We performed a comparison between FlexPod XCS and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others in Converged Infrastructure."It makes us more lateral and faster to production."
"We have absolutely been able to save space."
"Everything is preconfigured. We can ship it and manage it remotely from any server. It is all in a box."
"The most significant benefit is storage flexibility. FlexPod is a reference design to build on and add the appropriate resources you need for your workloads. That's what differentiates it from something like HCI, where you have to buy certain size pieces when you want to expand."
"It definitely streamlined operations. TCO-wise, it reduced cabling in the architecture. So, there has definitely been some savings. There have been a lot of reductions in the IT admin's time: reduced time to troubleshoot, reduced time to inventory the infrastructure, and reduced time to set up a host with templates and storage. The solution is saving easily 10 hours a week in time."
"Things got a lot faster. We can pull and test in DEV systems much more rapidly and are clearing up a lot of DBA time. In the past, every time we tested it, we needed to be refreshed. In the past, it would take a day of our DBA's time, and now it's just point, click, and ten minutes later it's done."
"It ships in a rack, so it is very easy to deploy."
"The solution is innovative. It handles virtual networking. Also, it can upgrade blades and continue working seamlessly, which is excellent."
"The feature we have found most valuable is the compatibility of VMware products with VCF and VMware Cloud Foundation."
"Its ease of use is most valuable. It is easy to configure, and there is a unified interface, which makes things slightly easier."
"The feature that I have found most valuable is that it is easy to deploy. It is easy to create and delete virtual servers. It is easy to create the load balancing and the clustering."
"The scalability of the solution is most valuable."
"The scalability is very good and the solution is stable and reliable."
"It helped us survive power outages in one of our data centers, then continued to function without a hitch."
"The most valuable features are its price point and that you can use existing storage; no specific storage requirements are needed."
"The product's initial setup phase is simple."
"We would like more integration with some other HCI solutions so we can take advantage of other opportunities."
"You must build each block separately, that's a disadvantage sometimes."
"It could be more innovative."
"The biggest thing that I would like to see is more cost-effective FlexPod solutions."
"This solution is very hard to maintain and keep up."
"We would like more security features."
"On the NetApp side, there are definitely things to improve in terms of software updates."
"FlexPod was born to be used like building-block elements, to create large EDP premises. If used to create a single FlexPod CED, optional operational collaterals (backup, management, etc.) are missing, both in docs and in design."
"This solution could be improved by having more than one controller for the environment. VMware depends on one controller for the whole environment, whereas Nutanix has one controller for each node. Because there is only one controller with VMware, if there was any drop, then the whole environment would stop working. In Nutanix, I have five nodes—there is one controller for each node and it depends on a virtual controller—so if the controller of any node is down, the whole environment will still work."
"This product is very expensive."
"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."
"Lacks sufficient storage terabytes."
"I would like to see more comprehensive lifecycle management. The current path and process for upgrading or updating the firmware, as well as the storage controller software to interact with that firmware, is fairly manual and not very well documented. A little more time and effort spent on the documentation of the lifecycle management for vSan would be really great."
"In a future release, they can bring in the object storage capabilities to this solution. Currently, there is not any compatibility."
"The main problem we had was hardware compatibility, finding the right hardware that was certified."
"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."
FlexPod XCS is ranked 2nd in Converged Infrastructure with 295 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. FlexPod XCS is rated 8.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of FlexPod XCS writes "Integrates everything so you are using fewer tools". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". FlexPod XCS is most compared with Dell PowerFlex, VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Oracle Exadata and HPE ConvergedSystem, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Dell PowerFlex.
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