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."It's quite easy to install."
"Integration with Microsoft clustering has been perfect, allowing us to leverage our investment in MS server licensing to the fullest."
"As the client had acquired another company some distance away, they were concerned about having a single SAN in one location or the other. StarWind vSAN allowed us to keep a copy of the data local to each site without asking the client to pay for two SANs in addition to the two new servers they needed."
"Immediately we noticed huge performance gains, even on older hardware and once we implemented a 10GB link between both servers, the sync was near-instant after the initial sync was complete."
"The product gave us a cost-effective way to deploy a highly available server environment."
"The iSCSI protocol is quite simple to configure."
"The ROI is great on this product."
"I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"The most valuable feature is the set of user tools that are available."
"The solution immediately expands storage area when you add nodes."
"The product is useful for DR and other things."
"It is easy to install."
"The most valuable feature of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is file sharing."
"No concerns regarding the footprint in the data center."
"We find the initial implementation process simple and straightforward."
"I have found the most important features of Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes are the capacity to manage the storage because the storage is built in the servers. The type of profiles you can attribute to the storage is a benefit. You can manage the storage by profiles. Overall the solution is a good speed and performance."
"Instead of going for SAN storage, customers can use the scale-up and scale-out features of VMware vSAN."
"The scalability is very good and the solution is stable and reliable."
"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."
"vSAN is easy for deploying and maintenance, so some customers can do service themselves."
"I like the orchestration feature."
"vSAN has just one datastore. so customers do not need to think where to put their VMs, how to design the physical disk RAID, the LUN size, the LUN mapping, etc. when they use NetApp/EMC/HDS or other storage systems."
"The most important feature to me, in my role, is cost. In the renewal cycle for storage, it was about a 40 percent saving compared to going to an all-flash array, which is what we first looked at doing. Secondly, performance: we need clinical data access in five seconds and need to do everything we can to retain that metric. Thirdly, I was really pleasantly surprised during the data migration across to vSAN, that it happened almost instantly whereas, in the past, migrating from array to array was an arduous and fraught process."
"It is easy to use. It is easy to implement for us, and it is also easy to maintain for the customers. It is not necessary to buy some extra devices and talk with other vendors."
"The configuration can a bit cumbersome."
"I had issues locating the documentation that applied to my version of StarWind vSAN."
"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."
"With data verification, I would like to know how does the solution perform validation of data being synced between two VSANs."
"The documentation could be clearer in terms of explaining the installation."
"An extended trial period would serve as a way to get clean insights into the technology's adaptability and alignment with their specific needs before committing to long-term integration."
"I wish there was online support because email return takes a long time and a faster solution should be found."
"I wish the sync after a failure, such as hardware failure or power-related issues, for example, was faster."
"The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required. The price of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes could be lowered."
"Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes is a great hyper-converged system that is a perfect platform for supporting any kind of workload. The only workload that it's not designed to support is big data."
"The deployment is done by doing it one by one and could be simplified."
"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."
"Compatibility with other hardware nodes needs to be improved."
"Dell vSAN Ready Nodes must be flexible since it is complex in designing concepts. It needs to improve stability. The product should integrate with the public cloud."
"Upgrades are carried out manually."
"Dell vSAN Ready Nodes' deployment is complex."
"I would love to see vSAN integrate Persistent Memory and NVDIMMs. I know they're supposed to be working on an elastic tier so that we don't have the issues with destaging from the cache to the capacity. Those are the things that I'm interested in."
"I would like to see a little bit more documentation on the initial setup, and a little bit more explanation on the expandability: How to extend out your vSAN much more simply through the console because, a lot of the time, you have to do it through the command line."
"The customer service is good but there is a cost for it. It does not come free."
"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."
"Perhaps they could provide encryption without having to use an encryption manager."
"The platform's cost affects the business. This particular area needs improvement."
"If one node out of your ten nodes fails, it takes a lot of time to replicate and rebalance VMware vSAN. This time can be reduced. When a node fails and the data is not accessible, vSAN has to be rebalanced to make the redundancy level of two again. However, if it is taking a lot of time and any other hardware fails during that time, then we have a problem. Two disk failures mean that all data will be lost, and we may have to recover it from the backup. So, the number of threads that run to do the rebalancing could be more so that the time taken to make it fully redundant again is not so much."
"In a future release, they could add micro-segmentation or security level features integrated into vSAN."
Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is ranked 12th in HCI with 14 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 226 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, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and Fujitsu PRIMEFLEX, 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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