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SteelFusion vs VMware vSAN comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 2024

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

SteelFusion
Ranking in HCI
28th
Average Rating
9.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware vSAN
Ranking in HCI
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
232
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2025, in the HCI category, the mindshare of SteelFusion is 0.2%, up from 0.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware vSAN is 14.0%, down from 17.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
HCI Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
VMware vSAN14.0%
SteelFusion0.2%
Other85.8%
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

it_user866178 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sync to Central and edge protection mitigate my risk in our branch offices
The level of tech support depends on who you get. There are some techs that just read the script and ask you if you’ve rebooted, but once you get past that - or if you have a very technical issue - the support is great. They really know the product and get you up and running again ASAP.
Pramod-Talekar - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Sync to Central and edge protection mitigate my risk in our branch offices. All services that need to be local to the user exist on local servers. Users run applications and access data locally while the data is constantly being synced to Central, and protected. If an edge device fails, we can recover quickly."
"VMware vSAN is an easy to use and easy to manage storage solution. Deploying and upgrading are easy. Technical support is very good."
"It's completely hyper-converged, so it's very convenient."
"The product is highly scalable and significantly supports our organization's needs."
"The solution's unified administration is its most valuable aspect."
"It uncoupled the idea of proprietary technology and component capabilities. It is basically a proprietary technology for a cost-effective infrastructure."
"I like that we could choose whatever hardware we wanted, rather than having to use one particular vendor."
"We didn't only choose vSAN; we chose VMware because of SR-IOV, which is more on the hypervisor level and not on the vSAN storage. It's part of the whole system."
"We've found the solution to be scalable."
 

Cons

"Setting up disks for use is a multi-step process that could use some refinement. Setting up a core-to-core replication or DR strategy is also cumbersome."
"I would like to see better performance graphs, maybe something that you can export outside to a different console, and maybe a little bit longer time period. The 18-hour maximum, or 24-hour maximum, is kind of short. Also, the hardware compatibility limitations are a little frustrating sometimes, but as everybody's starting to adopt vSAN more, you get more options for hardware."
"They can package it in a way that is specific to the hardware infrastructure and the hardware platform. It should stay fairly up to date with the drivers and the manufacturer issues. The problem with uncoupling the proprietary technology and component capabilities is that by uncoupling them, you run into some concerns or challenges over the poor performance model. These concerns really come when you start talking about high performance, high bandwidth, and high availability types of environments. While vSAN is a leader, in a critical view, it is not about being cost-effective. It is more about the immediate impact of money loss to the business in critical applications where we want to maintain a continuous operational 59 model. It is, however, good for QA/QC tasks. I don't necessarily know how it works in regards to VDI or virtual desktop infrastructure."
"The technical support, it's not satisfactory. Whenever we raise a ticket it takes a lot of time to have an engineer get involved sometimes, or we receive a less experienced engineer. We then have to repeat the situation to the next engineer which all takes time."
"We want see a better monitoring tool in vSAN. Monitoring is not that great as of now because it shows us false alarms in the Health status. We would like that to be improved."
"Hackers are able to manage to leak information or data from the product using some corrupt files, making it an area of major concern where improvements are required."
"The biggest room for improvement I see in vSAN is the lack of SAN connectivity. I've kind of joked around that there is no "SAN" in vSAN. And it's something that we've worked to try and introduce some options for, and we're going to continue to work towards that."
"We are facing some problems with updates with the VMware vSAN. When we upgraded from version 6.5 to 7, we have been faced with many problems. They have been deploying many hotfixes for this version, and they need to continue to improve this version."
"I would love for this product to be cheaper and easier to configure."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Price is an issue – this is expensive stuff. My advice is to beat up Riverbed as much as possible on price. These things are expensive and there is room for negotiation."
"It is an expensive solution. There should be more flexible with licensing to allow small businesses the essentials of the solution's features."
"The vSAN is somewhat expensive to license."
"The product's price has been increasing lately...VMware vSAN is expensive."
"The price of VMware vSAN is expensive and there is an annual license required."
"ROI from an administrative perspective is clearly much better because I only have to deal with one user interface."
"The product’s pricing is a bit higher than other solutions."
"The price of the solution package depends on the nodes and other factors. The cost some of our customers paid was $500,000. The licensing cost for the components is very good."
"This solution is expensive. Nutanix provides us with Acropolis Operating System (AOS) along with its hardware, while VMware provides vSAN, vCenter, and vSphere which all have separate licenses and costs."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
No data available
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business98
Midsize Enterprise58
Large Enterprise128
 

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...
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...
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 ...
 

Also Known As

No data available
vSAN
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Roxtec, Engen, Bobst, CBP, IUCN, Mahoning County, Kentucky Transportation Cabinet
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