VMware vSAN and VxRail are both highly regarded for enhancing virtual infrastructure efficiency and integration with VMware environments, with vSAN notably excelling in storage management and VxRail in operational efficiency through automation and seamless scalability. Both solutions present a potent return on investment and customer service, with users appreciating the substantial benefits in operational efficiency and support, despite some desires for more flexible pricing and easier navigation of support resources.
The summary above is based on 39 interviews we conducted recently with VMware vSAN and VxRail users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"The top-notch support before, during, and after deployments are better than any other vendor I have come across."
"It eliminates the use of expensive physical shared storage."
"The biggest benefit was that it allowed us to provide SAN services on a limited hardware budget."
"Besides being 80% cheaper than the other alternatives, the simplicity makes reconfiguration and support much easier."
"The fact that the solution is vendor-agnostic allows it to be used with any virtualization vendor while remaining a powerful abstraction over storage."
"The fact that we can expand our storage and add on to our compute nodes easily and how amazing the StarWind technical support team is really adding value to our purchase."
"They offer top-tier support."
"The failover redundancy is why we bought this product and it has never let us down."
"The most valuable features are Erasure Coding, Deduplication and Compression, and the advancement in stretching regarding replication."
"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."
"It is easy to find information out there, not only from searching the web, but even the times I have engaged VMware support."
"The scalability is very good and the solution is stable and reliable."
"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."
"vSAN is scalable for us. If any additional capacity needs to be included, we just add to the host and configure the vSAN cluster."
"vSAN is integrated into VMware."
"It's a good product based on the features. You can upgrade the solution with only one click."
"Enterprise is a complete solution that includes performance, backups and disaster recovery."
"The feature that I have found most valuable with VxRail is its upgrade. Because if you talk about the normal ESX process you have to upgrade the firmware, the bios, and you have to manage the compatibility. You have to do a lot of things. But in the case of VxRail, it's a single upgrade, end to end. You simply upload the bundle, click next, it will do some pre-checks, if those pre-checks pass, it will update everything one by one. It will put one ESX in the maintenance and move other VM's to another mode. There is no downtime to the VM's."
"My customers use it for VDI. It has been very usable and very fast to use with VDI. On the VxRail side also, it has been very fast."
"This product has given us clear visibility into what we need technology-wise to grow."
"The manageability for controlling the console is the most valuable feature."
"There is a single vendor with the hardware, software, and maintenance. Thus, there is a single vendor with whom we can contact."
"The technical support from Dell was very good."
"We would like to see the documentation more fully developed."
"I would like additional documentation regarding possible networking configurations with 10GbE switching."
"I'd love to see native export of metrics (via Prometheus or something of that nature) to allow us to get more metrics available on our existing dashboard software."
"It runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear."
"There needs to be more visibility on how long the cloud replication will take as there is no current ETA."
"Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer."
"It would be nice to see a new UI for the windows client, as it is not the easiest to find settings."
"While we had little to no issues in setting up StarWind and received excellent support from the StarWind technicians, we would have appreciated a clearer guideline for a setup with the free version of StarWind Management Console or, in other words - for the setup with the PowerShell."
"The monitoring feature in VMware vSAN could be better."
"There could be more features with the automatic backup."
"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."
"On the DevOps side, if there could be more automation it would be more helpful."
"VMware vSAN needs to improve its features because other solutions have more advanced features."
"I would like to see some of the more traditional SAN functions that are out the now. I can list them: being able to Snapshot on the back-end, better de-dupe, and better compression. Those are the major ones."
"The solution must provide better customization."
"More focus has to be put on deduplication and compression with a hybrid architecture."
"We have some issues, but they are possibly out-of-the-box issues. There was a host that was dead on arrival, and there were some file issues on other hosts. We're currently working actively with Dell to resolve all these issues. Once they are resolved, the product should be stable."
"I would like it to tier to the cloud effectively, making sure that cold data can be pushed out to some sort of Bitbucket."
"The fact that is based on vSAN is the main issue of this solution."
"I wish for the performance environment to be improved."
"The solution should facilitate the separate expansion of computing and storage."
"The scalability is limited to a single cluster with 64 nodes."
"It should not be deployed on one hypervisor. There should be multiple hypervisors supported like Hyper-V or KVM."
"It would be nice if its installation can be simplified, but it is currently not too bad. They can provide deduplication and compression in hybrid configurations. To the best of my knowledge, these features are not there, and it would be nice if these are added. Some of its competitors already have these features, so it will help VxRail to have a better feature set and compete more effectively."
VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 226 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 117 reviews. VMware vSAN is rated 8.4, while VxRail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". VMware vSAN is most compared with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Dell PowerFlex and Pure Storage FlashArray, whereas VxRail is most compared with Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and HPE Hyper Converged. See our VMware vSAN vs. VxRail report.
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In case of Dell EMC nodes, the only difference is setting up vSAN by yourself or pay someone else to set it up for you. In VxRail, you get licenses which are OEM locked that means you can not use those licenses on any other hardware. In VMware vSAN ready nodes, you can pick the hardware of your choice (from VMware HCL) and start building your vSAN cluster and all of the servers from different vendors work in the same cluster. In VxRail, you pay for the solution plus vSphere licenses based on your requirement. In VMware vSAN ready nodes, you pay for all the licenses separate from the hardware cost like, vCenter Server, vSphere, vSAN. for remote sites or very small setups you can use ROBO licenses in VMware vSAN ready nodes where this multi vendor thing can be very useful. From my experience, if the customer has 2-3 years old hardware, most of the times the hardware is good to be converted to an VMware vSAN ready node by making few or no changes.
VxRail is a solution that includes vSAN between their components... So VxRail is like a bundle with hardware and software components to deploy hyper-converged solution in very short time without pain.... vSAN is only a software solution that could be deploy in any hardware with enough processing and storage power... thath can be integrated with other components manually or semi automated way... VxRail includes other great components like RecoveryPoint for VM, an excellent DR/BCP solution... If you want an integrated HCI easy to deploy, manage and maintain... VxRail is the best solution
VxRail is a Turnkey solution from Dell EMC that uses VMware vSAN as the underlying storage technology
The main differences are:
vSAN can Run on any ReadyNode and can differ in the vendor, while VxRail only uses Dell Servers (PowerEdge) I do know that there other products that use CISCO (VxBlock, VXFLEX)
vSAN Requires a vSAN Licence and is renewed yearly (Or whatever your VMware Agreement is) VxRail vSAN Licences are Perpertual.
Patching and install on VxRail are simple and Dell EMC Check the updates before its generally available so the quality control is good. This is good as a bad/incompatible firmware can really cause issues with vSAN , all patching and firmware will need to be vetted and installed by yourself.
VxRail locks you into a Dell Solution. Where as with vSAN you can choose the Hardware you want.
VxRAIL is a pre buid HCI solution, with optimised configuration ready to deploy
also Vmware software VSAN and Vcenter are bundled with better prices and other bundled software
If you want to have an optimized and integrated software environment with integrated VSAN-in-Kernel into an appliance, a streamlined deployment experience, and single-vendor support go with VxRail because Dell EMC and VMware jointly developed the VxRail system powered by VMware vSAN software-defined storage. VxRail Manager is the sole and primary source for VxRail lifecycle management, cluster compatibility, software updates, and version control.
VxRail Manager further reduces operational complexity and provides software upgrade automation. Hence, VxRail is the simplest and easiest path to ready HCI and Hybrid Cloud.
VSAN is hardware agnostic but should need to have hardware/component level VSAN certifications. vSAN is enterprise-class, storage virtualization software that, when combined with vSphere, allows you to manage to compute and storage with a single platform. With vSAN, you can reduce the cost and complexity of traditional storage and have Software-Defined Storage in place but without integration with some appliance and always need to have VSA in place to bridge the communication between/among VMs and IO.
Thanks
Sufyan Ali Khan
+923018224536
The hardware hosting the solution. Vxrail is an engineered appliance from Dell to host vSAN.
In addition vSAN can be installed on any hardware that meets its requirements
When someone ask biggest, smallest, etc., they need simple answer :D VxRail is easy, while vSAN is complex. VxRail is prebuilt: easy to deploy, easy to scale out, one support contact for everything. VmWare vSAN is just an Software Defined Storage. Complex to deploy, complex to scale up/ out, and need several contact support for the whole solution.
Technically, it is hard to differentiate between two solutions.
As DellEMC is in the position of proposing two solutions at the same time, it really depends on the customer situation.
If the customer has favor on VMware and good experience of it, then VSAN would be better.
If the customer has an experience of Cisco or HP’s HCI solution, then Dell EMC will propose VxRAIL rather than VSAN.