Dell Unity XT vs VMware vSAN comparison

The compared Dell Technologies and VMware solutions aren't in the same category. Dell Technologies is ranked #4 in AFS , with an average rating of 8.2, and holds a 7.3% mindshare in the category. VMware is ranked #2 in HCI , with an average rating of 8.7, and holds a 15.0% mindshare. Additionally, 96% of Dell Technologies users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of VMware users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Dell Unity XT and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Pure Storage and others in All-Flash Storage.

To learn more, read our detailed All-Flash Storage Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

All-Flash Storage

April 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Mindshare comparison

All-Flash Storage

HCI

Featured Reviews

Eugene Hemphill

Sales Manager at Multicomputos PR

Helps to save money and resources with the data compression feature

One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them. One way to improve the product is to add an operational assistant that doesn't depend on VMware. It could also establish more alliances with other operational systems.

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Syed Habib

Head of Infrastructure Security (S.A.V.P) at EXIM Bank Ltd

Efficient data replication and fast IOPS have improved operational performance

Dell and a partner jointly implemented this solution in Auvink. We installed the Flash, which makes our IO operations fast and efficient. Replication is available, allowing us to replicate data simultaneously from one site to another. All-flash technology and vTXT enhance speed, and the IOPS are faster. The cache's IOPS are much better. Snapshots provide a unique feature for testing and make management more comfortable and easy. The platform is multi-supported and certification is more convenient and easy to manage.

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Yves Sandfort

CEO & Majority Shareholder at Comdivision Consulting GmbH

Gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources

Stability can be improved. Adding all these new features is nice, but we are now at the level where most of the features you need in production are there. The stability is not from a day-to-day operations perspective, but more from a supportability perspective, because currently some of the support scenarios require you to completely evacuate hosts or the complete cluster. That sometimes can be a stretch. This would clearly be an improvement if the support teams were given additional tools to make that easier. Upgradability could be a bit easier sometimes. We are now where vSAN can be updated without ESXi, but there is still enough dependency. So that would be good if that actually would be uncoupled even more. Dashboards are there, and we use vROps as well. So, we have all the beauty of capacity planning and everything over there. That's not really something where we need a lot of other things.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"It is very easy to install and configure. It has got excellent diagnostics. If you really need to see how the box is performing, the console gives you a lot of information. You can set thresholds as well as alerts based on the thresholds, which is a very powerful functionality. They are very proactive. They know how to monitor and manage the systems. They see a problem, and they are all over it before us. They see the problem before we see it, which is very good."

"FlashArray has some fresh efficiency features. I've never seen a storage solution with a compression rating this high before. It's at least 4-to-1 on Oracle databases. It's the best flash storage for Oracle."

"Technical support has been helpful and responsive."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is reliability."

"The most valuable features of this solution are its ease of use and performance."

"It's helped us because we've changed fundamentally what we talk about. We don't talk about storage and different tiers of storage anymore nor do we talk about servers. We talk now about applications and how applications impact the business and end users."

"On a scale of one to ten, I rate Pure FlashArray as ten."

"The system allows for seamless learning experiences, facilitating quick and easy cloning of environments within minutes."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pros

"The most valuable feature of Dell Unity XT is data duplication. Additionally, the management interface is simple, and is not a hassle using it. You don't need too much to learn or to be familiarized with it."

"I like that the solution is scalable. The initial setup is not complex. The basic licenses and software are included in the package. he primary advantage is that this product has been thoroughly tested and proven over time. I recommend this product."

"The feature that I have found most valuable is the unified storage. Also, its capabilities for block-access, file access, and the center box."

"I like Unity XT's software-defined storage. It's a new feature that isn't widely used yet, but customers are impressed with it."

"It's easy for us to use because we use other solutions which are built for Unity, like VMware, which are recovery points. They work with the Dell EMC Unity system, as these products integrate well in our environment."

"For me, the most valuable feature is the ease of management."

"It is lightning fast, low on power and heat, and has a small footprint with great performance."

"The high availability of Dell EMC Unity XT has been the most important feature."

More Dell Unity XT pros

"The solution has high performance."

"I like the orchestration feature."

"The technical support is good. We are always thankful for the technical support from VMware. They are very supportive when we have a technical problem."

"Data management and recovery processes are the most valuable features."

"You get the benefit of local storage, but you have the protection of shared storage."

"vSAN has just one datastore. so customers do not need to think where to put their VMs, how to design the physical disk RAID, the LUN size, the LUN mapping, etc. when they use NetApp/EMC/HDS or other storage systems."

"It is user-friendly, and its performance is good."

"The deduplication and compression are excellent."

More VMware vSAN pros

Cons

"Many options to check performance, like read, writes, random writes, and random reads, are missing in Pure FlashArray X NVMe."

"Efficiency improvements would always be welcome, but I'm not sure if they could get more efficient."

"The UI for this solution needs to be improved."

"In the next release, I would like to see real-time analytics for further insight into consumption models."

"One point I'd like to improve is that the tool should start selling small boxes again. It discontinued some products and is focusing on bigger, more capable boxes, neglecting the SMB market. Even though it's not a big market, it shouldn't have removed them."

"I'd like to see the product implement active replication for vehicles such as VMware."

"Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial."

"It's more multi-tenant functionality in their Pure1 manage portal that is lacking."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe cons

"This product needs to have better integration with enterprise backup solutions and archiving devices."

"The biggest one for us, and the reason we don't use it more, is that we can't throttle the replication speed. If it's on, it's on. So we have to be a little more WAN-sensitive, in some applications, which means we can't put it everywhere. That's the biggest issue for us, by far."

"The iSCSI and the VMware integation using vSphere could be less confusing."

"The interface can be a little challenging for someone new."

"Dell Unity XT could improve the compatibility of some of the features. Some of my customers had some problems. Additionally, it would be beneficial for the solution to have advanced AI and ML features."

"One of the issues we've had is that controllers have crashed several times... We've had a lot of problems with the storage processor, SPBs. We've actually had them crash."

"I would like to see them add Storage Groups, like we have had in Clariions and VNXs."

"This product has some scalability issues. Before you can get support, you have to look for the service tag number on your product which could make it difficult to access support."

More Dell Unity XT cons

"I think it needs to be more cost-effective. I would also say that even though the capacity is good, there is also room for improvement there. Also, they could improve the security of the system."

"Ease of administration is one area where vSAN could be improved."

"It can be very expensive."

"VMware vSAN could improve by having better integration with other vendors and the storage is limited, I prefer it to the traditional storage."

"This solution would benefit from better collaboration with Cisco for driver updates."

"I would like to see better integration between the cloud and our VMware virtual environment. We only have one virtual environment, which is VMware vSAN. Right now, there is little interoperability with the cloud solution at the moment."

"The platform’s pricing needs improvement. Additionally, there should be an appliance module included in it."

"Hackers are able to manage to leak information or data from the product using some corrupt files, making it an area of major concern where improvements are required."

More VMware vSAN cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The tool is an investment that we've budgeted for. While the prices may be higher than those of other vendors, we see it as a market leader with benefits. We don't regret purchasing it."

"As far as the licensing costs, everything is included in the license."

"Pretty much everything that you need is licensed when you buy the product. Licensing to me is different than the maintenance cost, but they can bleed into one another. We buy the product, and we expect three years of support bundled into what we negotiate on our storage arrays. I would start to see maintenance costs going into the fourth year, but we're not there yet."

"We pay approximately $50,000 USD per year in licensing fees."

"The support cost per array is about $20,000 a year for 24/7 support."

"The licensing is on a yearly basis."

"Our licensing fees are $500,000+ USD."

"Its price could be better. It is not too expensive, but it is the high-end cost. It is kind of a Rolls-Royce. You pay a lot, but you get a lot out of it. So, the price pressure on the way down would be great, but at the end of the day, if you need to do the work, you just pay for it."

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe pricing and cost advice

"Our costs are roughly $200,000 a year."

"We integrated it with VMware vSphere at no additional cost. As we moved into VMware vSphere, this is what we bought to go with it for our storage performance."

"The price is very reasonable."

"Pricing for this product is manageable, though slightly higher than comparable products."

"The license is not required, but we must renew the support every year, every two years."

"We bought extended warranties out of the box because our customer has a bad habit of managing warranties."

"This product is cheaper than the EMC VNX solution. It is good for small businesses."

"The support you're getting with it is probably an underestimated value that comes with the box you're buying."

More Dell Unity XT pricing and cost advice

"The price of VMware vSAN is expensive and there is an annual license required."

"Perhaps a bundle, like Essentials, would allow more businesses to make the leap to the product."

"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."

"In comparison with other solutions, such as HP or Cisco, I find the solution to be quite pricey."

"We have increased our user productivity."

"The cost of the solution is high and if it could be reduced the customers would be very happy."

"We pay a yearly licensing fee."

"The product's price has been increasing lately...VMware vSAN is expensive."

More VMware vSAN pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Educational Organization

67%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Government

Educational Organization

50%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Pure FlashArray X NVMe helps to improve our processing speed. It is user-friendly and easy to use.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

I am an engineer and am not aware of the setup cost.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Pure FlashArray X NVMe?

Adding some functions to the product would be beneficial. Storage replication should be essential, and the analytics ...

See all answers

What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?

I saw that you have doubts about what you chose. I have a lot of experience with the constructor, honestly I can reco...

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What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?

They’re both great solutions and I’ve used both. EMC is being VERY aggressive on pricing which may be the undoing of...

See all answers

What is the Biggest Difference Between Dell EMC Unity and NetApp AFF?

First of all the decision should be taken looking at similar products in terms of capacity and performance. I will sh...

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What Is The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail?

While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an e...

See all answers

Which would you choose - Nutanix Acropolis AOS or VMware vSAN?

We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interfa...

See all answers

How does HPE Simplivity compare with VMware vSAN?

HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We resea...

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Comparisons

Dell PowerStore vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 30% of the time

TrueNAS R-Series vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 17% of the time

Pure Storage FlashBlade vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 15% of the time

IBM FlashSystem vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 11% of the time

Dell PowerMax NVMe vs Pure FlashArray X NVMe

Compared 6% of the time

More Pure FlashArray X NVMe Competitors

Dell PowerStore vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 38% of the time

NetApp AFF vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 12% of the time

Pure Storage FlashArray vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 5% of the time

HPE Nimble Storage vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 5% of the time

Dell PowerMax NVMe vs Dell Unity XT

Compared 3% of the time

More Dell Unity XT Competitors

VxRail vs VMware vSAN

Compared 18% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs VMware vSAN

Compared 16% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VMware vSAN

Compared 8% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs VMware vSAN

Compared 8% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs VMware vSAN

Compared 6% of the time

More VMware vSAN Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Pure FlashArray X NVMe

April 2025

Download Pure FlashArray X NVMe product report

Buyer's Guide

Dell Unity XT

April 2025

Download Dell Unity XT product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware vSAN

April 2025

Download VMware vSAN product report

Also Known As

Pure FlashArray//X NVMe, Pure FlashArray//X, FlashArray//X

EMC Unity, Dell EMC Unity

vSAN

Overview

Pure Storage FlashArray//X is the world’s first enterprise-class, all-NVMe flash storage array. It represents a new class of storage – shared accelerated storage, which is a term coined by Gartner – that delivers major breakthroughs in performance, simplicity, and consolidation.

Pure Storage

Dell EMC Unity XT is one of the best all-flash storage arrays on the market today. Dell EMC Unity XT arrays are designed for performance, optimized for efficiency, and built for a multi-cloud world. In addition, they support digital transformation, enabling businesses to reach the full potential of their data capital quickly and easily. Dell EMC Unity’s All-Flash and Hybrid Flash storage platforms provide the performance, efficiency, enterprise-class software, and virtualization integrations required for running a wide range of virtualized applications.

Dell EMC Unity XT Features

Dell EMC Unity XT has many valuable key features, including:

Unified storage flexibility: With Dell EMC Unity XT you can consolidate separate storage platforms into a single Unity XT unified storage system via a simple and intuitive (HTML5) management GUI that also connects you to CloudIQ.
All-inclusive data protection: Dell EMC Unity XT offers a reliable way to protect application data with all-inclusive data protection services, including snapshots, data-at-rest drive encryption, replication, thin clones, and dynamic pools.
Software-defined solutions: Dell EMC Unity XT provides software-defined storage and HA for on-prem and in the cloud solutions.
Multi-cloud alignment: With Dell EMC Unity XT you have the ability to build and manage an effective data-first multi-cloud strategy. It allows you to consolidate public and private cloud resources that align with your business goals.
Metro node: This feature enables automated business continuity with zero RPO and RTO. It also provides greater flexibility through multi-platform support and replication to any array and has zero performance impact on the storage array.
Scalable file system: Dell EMC Unity XT is built with a robust 256TBu file system. The UFS64 file system includes up to 256 independent VMDK clones, 16 thin clones, space efficient snapshots with a simple space reclaim and low IO impact, file system shrink that can reclaim free blocks, simplified Quotas for User, and much more.
DevOps integrations: Dell EMC Unity XT supports the Container Storage Interface (CSI) plugin to run Kubernetes workloads.

Dell EMC Unity XT Benefits

Some of the benefits of using Dell EMC Unity XT include:

High-speed data access
Low latency
Dual-active controller architecture
Multi-cloud
Intuitive user interface
Cost efficient
Solid performance

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by Dell EMC Unity XT users.

A Systems Engineering Manager at a manufacturing company says, "It is definitely one of the most robust, solid, well-performing products that I have dealt with. It is set it and forget it, which is pretty amazing." He also mentions, “We can do both block and file storage on one unit without purchasing a separate device.”

Peter S., Senior Technical Specialist at a healthcare company, states, “The most valuable feature is reliability. At the end of the day, it just runs. This solution is easy to work with and easy to maintain.”

PeerSpot user Melvin T., Senior Systems Engineer at Prosperity Bank, explains that the solution is “easy to use and we can add LUNs or space without interruption to end-users. We're able to access it from just about anywhere, as long as we have access to a browser. That feature is really neat because sometimes we will go to a different data center or a different site, and if we need to access it to see a LUN or to see any type of storage, we can do that. That's one of the big takeaways with Unity."

Dell Technologies

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."

VMware

Sample Customers

Fremont Bank, Judson ISD, The Nielsen Company

Draper, Rio Grande Pacific, Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre

Read Some Case Studies At Home Cloud CaribCINgroupDiscovery Check out the Rest of our Customer Stories Here

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Pure Storage and others in All-Flash Storage. Updated: April 2025.

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