Azure Local vs VMware vSAN comparison

Azure Local integrates on-premises infrastructure with cloud services, offering tools for software-defined networking, Kubernetes deployment, and VM management. It ensures cost efficiency through existing Microsoft licenses and robust disaster recovery, despite some complexities in deployment.

Azure Local is designed for businesses needing a blend of local and cloud services while remaining compliant with data privacy regulations. It excels in environments demanding high computing power, software-defined networking, and seamless scaling through Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure DevOps. Although it offers excellent VM management and analytics capabilities with Microsoft Fabric, deployment complexity and operational challenges remain. Businesses looking for a robust edge computing solution find significant benefits, especially with efficient local Azure storage and advanced hardware such as the latest processors and SSDs. There are areas needing improvements like multi-cluster management, stability, and Initial setup, which can be cumbersome. Pricing can be a concern against competitors, and enhanced support and training are needed for smoother user experience.

• Software-Defined Networking: Facilitates management with drag-and-drop setup.
• Kubernetes Deployment: Provides Azure Kubernetes Service for managing microservices.
• VM Management: Reduces server count and enhances efficiency.
• Integration with Azure Arc: Seamless collaboration with Azure Arc for hybrid deployments.
• Infrastructure as Code: Utilizes Azure DevOps for deployment.
• Analytics Capabilities: Microsoft Fabric enhances insights and decision-making.

• Cost Efficiency: Leverages existing Microsoft licenses for financial savings.
• Improved Disaster Recovery: Advanced edge computing features bolster resiliency.
• High Performance: Enhanced by the latest processors and SSDs for demanding applications.
• Seamless Cloud Integration: Smooth transition capabilities between local and cloud environments.

Azure Local finds application in sectors like manufacturing and maritime operations where robust edge computing helps in seamless data management and analytics. Factories benefit from compliance with data privacy rules while blended local and cloud services improve efficiency on ships, providing an alternative to VMware with support for virtual desktops and SQL Managed Instances.

VMware vSAN is a software-defined storage product that is used in collaboration with VMware ESXi hypervisor and that provisions and manages storage based on policies, regardless of the underlying hardware. The solution enables you to prime your business for growth through its seamless evolution (it is integrated with vSphere and requires no new tools), its flexibility, and its multi-cloud capabilities. As an industry-leading software, VMware vSAN provides high levels of performance with minimal impact on CPU and memory.

VMware vSAN Features

VMware vSAN has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

• Storage policy-based management (SPBM): VMware vSAN supports storage policy-based management for automated management of storage profiles.

• Software-defined data-at-rest encryption: With this VMware vSAN feature, you can prevent unauthorized access of data at rest.

• Multiple nodes: VMware vSAN provides clusters that can include as few as 2 nodes or as many as 64 nodes.

• High security and availability: VMware vSAN offers stretched clusters, allowing more than one virtualization host server to be used in the same setup, promoting higher security as well as availability.

• Deduplication: VMware vSAN’s deduplication compresses data to ensure efficient storage management and security.

• HCI mesh updates: VMware vSAN clusters can share storage capacity with non-HCI Sphere clusters and can adopt HCI without having to scale computing resources and storage or replace existing servers.

• Simplified file services: With VMware vSAN’s file services, backup of file shares is simplified. You can use APIs that allow backup and recovery software vendors to integrate with your VMware vSAN file services, which enables backup software to track new data and add scalability enhancements to files.

VMware vSAN Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing VMware vSAN. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

• Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO): VMware vSAN helps you reduce upfront costs for businesses because it can be easily deployed on inexpensive x86 servers. In addition, its highly scalable infrastructure and quick deployment also save organizations time and money, making it an efficient storage solution. 

• Good manageability: VMWare vSAN is easy to set up, manage, and provision, without sacrificing performance. 

• Scalability: VMware vSAN is agile and allows administrators to scale storage on demand, quickly, and efficiently via policies and rules.

• Simplicity: VMWare vSAN is simple to configure since it is embedded in the vSphere hypervisor. Installing it using the vSphere Web Client can be done quickly. 

• Reduced risk: VMWare vSAN reduces the risk associated with digital transformations by utilizing existing tools, skill sets, and solutions.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the VMware vSAN solution.

PeerSpot user Yves S., CEO, Cloud Evangelist at Comdivision Consulting GmbH, says, “vSAN gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources. We have an overall larger host infrastructure, and we split that up for specific customer test and use cases. In that specific scenario, we can easily add more hosts or reduce the number of hosts in the environment.”

A reviewer who works in Infrastructure Security explains, “The ease of use is great. The initial setup and upgrade process was pretty straightforward. And, technical support is great.”

Laurent N., Director at Softlogic, comments, "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."