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Dell vSAN Ready Nodes vs VMware vSAN comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 2024

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

Dell vSAN Ready Nodes
Ranking in HCI
12th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware vSAN
Ranking in HCI
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
231
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the HCI category, the mindshare of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is 2.6%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware vSAN is 15.0%, down from 18.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

Saleh Khalid - PeerSpot reviewer
Efficient consolidated storage and plug-and-play with room for more flexibility
The initial setup was straightforward. However, there is a need for detailed steps, and missing any step could result in the solution not working. The whole environment, including designing and preparation, took around two weeks, and the deployments, including shipping of the servers and everything, took another two weeks to make it production ready. It was around four weeks in total from starting design to being production ready.
Yves Sandfort - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature is the set of user tools that are available."
"I rate vSAN ReadyNodes as a nine out of ten."
"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."
"The tool's most valuable feature is high availability."
"If I consider the overall product, I would say that it is an excellent solution that offers very good performance and stability."
"The tool's most valuable features are compression and its usage in Kubernetes."
"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."
"They are heading in the right direction and moving to integrate everything with a hybrid cloud, and moving workloads back and forth."
"I like the tolerance of VMware vSAN."
"It is more stable now than it was before. It's not like it was in the first year. Now it is stable, and we trust it more."
"The solutions best feature is that it is easy to use."
"It uncoupled the idea of proprietary technology and component capabilities. It is basically a proprietary technology for a cost-effective infrastructure."
"We find it easy to deliver this solution."
"The most valuable features for us are the ability to scale out the nodes independently, and the flexibility of the nodes. We can put almost any type of server in there with our connectivity and everything works great."
"The most valuable feature of VMware vSAN is the ease of management. VMware vSAN it's a part of VMware ESXi and when you do patching for VMware ESXi, VMware vSAN receives the patches too."
"The scalability of the solution is most valuable."
 

Cons

"Upgrades are carried out manually."
"The solution doesn't scale."
"Scalability is an area that could be improved. We are looking at a maximum of 32 nodes now in a cluster, but going to 64 or 128 would be a major advantage."
"Compatibility with other hardware nodes needs to be improved."
"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."
"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."
"Currently, it's like a black box that only Dell technical support knows how to handle."
"The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required. The price of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes could be lowered."
"Troubleshooting tools could be improved."
"If one node out of your ten nodes fails, it takes a lot of time to replicate and rebalance VMware vSAN. This time can be reduced. When a node fails and the data is not accessible, vSAN has to be rebalanced to make the redundancy level of two again. However, if it is taking a lot of time and any other hardware fails during that time, then we have a problem. Two disk failures mean that all data will be lost, and we may have to recover it from the backup. So, the number of threads that run to do the rebalancing could be more so that the time taken to make it fully redundant again is not so much."
"The server files are larger than before."
"I would like compression and deduplication to be offered for offloading hardware, instead of doing it with software. That would be nice."
"As a software-based product, it requires a lot of system resources."
"There's already a concern with VMware with ransomware and security issues. VMware could focus on improving security."
"We have encountered some challenges related to administrative tasks and licensing issues for the product."
"I would like to see it be more hardware-agnostic. Other than that, the only other complication is - and it has gotten better with the newer versions - that lately, once you're running an all-flash, if you need to grow or scale down your infrastructure, it's a long process. You need to evacuate all data and make sure you have enough space on the host, then add more hosts or take out hosts. That process is a little bit complex. You cannot scale as needed or shrink as needed."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"My company makes yearly payments towards the licensing charges attached to the solution. The solution is expensive."
"The tool's pricing is competitive compared to others. The tool's licensing is based on annual subscriptions."
"The price of the solution was reasonable."
"There is a problem, which is the lack of an integrated price structure."
"The solution is more expensive than a traditional array. The prices are skyrocketing."
"Comparing the price of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes to other solutions it is not expensive."
"We have a four-year contract to use Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes."
"If you compare the price of VMware vSAN with other players like Nutanix and Cisco, its price is good, but could still have some improvement."
"With the new pricing model, it's expensive for the customer."
"VMware is not a cost effective solution, especially if you have a Microsoft shop. In this case, you would have to purchase the VMware license when there are already Hyper-V solutions that could do it for much cheaper."
"vSAN has many versions with standard and advanced including Enterprise and Enterprise Plus. Regarding the Enterprise and the Advanced, it could be lower."
"This is a cost-effective product. It's a bit cheaper than the other solutions."
"Its reasonable, compare with other storage vendors"
"In comparison with other solutions, such as HP or Cisco, I find the solution to be quite pricey."
"The cost of the solution is high and if it could be reduced the customers would be very happy."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Government
9%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Educational Organization
50%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Dell vSAN Ready Nodes?
If I consider the overall product, I would say that it is an excellent solution that offers very good performance and stability.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Dell vSAN Ready Nodes?
There is no specific licensing model for vSAN ReadyNodes as it is linked with Broadcom VMware's solutions rather than Dell's. As a group under Comcast, we receive very good pricing from Dell due to...
What needs improvement with Dell vSAN Ready Nodes?
Although vSAN ReadyNodes work well, a faster firmware lifecycle with the release of validated firmware catalogs more quickly would be a desired improvement.
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 engineered system. The choice to choose which technology depends on two major fac...
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 interface that allows you to talk directly to your VM from the present software. We fou...
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 researched VMware vSAN but found HPE was a better option for us. HPE SimpliVity has ...
 

Also Known As

vSAN Ready Nodes
vSAN
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Rackspace
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