VMware vSAN and Dell PowerFlex compete in the hyperconverged infrastructure category. VMware vSAN appears to have the upper hand with its seamless integration capabilities and software-defined features that enhance scalability and centralized management.
Features: VMware vSAN provides centralized storage and works well with vSphere, offering important capabilities like vMotion and Distributed Resource Scheduler for efficient load balancing. It allows users to scale with minimal costs and is a good cost-saving solution compared to traditional storage systems. Dell PowerFlex delivers high IOPS and improves application performance, suitable for critical workloads requiring high storage capacity and efficient resource utilization.
Room for Improvement: VMware vSAN could enhance its management and deduplication features and improve hardware compatibility and encryption. Integration with VMware DOS vBackup and support for iSCSI protocol need refinement. Dell PowerFlex requires simplified deployment processes, more flexible pricing models, and advanced data protection strategies. Enhancements in integration flexibility and documentation could further improve the user experience.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware vSAN is known for simple deployment across on-premises and cloud environments but may suffer from slow support interactions. Dell PowerFlex offers versatile deployment across cloud setups with responsive technical support, although improvements in documentation, cost, and licensing management are required.
Pricing and ROI: VMware vSAN is expensive, impacting appeal for smaller businesses despite excellent ROI potential from simplified management and hardware needs. Its licensing and complex pricing contribute to costs. Dell PowerFlex is also perceived as costly, especially for small to medium-sized businesses, offering competitive pricing within enterprise solutions. A broader audience could be reached with adjusted pricing and bundling strategies.
VxRack System consists of hyper-converged rack-scale engineered systems, with integrated networking, to achieve the scalability and management requirements of traditional and cloud native workloads. The VxRack series is purposely designed to enable customers to quickly deploy Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and/or Private Cloud architectures. VxRack Systems tightly integrate hardware with software and management layers.
The result is a fully tested, pre-configured, hyper-converged system with simplified operations at data center and Service Provider scale. VxRack Systems support the deployment of a variety of application workloads, allowing IT to rapidly deliver new services while improving overall agility and efficiency.
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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