VMware vSAN and VxRail are both highly regarded for enhancing virtual infrastructure efficiency and integration with VMware environments, with vSAN notably excelling in storage management and VxRail in operational efficiency through automation and seamless scalability. Both solutions present a potent return on investment and customer service, with users appreciating the substantial benefits in operational efficiency and support, despite some desires for more flexible pricing and easier navigation of support resources.
The summary above is based on 39 interviews we conducted recently with VMware vSAN and VxRail users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"The fact that I can now count on a true failover solution is what is most appealing."
"The configuration is so much simpler than that of a traditional SAN with fewer points of failure to worry about."
"You can turn your local disk storage into high-availability iSCSI storage."
"StarWind allows us to move virtual machines from one physical host to another, which greatly reduces the downtime required for maintenance."
"StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution."
"It eliminates the use of expensive physical shared storage."
"PowerShell library is pretty good feature as I created with APC PowerChute a script to put volumes on maintenance mode then turning off the StarWind nodes together with the VM and Hosts when UPS reaches 15 percent, this way after a blackout or electrical problems when turning servers on again, there is no issues for syncing or data loss due to energy interrupts."
"Using our own choice of HW allowed us to price our service to answer our customers' needs."
"The solution's unified administration is its most valuable aspect."
"The deduplication and compression are excellent."
"The newer versions of this solution are much more stable and easier to manage."
"The flexibility is most valuable. Being able to manage things quickly if something goes wrong is also valuable. Very recently, we had one node that went down due to a power problem, but there was really no major impact on the systems running on top of it."
"This solution has a dashboard that you can log into and control if you need too while the VM is getting created."
"Overall the solution is very good."
"The most valuable feature is fhe flexibility, the ability to move the machines around without hesitation."
"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."
"I like the managed updates. They are really nice in VxRail. Everything comes packaged and the updates are much easier than with other solutions that I've had to work with."
"VxRail does not require fiber switches or external storage. It's easy to replace and manage. It's centralized management through VxRail Manager."
"Being able to perform upgrades and check the system through the VxRail Manager has been very helpful."
"A valuable feature of the solution is that it allows everything to be integrated into a single model, comprised of hardware and software."
"The stability continues to get better and better. It's pretty reliable."
"The initial setup was not complex."
"RecoverPoint give us peace of mind knowing any corruption or server issue can be rectified very quickly, making sure the business impact is minimal."
"Our clients value being able to upgrade with one click or a few clicks."
"While we had little to no issues in setting up StarWind and received excellent support from the StarWind technicians, we would have appreciated a clearer guideline for a setup with the free version of StarWind Management Console or, in other words - for the setup with the PowerShell."
"It would be nice if we could designate pools, or tiers, for storage of different speeds, and then assign rules to new VMs that would automatically place them into the proper pool."
"It is hard to find adequate technical documentation on their support website."
"It would help us if the vendor continues to release software updates for earlier versions of the Windows operating systems."
"StarWind Virtual SAN could benefit from better integration with other tools and technologies, such as backup and disaster recovery solutions."
"The number of different ways you can set it up can make it a little daunting."
"The console is something that I feel could be improved. There is nothing technically wrong with it, but it can be jazzed up and/or made to be a little more intuitive."
"They require more media visibility."
"It could be cheaper."
"There is a lot that VMware could improve from a marketing perspective. The cloud is still new for many people, so extending storage should be effortless. It shouldn't be so complicated to extend the storage so workloads can access it no matter where they go."
"One of the things that we've had challenges with are when we place hosts into maintenance mode. Sometimes doing so triggers large re-sync processes which can be time-consuming and which have, at times, pushed the capacity to the threshold. I definitely think making some changes in that area would provide some big improvements."
"What I would like to see, for the really small customers, is the ability to have two nodes."
"Integration could be better."
"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."
"This is quite an expensive solution."
"It would be ideal if the solution offered some intelligent monitoring."
"The price could be better. The backup mechanism could also be better. Some of our clients prefer to work with backup software from a different vendor. They don't do a built-in backup solution. It would be better if they had guidelines on proper sizing and the whole life cycle from the requirement collection. If there aren't any proper guidelines, how do I go to the customer and evaluate their existing infrastructure? How can you do appropriate sizing to migrate to a hyper-converged environment? I think this is a requirement because most of our clients are migrating to a hyper-converged environment. In the next release, they can improve absolutely anything you can think of to improve the product in general—for example, the clusters and backup software."
"What I did not like so much was the amount of VMware that you have to put in your system related to the VxRail."
"The agility of the support team to provide you with better solutions should be improved. VxRail also has to be improved in terms of simplicity. Adding a simple node seemed like quite a project."
"We have issues at times with the one-click upgrade, which is bugging us. At times, the one-click upgrade does not work or does not work well."
"A more containerized approach in regards to the interface would be better."
"The implementation of a VxRail, it's straightforward, but the ongoing utilization, and integration, are where it can start to become difficult if you're not used to doing it."
"VxRail is a closed system with an out-of-the -box solution approach, it has basic 3 layers, Hardware, Network, Storage, Software, (Virtualizing) Applications. Release notes and improvement tips, patches from the back office, the business units, should be frequent and up to the patches which are coming from different vendors as far as the operating system application and also the technology itself is concerned."
"Next release, we would like to see online applications."
VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 226 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 119 reviews. VMware vSAN is rated 8.4, while VxRail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". VMware vSAN is most compared with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Dell PowerFlex and Pure Storage FlashArray, whereas VxRail is most compared with Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Hyper Converged and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes. See our VMware vSAN vs. VxRail report.
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In case of Dell EMC nodes, the only difference is setting up vSAN by yourself or pay someone else to set it up for you. In VxRail, you get licenses which are OEM locked that means you can not use those licenses on any other hardware. In VMware vSAN ready nodes, you can pick the hardware of your choice (from VMware HCL) and start building your vSAN cluster and all of the servers from different vendors work in the same cluster. In VxRail, you pay for the solution plus vSphere licenses based on your requirement. In VMware vSAN ready nodes, you pay for all the licenses separate from the hardware cost like, vCenter Server, vSphere, vSAN. for remote sites or very small setups you can use ROBO licenses in VMware vSAN ready nodes where this multi vendor thing can be very useful. From my experience, if the customer has 2-3 years old hardware, most of the times the hardware is good to be converted to an VMware vSAN ready node by making few or no changes.
VxRail is a solution that includes vSAN between their components... So VxRail is like a bundle with hardware and software components to deploy hyper-converged solution in very short time without pain.... vSAN is only a software solution that could be deploy in any hardware with enough processing and storage power... thath can be integrated with other components manually or semi automated way... VxRail includes other great components like RecoveryPoint for VM, an excellent DR/BCP solution... If you want an integrated HCI easy to deploy, manage and maintain... VxRail is the best solution
VxRail is a Turnkey solution from Dell EMC that uses VMware vSAN as the underlying storage technology
The main differences are:
vSAN can Run on any ReadyNode and can differ in the vendor, while VxRail only uses Dell Servers (PowerEdge) I do know that there other products that use CISCO (VxBlock, VXFLEX)
vSAN Requires a vSAN Licence and is renewed yearly (Or whatever your VMware Agreement is) VxRail vSAN Licences are Perpertual.
Patching and install on VxRail are simple and Dell EMC Check the updates before its generally available so the quality control is good. This is good as a bad/incompatible firmware can really cause issues with vSAN , all patching and firmware will need to be vetted and installed by yourself.
VxRail locks you into a Dell Solution. Where as with vSAN you can choose the Hardware you want.
VxRAIL is a pre buid HCI solution, with optimised configuration ready to deploy
also Vmware software VSAN and Vcenter are bundled with better prices and other bundled software
If you want to have an optimized and integrated software environment with integrated VSAN-in-Kernel into an appliance, a streamlined deployment experience, and single-vendor support go with VxRail because Dell EMC and VMware jointly developed the VxRail system powered by VMware vSAN software-defined storage. VxRail Manager is the sole and primary source for VxRail lifecycle management, cluster compatibility, software updates, and version control.
VxRail Manager further reduces operational complexity and provides software upgrade automation. Hence, VxRail is the simplest and easiest path to ready HCI and Hybrid Cloud.
VSAN is hardware agnostic but should need to have hardware/component level VSAN certifications. vSAN is enterprise-class, storage virtualization software that, when combined with vSphere, allows you to manage to compute and storage with a single platform. With vSAN, you can reduce the cost and complexity of traditional storage and have Software-Defined Storage in place but without integration with some appliance and always need to have VSA in place to bridge the communication between/among VMs and IO.
Thanks
Sufyan Ali Khan
+923018224536
The hardware hosting the solution. Vxrail is an engineered appliance from Dell to host vSAN.
In addition vSAN can be installed on any hardware that meets its requirements
When someone ask biggest, smallest, etc., they need simple answer :D VxRail is easy, while vSAN is complex. VxRail is prebuilt: easy to deploy, easy to scale out, one support contact for everything. VmWare vSAN is just an Software Defined Storage. Complex to deploy, complex to scale up/ out, and need several contact support for the whole solution.
Technically, it is hard to differentiate between two solutions.
As DellEMC is in the position of proposing two solutions at the same time, it really depends on the customer situation.
If the customer has favor on VMware and good experience of it, then VSAN would be better.
If the customer has an experience of Cisco or HP’s HCI solution, then Dell EMC will propose VxRAIL rather than VSAN.