We performed a comparison between Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The access to our data is quicker and cheaper than it used to be in a traditional storage system."
"The ability to run the software virtually on every virtualization platform and the ability to eliminate all storage vendor locking are the most valuable features."
"The software is easy to setup and manage, and the support is excellent."
"The features that I found most valuable are ease of use of the software that StarWind offers - with the first setup being a bit painful."
"The backup is readily available for use, and the restoration process is easy."
"It's quite easy to manage."
"It also provides a high degree of mobility, as the virtual SAN can be moved relatively painlessly between on-site devices and the cloud."
"Ten gigabit Ethernet compatibility, support, ease of use, and management are some positive features."
"Dell EMC VxFlex Ready Nodes can support what we call a heterogeneous environment. So you can have VMware workloads, Hyper-V workloads, bare metal Red Hat workloads, Kubernetes workloads all on the same cluster. You're not pigeonholed into either all bare metal or all virtualized. So it supports basically any platform."
"The most valuable features of Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes are the ease of acquisition."
"The performance has exceeded our expectations and exceeded our traditional converged infrastructure."
"vSAN is very integrated."
"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 of the valuable features of vSAN is it has a universal type of technology that allows you to deploy it on any server or hardware. Competitors, such as Nutanix, provides the AOS and can be deployed only on certified hardware. For vSAN, it does not require any kind of certified hardware."
"It is user-friendly, and its performance is good."
"Easy to deploy and manage."
"The most valuable features for us are the ability to scale out the nodes independently, and the flexibility of the nodes. We can put almost any type of server in there with our connectivity and everything works great."
"The valuable features of vSAN are that you can get it up and running quickly, you get redundancy built-in, and it's pretty much the perfect solution for a cluster."
"You have to do a "full" sync on write-back cache disks instead of a quick sync if there is an issue."
"We have, in rare cases, received conflicting guidance between different support folks within StarWind."
"The GUI deserves a little love."
"It runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear."
"The cluster configuration is time-consuming and tedious."
"The system failovers properly on its own without too much worry."
"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."
"We don't really have any issues with this product."
"From a technical perspective, it's a pretty rock solid solution. I would say the only area for improvement is around its price."
"Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is a little less sophisticated than some of the other solutions out there. A full-blown cloud foundation has a lot more to it."
"I would love for this product to be cheaper and easier to configure."
"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."
"Troubleshooting tools could be improved."
"The UI falls short compared to other solutions. It needs some development to make it more user-friendly."
"I have used the VMware Replication but I can't get it to work properly. The process should be simplified."
"The UI could certainly be better. The inside into what's actually going on with vSAN would be nice to know."
"I would like a better Hardware Certification List (HCL). The HCL should a little easier to deal with."
"The solution must provide better customization."
Earn 20 points
Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is ranked 21st in HCI while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is rated 9.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes writes "Single platform for a mix of virtualized and physical workloads". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is most compared with VxRail and HPE Alletra dHCI, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes vs. VMware vSAN report.
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