We performed a comparison between Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes 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."We test live failovers every week, and so far, everything has been running smoothly without anything unexpected."
"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."
"The ability to run the software virtually on every virtualization platform and the ability to eliminate all storage vendor locking are the most valuable features."
"It has allowed me to effectively and confidently manage the maintenance of hosts where I can power off a host and have its VMs migrate to another one."
"The solution offers easy one-click PowerShell scripts that are ready to run."
"The installation of StarWind Virtual SAN was pretty easy, and the configuration was done in no time."
"The StarWind Virtual SAN provides a clever and unique solution to the Computing Split Brain problem."
"Quick setup, great support, stability is great"
"Dell EMC VxFlex Ready Nodes can support what we call a heterogeneous environment. So you can have VMware workloads, Hyper-V workloads, bare metal Red Hat workloads, Kubernetes workloads all on the same cluster. You're not pigeonholed into either all bare metal or all virtualized. So it supports basically any platform."
"The most valuable features of Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes are the ease of acquisition."
"Technical support has been very good. They respond pretty fast, especially if we have a critical issue. Their responses have been great."
"vSAN is scalable for us. If any additional capacity needs to be included, we just add to the host and configure the vSAN cluster."
"VMware vSAN is compatible with the legacy hypervisor solutions and most of the features are good."
"The technical support is good. We are always thankful for the technical support from VMware. They are very supportive when we have a technical problem."
"We've found the solution to be scalable."
"This product has very good performance when it comes to virtualization storage and works well with solutions such as SAP HANA, Exadata, Hadoop, and Big Data Analytics."
"The most valuable feature is the simplicity of its scalability: being able to grow it without having to make sure you get the right disks and the right nodes. The solution is also easy to manage. It's all right there in the vSphere Client. You're not going through multiple things. You don't have to know, once you've created the vSAN node. You add storage, it sees it, and you create your data storage from there. Everything is right there for you."
"Overall the solution is very good."
"One main thing this product needs to work on is reporting."
"It would be helpful to have a little more insight into what kind of performance the VSAN cluster is utilizing; something that would be more proactive on our side, versus their ProActive Support."
"The console is something that I feel could be improved. There is nothing technically wrong with it, but it can be jazzed up and/or made to be a little more intuitive."
"I think the setup could be streamlined a bit."
"New versions of this solution should be tested more thoroughly before the release as we had a few problems with one version due to a bug."
"Sometimes documentation on their site can be out of date."
"There is one issue as far as licensing goes and that is a lack of documentation online for users when transitioning from the free version to the paid version, or vice versa."
"The management console of StarWind Virtual SAN is pretty complex."
"Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is a little less sophisticated than some of the other solutions out there. A full-blown cloud foundation has a lot more to it."
"From a technical perspective, it's a pretty rock solid solution. I would say the only area for improvement is around its price."
"Ease of administration is one area where vSAN could be improved."
"It should be easier to use."
"The solution could maybe improve failure protection."
"One of the things that we've had challenges with are when we place hosts into maintenance mode. Sometimes doing so triggers large re-sync processes which can be time-consuming and which have, at times, pushed the capacity to the threshold. I definitely think making some changes in that area would provide some big improvements."
"It is a memory intensive app."
"Lacks an integrated backup solution."
"There's a lot that can be done to segregate. That may be available now in vSAN 7, I suppose, however, the deduplication and compression can be segregated."
"Hardware load balancing is available on the enterprise version of the solution, however, it's extremely expensive and therefore out of our budget."
Earn 20 points
Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is ranked 21st in HCI while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is rated 9.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes writes "Single platform for a mix of virtualized and physical workloads". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is most compared with VxRail and HPE Alletra dHCI, 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 VxFlex Ready Nodes vs. VMware vSAN report.
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