We performed a comparison between Dell vSAN 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."The failover redundancy is why we bought this product and it has never let us down."
"The biggest benefit was that it allowed us to provide SAN services on a limited hardware budget."
"It integrates (fully) with VMware and Veeam, my hypervisor, and backup vendors, so for me, all the puzzle pieces simply fit and work smoothly."
"I save both physical and virtual space."
"StarWind support has been great in helping resolve other issues not caused by their software."
"It's quite easy to install."
"The features that I found most valuable are ease of use of the software that StarWind offers - with the first setup being a bit painful."
"Before VSAN, hypervisor configuration changes and updates resulted in VM outages. Now, downtime is dramatically reduced."
"The solution immediately expands storage area when you add nodes."
"You don't have to spend much time evaluating the hardware. It can be deployed in a short time. The tool is also easy to upgrade."
"We find the initial implementation process simple and straightforward."
"They are heading in the right direction and moving to integrate everything with a hybrid cloud, and moving workloads back and forth."
"It is easy to install."
"The product is useful for DR and other things."
"No concerns regarding the footprint in the data center."
"Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes is scalable"
"vSAN Health is a feature designed to monitor the health and performance of the vSAN environment. It's crucial for us and our customers to frequently check on this to ensure everything is operating smoothly."
"There is not a lot of maintenance required."
"I like vSAN because they release features incrementally, every year, and you don't have to upgrade your hardware to get those features. If you bought a traditional SAN, you would have to upgrade your hardware constantly, every three years: You would get it, and it is how it is for three years. But on vSAN, you upgrade when you have to, when your hardware gets old or when you need more capacity. It's great, you get new features constantly."
"The most valuable features are its performance, simplicity, and synchronicity with vSphere."
"VMware vSAN is a global solution, so we can manage all the storage solutions in one place. It's embedded in VCI solutions."
"The solution's unified administration is its most valuable aspect."
"Provides good performance as well as integration with deployment tools."
"The most valuable features of VMware vSAN are that it receives updates frequently, has good compression, optimized storage, and they provide webinars on what is new. Additionally, the integration with third-party products is good and it is easy to manage."
"Diagnostics information or alerts on the state of systems could also be implemented to give more visibility."
"They need to invest more in the support documents for real issues happening when integrating the solution with the hypervisor."
"The setup and documentation for the installation with the free version could definitely be improved."
"This product could be improved with the inclusion of new health check procedures."
"It would be good to have a little more access to control certain aspects within the UI."
"It would be helpful to have a little more insight into what kind of performance the VSAN cluster is utilizing; something that would be more proactive on our side, versus their ProActive Support."
"Feature-wise we are only waiting for the release of a "planned disaster" feature that would allow us to patch a hypervisor node without having to take the full storage offline."
"I think the setup could be streamlined a bit."
"Upgrades are carried out manually."
"There is room for improvement in the maintenance pricing. Maintenance isn't difficult, but the prices are high and ridiculous. Some customers feel it is better to go with a new solution rather than renew this one."
"Scalability is an area that could be improved. We are looking at a maximum of 32 nodes now in a cluster, but going to 64 or 128 would be a major advantage."
"Compatibility with other hardware nodes needs to be improved."
"The solution doesn't scale."
"The power switch on the hardware is located in a poor location where it can accidentally be pushed. In an update, they should solve this issue so people do not push it accidentally to have their service go down. A possible solution is the switch should be inside."
"The Dell VxRail solution is based on vSAN Ready Nodes, but the Dell VxRail is fully automated. It would be helpful if this automation feature could be added to the Dell vSAN Ready Nodes. For example, we need to install VMware ESXi, and manually expand the cluster."
"This product is not sufficiently scalable."
"If we have some complicated issues, you have to use the command lines interface. Not everything is possible to be fixed in the GUI. This is a drawback, that some things have to be fixed via command-line interface and should be able to be done in the GUI."
"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."
"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."
"VMware vSAN could improve by adding NAS and object storage."
"It would be ideal if the solution offered some intelligent monitoring."
"The customer service is good but there is a cost for it. It does not come free."
"I would like more integration with the hardware when it comes to disc types and supporting the newer types of storage."
"I think it needs to be more cost-effective. I would also say that even though the capacity is good, there is also room for improvement there. Also, they could improve the security of the system."
Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is ranked 12th in HCI with 14 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is rated 8.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes writes "Offers good performance and is easy to use". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is most compared with VxRail, Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series, Dell PowerFlex, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, 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 vSAN Ready Nodes vs. VMware vSAN report.
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