We performed a comparison between Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, VMware and others in HCI."StarWind Virtual SAN is a highly flexible solution, as it can be deployed on physical servers or on top of virtual machines running on hypervisors such as VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V."
"In the three years that we have been using StarWind, the product has yet to cause us any problems."
"The fact that the solution is vendor-agnostic allows it to be used with any virtualization vendor while remaining a powerful abstraction over storage."
"Their support staff is comprised of true experts who can also communicate clearly."
"The product gave us a cost-effective way to deploy a highly available server environment."
"The management was very easy and I was able to find all that I need in the software dashboard."
"The StarWind VSAN is always up and allows us to move VMS to other nodes for maintenance, without interruption to service."
"One of the standout features of StarWind.com is its remarkable ability to seamlessly integrate with Dell systems. This integration provides users with an unmatched level of convenience and compatibility, allowing for streamlined operations within a Dell environment. This compatibility factor alone can save significant time and effort for IT professionals, ensuring a smooth integration process and optimized performance."
"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."
"One of the valuable features of vSAN is it has a universal type of technology that allows you to deploy it on any server or hardware. Competitors, such as Nutanix, provides the AOS and can be deployed only on certified hardware. For vSAN, it does not require any kind of certified hardware."
"The solution is easy to use."
"Easy-to-use, and easy-to-scale product."
"The solution is simple to use compared to other solutions, such as Hyperflex, VxRail, and Nutanix"
"The scalability has been quite good."
"It is very easy to set up and very easy to use. It is very useful."
"The technical support is good. We are always thankful for the technical support from VMware. They are very supportive when we have a technical problem."
"The most important functionality is the ability to extend cluster storage and cluster computing power securely without loss of data."
"If there was one feature I would like to see it would be a built-in subsystem for managing UPS backups shutdown procedures providing a way to initiate VM shutdown on all host servers, shut down the host servers, then put the fault-tolerant mirroring in standby, and finally shut down the StarWind SANs."
"Sometimes documentation on their site can be out of date."
"There is a general lack of documentation, especially up-to-date documentation to get started."
"You have to do a "full" sync on write-back cache disks instead of a quick sync if there is an issue."
"The GUI deserves a little love."
"The gathering of monthly consumption and performance reports for future dissemination to concerned parties is very important. Unfortunately, StarWinds vSAN doesn't offer this functionality."
"The only way I can see this product needing improvement is the consultation level of the StarWind sales and engineers."
"Initially, when we first started, the sync was horrible."
"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."
"This is quite an expensive solution."
"The server files are larger than before."
"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."
"This solution could be improved by having more than one controller for the environment. VMware depends on one controller for the whole environment, whereas Nutanix has one controller for each node. Because there is only one controller with VMware, if there was any drop, then the whole environment would stop working. In Nutanix, I have five nodes—there is one controller for each node and it depends on a virtual controller—so if the controller of any node is down, the whole environment will still work."
"A vSAN cluster must have compression and deduplication to be an all-flash array, but it's not supported with a hybrid array. Deduplication and compression work better with an all-flash array, so I think that VMware should give customers the option to activate and support this feature for hybrid arrays. Other products like Nutanix support this."
"I see room for improvement for vSAN just around general hardware compatibility and expanding that sort of matrix."
"The only thing I can think of at this time is to improve the performance monitoring and performance visibility within the GUI."
"vSAN does not have online dedup. When opening the inline dedupe, the performance will be lower than off inline."
Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is ranked 19th in HCI with 2 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 226 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.
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