We performed a comparison between Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure 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."The support team is available to solve any problem efficiently."
"The best part is the easy way it operates with a very clear GUI without any unnecessary items."
"StarWind allowed us to deploy highly available shared storage within our budget."
"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."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a very mature software that supersedes its capabilities with my use cases."
"Using our own choice of HW allowed us to price our service to answer our customers' needs."
"High Availability is the best feature of product."
"The ProActive support gives me peace of mind because I am a one man shop, but with the technical support behind me, I feel like more than just one person. We spent two to three hours, depending on what we have to do, always on the phone, and they do not push to end the call."
"It is stable and scalable."
"The most useful feature is the solution's automation in terms of how we are able to spin up a certain workload in real-time when we are doing R&D."
"I like that you can add other types of services."
"Both the scalability and stability of this solution are excellent."
"The consolidation of the management in one control point is the most valuable. The whole infrastructure management is consolidated in just one console point. The documentation is also pretty good."
"The size of the hardware is what we need because it is very good for small configurations."
"We didn't only choose vSAN; we chose VMware because of SR-IOV, which is more on the hypervisor level and not on the vSAN storage. It's part of the whole system."
"The most valuable features are ease of deployment, and ease of management. If you compare it to other software-defined storage products, it's much easier. It's a checkbox. It's lot easier to manage."
"Allows us to implement more quickly, and to ease the maintenance."
"The product's initial setup phase is simple."
"It is easy to work with, easy to handle, and easy to manage."
"The feature we have found most valuable is the compatibility of VMware products with VCF and VMware Cloud Foundation."
"The most valuable feature is the simplification of storage. We no longer need to deal with Fibre Channel and the external storage arrays."
"I think vSAN's stability is good. It's an underlying solution for both on-prem and in the cloud, especially the VMC on AWS stuff too. VMware has been around for a long time, so it's pretty stable."
"The configuration can a bit cumbersome."
"I would like to see some additional, and possibly clearer, implementation videos with some slower and possibly more detailed descriptions of what the various steps of implementation are for someone who is unfamiliar with high availability and failover clustering in Windows."
"I would like additional documentation regarding possible networking configurations with 10GbE switching."
"I did not see any indication that StarWinds vSAN is a usable solution with non-GUI instances of Hyper-V."
"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."
"The most disappointing side of the application is the free edition. There used to be GUI attached. That has recently changed to only CLI management of the application."
"This product could be improved with the inclusion of new health check procedures."
"A web management interface would be good, especially for those coming from other solutions that have one."
"This product is not so stable. Maybe it is just not mature enough in its development."
"The main issue is the initial investment. It is an expensive product, and it should be cheaper. It should also be easier to use and manage. The professional service for this solution is quite complex and expensive."
"It is not user-friendly, and it is very difficult to operate. You have to have a deep understanding of the technical details of the infrastructure to implement it. When you compare it with VMware, it is totally different because the graphical user interface is not that easy to understand. It is not intuitive. To use it, you have to read a lot of documentation and even understand what is going on behind the solution. It is not for someone who has a little bit of knowledge. Currently, it is too complex. I need something that is easy to implement. It should have a basic configuration as well as a complex configuration."
"The licensing policy needs to be improved. They have a licensing policy based on the number of CPU sockets. Nowadays what has happened is that the license they are trying to move is based on the number of CPU cores. With the advancement in technology there are now more cores in a single CPU. It's been very challenging in terms of managing the license around everything. Today we have a processor with 24 and 32 cores on the same physical CPU."
"The cloud deployment could be improved."
"It should be more user-friendly, in my opinion."
"VMware vSAN could improve by adding NAS and object storage."
"The product's high price is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"I would have liked it to have been more scalable. It's scalable but not as much as, for example, the ScaleIO systems were or the Kaminario"
"I would rate the stability a seven out of ten."
"The vSan product uses a software system called Vsphere to monitor the system. It is sometimes difficult to manage the PCs within the systems."
"Disaster recovery needs to be improved, when there is a crisis, there is a problem with what is the quickest way to get out of it."
"I think it needs to be more cost-effective. I would also say that even though the capacity is good, there is also room for improvement there. Also, they could improve the security of the system."
"In a future release, they can bring in the object storage capabilities to this solution. Currently, there is not any compatibility."
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Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is ranked 22nd in HCI while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is rated 8.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure writes "Comes in a small, compact model that does not have any separate management but it is not so stable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is most compared with VxRail, Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure 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. See our Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure vs. VMware vSAN report.
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