VMware vSAN and Dell PowerFlex are leading players in the hyperconverged infrastructure market. With its seamless integration and scalability, VMware vSAN may have a slight advantage in environments already utilizing VMware products, while Dell PowerFlex appeals to organizations prioritizing combined infrastructure strength.
Features: VMware vSAN's key features include vMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduler, and seamless integration with VMware solutions. It offers scalability, a cost-efficient entry point, and high performance in VMware-centric environments. Dell PowerFlex combines storage, compute, and network capabilities, providing high performance, scalability, and powerful data protection tailored for consolidated infrastructure needs.
Room for Improvement: VMware vSAN could improve in deduplication, compression for non-flash environments, management, and hardware compatibility. Enhancing monitoring tools and integration with diverse hardware is noted. Dell PowerFlex could benefit from simplified configuration processes, reduced costs, and more upgrade flexibility, particularly regarding AI integration.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware vSAN is recognized for its ease of use post-deployment, with smooth integration into VMware-centric setups, often deployed in on-premises, hybrid, and private cloud environments. Technical support is consistently praised for its responsiveness. Dell PowerFlex is widely deployed on-premises and in private cloud settings, receiving mixed reviews for support speed and detail, but overall solid stability and operations post-deployment.
Pricing and ROI: VMware vSAN, while initially costly, offers a tailored pricing model based on CPU count, allowing cost savings via reduced infrastructure needs over time, enabling incremental investments. Dell PowerFlex demands high upfront investment, noted for its high cost and licensing management complexity, but justifies its expense through comprehensive features suitable for mission-critical applications, offering considerable administrative savings.
Starting with a smaller infrastructure and scaling as required allows us to save costs initially.
The level of support needs improvement as the front-line support staff lack knowledge when we raise cases.
We do not have local Dell technical support.
I would rate their support nine points.
I am not satisfied with VMware support, particularly with the reaction times, SLAs, and those kinds of issues.
The scalability is very good and is one of the key features of Dell PowerFlex.
It supports up to 64 nodes in a cluster, allowing us to add nodes and expand the cluster as needed.
In terms of stability, I give VMware vSAN nine points.
They could have more AI functionality in the future.
The level of support needs improvement as the front-line support staff lack knowledge when we raise cases.
As more customers start deployment, I believe use cases will develop, leading companies to consider that.
A proper monitoring tool that encompasses both applications and infrastructure would help in quickly resolving issues.
Maybe incorporation of automation to build clusters in a more automated way would be beneficial.
This has resulted in a slight cost increase.
Dell PowerFlex includes PowerFlex Manager, which integrates with this solution to provide complete orchestration; you can manage your entire hardware as well as software segment and application segment through a single pane of glass, making it very easy to use and manage.
The scalability is very good and is one of the key features of Dell PowerFlex.
Hot add features are available by default in vSphere, allowing us to immediately increase memory, CPU, and hard drive without any downtime.
A one-stack solution from one vendor is the main benefit here.
VxRack System consists of hyper-converged rack-scale engineered systems, with integrated networking, to achieve the scalability and management requirements of traditional and cloud native workloads. The VxRack series is purposely designed to enable customers to quickly deploy Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and/or Private Cloud architectures. VxRack Systems tightly integrate hardware with software and management layers.
The result is a fully tested, pre-configured, hyper-converged system with simplified operations at data center and Service Provider scale. VxRack Systems support the deployment of a variety of application workloads, allowing IT to rapidly deliver new services while improving overall agility and efficiency.
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:
VMware vSAN Benefits
There are many benefits to implementing VMware vSAN. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:
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."
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