Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs VMware vSAN comparison

The compared Microsoft and VMware solutions aren't in the same category. Microsoft is ranked #8 in SDS , with an average rating of 6.0, and holds a 8.4% mindshare in the category. VMware is ranked #2 in HCI , with an average rating of 8.7, and holds a 16.2% mindshare. Additionally, 75% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of VMware users who would recommend it.

Microsoft Storage Spaces Di...

Read 9 Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct reviews

1,538 Views
1,108 Comparison Views

75% willing to recommend

VMware vSAN

Read 230 VMware vSAN reviews

18,270 Views
12,970 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Microsoft Storage Spaces Di...

VMware vSAN

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about StarWind, Red Hat, Nutanix and others in Software Defined Storage (SDS).

To learn more, read our detailed Software Defined Storage (SDS) Report (Updated: February 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

February 2025

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Helped 838,533 peers since 2012

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

Microsoft Storage Spaces Di...

Average Rating

7.2

Reviews Sentiment

6.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Software Defined Storage (SDS) (8th)

VMware vSAN

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

230

Ranking in other categories

HCI (2nd)

Mindshare comparison

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and VMware vSAN aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is designed for Software Defined Storage (SDS) and holds a mindshare of 8.4%, up 7.7% compared to last year.
VMware vSAN, on the other hand, focuses on HCI, holds 16.2% mindshare, down 18.5% since last year.

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

HCI

Featured Reviews

Stanislaw Mielicki

Solution architect at Netland

Achieve cost-effectiveness with superior performance while needing to address cluster support

I am working with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct for applications, SQL, and VRS. I am an integrator for this solution The price performance is the best advantage of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct. They introduced the All-Flash array using SSD or NVMe drives without cache drives. It is…

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Lipaz Hessel

Integration Manager at Gilat Satellite Networks

Expensive solution that requires professional services for installation and implementation

I'm still using a different solution. I only took two servers with vSAN to support one application that needs one feature that only VMware has. If not for that feature, I wouldn't touch VMware. Now, I'm looking at products like Nutanix, Silver Peak, Flexione, and FortiGate. For products that I choose, I don't need a specialist of that vendor. In VMware, I need a specialist in VMware. That's the issue I have with VMware. It's not like I can take any IT person, and they will know what to do. I need to make sure he will do the call, get the certificate and time to practice.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The price performance is the best advantage of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct."

"Its technical support is excellent."

"The price performance is the best advantage of Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct."

"The most valuable feature is that there is no single point of failure."

"It's mainly about the storage expansion, like in hyper-converged solutions."

"The initial setup is straightforward."

"The performance, reliability, and affordability has been most valuable."

"The flash ability, in terms of tiering and caching, is amazing"

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct pros

"Storage virtualization software with a good storage management feature. It's a scalable and stable software."

"The migration of servers feature makes server rack maintenance easy."

"The most valuable feature is the ability to continue our business needs and have higher visibility. It has definitely increased our business productivity levels."

"The valuable features are its scalability and the standardization - one size fits all. It's also intuitive and easy to use because one size fits all. Obviously, it scales out, but it's the same solution at every physical location I manage."

"We have found the solution to be very scalable."

"The high availability is very good."

"The feature we have found most valuable is the compatibility of VMware products with VCF and VMware Cloud Foundation."

"The solution is easy to use."

More VMware vSAN pros

Cons

"It is scalable, but only beyond two nodes. If I go for two nodes it's not scalable. I need to build a complete cluster from the beginning if I'm going for two nodes."

"The management tool within this solution could be improved. We would also like to be able to access services like Azure when using this solution."

"I think the online documentation needs a lot of work and so do the sizing tools."

"More optimization could be done in terms of mirroring."

"The integration is not difficult because there is no GUI, but we need to use a PowerShell command. This makes it difficult to monitor and to see the components' statuses."

"Documentation management could be improved"

"Microsoft closed the shared cluster support, which is important for the solution."

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct cons

"The product's high price is an area of concern where improvements are required."

"The stability needs to be improved."

"Lacks an integrated backup solution."

"The big thing is pricing, and the rest of it is mostly good. From a scalability point of view, scaling the storage from network or compute should be easier. It is again all around the cost, and it would be good if it was easier to scale your storage separately from your compute."

"We would like to see additional backup and recovery options added. In particular, integration with popular applications like databases."

"Hardware load balancing is available on the enterprise version of the solution, however, it's extremely expensive and therefore out of our budget."

"I would have liked it to have been more scalable. It's scalable but not as much as, for example, the ScaleIO systems were or the Kaminario"

"Based on my testing, I would like to expand deduplication to include hybrid deployments and not just for all-flash deployments."

More VMware vSAN cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"With the data center licensing and everything that is connected to that, this solution is relatively costly."

"The solution is expensive."

"Cost-wise the product is one of the more affordable within the category of products."

"If they could reduce the cost, it would be better. Licensing costs are something that they could take care of. If you are a smaller and strong IT team, then VMware vSAN is a very good product. If you want to expand in the service provider space, then you will have to go for an open-source solution like OpenStack. We are now looking at OpenStack because we sell licensing costs. We are a service provider, so the IT component data is a substantial component in our overall costing. We feel that OpenStack might help us to cut down the licensing cost. Therefore, we are looking at SAS storage instead of vSAN. SAS is open source, but it is not wise to have open source without having the backend support. We are using RedHat SAS, and it is an open-source solution. You can also have a free version, but we are using it with support from RedHat so that we have somebody to back us up in case we have a problem. If you do normal business, then IT expense is 1% or 2% of the total turnover. The higher licensing costs sometimes don't make difference to the big companies who are not service providers and are using it only for their internal use. For them, the IT cost is 1% or 2%, but for an IT service provider, the IT costs will go up to 15% to 16% of the total cost of the operations. This is where the licensing costs become irrelevant. For example, the licensing cost of using VMware, VC, and vSAN is 8% of my monthly revenue. Every month, I pay about $35,000, and, with the revised plan, it will be something like $50,000 or revenue of 600k per month, which means almost 8% of the revenue is going into VMware licensing. In a very competitive world, 8% as a cost element is huge. So, if I can bring it down to 2%, I save 6% in revenue expenditure. In terms of profit, 6% of 30% is something like another 25% increase in my profit. My profit can be almost 25%. It would be 20% to 25% in case I am able to handle the licensing costs and bring them to a very low level. Because these IT costs are substantial for us, that is why we are going with OpenStack. OpenStack has a limitation that it requires more hardware. There will be some increase in the hardware cost, but overall we will save 5% to 6% of our licensing cost by using OpenStack."

"I would like to see this technology be made available to smaller businesses, who might benefit from high availability but struggle with the entry fee."

"For a classical node plus storage solution, the price is higher."

"This solution requires the purchase of a license."

"VMware vSAN is an expensive platform. We purchase its yearly license."

"It is not that expensive, and it is not even cheap. If it is designed in a proper way, it has good pricing, but if you do oversizing, the price will be high. There are different licensing models."

"vSAN has many versions with standard and advanced including Enterprise and Enterprise Plus. Regarding the Enterprise and the Advanced, it could be lower."

"From a cost perspective, it is expensive. From a usability perspective, it reduces the overhead costs attached to its users' servers."

More VMware vSAN pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Educational Organization

53%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

How does VMware vSAN compare with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?

We found VMware’s vSAN was easy to set up, configure, and manage compared to other solutions we considered. It is best suited for small- to medium-sized organizations. It is easy to create load bal...

See all answers

What do you like most about Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?

Its technical support is excellent.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?

Pricing is an advantage of Storage Spaces Direct. Licenses can be on a monthly or yearly basis, depending on the addition of software assurance.

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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 ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 11% of the time

StarWind Virtual SAN vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 8% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 6% of the time

Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 4% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

Compared 3% of the time

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct Competitors

VxRail vs VMware vSAN

Compared 17% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VMware vSAN

Compared 9% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs VMware vSAN

Compared 9% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs VMware vSAN

Compared 7% of the time

Azure Stack HCI vs VMware vSAN

Compared 5% of the time

More VMware vSAN Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct

February 2025

Download Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware vSAN

January 2025

Download VMware vSAN product report

Also Known As

MS Storage Spaces Direct

vSAN

Overview

Storage Spaces Direct uses industry-standard servers with local-attached drives to create highly available, highly scalable software-defined storage at a fraction of the cost of traditional SAN or NAS arrays. Its converged or hyper-converged architecture radically simplifies procurement and deployment, while features like caching, storage tiers, and erasure coding, together with the latest hardware innovation like RDMA networking and NVMe drives, deliver unrivaled efficiency and performance.

Microsoft

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:

Storage policy-based management (SPBM): VMware vSAN supports storage policy-based management for automated management of storage profiles.

Software-defined data-at-rest encryption: With this VMware vSAN feature, you can prevent unauthorized access of data at rest.

Multiple nodes: VMware vSAN provides clusters that can include as few as 2 nodes or as many as 64 nodes.

High security and availability: VMware vSAN offers stretched clusters, allowing more than one virtualization host server to be used in the same setup, promoting higher security as well as availability.

Deduplication: VMware vSAN’s deduplication compresses data to ensure efficient storage management and security.

HCI mesh updates: VMware vSAN clusters can share storage capacity with non-HCI Sphere clusters and can adopt HCI without having to scale computing resources and storage or replace existing servers.

Simplified file services: With VMware vSAN’s file services, backup of file shares is simplified. You can use APIs that allow backup and recovery software vendors to integrate with your VMware vSAN file services, which enables backup software to track new data and add scalability enhancements to files.

VMware vSAN Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing VMware vSAN. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO): VMware vSAN helps you reduce upfront costs for businesses because it can be easily deployed on inexpensive x86 servers. In addition, its highly scalable infrastructure and quick deployment also save organizations time and money, making it an efficient storage solution.

Good manageability: VMWare vSAN is easy to set up, manage, and provision, without sacrificing performance.

Scalability: VMware vSAN is agile and allows administrators to scale storage on demand, quickly, and efficiently via policies and rules.

Simplicity: VMWare vSAN is simple to configure since it is embedded in the vSphere hypervisor. Installing it using the vSphere Web Client can be done quickly.

Reduced risk: VMWare vSAN reduces the risk associated with digital transformations by utilizing existing tools, skill sets, and solutions.

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."

VMware

Sample Customers

Acuutech, Quest Technology Management, Bradley, Mead & Hunt

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Software Defined Storage (SDS)

February 2025

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