Dell vSAN Ready Nodes vs VMware vSAN comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Dell vSAN 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.
To learn more, read our detailed Dell vSAN Ready Nodes vs. VMware vSAN Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"It also provides a high degree of mobility, as the virtual SAN can be moved relatively painlessly between on-site devices and the cloud.""It's very easy to resize disks and they show up in VMware almost instantly.""StarWind vSAN has allowed us to grow rapidly while still providing flexibility and reliability.""The management was very easy and I was able to find all that I need in the software dashboard.""The ability to run a two-node cluster without a dedicated witness has made this an excellent product for small deployments, which is right on target for our needs in regional offices.""The ease of reaching the support team and their promptness for support is great.""We have experienced multiple hardware failures at one site and the fault-tolerant volume worked exactly as expected with zero downtime.""Immediately we noticed huge performance gains, even on older hardware and once we implemented a 10GB link between both servers, the sync was near-instant after the initial sync was complete."

More StarWind Virtual SAN Pros →

"The tool's most valuable feature is high availability.""The most valuable feature of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is the flexibility of the nodes. Additionally, if there are any critical issues they update us through emails. The issues are taken care of remotely on the system.""The most valuable feature is the set of user tools that are available.""I have found the most important features of Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes are the capacity to manage the storage because the storage is built in the servers. The type of profiles you can attribute to the storage is a benefit. You can manage the storage by profiles. Overall the solution is a good speed and performance.""We find the initial implementation process simple and straightforward.""It is easy to install.""No concerns regarding the footprint in the data center.""You don't have to spend much time evaluating the hardware. It can be deployed in a short time. The tool is also easy to upgrade."

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"Very good VCG notification feature.""It easily integrates with all types of storage.""The most valuable feature of VMware vSAN is you do not have to use additional hardware for storage. The operation of VMware vSAN does not take a lot of effort. If you have VMware technology on your site, then it's easy for the operational support of the system.""All orchestration and monitoring are routed to the cloud.""The valuable features of vSAN are that you can get it up and running quickly, you get redundancy built-in, and it's pretty much the perfect solution for a cluster.""The solution is quite stable.""Storage is expandable with no extra cost.""The performance of VMware vSAN is very good."

More VMware vSAN Pros →

Cons
"Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer.""StarWind relies on the underlying OS to manage the "SAN files" whether that would be a RAID volume, software RAID (such as LVM), etc. It would be useful if StarWind could incorporate the actual physical drive management inside of the solution, similar to Storage Spaces Direct.""It would be helpful if StarWind provided more precise and detailed documentation explaining how to configure the solution in various scenarios, including the advantages and disadvantages of each.""We would like the documentation to be more complete. Most items are covered, but if you don't know something, you may need to contact their support.""It would be nice to see a new UI for the windows client, as it is not the easiest to find settings.""The only point they should improve is the amount of documentation available for the user, especially in the first preliminary phase in which we were testing the product on our own.""I did not see any indication that StarWinds vSAN is a usable solution with non-GUI instances of Hyper-V.""Management of VSAN itself could be improved. A Web UI for management would be great rather than an application installation. StarWind is testing a command center virtual appliance that I have installed in my environment."

More StarWind Virtual SAN Cons →

"There is room for improvement in the maintenance pricing. Maintenance isn't difficult, but the prices are high and ridiculous. Some customers feel it is better to go with a new solution rather than renew this one.""The deployment is done by doing it one by one and could be simplified.""Dell vSAN Ready Nodes must be flexible since it is complex in designing concepts. It needs to improve stability. The product should integrate with the public cloud.""Upgrades are carried out manually.""The power switch on the hardware is located in a poor location where it can accidentally be pushed. In an update, they should solve this issue so people do not push it accidentally to have their service go down. A possible solution is the switch should be inside.""The solution should provide daily task alerts for data recovery maintenance, usage, and other instructions to ensure the systems are in a good status.""The solution doesn't scale.""Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes is a great hyper-converged system that is a perfect platform for supporting any kind of workload. The only workload that it's not designed to support is big data."

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"They should make the software updates easier. We should be able to upgrade it more easily.""The price for the hard drive, for vSAN, is very expensive.""Its installation should be easier, and its price should be cheaper. It would be good for the product if they can include the data locality feature.""It could be more robust. The latency is also an issue for us, and the reliability. I would like it to be faster and a little more flexible.""There needs to be an increase in the supported memory and hard disk space, as it is an area where the product currently has certain shortcomings.""We want see a better monitoring tool in vSAN. Monitoring is not that great as of now because it shows us false alarms in the Health status. We would like that to be improved.""We are facing some problems with updates with the VMware vSAN. When we upgraded from version 6.5 to 7, we have been faced with many problems. They have been deploying many hotfixes for this version, and they need to continue to improve this version.""More focus has to be put on deduplication and compression with a hybrid architecture."

More VMware vSAN Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The setup cost is very low. The pricing is great."
  • "We are happy with the price."
  • "The license is reusable. We can always rebuild it and apply the license. Then, boom, we get new servers, apply the license, and we're back up and running."
  • "The pricing is fine for the work that it does."
  • "When we did all the analysis for StarWind, it was approximately 20 percent less than any of the other solutions that we looked at."
  • "The scalability limitation for us is its licensing. At some point in the fairly near future, we will probably have to upgrade our license so we can store eight terabytes instead of four. We are currently at four terabytes, but we're starting to knock on the door of that capacity."
  • "The pricing is excellent. It will run on anything. You don't have to buy a $100,000 server, with hardware you don't need. You just pay for the license and you're good to go."
  • "The licensing is a bit weird. If you license the standard version of StarWind, it allows you four terabytes. Then, they have a pro version, but with the pro version, the only difference is it doubles the terabytes to eight."
  • More StarWind Virtual SAN Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "There is a problem, which is the lack of an integrated price structure."
  • "The price of the solution was reasonable."
  • "We have a four-year contract to use Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes."
  • "Comparing the price of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes to other solutions it is not expensive."
  • "The tool's pricing is competitive compared to others. The tool's licensing is based on annual subscriptions."
  • More Dell vSAN Ready Nodes Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The first 1-2 years of purchasing vSAN will be expensive. Thereafter, the longer you are running it, the more cost savings you will have."
  • "Its reasonable, compare with other storage vendors"
  • "Basically, vSAN is a license in addition to that of the classic VMware Vsphere, which is also mandatory."
  • "​I would like to see this technology be made available to smaller businesses, who might benefit from high availability but struggle with the entry fee.​"
  • "Perhaps a bundle, like Essentials, would allow more businesses to make the leap to the product."
  • "We have increased our user productivity."
  • "What made us go with this solution was price point. When you can utilize existing storage infrastructure, and not have to continually purchase new SAN products out there that are going up in price as time goes by, then it's a wonderful thing."
  • "We did consider other hyperconverged solutions. It usually came down to price. vSan was the most cost effective thing."
  • More VMware vSAN Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combines… more »
    Top Answer:The cost of this is less than you expect. Since they're selling a software stack, you do need to consider your own… more »
    Top Answer:You can maintain and update it with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings the… more »
    Top Answer:The tool's most valuable feature is high availability.
    Top Answer:The tool's pricing is competitive compared to others. The tool's licensing is based on annual subscriptions.
    Top Answer:Dell vSAN Ready Nodes' deployment is complex.
    Top Answer:While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an… more »
    Top Answer:We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface… more »
    Top Answer:HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    StarWind SAN & NAS
    vSAN Ready Nodes
    vSAN
    Learn More
    Overview

    StarWind Virtual SAN provides high availability and fault tolerance for virtualized environments without the need for dedicated SAN hardware. It allows for real-time replication between servers, shared storage for Hyper-V clusters, and enables vMotion and High Availability features for VMware vSphere. The solution reduces costs and leverages existing hardware while providing a scalable and reliable infrastructure. Valuable features include ease of use, scalability, top-tier support, hardware agnosticism, and the ability to use off-the-shelf standard servers to increase storage space. StarWind VSAN has helped organizations improve performance, data availability, and data security while reducing downtime and providing cost-saving storage options.

    Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes are pre-configured building blocks that reduce deployment
    risks with certified configurations, improve storage efficiency by up to 50%1
    , and can help
    you build or scale your vSAN cluster faster.14 Whether you're just getting started, and/or
    expanding your existing VMware environment, Dell EMC is here for you every step of the
    way with consulting, education, deployment and support services for the entire solution.

    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."

    Offer
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    Try it today

    Learn more about Dell vSAN Ready Nodes
    Learn more about VMware vSAN
    Sample Customers
    Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
    Rackspace
    Read Some Case Studies At Home Cloud CaribCINgroupDiscovery Check out the Rest of our Customer Stories Here
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Construction Company8%
    Educational Organization8%
    Computer Software Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company18%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    Government9%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company60%
    Energy/Utilities Company10%
    Healthcare Company10%
    Government10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company15%
    Government10%
    Comms Service Provider8%
    Manufacturing Company7%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Comms Service Provider12%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Healthcare Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization45%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    Financial Services Firm5%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business64%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise58%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business36%
    Midsize Enterprise21%
    Large Enterprise43%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business23%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise62%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business34%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise44%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business13%
    Midsize Enterprise53%
    Large Enterprise34%
    Buyer's Guide
    Dell vSAN Ready Nodes vs. VMware vSAN
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Dell vSAN Ready Nodes vs. VMware vSAN and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is ranked 12th in HCI with 13 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 219 reviews. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is rated 8.4, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes writes "Scalable solution, easy to install but maintenance costs are considered high". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is most compared with VxRail, Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series, Dell PowerFlex, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, 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 vSAN Ready Nodes vs. VMware vSAN report.

    See our list of best HCI vendors.

    We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.