Portworx Enterprise vs VMware vSAN comparison

Pure Storage and VMware are both solutions in the Cloud Software Defined Storage category. Additionally, 100% of Pure Storage users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of VMware users who would recommend it.

Portworx Enterprise

Read 6 Portworx Enterprise reviews

512 Views
185 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

VMware vSAN

Read 231 VMware vSAN reviews

13,937 Views
8,456 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Portworx Enterprise

VMware vSAN

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Portworx Enterprise and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Cloud Software Defined Storage solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Portworx Enterprise vs. VMware vSAN Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Portworx Enterprise vs. VMware vSAN

June 2025

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Helped 856,873 peers since 2012

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

Portworx Enterprise

Average Rating

9.2

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Software Defined Storage (3rd), Data Storage for Kubernetes (1st)

VMware vSAN

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

231

Ranking in other categories

HCI (2nd)

Featured Reviews

Paulo Jose Bosco Otto

Consultant at PBOservicos-Informatica

A solution backed by strong customer support, that is stable and scalable

As a company managed in a Kubernetes environment, being trusted by a Kubernetes vendor, Red Hat creates barriers against using other certified solutions that work. Because IBM is a competitor of Pure Storage, things seem to be getting worse. I don't have plans to use Portworx Enterprise in the future because, at the moment, I am working with Ondat, and I have to follow NetApp's direction on that. When evaluating Portworx, one should make sure their company has already chosen Pure Storage. Still, if they are evaluating the solution on Ondat or Dell or other platforms, they should get a roadmap statement from Pure Storage, that they will continue to develop storage hardware diagnostics. I rate Portworx a nine out of ten.

Read full review

Pramod-Talekar

Sr Service Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Enables efficient multi-environment cluster deployment and resource management with versatile features

While VMware vSAN is quite comprehensive, if we are running multiple infrastructures, applications, databases, and other elements, having a diagnostic tool to identify the actual problem area, whether application-side or infrastructure-side, would be beneficial. A proper monitoring tool that encompasses both applications and infrastructure would help in quickly resolving issues.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"A custom IBM script is designed to tackle the storage management challenges within containerized environments, providing crucial data services and features required for enterprise applications."

"I like that you have a small dedicated file system that is fast and resilient for containerized workloads."

"The best thing about Portworx is the Stork, they have called the VPS (Volume Replacement Strategy) and they also have topology awareness, and these are the three features I like."

"Portworx is a simple solution. It's similar to Pure Storage products. They're all easy to use and install. You need to have a little expertise with containers to use Portworx, but it will be no problem for you if you understand containers."

"Portworx virtualizes the aspects of the underlying block storage. That is good because they can also use block storage for their future deployment instead of just NFS."

"The solution is user-friendly."

"The valuable features of vSAN are that you can get it up and running quickly, you get redundancy built-in, and it's pretty much the perfect solution for a cluster."

"The most valuable feature is fhe flexibility, the ability to move the machines around without hesitation."

"The newer versions of this solution are much more stable and easier to manage."

"The implementation is simple, it was very straightforward. It took us approximately three weeks because it was installed in four locations."

"In my opinion, vSAN is the most natural way to migrate to a fully hyperconverged solution. If a customer needs a more scalable solution with consolidated management, vSAN is excellent."

"VMware vSAN has greatly reduced refresh spending."

"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."

"vSAN Health is a feature designed to monitor the health and performance of the vSAN environment. It's crucial for us and our customers to frequently check on this to ensure everything is operating smoothly."

More VMware vSAN pros

Cons

"They have not integrated Portworx with Ondat since they are too focused now on Pure Storage APIs and not on users like us."

"I would like to see a more native mapping to mainframe-type systems."

"The integration has room for improvement."

"I think the vendor could provide more training for new users who may not be familiar with containers."

"The documentation could be better."

"It would be highly advantageous to include an integrated backup solution within the same license, rather than purchasing backup separately."

"We do see weird things crop up every now and again. It will say that a drive gets kicked off even though it's fine, and we have to re-add it."

"The product can be improved in a couple of ways. One of those would be that they have a lot of hidden features, that are through the CLI, that would be great to have in the GUI, or just be more open about those features. It's something called RVC. It's a tool in the back end. It's a really great tool, but I had to find it through Reddit. So more information on stuff like that would be great. Also, in the user interface, giving us more features and more reporting that we can do from vSphere itself would be helpful."

"The customer service is good but there is a cost for it. It does not come free."

"It should be easier to use."

"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 ability to access SAN environments with fiber channels (or even NVMe) would be a good addition."

"Perhaps they could provide encryption without having to use an encryption manager."

"We often run out of space but we have enough capacity for memory and CPU. It's difficult to find the balance between storage and memory CPU."

More VMware vSAN cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I'm not sure how the licensing was broken out, but I don't think our offering of the Portworx was more than USD $20,000."

"The price is competitive, but it is too expensive when paired with Red Hat IBM."

"It has two offerings. One is free, which is limited to only five nodes. The other is enterprise, which is a bit pricier."

"The price of Portworx Enterprise is high."

"If they could reduce the cost, it would be better. Licensing costs are something that they could take care of. If you are a smaller and strong IT team, then VMware vSAN is a very good product. If you want to expand in the service provider space, then you will have to go for an open-source solution like OpenStack. We are now looking at OpenStack because we sell licensing costs. We are a service provider, so the IT component data is a substantial component in our overall costing. We feel that OpenStack might help us to cut down the licensing cost. Therefore, we are looking at SAS storage instead of vSAN. SAS is open source, but it is not wise to have open source without having the backend support. We are using RedHat SAS, and it is an open-source solution. You can also have a free version, but we are using it with support from RedHat so that we have somebody to back us up in case we have a problem. If you do normal business, then IT expense is 1% or 2% of the total turnover. The higher licensing costs sometimes don't make difference to the big companies who are not service providers and are using it only for their internal use. For them, the IT cost is 1% or 2%, but for an IT service provider, the IT costs will go up to 15% to 16% of the total cost of the operations. This is where the licensing costs become irrelevant. For example, the licensing cost of using VMware, VC, and vSAN is 8% of my monthly revenue. Every month, I pay about $35,000, and, with the revised plan, it will be something like $50,000 or revenue of 600k per month, which means almost 8% of the revenue is going into VMware licensing. In a very competitive world, 8% as a cost element is huge. So, if I can bring it down to 2%, I save 6% in revenue expenditure. In terms of profit, 6% of 30% is something like another 25% increase in my profit. My profit can be almost 25%. It would be 20% to 25% in case I am able to handle the licensing costs and bring them to a very low level. Because these IT costs are substantial for us, that is why we are going with OpenStack. OpenStack has a limitation that it requires more hardware. There will be some increase in the hardware cost, but overall we will save 5% to 6% of our licensing cost by using OpenStack."

"The only problem I have with VMware is the price. It is a good product, but it is expensive."

"Its price could be improved."

"For a classical node plus storage solution, the price is higher."

"What made us go with this solution was price point. When you can utilize existing storage infrastructure, and not have to continually purchase new SAN products out there that are going up in price as time goes by, then it's a wonderful thing."

"Every product is licensed with full support for a certain number of years. The licensing could be cheaper."

"Cost-wise, the Nutanix licenses were cheaper, but in terms of the hardware, there was some contention around it. So, in terms of implementation, the way Nutanix was projecting the implementation on their end was that there were a lot of open-source admin platforms. vSAN is a licensed product in VMware, and Nutanix was proposing a KVM solution, which is open source. That's why their pricing was a bit cheaper, but when we were trying to compare it with an enterprise version of their management platform, it boiled down to the VMware vSAN being most effective in the long run."

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

More VMware vSAN pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

12%

Government

Educational Organization

39%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Portworx Enterprise?

A custom IBM script is designed to tackle the storage management challenges within containerized environments, providing crucial data services and features required for enterprise applications.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Portworx Enterprise?

The price is competitive, but it is too expensive when paired with Red Hat IBM.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Portworx Enterprise?

It would be highly advantageous to include an integrated backup solution within the same license, rather than purchasing backup separately. It would ensure a comprehensive and streamlined approach ...

See all answers

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...

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 interface that allows you to talk directly to your VM from the present software. We fou...

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 researched VMware vSAN but found HPE was a better option for us. HPE SimpliVity has ...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 10% of the time

IBM Spectrum Scale vs Portworx Enterprise

Compared 5% of the time

Rancher Labs vs Portworx Enterprise

Compared 5% of the time

More Portworx Enterprise Competitors

VxRail vs VMware vSAN

Compared 18% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs VMware vSAN

Compared 15% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VMware vSAN

Compared 8% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs VMware vSAN

Compared 7% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs VMware vSAN

Compared 6% of the time

More VMware vSAN Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cloud Software Defined Storage

May 2025

Download Portworx Enterprise product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware vSAN

May 2025

Download VMware vSAN product report

Also Known As

No data available

vSAN

Overview

Portworx is the solution for running stateful containers in production, designed with DevOps in mind. With Portworx, users can manage any database or stateful service on any infrastructure using any container scheduler, including Kubernetes, Mesosphere DC/OS, and Docker Swarm. Portworx solves the five most common problems DevOps teams encounter when running stateful services in production: persistence, high availability, data automation, security, and support for multiple data stores and infrastructure.

Pure Storage

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

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Buyer's Guide

Portworx Enterprise vs. VMware vSAN

June 2025

Free Report: Portworx Enterprise vs. VMware vSAN

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