VMware vSAN and Sangfor HCI compete in the hyperconverged infrastructure market, both offering distinct strengths. VMware vSAN appears to have the upper hand in integration with existing VMware environments and feature diversity, while Sangfor HCI offers an advantage in cost-effectiveness and simplicity.
Features: VMware vSAN is known for its integration with vSphere, vMotion, and Distributed Resource Scheduler, allowing seamless scalability and reducing hardware needs. It supports centralized storage and provides high availability and data security. Sangfor HCI boasts robust data protection, ease of management, and built-in recovery functionalities, making it a cost-effective alternative with simple usability.
Room for Improvement: VMware vSAN requires enhancements in management dashboards and compatibility with varied hardware configurations, with concerns raised about encryption and deduplication features. Sangfor HCI needs to improve its integration capabilities, specifically with Kubernetes, and enhance support for SAS configurations, while its security and migration features could also see development.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware vSAN is lauded for its smooth integration into VMware ecosystems and robust performance in private clouds, despite some initial deployment complexities. Its technical support is generally reliable but inconsistent response times can occur. Sangfor HCI is praised for straightforward deployment and robust on-premises support, although flexibility in hybrid and public cloud are noted as areas needing growth.
Pricing and ROI: VMware vSAN is considered an expensive solution, particularly upfront, with users finding long-term savings due to reduced hardware needs. Opinions vary with some appreciating the total cost of ownership in comparison to traditional solutions. Sangfor HCI offers competitive pricing, appealing to enterprises with lower initial cost constraints, though high renewal costs are noted. While both solutions offer beneficial ROI, VMware's initial pricing can act as a barrier, whereas Sangfor provides an appealing cost-effective option.
Starting with a smaller infrastructure and scaling as required allows us to save costs initially.
I have seen a return on investment; it's satisfactory in the long run.
I would rate their support nine points.
I am not satisfied with VMware support, particularly with the reaction times, SLAs, and those kinds of issues.
If we consider technical support from Broadcom, I would rate them an eight or nine now.
It supports up to 64 nodes in a cluster, allowing us to add nodes and expand the cluster as needed.
If you have already bought it, you need specific servers, and it is easier with a SAN.
From my perspective, I would rate VMware vSAN's stability as extremely high, perhaps a nine.
In terms of stability, I give VMware vSAN nine points.
I have recently used Nutanix, and I observed that Nutanix provides better performance than VMware vSAN due to its data locality features.
Discussing the pricing model is significant as Broadcom creates many discussions worldwide regarding pricing.
A proper monitoring tool that encompasses both applications and infrastructure would help in quickly resolving issues.
This has resulted in a slight cost increase.
Hot add features are available by default in vSphere, allowing us to immediately increase memory, CPU, and hard drive without any downtime.
The performance is excellent, handling workloads better than direct-attached or legacy storage solutions.
Everything is integrated, allowing for more automation and ease of use.
| Product | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| VMware vSAN | 12.0% |
| Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure | 4.2% |
| Other | 83.8% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 23 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 6 |
| Large Enterprise | 3 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 100 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 58 |
| Large Enterprise | 129 |
Sangfor HCI is an IT infrastructure platform built on converged architecture. It integrates server virtualization, distributed storage, and networking. Sangfor HCI provides a unified management platform that converges compute, storage, networking, and security on a single software stack. This approach delivers a simplified architecture, ease of use, and reliability for business-critical applications.
Hyperconverged infrastructure is a unified system of data storage. HCI combines storage, computing, networking, and management, unlike traditional storage solutions. HCI systems enable you to build your private cloud, expand to a public cloud, or have your own true hybrid cloud. Sangfor HCI presents two product models: The Sangfor HCI server appliance is a hardware version that enables easy deployment. Sangfor HCI software is the digital version combined with a third-party server that enables flexible deployment.
Sangfor HCI supports Windows systems on desktop and is web-based. Its range of use cases cover a wide spectrum of industries, from healthcare to manufacturing. It is applicable for mid- and large-sized businesses. The software is customizable. Users can customize the logo and contact information in the user interface.
Benefits and Features
Use Cases
Sangfor HCI can be applied tin various scenarios:
Reviews from Real Users
Gabriele P., Senior Software and Systems Engineer at SAMU.IT, says "It is flexible like a hyper-convergence system. You can add nodes, and you can scale to have better performance and stability. I also like the backup feature, the recovery system, and the web interface GUI to handle everything."
A Junior Solutions Engineer at a tech services company adds that "Sangfor has many solutions, and you can easily manage their machine servers with just one management. They're always striving for greatness, and they continuously update their products. For example, they have now built endpoint security within the firewall. They are continuously improving not only the security but also all other products."
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:
VMware vSAN Benefits
There are many benefits to implementing VMware vSAN. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:
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."
We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
