VMware Software Defined Storage should include a shared database on a standard version. Right now, it's included in the enterprise version.

The cost of the product is where an improvement could be made. It's generally very expensive and requires a lot of architecture that needs to be designed according to specific situations. If it could be designed with open architecture, it would increase the value of the product.

I would like to see a greater ability to work with any kind of infrastructure, and there are currently some restrictions. It should have the ability to be deployed on any kind of hardware and network connectors, or protocols for that matter, and it should be more open to cloud.

I think VMware SDS is pretty good. It has all the ingredients that an SDS should have. I think it's the most competitive product in the market. 

The OEM solutions that are being offered based on the VMware SDS solution is different to that offered by other companies. HP and Dell EMC offer the data migration service to their appliances. The data migration itself is not a big challenge. It's sort of an OEM customized solution. VMware does not offer similar equivalent the solution, they work with OEM partners, and they offer it that way. Since normally, enterprise customers won't rely on unknown brand storage. They rely on the larger players like HP, EMC, IBM, NetApp and Hitachi - VMware has an alliance with those companies. 

Ideally, I'd like to see improved hardware compatibility because normally all the software-defined solutions require compatible hardware. Usually, the hardware evolution is quite fast-paced.  If customers procure one class of the device or hardware and it's compatible with a certain type of software version, and later they purchase another from a different vendor, there is a catch. I think the hardware compatibility should be very open and support different kinds of hardware because the hardware is very specific. 

Performance is probably the area where VMware needs the most improvement. ScaleIO is one of the competitors for VMware Software Defined Storage. In testing, the performance is one of the places where ScaleIO was better than VMware. VMware should work more on their performance to come up to the level of their competition — in this case referring specifically to ScaleIO. This really works out to not much more than having better dashboards in the management console for performance measures.

I think it could also improve in the area of reporting. It specifically lacks executive-level reporting. So that is more levels or types of reporting and some reporting flexibility.