Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure vs VMware vSAN comparison

Red Hat and VMware are both solutions in the HCI category. Red Hat is ranked #24, while VMware is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.8. Red Hat holds a 0.8% mindshare in HCI, compared to VMware’s 14.9% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Red Hat users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of VMware users who would recommend it.

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infr...

Read 6 Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure reviews

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100% willing to recommend

VMware vSAN

Read 231 VMware vSAN reviews

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8,456 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infr...

VMware vSAN

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 2024

VMware vSAN and Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure compete in the hyper-converged infrastructure market with distinct advantages depending on organizational needs. VMware vSAN has an edge in features, while Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure excels in flexibility and technology integration, potentially making it a superior choice for some environments.

Features: VMware vSAN offers seamless integration within the VMware ecosystem, comprehensive storage functionalities, and optimized management for VMware environments. It is ideal for organizations heavily invested in VMware technologies. Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure leverages its open-source nature, allowing extensive customization and integration with a wide array of software ecosystems, catering to enterprises with diverse IT landscapes.

Room for Improvement: VMware vSAN can enhance its flexibility across non-VMware environments and improve ease of deployment for those unfamiliar with VMware ecosystems. It could also benefit from more competitive pricing. Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure could improve by simplifying its deployment process, tightening integration with legacy systems, and expanding its support resources to match the scale and scope of closed-source competitors.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware vSAN integrates smoothly within VMware environments, providing a streamlined deployment process with extensive support resources. Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure offers a more adaptable but potentially complex deployment, supported by Red Hat's community support and documentation. While VMware vSAN enables a straightforward setup for VMware users, Red Hat's comprehensive support aids in managing complex, custom environments.

Pricing and ROI: VMware vSAN typically involves a higher upfront cost but provides significant ROI in VMware-centric data centers due to its seamless integration. Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure offers a more appealing cost-to-value ratio for those utilizing open-source solutions, leading to competitive ROI, particularly in environments exploiting its flexibility to reduce licensing expenses.

To learn more, read our detailed Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure vs. VMware vSAN Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure 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

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infr...

Ranking in HCI

24th

Average Rating

8.0

Number of Reviews

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 June 2025, in the HCI category, the mindshare of Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is 0.8%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware vSAN is 14.9%, down from 18.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

HCI

Featured Reviews

PaulSorelli

IBM Data & IA Technology Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Consolidated management and good documentation but very complex and difficult to operate

It is not user-friendly, and it is very difficult to operate. You have to have a deep understanding of the technical details of the infrastructure to implement it. When you compare it with VMware, it is totally different because the graphical user interface is not that easy to understand. It is not intuitive. To use it, you have to read a lot of documentation and even understand what is going on behind the solution. It is not for someone who has a little bit of knowledge. Currently, it is too complex. I need something that is easy to implement. It should have a basic configuration as well as a complex configuration.

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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

"The most useful feature is the solution's automation in terms of how we are able to spin up a certain workload in real-time when we are doing R&D."

"I like that you can add other types of services."

"Both the scalability and stability of this solution are excellent."

"It is stable and scalable."

"The consolidation of the management in one control point is the most valuable. The whole infrastructure management is consolidated in just one console point. The documentation is also pretty good."

"The size of the hardware is what we need because it is very good for small configurations."

"It uncoupled the idea of proprietary technology and component capabilities. It is basically a proprietary technology for a cost-effective infrastructure."

"The most valuable features are its performance, simplicity, and synchronicity with vSphere."

"I like the orchestration feature."

"Scalability in vSAN has been really good. It's very easy to add nodes in, to automatically generate the drives and the disk groups. It has been a piece of cake, surprisingly so."

"We've found the solution to be scalable."

"VMware vSAN's most valuable features are the capability to consolidate standalone physical infrastructure into virtualization and the ease of management."

"The most valuable features of vSAN are its simplicity to deploy and that we can use commodity disks in our servers without complexity or need for external storage arrays or storage specialists on our teams."

"The most important thing is the simplicity of the product. It is a well-established product with good stability."

More VMware vSAN pros

Cons

"The licensing policy needs to be improved. They have a licensing policy based on the number of CPU sockets. Nowadays what has happened is that the license they are trying to move is based on the number of CPU cores. With the advancement in technology there are now more cores in a single CPU. It's been very challenging in terms of managing the license around everything. Today we have a processor with 24 and 32 cores on the same physical CPU."

"It is not user-friendly, and it is very difficult to operate. You have to have a deep understanding of the technical details of the infrastructure to implement it. When you compare it with VMware, it is totally different because the graphical user interface is not that easy to understand. It is not intuitive. To use it, you have to read a lot of documentation and even understand what is going on behind the solution. It is not for someone who has a little bit of knowledge. Currently, it is too complex. I need something that is easy to implement. It should have a basic configuration as well as a complex configuration."

"The cloud deployment could be improved."

"The main issue is the initial investment. It is an expensive product, and it should be cheaper. It should also be easier to use and manage. The professional service for this solution is quite complex and expensive."

"It should be more user-friendly, in my opinion."

"This product is not so stable. Maybe it is just not mature enough in its development."

"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."

"Its integration with a hybrid cloud can be improved. Its scalability can also be improved so that it can be integrated with more than 32 nodes. The maximum number of nodes is okay, but our use cases could probably do with more nodes, probably up to 64. In terms of new features, it should probably have the basic support for high-speed networking spaces."

"Lacks sufficient storage terabytes."

"The integration could be improved. I would like to see integration with other platforms."

"The only thing that can be improved is the cost."

"The only thing I can think of at this time is to improve the performance monitoring and performance visibility within the GUI."

"In a future release, they could add micro-segmentation or security level features integrated into vSAN."

"They should make the software updates easier. We should be able to upgrade it more easily."

More VMware vSAN cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is quite pricey."

"Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is an open-sourced, low-cost solution with full features."

"I would rate the licensing model a three out of ten, where one is expensive, and ten is cheap."

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

"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."

"It is expensive. It should be cheaper. It has a perpetual license as well as a subscription-based license, but they are moving towards subscription-based licenses."

"The current pricing needs to meet the customers' expectations, posing significant issues."

"The first 1-2 years of purchasing vSAN will be expensive. Thereafter, the longer you are running it, the more cost savings you will have."

"The licenses are very expensive. The renewal of licenses has extra costs attached to it."

More VMware vSAN pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Computer Software Company

14%

Real Estate/Law Firm

Educational Organization

39%

Computer Software Company

10%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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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...

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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...

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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 ...

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Comparisons

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Compared 14% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Compared 12% of the time

Azure Stack HCI vs Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Compared 12% of the time

VxRail vs Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Compared 11% of the time

SteelFusion vs Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Compared 10% of the time

More Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure 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

HCI

May 2025

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure report

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Buyer's Guide

VMware vSAN

May 2025

Download VMware vSAN product report

Also Known As

Red Hat HCI, Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Virtualization

vSAN

Overview

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure - based on our leading OpenStack and virtualization platforms - provides co-located, scalable, software-defined compute and storage, driven by Red Hat Ansible Automation on economical, industry-standard hardware.

Red Hat

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

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure vs. VMware vSAN

June 2025

Free Report: Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure vs. VMware vSAN

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