"The solution is also quite flexible. As an example, other vSAN solutions that we looked at had more stringent requirements regarding mixed HDD/SSD storage which wouldn't have worked in our environment."
"This solution enables us to make better cost-effective use of our existing hardware and leverage the current infrastructure at a higher level than we could before."
"Recovery and maintenance are now less stressful and most importantly, it allows our users to keep working."
"vSAN we found was simple to set up, easy to configure and manage and allows us to achieve storage redundancy."
"The vSAN provides full redundancy for storage while reclaiming some rack space."
"In the three years that we have been using StarWind, the product has yet to cause us any problems."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to leverage our server infrastructure more completely without the need to add more hardware."
"The ability for us to manage all of our nodes from the same console makes systems administration very easy."
"The most valuable features of VMware vSAN are that it receives updates frequently, has good compression, optimized storage, and they provide webinars on what is new. Additionally, the integration with third-party products is good and it is easy to manage."
"Storage is expandable with no extra cost."
"The solutions best feature is that it is easy to use."
"The solution is simple to use compared to other solutions, such as Hyperflex, VxRail, and Nutanix"
"Everyone uses virtualization to more efficiently utilize hardware resources. That's the main point of vSAN and VMware."
"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."
"Very good VCG notification feature."
"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."
"One beneficial feature is that the solution can handle complex environments."
"The solution is easy to use. When turning on a server or a machine that is required for, deployment or quality assurance, the dynamic deployment of resources is good."
"The pricing is very, very good."
"There are so many features, but if I have to choose, I would go for scale-out upgrades and performance. Scale-out upgrades are very valuable. Typically, when customers engage in virtualization, they're committing themselves to run many virtual machines on a fewer number of hosts. They'll have five or six hosts, and they will run all their virtualization on vSphere. They could be having anywhere from 50 to 100 or even more virtual machines. Once all these go into production, getting downtime or getting planned maintenance windows is extremely difficult. It is something that typically businesses will frown upon. With VxRail, you can just go ahead and add a node without disrupting the existing environment, which works very well. That's why scale-out upgrades are a key feature. Its performance is also valuable. It delivers a very high number of IOPS for a hybrid configuration or an all-flash configuration. The processors that are available in the Xeon family are very powerful. They are multi-core with typically 2 gigahertz, 2.4 gigahertz, or higher frequency, so the performance is very much appreciated."
"VxRail has high performance and has great efficiency. There is a single place for us to manage all of our virtual machines. The ability to right-size instead of overcommit VMs is a large benefit."
"The stability is very good. We haven't had any issues at all. There aren't bugs or glitches. There aren't system crashes or anything of that nature."
"It's somewhat hard to speak about specific features, but I like VxRail's simplicity and ease of use. It's a decent solution for customers with a small footprint. If you're operating a big data center, it's not easy to position VxRail or HCI solutions, but when you have a small customer managing many different components, it's easier to work only with one solution."
"The updating of the features was one aspect of the solution that made us decide to use it."
"This product would benefit from having automated alerting functionality."
"Performance when in storage-separate configuration needs to be improved."
"I found that certain browsers are not fully compatible with the administration web access portal."
"I wish the sync after a failure, such as hardware failure or power-related issues, for example, was faster."
"Maybe in the future, the replication will be supported in more cloud providers."
"I see no need for major improvements but there could be some improvements in the form of notifications and the simplifying of maintenance mode."
"StarWind relies on the underlying OS to manage the "SAN files" whether that would be a RAID volume, software RAID (such as LVM), etc. It would be useful if StarWind could incorporate the actual physical drive management inside of the solution, similar to Storage Spaces Direct."
"The console is something that I feel could be improved. There is nothing technically wrong with it, but it can be jazzed up and/or made to be a little more intuitive."
"The solution could maybe improve failure protection."
"Upgradability could be a bit easier sometimes. We are now where vSAN can be updated without ESXi, but there is still enough dependency. So that would be good if that actually would uncoupled even more."
"If one node out of your ten nodes fails, it takes a lot of time to replicate and rebalance VMware vSAN. This time can be reduced. When a node fails and the data is not accessible, vSAN has to be rebalanced to make the redundancy level of two again. However, if it is taking a lot of time and any other hardware fails during that time, then we have a problem. Two disk failures mean that all data will be lost, and we may have to recover it from the backup. So, the number of threads that run to do the rebalancing could be more so that the time taken to make it fully redundant again is not so much."
"This is quite an expensive solution."
"The customer service is good but there is a cost for it. It does not come free."
"I am looking for more of a software-defined storage platform that uses different protocols, such as iSCSI, NFS, and CIS, and maybe also has an object as part of that. They should 100% make it more of a storage-based product where it is not linked just to VMware, and it also has NFS and iSCSI built-in at a scalable level. They should turn it more into a dedicated storage-as-a-service platform instead of just being built into the VMware kernel. Their level one and level two support is not at all good, and it should be improved."
"This product is very expensive."
"We would like to see additional backup and recovery options added. In particular, integration with popular applications like databases."
"What I did not like so much was the amount of VMware that you have to put in your system related to the VxRail."
"We would like to see integrating with Nutanix. Currently, we are working on integrating the two to see if there is any value in doing so."
"One area of the product that could be improved is the support."
"You cannot install another operating system such as Microsoft or Hyperflex or Nutanix. We have also had a hardware problem."
"If VxRail could also offer file services in addition to virtualization, that would be nice because sometimes people want to complement their environment with file services, and you don't have that in VxRail."
"The price could be better. The backup mechanism could also be better. Some of our clients prefer to work with backup software from a different vendor. They don't do a built-in backup solution. It would be better if they had guidelines on proper sizing and the whole life cycle from the requirement collection. If there aren't any proper guidelines, how do I go to the customer and evaluate their existing infrastructure? How can you do appropriate sizing to migrate to a hyper-converged environment? I think this is a requirement because most of our clients are migrating to a hyper-converged environment. In the next release, they can improve absolutely anything you can think of to improve the product in general—for example, the clusters and backup software."
"You have to buy a new server if you want to scale up."
"Technically speaking, the vCenter and the administration of the integration of the vCenter could be improved."
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VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in Hyper-Converged (HCI) with 64 reviews while VxRail is ranked 3rd in Hyper-Converged (HCI) with 65 reviews. VMware vSAN is rated 8.4, while VxRail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VxRail writes "Good automation makes this solution practical". VMware vSAN is most compared with Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Red Hat Gluster Storage, whereas VxRail is most compared with HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Dell EMC PowerFlex, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and HPE Hyper Converged. See our VMware vSAN vs. VxRail report.
See our list of best Hyper-Converged (HCI) vendors.
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Quite simply, VxRail is a vSAN appliance. It's a Dell based server node fully integrated with a pre-loaded VMware vSphere and vSAN software stack. Since it's integrated, the hardware is optimized to take full advantage of all the features and functions associated with vSAN.This is the best choice for someone who is interested in deploying hyper-converged infrastructure but doesn't currently have one in place. The VxRail nodes can be simply slid into the racks, connected and zoned.
vSAN, on the other hand, is purely a software solution. It's best for a data center that's already using VMware and would like to introduce storage management elements into their infrastructure. The benefit of this approach is that the configuration is customizable and feature elements can be added as needed.
In case of Dell EMC nodes, the only difference is setting up vSAN by yourself or pay someone else to set it up for you. In VxRail, you get licenses which are OEM locked that means you can not use those licenses on any other hardware. In VMware vSAN ready nodes, you can pick the hardware of your choice (from VMware HCL) and start building your vSAN cluster and all of the servers from different vendors work in the same cluster. In VxRail, you pay for the solution plus vSphere licenses based on your requirement. In VMware vSAN ready nodes, you pay for all the licenses separate from the hardware cost like, vCenter Server, vSphere, vSAN. for remote sites or very small setups you can use ROBO licenses in VMware vSAN ready nodes where this multi vendor thing can be very useful. From my experience, if the customer has 2-3 years old hardware, most of the times the hardware is good to be converted to an VMware vSAN ready node by making few or no changes.
VxRail is a Turnkey solution from Dell EMC that uses VMware vSAN as the underlying storage technology
The main differences are:
vSAN can Run on any ReadyNode and can differ in the vendor, while VxRail only uses Dell Servers (PowerEdge) I do know that there other products that use CISCO (VxBlock, VXFLEX)
vSAN Requires a vSAN Licence and is renewed yearly (Or whatever your VMware Agreement is) VxRail vSAN Licences are Perpertual.
Patching and install on VxRail are simple and Dell EMC Check the updates before its generally available so the quality control is good. This is good as a bad/incompatible firmware can really cause issues with vSAN , all patching and firmware will need to be vetted and installed by yourself.
VxRail locks you into a Dell Solution. Where as with vSAN you can choose the Hardware you want.
VxRAIL is a pre buid HCI solution, with optimised configuration ready to deploy
also Vmware software VSAN and Vcenter are bundled with better prices and other bundled software
If you want to have an optimized and integrated software environment with integrated VSAN-in-Kernel into an appliance, a streamlined deployment experience, and single-vendor support go with VxRail because Dell EMC and VMware jointly developed the VxRail system powered by VMware vSAN software-defined storage. VxRail Manager is the sole and primary source for VxRail lifecycle management, cluster compatibility, software updates, and version control.
VxRail Manager further reduces operational complexity and provides software upgrade automation. Hence, VxRail is the simplest and easiest path to ready HCI and Hybrid Cloud.
VSAN is hardware agnostic but should need to have hardware/component level VSAN certifications. vSAN is enterprise-class, storage virtualization software that, when combined with vSphere, allows you to manage to compute and storage with a single platform. With vSAN, you can reduce the cost and complexity of traditional storage and have Software-Defined Storage in place but without integration with some appliance and always need to have VSA in place to bridge the communication between/among VMs and IO.
Thanks
Sufyan Ali Khan
+923018224536
The hardware hosting the solution. Vxrail is an engineered appliance from Dell to host vSAN.
In addition vSAN can be installed on any hardware that meets its requirements
When someone ask biggest, smallest, etc., they need simple answer :D VxRail is easy, while vSAN is complex. VxRail is prebuilt: easy to deploy, easy to scale out, one support contact for everything. VmWare vSAN is just an Software Defined Storage. Complex to deploy, complex to scale up/ out, and need several contact support for the whole solution.
Technically, it is hard to differentiate between two solutions.
As DellEMC is in the position of proposing two solutions at the same time, it really depends on the customer situation.
If the customer has favor on VMware and good experience of it, then VSAN would be better.
If the customer has an experience of Cisco or HP’s HCI solution, then Dell EMC will propose VxRAIL rather than VSAN.