We performed a comparison between Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure 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 product only requires two VMWare ESXi host servers versus three host servers for VMware's comparable solution."
"StarWind vSAN is a great solution to create a redundant two-node-only Hyper-V cluster, both for domain or workgroup scenarios."
"It includes every feature that a traditional SAN offers and so much more."
"High Availability is the best feature of product."
"The solution provides great performance for the price it is listed with."
"Updates to server hardware are now painless and done during working hours with zero stress. We had a RAID failure a few months back, and nobody in the building even noticed and there was no after hours time used for repair."
"The ability to keep data accessible even in the event of hardware failures is highly valued, as it ensures business continuity."
"StarWind allowed us to deploy highly available shared storage within our budget."
"I like that you can add other types of services."
"The size of the hardware is what we need because it is very good for small configurations."
"The most useful feature is the solution's automation in terms of how we are able to spin up a certain workload in real-time when we are doing R&D."
"The consolidation of the management in one control point is the most valuable. The whole infrastructure management is consolidated in just one console point. The documentation is also pretty good."
"Both the scalability and stability of this solution are excellent."
"It is stable and scalable."
"I like the scalability and the fact that it reduces your total cost for storage over several years."
"The valuable feature of the solution is the total hyperconverged facility."
"We find it easy to deliver this solution."
"VMware comes with different stacks like VMware Cloud Foundation, which is integrated with different VMware modules. There's interoperability between VMware products."
"The installation is very easy."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"Good performance, reliable and agile."
"By eliminating dependency on that back-end storage, we now depend on everything that's in the VMkernel with vSAN. We eliminate the middleman."
"The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us."
"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."
"To enable the proactive support capability that is part of our support agreement, I would ask that the terms and conditions be revised and made acceptable to corporate security."
"I would like them to invest time in reducing the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure."
"The StarWind Management Console is available only for Microsoft Windows/Windows Server, and should also be available for Linux and macOS, as it would reduce implementation costs."
"It is not very clear within the StarWind Management Console or the StarWind support documentation how to perform maintenance on a single node in a two-node HA cluster."
"I would like an automated installation/configuration despite the fact that their service is very collaborative, a customer should be able to deploy the solution by themselves."
"They recommend RAID10 for HDD, which reduces the usable storage capacity."
"The main issue is the initial investment. It is an expensive product, and it should be cheaper. It should also be easier to use and manage. The professional service for this solution is quite complex and expensive."
"It is not user-friendly, and it is very difficult to operate. You have to have a deep understanding of the technical details of the infrastructure to implement it. When you compare it with VMware, it is totally different because the graphical user interface is not that easy to understand. It is not intuitive. To use it, you have to read a lot of documentation and even understand what is going on behind the solution. It is not for someone who has a little bit of knowledge. Currently, it is too complex. I need something that is easy to implement. It should have a basic configuration as well as a complex configuration."
"The licensing policy needs to be improved. They have a licensing policy based on the number of CPU sockets. Nowadays what has happened is that the license they are trying to move is based on the number of CPU cores. With the advancement in technology there are now more cores in a single CPU. It's been very challenging in terms of managing the license around everything. Today we have a processor with 24 and 32 cores on the same physical CPU."
"This product is not so stable. Maybe it is just not mature enough in its development."
"It should be more user-friendly, in my opinion."
"The cloud deployment could be improved."
"The pricing model is sometimes a challenge for us because their licenses are very costly."
"The integration could be improved. I would like to see integration with other platforms."
"The solution could maybe improve failure protection."
"I would like to see it be more hardware-agnostic. Other than that, the only other complication is - and it has gotten better with the newer versions - that lately, once you're running an all-flash, if you need to grow or scale down your infrastructure, it's a long process. You need to evacuate all data and make sure you have enough space on the host, then add more hosts or take out hosts. That process is a little bit complex. You cannot scale as needed or shrink as needed."
"Some intelligence can be added to the newest version to provide more flexibility between storage tiers."
"I would like to see more comprehensive lifecycle management. The current path and process for upgrading or updating the firmware, as well as the storage controller software to interact with that firmware, is fairly manual and not very well documented. A little more time and effort spent on the documentation of the lifecycle management for vSan would be really great."
"The solution must provide better customization."
"They can improve the manageability of the solution to make it more simple. It is not that complicated, but it will be good if they can make it more simple."
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Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is ranked 22nd in HCI while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is rated 8.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure writes "Comes in a small, compact model that does not have any separate management but it is not so stable". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is most compared with VxRail, Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure vs. VMware vSAN report.
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