I evaluated Red Hat Ceph Storage and VMware vSAN.

Against VMware vSAN, my company has started to consider other solutions in the market, like XCP-ng and other discounted products.

Speaking about whether my company evaluated any other product against VMware vSAN, I can say that many of our customers use Nutanix.

Though I am not sure, I believe that our company's customers use Nutanix since it has some advantages over VMware vSAN.

VMware brought this is as free upgrade, so we did not evaluate any other options but Nimble is the next one.

My company chose VMware vSAN over other products, considering the stability it offers.

VMware vSAN is better than its competitors.

Comparing vSAN to traditional infrastructure solutions like those from VMware or SolarWinds, I don't see a distinct advantage.

We are exploring other vendors. One consideration is Microsoft Hyper-V clusters, and we are also looking into Microsoft Azure Stack HCI. Additionally, we are evaluating Red Hat solutions as potential alternatives. The decision-making process involves assessing the pricing factor.

We evaluated StorMagic before choosing VMware vSAN which was a better git for our use case.

Before choosing VMware, we evaluated Microsoft Nutanix and Cisco HyperFlex. VMware design is more mature than the other solutions, generally.

At the time, we did not look into other solutions. It was either SAN or VSAN. From a SAN perspective, we have a partnership with HP for some 3PAR storage, and we have some EMC storage as well. When it comes to VSAN, it was included in our ELA that we agreed with from VMware's perspective. We figured, if we're paying for it, we might as well try using it. It worked out really well.

I am also working with Microsoft and Safe Key, another solution for the clustering, and I tried HPE SimpliVity for simple cluster and for multi-cluster. When I saw the costs of HPE SimpliVity for multi-cluster, there were two points that made me not feel good about it: the price and that when we needed more than 20 or 40 terabytes of data, the HP license was such that I could not use this solution alone. We had to use the HP team at the beginning.

We evaluated different 3-tier approaches, 2-tier and HCI approaches.

We're looking for another solution like Nutanix to use concurrently with vSAN. Nutanix is more efficient but also more expensive. Nutanix is a little more stable, efficient, and simple to manage. However, I expect VMware and EMC will improve soon. I think in the next year, VMware's solution will become more stable and easier to manage.

We evaluated Microsoft Hyper-V which has a similar storage area network. However, it can not be used together with NSX and vSpere like this solution. 

On our shortlist were Dell EMC Vx Rack FLEX, VxRail, and we looked at Nutanix a little bit. We chose vSAN because we had done PoCs in the past and, comparing it to every other software-defined storage product out there, its ease of use is unparalleled. It's very easy to set up and very easy to administer, comparatively.

We looked at Nutanix, we looked at Cisco, and we looked at Dell in the hyperconverged space. On the flip side, we were looking at the traditional SAN vendors and the traditional compute and networking vendors. We selected vSAN because it met the three criteria that I called out.

When comparing, other vendors have their own hardware with vSAN. They have hardware with HCI, for example, Hyperflex is a hardware that is OEM locked. If a customer purchased three nodes, with Hyperflex, the next time they will have to buy from Cisco. 

It's the same with HPE; if customers purchase three or four nodes from HPE, the next ones can only be purchased from HPE.

VMware vSAN has the flexibility to buy from anywhere. There is no lock key. They can purchase from any customers and any OEM.

I compared VMware to Oracle. They're very good, but Oracle is expensive, so people buy it and then start using open-source. Oasis is another option because it's cheaper and it's a similar process. So that is the problem I think VMware is going to have to compete with them in the future, and it is only going to get worse.

When we started with VMware, it was a three-node package with the VSA, virtual storage appliance, which was sort of the precursor to vSAN. And it just came as a package, so we said, "Okay, great. We have our storage and our compute tied together."

When we selected VSAN, as I said, remember, it's part of a total package, so the better question is, when we were selecting hyper-convergence, who would be the vendor for that. Well, there aren't that many options out there. There's really three. You have Microsoft. You have, open stack solutions and open source solutions, and then you have VMware. The Microsoft product, although engaging, isn't really ready for prime time according to our needs. The open source open/stack option is potentially interesting but requires a great deal of internal engineering and support that healthcare systems really don't have. Really left VMware as the only viable, affordable, complete solution. And hence we chose it.

When we were exploring an HCI solution, we zoned in on the VMware vSAN, HPE solution, and Nutanix solution. 

For our shortlist, we looked at SimpliVity, some Dell EMC solutions, and Nutanix. 

The top criteria we looked at when considering VSAN was performance and cost. We were going to make sure that we could deliver the performance that people are used to and used the system that costs less than a traditional array model. We did not look at other vendors because there really isn't another vendor that's doing this. There are people that are close but with a traditional hyper-converged box, there's a bunch of things I don't need. With VSAN I have the technical backing from VMware to back-stop the product and is doing what I need and no more so there is a cost-savings for not buying features-compute that I don't need.

We did consider other hyperconverged solutions. It usually came down to price. vSan was the most cost effective thing. That's why we went with it. Also, we didn't have to get a connected array. We can put it in small places, remote sites, etc.

Nutanix, Cisco HyperFlex Edge, and VxRail were on our shortlist.

We were using Dell and then we had a Dell EMC box, a hybrid. But it was a lot more money and it seemed we would always be a version behind. But with this one, the vSAN that we chose, we can upgrade it as needed. We can always be at the latest and greatest.

As a vSAN, we didn't find that competitive market. VMware is doing good with the local storage piling up with the cluster configuration. vSAN is doing great on that.

We looked at Nutanix before we went with vSAN. For budgeting reasons, we weren't able to pursue Nutanix after a pilot.

We considered EMC as well. We considered HPE LeftHand, which we had used in the past, so we were familiar with the virtualized SAN. We like the vSAN a lot.

We have played with Nutanix but it wasn’t there yet – VSAN is more attractive because it operates kernel level, as opposed to Nutanix.

Picking a vendor also depends on which segment is looking – I run most of the IT stuff and to me peer reviews are very important. Others within our company look to Gartner.

We did not evaluate any other options.

The vendors that were directly competing with Virtual SAN for our project were hardware vendors that were providing all-flash systems. This would be the comparison for us. The cost of the all-flash systems was prohibitive for us. We are a relatively small cloud provider in the Caribbean and, with Virtual SAN, we like the fact that we can pay through the VCOM program where we pay for only what we use and this was another huge benefit with Virtual SAN in our use case.

We have evaluated Nuranix and HPE.

We're currently evaluating Nutanix and Sangfor as options to replace VMware in our organization. We want more load balancing and therefore are looking for a solution that could potentially offer us that.

To my knowledge we didn't ever do like Citrix or, you know, anything like that. We didn't actually deploy the VDIs that are on traditional SANS so I think that we have just done pretty much all VSAN coupled with VDI 'cause it just makes so much sense.

I have evaluated many other solutions, such as Cisco Hyperflex, Dell VxRail, and Nutanix

We just wrapped up proofs of concept for both hardware and software. We did vSAN, we did Nutanix, and we did Simplivity. We looked at HPE hardware and we looked at Dell EMC hardware, among others.

We actually decided to go with Dell with a vSAN solution, even though Nutanix had better day-one/day-two operations, straight out of the box for us. Long-term, we felt that the vSAN solution itself was going to serve us in terms of to utilizing and leveraging the power of VMware, either going to a private and hybrid-cloud solution or public and hybrid cloud solution.

As far as the hardware goes, we didn't really have that much of a preference among the three, but we did see that Dell EMC's OpenManage solution for managing the hardware, the bare metal itself, was much more productive than the other two.

I have two environments: Nutanix AHV and VMware. We use the Nutanix environment more than the VMware environment. 

We evaluated Nutanix and other hyper-converged solutions, but we choose VMware vSAN.

We compared it with Nutanix but Nutanix was so expensive for us because our infrastructure is not as high-end as in America. In Chile, it's lower-end. Also, because we are a service provider, the price of vSAN is not expensive for us. Other products, like Nutanix, don't have a program for service providers and the price is prohibitive for us.

We didn’t look at alternatives.

I will evaluate alternatives depending on customer’s needs, but I compare it with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and Nutanix.

We're a VMware partner, a Nutanix partner, a SimpliVity partner and a Cisco partner. Personally, VSAN is the best solution for most customers and workloads.

Look outside of upfraont costs, because it’ll be equivalent to Nutanix. Its biggest value is its scalability. You can buy a little bit, and not a whole infrastructure box when you want to grow. Customers can just spin up half a dozen additional hosts quickly of they want.

There are several virtual solutions that I have hands-on experience with, including VMware, Hyper-V, and some open source software. I could only compare Microsoft and VMware. VMware is significantly more expensive than Microsoft, but I still prefer VMware because it's manageable and easy to set up.

As a VMware customer, it's hard to judge the value I'm getting for the price in terms of operability and manageability. Then there are other factors, such as the amount of resources used. So when we're evaluating, we're not just looking at the price. We don't want to settle for something cheaper that might cost us some headaches.

We did look at other options. We ended up choosing vSAN mostly due to the price. However, we also liked how easy it was to set up, configure, and manage compared to other options.

We looked briefly at alternatives, but nothing stood out like vSAN. Nutanix was another solution, but surprisingly, it would have costed us more.

We looked into several other products, such as Pure Storage and Dell solutions.

I was not part of the evaluation process but cost was a major factor, as well as high availability.

We looked into Dell and Nutanix, and chose VSAN because of ease of setup.

No other options were looked, but peer reviews are important. My peer reviews are usually on social media channels, but it's important.

Product knowledge is the most important criteria we look for when selecting a vendor.

Customer also considered Nutanix.

Compared it to a similar sized fibre SAN.

Nutanix and VxRail because these also serve the same function.

We got presentations both from SimpliVity and Nutanix. No serious evaluation of other products was made. We did evaluate vSAN a couple months before the purchase, so as to get familiar with it, and we do have a lab environment now to play with.

In hindsight, we could have carried out a more-thorough evaluation of vSAN to get a really good feel about it; maybe even run a part of your actual production there for an extended period of time to see all the pros and cons.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated EMC ScaleIO.

We did evaluate other vendors initially but this was our second hyperconverged solution. We went with it because of the cost.

Our shortlist was really just EMC. That decision was made before I took over the project. We were always an EMC shop, so we moved away from Cisco and went to Dell EMC for it. I don't know why, exactly, but they said to me, "Here, make it work."

My customer was focusing on continuing with NetApp filers and ESXi hosts or vSAN for ROBO.

We did not look into alternative solutions for the virtualization part. But for storage, we looked at other vendors. For example: NetApp, Tintri, and Nimble.

We didn’t evaluate other options, except for the line of traditional iSCSI storage solutions. We wanted to continue working with the same virtualization-based system. We wanted to get a solution with the smallest possible footprint. The vSAN solution met these requirements.

I have deployed Nutanix and VMware VSAN clusters.

We looked at other vendors – classic storage vendors – but we thought this direction was faster as things are moving towards a software designed storage.

We evaluated Nutanix and Cisco.

Compared to Nutanix, the design of VMware vSAN is probably the highest in the marketplace in terms of market penetration. I think it's number one, and Nutanix is not that far behind.

From an upgrade perspective, it's not as straightforward compared to a Nutanix. You need to do a lot of checks and balances before you do the upgrade. With Nutanix, you don't need to worry about it at all, probably because those nodes are coming from Nutanix itself. Because of that, they kind of keep everything to a single file where all these checks will be done initially when you run it. With vSAN, the server could be coming from different vendors like HP or Huawei. So it won't be that easy to come up with a single package to check all of these formula licenses because the upgrade is not that smooth compared to Nutanix.

While vSAN performs pretty well, when we were doing all the performance tests, ScaleIO did pretty well. In fact, it did better than vSAN, but we liked vSAN better because it was more integrated with our VMware environment, obviously. We chose it and we're happy with it.

Yes, at the time, like everyone else, we looked at the classic option, storage bay with SSD caches, but the prices were not necessarily interesting.

Moreover, it requires knowing all the management consoles and specificities related to particular types of storage, network, and infrastructure.

With the use of VMware vSAN, we have not had this worry, since by mastering the VMware vSphere Web Client, I manage all from a single interface, and it is very simple.

Today, I am looking at Nutanix products, and other VxRAIL, and the goal is to identify a concurrent product which can interest us.

We evaluated other all-flash arrays and hyper converged infrastructure.

We chose VSAN based on a POC. We looked at Nutanix, but VSAN was more robust for our needs and less expensive.

My customers were comfortable with VMware and then they decided to use VMware instead of another solution.

We are biased from the start to use VMware products only.

Currently, our environment is running VMware; therefore, we can consider using original distributed storage that connects directly to the kernel. That would reduce latency and data transfer loss.

Because of COVID-19's impacts, we looked for a different IT system that would match our budget.

We looked at other vendors but we chose VMware because it has a good reputation and because the underlying technology is pretty solid.

We evaluated Cisco vSAN.

I would certainly consider other options, but I apply that logic to any solution. Always weigh the pros and cons of the solution that you are looking for. Does it satisfy your solution requirements? Does it fit with the long term goals? What type of workloads are being deployed? Cloud integration or some type of automation required? Many factors can and will come into play with choosing the proper hyper-converged solution. Look very closely at each one and do a comparison to determine which solution aligns with your needs the most. Once you have narrowed things down to two or three solutions you can then use the results of the assessment to assist with the final decision.

We had previous solutions, but vSAN was the logical choice.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated HPE VSA, Nutanix, and DataCore.

Basically we're a one man shop – we like to keep our list short and simple: VMWare and Cisco.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated OpenStack Object Storage.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

We did not evaluate other options.

No

HP and Cisco have lower priced solutions than VMware vSAN, which I find to be quite pricey. 

We keep an eye on all solutions that come to the market. We have tested SimpliVity and Nutanix. We use MS Storage Spaces in our production. All these products have their pros and cons.

There are a few products on the market. vSAN has lots of competitors, but if you want to play with a single software provider, go with vSAN. However, if you want more hardware, maybe go with Nutanix.

We also evaluated Dell EMC before choosing this solution. 

I’ve looked at HPE SimpliVity, but it has a special hardware requirement whereby it failed in terms of the project requirements.

• NetApp
• Nutanix

A good orchestration solution is SimpliVity. It's a very good choice because you don't have to dedicate much time. But vSAN is also very good. Dell's solution is very similar, but it's a complex tool.

In my company have some new consultant technicians who have more experience in the bigger setups. They suggest that I look at the VxRail solution.

We have been evaluating VMware Horizon and we are thinking about using it.