We performed a comparison between FlexPod XCS and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others in Converged Infrastructure."Our footprint is lower than it used to be."
"The most valuable is the one support. I have a 1-800 number. I call one number rather than figuring out whether it's a network, compute, or storage issue. It is beautiful and works out nicely."
"The solution is innovative when it comes to compute storage and networking. Each environment has knowledge of another in a FlexPod environment. This would be difficult to operate separately."
"With FlexPod, it is about the synergy of the server, the storage, and the whole management layer. Together, it is really about minimizing staff. You don't have to hire more people. You can work with the minimum level of resources and the availability is really good. We have had very little downtime."
"The initial setup is not complex. It is user-friendly since it is a single solution with all the components delivered in one package."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the stability."
"The fact that it can run the entire stack in terms of protocols. The integration for most of our customers is VMware; the full-stack integration. Also, the ability to do rapid cloning."
"UCS Profiles enable recovering a physical server in less than 15 minutes."
"The product's initial setup phase was very straightforward."
"It's completely hyper-converged, so it's very convenient."
"I like the orchestration feature."
"The simplicity, as well as the integration with virtualization."
"Technical support is very helpful and very good at resolving issues."
"All the features are working great."
"The most valuable feature is the simplicity of its scalability: being able to grow it without having to make sure you get the right disks and the right nodes. The solution is also easy to manage. It's all right there in the vSphere Client. You're not going through multiple things. You don't have to know, once you've created the vSAN node. You add storage, it sees it, and you create your data storage from there. Everything is right there for you."
"The technical support is good."
"I think they can always improve, whether it's dedupe or compression, those algorithms; and flash through better SSDs."
"I have noticed a lot of customers, they will kick it over the fence. It is FlexPod; it is that mystery animal. The room for improvement is to better present it to those users, so they will not have to be afraid of it."
"They need to improve the user interface to make it easier to work in this environment. The older version is poor."
"The biggest problem we have seen is, we were using the vStorage which comes with the NetApp environment, a kind of fiber connect. We were missing fibre channel connectivity and we got lots of I/O errors."
"There are apparently some new products coming around the whole FlexPod side of things with regards to auditing, to ensure everything is configured correctly. It's basically a "delta" if there have been any changes. It's important to us, from a support perspective, to know if there have been changes and what impact they have actually had."
"Make it easier to refresh hardware. We got to the point where we couldn't fix vulnerabilities without refreshing the hardware, then that became a little too expensive for us to do."
"We haven't seen ROI yet."
"A piece where FlexPod has come up short in the past and an area for them to improve upon: single pane of glass management and single pane of glass upgrade process."
"Enterprise customers get discounts on the solution's licensing pricing, but it is too expensive for SMB customers."
"The pricing could be better when it comes to renewing the licenses."
"It could have some automation. We haven't involved ourselves in a lot of automation around the vSAN environment capabilities. We're still running it using a very traditional setup. So, there could be some plugins to automate it using third-party environments, such as Jenkins."
"The only thing I can think of at this time is to improve the performance monitoring and performance visibility within the GUI."
"Dedupe in non flash drives can be improved."
"Its price could be improved. It is too expensive for our clients."
"Improvements can be made with respect to scalability."
"If the support could be provided more quickly, it would be very helpful."
FlexPod XCS is ranked 2nd in Converged Infrastructure with 295 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 226 reviews. FlexPod XCS is rated 8.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of FlexPod XCS writes "Integrates everything so you are using fewer tools". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". FlexPod XCS is most compared with Dell PowerFlex, Oracle Exadata, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VxRail and Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI).
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