We performed a comparison between NetApp HCI [EOL] and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Nutanix, VMware and others in HCI."Virtualizing data infrastructure with StarWind Virtual SAN improves efficiency and reduces operational costs."
"The virtual tapes can be uploaded to the object storage of your choice with object locking/governance which gives you an extra layer of protection."
"I like the asynchronous replication and failover features. They are what I'm primarily using it for. The asynchronous replication is helpful because our servers are backed up continuously throughout the day. If anything goes wrong we just fail over immediately. That is a very nice feature to have."
"The solution is also quite flexible. As an example, other vSAN solutions that we looked at had more stringent requirements regarding mixed HDD/SSD storage which wouldn't have worked in our environment."
"The support team is available to solve any problem efficiently."
"Their support staff is comprised of true experts who can also communicate clearly."
"The installation of StarWind Virtual SAN was pretty easy, and the configuration was done in no time."
"The ease of reaching the support team and their promptness for support is great."
"In terms of helping us with storage persistence across private and hybrid clouds, we do store data internally and in Azure. It has allowed us to consolidate a number of workloads, across our old NetApp and a number of our older storage arrays, into a single unit and have that unit also working with Azure."
"It allows me to move a VM set and require extra performance. I can easily move them onto it and have it just run."
"We're trying to move to a much more API-driven management of all of our products, and NetApp's product is, from all the SDS providers we have seen, the most fully-baked API out there."
"Scalability was another thing I was looking at. The solution, by its very nature, is designed to be expandable and flexible, so you don't have to buy performance you don't need today, but you're also not stuck with something you can't expand."
"Our goal with NetApp HCI is to have no single point of failure."
"The NetApp Deployment Engine that comes with it makes the actual deployment and usage very easy. That's our primary focus and it's hyper-converged. That's something that we want to use as well."
"The scalability is great, because it can scale independently."
"It is scalable, and NetApp Deployment Engine (NDE) makes its deployment easier."
"The most valuable features are productivity and data storage."
"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."
"The ability to have a disaster recovery option for our end-users by being able to use VDI and the vSANs, and the ability to do replication across multiple data centers, are valuable to us."
"The technical support is good."
"We find it easy to deliver this solution."
"It is easy to find information out there, not only from searching the web, but even the times I have engaged VMware support."
"The solution's unified administration is its most valuable aspect."
"The most valuable features are secure IOPs and LAN security."
"I would like to see an extensive set of cmdlets that could allow for easier automation as well as status management."
"The software monitoring should be web-based to be reachable from any VLAN workstation."
"It would be good to have a little more access to control certain aspects within the UI."
"New versions of this solution should be tested more thoroughly before the release as we had a few problems with one version due to a bug."
"The platform needs to improve user management and the web console."
"We ran into an issue with alerts."
"I want to suggest that the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure needs to be reduced."
"Ongoing improvements in read and write performance would help meet increasingly demanding workloads."
"The vCenter keeps crashing, meaning that there is no stability in our environment."
"If you want to have a really dense data center then it's hard to have a big chunk of cabling going through everything."
"The administration side of it needs to be improved. We expect an easier interface and a single upgrade for updating the infrastructure."
"To improve the product, they should make it more flexible."
"It is easy to install now, but could potentially be even simpler."
"Because I like block mode, I'd like to see SAN connectivity. I would like to be able to easily put it into my current environment."
"The fact that it doesn't have all the data points we need and all the historical data that I would like. I find that a lot of the performance analysis is done through support, where they have something that we don't have. It would be nice just to have all that on-prem."
"The problem is that it needs to be much more stable, for example, when I want to do the upgrade to 1.7 that just released, I also need to issue a ticket to the support guy in India and he asked me to deploy another mlock. There are a lot of manual steps compared with other products."
"There is room for improvement in vSAN's ability to debug. When it's not working well, debugging becomes quite challenging. Identifying issues when it's lagging or not functioning properly can be difficult."
"It would be ideal if clients didn't need to monitor the solution on a daily basis."
"There's a lot that can be done to segregate. That may be available now in vSAN 7, I suppose, however, the deduplication and compression can be segregated."
"It could be more robust. The latency is also an issue for us, and the reliability. I would like it to be faster and a little more flexible."
"I am looking for more of a software-defined storage platform that uses different protocols, such as iSCSI, NFS, and CIS, and maybe also has an object as part of that. They should 100% make it more of a storage-based product where it is not linked just to VMware, and it also has NFS and iSCSI built-in at a scalable level. They should turn it more into a dedicated storage-as-a-service platform instead of just being built into the VMware kernel. Their level one and level two support is not at all good, and it should be improved."
"They should provide Deduplication and Compression over the hybrid drives."
"Because of virtual storage, the system reaches reserve storage for its functions. It also consumes a certain amount of storage, which then results in the creation of a fault tolerance for the system. All of this adds to a lot of capacity being consumed in terms of storage for each drive for vSan. I find this to be one drawback of using vSan."
"I would like to see a little bit more documentation on the initial setup, and a little bit more explanation on the expandability: How to extend out your vSAN much more simply through the console because, a lot of the time, you have to do it through the command line."
NetApp HCI [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in HCI with 32 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 226 reviews. NetApp HCI [EOL] is rated 8.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of NetApp HCI [EOL] writes "Ease of provisioning has allowed us to implement large installations in a very short time frame". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". NetApp HCI [EOL] 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.
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