance and overhead by having to only maintain physical boxes for one cluster instead of having to manage physical boxes for two clusters."
"It is extremely stable."
"StarWind allows us to move virtual machines from one physical host to another, which greatly reduces the downtime required for maintenance."
"The fact that we can expand our storage and add on to our compute nodes easily and how amazing the StarWind technical support team is really adding value to our purchase."
"The management interface on the software is very simple. It is insanely simple compared to most SANs. The interface is also powerful when used to complete tasks that an IT administrator needs to complete."
"I like that you can add other types of services."
"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."
"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."
"It is stable and scalable."
"The size of the hardware is what we need because it is very good for small configurations."
"Being able to deploy multiple applications with virtual servers is the most valuable for us. The capacity of the system is quite constant so it's got some of the good features."
"Very good VCG notification feature."
"VMware vSAN is easy to configure, with basic functionality and the customer can maintain the solution."
"The features of vSAN allow us to reduce our operational complexity to a large degree."
"This solution has a dashboard that you can log into and control if you need too while the VM is getting created."
"Allows us to implement more quickly, and to ease the maintenance."
"All orchestration and monitoring are routed to the cloud."
"It is easier to deploy than the traditional SAN."
"We would like the documentation to be more complete. Most items are covered, but if you don't know something, you may need to contact their support."
"It is not very clear within the StarWind Management Console or the StarWind support documentation how to perform maintenance on a single node in a two-node HA cluster."
"The management console of StarWind Virtual SAN is pretty complex."
"It would be good to have a little more access to control certain aspects within the UI."
"The system performs as expected, but we're always looking for performance improvements regarding the best utilization of NVMe disks."
"The documentation is good yet is still lacking in a few areas."
"StarWind really needs to market its product more."
"I would like to see more advanced free versions."
"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."
"This product is not so stable. Maybe it is just not mature enough in its development."
"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."
"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."
"Hardware load balancing is available on the enterprise version of the solution, however, it's extremely expensive and therefore out of our budget."
"We are facing some problems with updates with the VMware vSAN. When we upgraded from version 6.5 to 7, we have been faced with many problems. They have been deploying many hotfixes for this version, and they need to continue to improve this version."
"External storage would be a good thing to have in the next release, something other than iSCZI, something a little more, not HA, a little more production-oriented, than iSCZI."
"The platform's cost affects the business. This particular area needs improvement."
"vSAN itself is a great storage platform, but one of the issues with it is that you have to be fully locked into the VMware package to use it. We're going to be deploying 72 Kubernetes nodes, and we're not going to buy VMware licenses for 72 of them, just so they can access vSAN. That's what we're using the Pure for. Opening it up so you could have vSAN as a data store, use it as a data lake, hit it with an NFS, S3 from outside the VMware ecosystem, would be great."
"The solution must provide better customization."
"I would like more integration with the hardware when it comes to disc types and supporting the newer types of storage."
"Customers who are using Essentials Plus or even Essentials have to pay for technical support. However, they should not have to pay for support."
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Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is ranked 22nd in HCI while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 226 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, Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray.
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