We performed a comparison between Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."I like StarWind's high availability. The failover is almost immediate, so the end users have no idea the guest VM moved at all. We can failover all guest VMs onto a single hypervisor, place it into maintenance mode, install updates, and reboot a hypervisor all during the daytime and remotely, with confidence the process will be successful."
"This solution made it possible to deploy a new infrastructure in the shortest amount of time, at a low cost without purchasing expensive hardware storage, and use unused servers."
"A great feature is that I basically set it and forget it, as everything is automatic."
"The product has improved the ability to mimic physical SAN environments to demo scenarios and troubleshoot problems."
"The most valuable feature is the reliable storage replication, which enables me to create a robust infrastructure to run our business."
"It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it."
"Their support staff is comprised of true experts who can also communicate clearly."
"We like their high availability. It reduces the downtime for our entire organization's environment."
"Dell EMC VxFlex Ready Nodes can support what we call a heterogeneous environment. So you can have VMware workloads, Hyper-V workloads, bare metal Red Hat workloads, Kubernetes workloads all on the same cluster. You're not pigeonholed into either all bare metal or all virtualized. So it supports basically any platform."
"The most valuable features of Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes are the ease of acquisition."
"VMware has been around for a long time are are doing a decent job at catching up with the latest technologies i.e. bringing in kubernetes and containerization. Overall, this is a great tool for virtualization."
"The most valuable features are ease of deployment, and ease of management. If you compare it to other software-defined storage products, it's much easier. It's a checkbox. It's lot easier to manage."
"Since the storage space is local to the hosts, it reduces the overall response time and improves the performance."
"While we haven't made major changes to our disaster recovery and business continuity processes yet, moving towards stretch vSAN across sites will simplify and expedite our DR processes in the future."
"The performance has exceeded our expectations and exceeded our traditional converged infrastructure."
"The deduplication and compression are excellent."
"The most valuable features for us are the ability to scale out the nodes independently, and the flexibility of the nodes. We can put almost any type of server in there with our connectivity and everything works great."
"Storage virtualization software with a good storage management feature. It's a scalable and stable software."
"In all areas the product could be made faster."
"I would like to see an extensive set of cmdlets that could allow for easier automation as well as status management."
"Some of the documentation seems to be a bit older and refers to deprecated items."
"To enable the proactive support capability that is part of our support agreement, I would ask that the terms and conditions be revised and made acceptable to corporate security."
"Some configuration options still demand service restarting."
"The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us."
"While StarWind.com excels in numerous areas, there are a couple of notable functionalities that it currently lacks. One of these is duplication, which could be an invaluable feature for data redundancy and backup purposes. The ability to duplicate data across different storage locations can be crucial for safeguarding against data loss, and its absence is a minor limitation in an otherwise stellar offering."
"StarWind Virtual SAN architecture is slightly complex and requires the team to carefully identify and study how the solution integrates with VMware vSphere."
"From a technical perspective, it's a pretty rock solid solution. I would say the only area for improvement is around its price."
"Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is a little less sophisticated than some of the other solutions out there. A full-blown cloud foundation has a lot more to it."
"VMware vSAN could improve by having faster reload time and a single point of failure. Resynchronization of many hardware could be better. If you have an outage of a disc or a full system, the replication time is too slow. This has room for improvement."
"I would like to see more comprehensive lifecycle management. The current path and process for upgrading or updating the firmware, as well as the storage controller software to interact with that firmware, is fairly manual and not very well documented. A little more time and effort spent on the documentation of the lifecycle management for vSan would be really great."
"There's a lot that can be done to segregate. That may be available now in vSAN 7, I suppose, however, the deduplication and compression can be segregated."
"This solution would benefit from better collaboration with Cisco for driver updates."
"The solution functions as the marketing says, as long as you follow certain rules."
"When designing the implementation for vSAN, I have noticed that it requires a minimum of six nodes, and this creates a problem when it comes to maintenance. If, out of the six nodes, I put one node in maintenance mode, then vSAN does not create other VM components."
"I would like to be able to limit IOPS."
"The product's complex setup phase is an area of concern where improvements are required."
Earn 20 points
Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is ranked 20th in HCI while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is rated 9.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes writes "Single platform for a mix of virtualized and physical workloads". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is most compared with VxRail, HPE Alletra dHCI 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. See our Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes vs. VMware vSAN report.
See our list of best HCI vendors.
We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
