We performed a comparison between Dell PowerFlex 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."StarWind Virtual SAN is a very mature software that supersedes its capabilities with my use cases."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements."
"The vSAN provides full redundancy for storage while reclaiming some rack space."
"We have been able to use more on-prem hardware to reduce cost and also use old disks that we do not trust enough for ordinary RAID or usage."
"The support team is available to solve any problem efficiently."
"Having the ability to migrate machines live in our environment was made possible by this software."
"The user interface for this application is amazing."
"I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"Saves us a lot of space in the data center."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"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."
"One of the valuable features of vSAN is it has a universal type of technology that allows you to deploy it on any server or hardware. Competitors, such as Nutanix, provides the AOS and can be deployed only on certified hardware. For vSAN, it does not require any kind of certified hardware."
"The ease of use is great."
"Its ease of use is most valuable. It is easy to configure, and there is a unified interface, which makes things slightly easier."
"vSAN is very integrated."
"The scalability has been quite good."
"The most valuable features of VMware vSAN are that it receives updates frequently, has good compression, optimized storage, and they provide webinars on what is new. Additionally, the integration with third-party products is good and it is easy to manage."
"Very good VCG notification feature."
"There is no IPv6 support. That is our only issue at this time."
"I see no need for major improvements but there could be some improvements in the form of notifications and the simplifying of maintenance mode."
"Feature-wise we are only waiting for the release of a "planned disaster" feature that would allow us to patch a hypervisor node without having to take the full storage offline."
"For me, the product could be improved by it being made cheaper."
"I had to buy upgraded support, which was not a problem, but it wasn't a prorated amount, so I paid for the support, the full upgrade, but I only got a couple of months out of it because it was only good until renewal time."
"Though I have learned some of the nuances with the upgrading of firmware/windows/etc., it would be nice to have a more efficient method of doing so."
"There needs to be more visibility on how long the cloud replication will take as there is no current ETA."
"I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues."
"Licensing restrictions can be frustrating."
"The installation is complex."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"It would be great to get earlier access to beta builds because we have to develop providers on our own. The APIs and enablers for custom automation could also be improved."
"The big thing is pricing, and the rest of it is mostly good. From a scalability point of view, scaling the storage from network or compute should be easier. It is again all around the cost, and it would be good if it was easier to scale your storage separately from your compute."
"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."
"A vSAN cluster must have compression and deduplication to be an all-flash array, but it's not supported with a hybrid array. Deduplication and compression work better with an all-flash array, so I think that VMware should give customers the option to activate and support this feature for hybrid arrays. Other products like Nutanix support this."
"In a future release, they could add micro-segmentation or security level features integrated into vSAN."
"The interface is a little complicated, it could be simplified with more graphical gadgets. We have many servers, and the built-in functions, such as rate configuration, are a bit complex."
"The integration could be improved. I would like to see integration with other platforms."
"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."
"The price for the hard drive, for vSAN, is very expensive."
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Dell PowerFlex is ranked 13th in HCI with 4 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 78 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 7.8, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Dell PowerFlex writes "Stable with good technical support and the capability to scale". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VxRail, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and Huawei FusionCube Hyper-Converged Infrastructure, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and HPE Hyper Converged. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. VMware vSAN report.
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