We performed a comparison between Dell XC Appliance 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."The product creates opportunities with hybrid on-premise solutions."
"It provides shared storage to multiple hypervisor hosts. Times had changed, however. StarWind Virtual SAN is the “software replaces hardware” for SAN. We have access control and CCTV systems up and running using Microsoft clustering and shared storage"
"The Windows-based StarWind GUI is easy to use and understand and integrates seamlessly with VMware's vSphere portal as well."
"This was a great implementation for a small to mid-size business."
"Having the ability to migrate machines live in our environment was made possible by this software."
"In the three years that we have been using StarWind, the product has yet to cause us any problems."
"It allows you to use ANY consumer or enterprise HDDs and SSDs, and that's a really great thing!"
"You can turn your local disk storage into high-availability iSCSI storage."
"The most valuable features are the deduplication and the compression features."
"The most valuable feature is the low management overhead, and the lower skill set required to manage it."
"What I like the most is that it is easy to implement, easy deployment and that it's easy to manage."
"The solution's hardware is great."
"When we compare it to normal hardware servers, I'd say it is quite easy to configure and deploy."
"The solution's best feature is its simplicity. It's so simple to deploy it. You've got the VMware, and it's own appliance. It is really helpful. The system is online within half a day and saves so much time."
"The most valuable feature is that you can assign a volume to an off-shore workload on the fly."
"Storage is expandable with no extra cost."
"Since the storage space is local to the hosts, it reduces the overall response time and improves the performance."
"It's stable and scalable. Also, you can virtualize SAN so that you don't have to have a separate storage area network and can have your computer and storage on the same box or computer."
"It allows us to put our infrastructure in remote locations and still get the same performance we get from our onsite SAN solutions."
"The solution's technical support is good."
"The simplicity, as well as the integration with virtualization."
"Flexibility, growth, and expansion are probably the more important features for us. As our environment grows, the more users come on, the more VDI workstations that we need, we can easily expand either horizontally or vertically with the environment"
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"An update caused a syncing issue and it took over a month to resolve it"
"If there are domain controllers inside the cluster, there needs to be some sort of logic allowing them to boot independently so all the rest of the domain clients can gain the authority they need to come online."
"If it's possible to make a driver/solution that does not make use of the iSCSI targets of Windows, that would be great. I don't know if that's possible, however, it could make the configuration a little easier."
"The number of different ways you can set it up can make it a little daunting."
"I would like to see more advanced free versions."
"I would like to see more monitoring and alert tools."
"One main thing this product needs to work on is reporting."
"For me, the product could be improved by it being made cheaper."
"The cost of using the public cloud deployment is astronomical."
"There should be more provisioning capabilities within the solution."
"Dell needs to do a lot of work to simplify the maintenance and life-cycle upgrades for the product."
"In the next release, I would like to see support for Docker and containers."
"Currently, there is no support for the servers that are not in the cluster."
"The solution's storage size could be improved."
"We are not always advised of new features or updates, so we must research to stay up to date."
"I would like compression and deduplication to be offered for offloading hardware, instead of doing it with software. That would be nice."
"They should provide Deduplication and Compression over the hybrid drives."
"Disaster recovery needs to be improved, when there is a crisis, there is a problem with what is the quickest way to get out of it."
"The stability needs to be improved."
"Dedupe in non flash drives can be improved."
"The only thing I can think of at this time is to improve the performance monitoring and performance visibility within the GUI."
"Troubleshooting tools could be improved."
"There is a room for improvement on the latest version of compatibility with the VMware product, especially for vSAN and with other vendors on their motherboards and driver configurations."
Dell XC Appliance is ranked 38th in HCI while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Dell XC Appliance is rated 8.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Dell XC Appliance writes "Turnkey solution with low management costs that is easy to use". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Dell XC Appliance is most compared with , 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 XC Appliance vs. VMware vSAN report.
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