We compared VMware vSAN and Dell PowerFlex based on our user's reviews in several parameters.
Overall, VMware vSAN is praised for its simplicity, integration, and scalability, with positive feedback on customer service and ROI. On the other hand, Dell PowerFlex is highly regarded for its flexibility, performance, and reliability, with positive feedback on pricing and customer service. Users note varying deployment times for both products.
Features: VMware vSAN is valued for its simplicity, cost-effectiveness, and seamless integration. On the other hand, Dell PowerFlex is highly regarded for its flexibility, scalability, and reliability. Both offer high performance and user-friendly interfaces.
Pricing and ROI: The setup cost for VMware vSAN was initially deemed expensive by users, but it provided good long-term value. On the other hand, Dell PowerFlex had a reasonable and competitive pricing. Users found its setup cost to be straightforward and hassle-free, resulting in a smooth implementation process., Users report positive ROI for both VMware vSAN and Dell PowerFlex. vSAN offers improved virtualization performance and data protection, while PowerFlex enhances productivity and cost savings.
Room for Improvement: VMware vSAN has room for improvement in performance optimization, scalability for larger environments, configuration ease, and integration with third-party solutions. Dell PowerFlex needs enhancements in specific areas.
Deployment and customer support: The user reviews for VMware vSAN and Dell PowerFlex indicate that the duration required to establish a new tech solution can vary. Some users of VMware vSAN reported spending one week for both deployment and setup, while for Dell PowerFlex, some users mentioned needing a week for deployment and another week for setup. This suggests that the two products may have different timelines for deployment and setup., The customer service provided by VMware vSAN is described as top-notch, with users praising the support team's helpfulness, knowledge, and responsiveness in troubleshooting and providing timely solutions. Dell PowerFlex also offers efficient and helpful assistance, promptly addressing users' questions and concerns with knowledgeable and friendly representatives. Both products prioritize customer satisfaction and provide reliable support.
The summary above is based on 29 interviews we conducted recently with VMware vSAN and Dell PowerFlex users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"Using our own choice of HW allowed us to price our service to answer our customers' needs."
"The ability to choose our own hardware and our own vendors for this was hugely beneficial, as we had pre-existing relationships with vendors we wanted to maintain."
"StarWind vSAN was very easy to integrate into our system and ran flawlessly during our entire use time."
"You can turn your local disk storage into high-availability iSCSI storage."
"Quick setup, great support, stability is great"
"The best feature is its ease of installation and integration within a current infrastructure."
"With an uptime of 384 days, StarWind has improved overall server reliability."
"Integration with Microsoft clustering has been perfect, allowing us to leverage our investment in MS server licensing to the fullest."
"The solution was connected to alternate storage. It provides great scalability and reliability."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is integration."
"The setup was very straightforward."
"The most valuable feature is high availability."
"The most valuable feature is the overall integration and just seeing the three different layers which make up the machine software. Altogether, it's something that I would say is much better than any other solution that I have experienced before."
"It has reduced downtime. Before, on our previous solution, we used to have downtime on some of the servers because of the sort of convention. But currently I've not experienced any downtime on any of the servers, and there is no more resource congestion."
"Perfectly suits customers dealing with the combination of future storage needs and, at the same time, keeping up their computing power."
"The most valuable features of vSAN are its simplicity to deploy and that we can use commodity disks in our servers without complexity or need for external storage arrays or storage specialists on our teams."
"It is scalable, overall. If you need to add storage, it makes it easy to scale by adding additional hard drives into the existing servers or you can add storage by just adding more servers."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"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."
"To me, VMware is a leader of the visualizations. I think everyone just follow VMware."
"Easy to deploy and manage."
"vSAN is easy for deploying and maintenance, so some customers can do service themselves."
"The most valuable features are secure IOPs and LAN security."
"Ongoing improvements in read and write performance would help meet increasingly demanding workloads."
"It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers."
"StarWind currently has a Windows native application that it uses for management. There is not a web-based GUI at this time."
"The system failovers properly on its own without too much worry."
"To enable the proactive support capability that is part of our support agreement, I would ask that the terms and conditions be revised and made acceptable to corporate security."
"High availability for direct attached hardware drives could be useful for increasing the performance of a storage appliance."
"We just need more integration with Veeam."
"It is hard to find adequate technical documentation on their support website."
"Compared to similar solutions, Dell PowerFlex is not cost-effective and has room for improvement."
"The solution needs to offer more documentation and educational materials."
"I would like to see a more user-friendly interface."
"I am not really impressed by the technical support of this solution."
"I think there might be some room for improvement when it comes to pricing, because although I know how to convert customers, at the end of day, it's quite expensive. Sometimes your feature architecture is still coming out much cheaper than hardware costs for your infrastructure."
"The biggest issue with the solution is that it doesn't support Hyper V. It's a big problem."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"Including instrumentation would be a helpful improvement."
"The product's complex setup phase is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"When you upgrade the vSAN, there are some issues like lost data and problems with the log. The log disappears. When you upgrade the solution, you must have several logs, so if you have some problems, you can check the log server to find them."
"There is a room for improvement on the latest version of compatibility with the VMware product, especially for vSAN and with other vendors on their motherboards and driver configurations."
"More focus has to be put on deduplication and compression with a hybrid architecture."
"Improvements are also needed as per the customer's requirements."
"I would like to be able to limit IOPS."
"I see room for improvement with vSAN in particularly in the reporting realm. Now, with vSAN 6.7, they're starting to include vRealize Operations components in the vSphere Client, even if you're not a vRealize Operations customer. So, that's really good. It exposes some really low-level reporting. I would like to see more of that. However, you have to be a vRealize Operations customer to obtain that. I would like to see more include of this included in the vSAN licensing."
"Lacks an integrated backup solution."
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 8th in HCI with 19 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 8.2, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Dell PowerFlex writes "Infrastructure management solution that offers rapid provisioning of computer storage but the APIs and enablers for custom automation could be improved". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity, HPE Alletra dHCI and HPE Hyper Converged, 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 PowerFlex vs. VMware vSAN report.
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