VMware vSAN and Sangfor HCI are leading competitors in the hyper-converged infrastructure market. VMware vSAN seems to have the upper hand due to its performance and integration capabilities, even though Sangfor HCI offers attractive cost efficiency and simplicity.
Features: VMware vSAN offers vMotion for seamless VM migration, Distributed Resource Scheduler for optimal resource utilization, and strong integration with VMware solutions. It's fast, easy to implement, and provides centralized management with scalable performance. Sangfor HCI is known for its competitive pricing, simplicity, and user-friendly interface. It includes Continuous Data Protection and a built-in firewall without additional licensing.
Room for Improvement: VMware vSAN could enhance its management dashboard, extend deduplication capabilities, and improve hardware compatibility. Users seek better monitoring tools and support for iSCSI and NVMe integrations. Sangfor HCI would benefit from enhanced security features, better third-party integration, and improved administrative tools. Users desire support for object storage and more comprehensive documentation.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware vSAN requires a more complex deployment often necessitating expert support, but it's lauded for robust technical support even though response times can vary. It's designed for complex environments demanding substantial planning. Sangfor HCI is known for its straightforward deployment and less complex setup, accessible for organizations with limited IT resources. Its responsive and effective technical support contributes to a smoother implementation experience.
Pricing and ROI: VMware vSAN involves higher initial and ongoing costs, targeting enterprise solutions with potential ROI through reduced hardware and maintenance costs over time. It's considered pricey, with significant licensing and scaling costs. Sangfor HCI, however, offers a cost-effective pricing model appealing to smaller organizations, providing essential features at a lower cost and promising ROI through lower total cost of ownership.
Starting with a smaller infrastructure and scaling as required allows us to save costs initially.
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.
It supports up to 64 nodes in a cluster, allowing us to add nodes and expand the cluster as needed.
In terms of stability, I give VMware vSAN nine points.
A proper monitoring tool that encompasses both applications and infrastructure would help in quickly resolving issues.
Maybe incorporation of automation to build clusters in a more automated way would be beneficial.
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.
A one-stack solution from one vendor is the main benefit here.
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."
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