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 6.5, and holds a 8.3% mindshare in the category. VMware is ranked #2 in HCI , with an average rating of 8.7, and holds a 15.9% 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

1,558 Views
1,103 Comparison Views

75% willing to recommend

VMware vSAN

Read 230 VMware vSAN reviews

17,206 Views
12,292 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Microsoft Storage Spaces Di...

VMware vSAN

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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 841,004 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 8.3%, up 7.8% compared to last year.
VMware vSAN, on the other hand, focuses on HCI, holds 15.9% 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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Yves Sandfort

CEO & Majority Shareholder at Comdivision Consulting GmbH

Gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources

Stability can be improved. Adding all these new features is nice, but we are now at the level where most of the features you need in production are there. The stability is not from a day-to-day operations perspective, but more from a supportability perspective, because currently some of the support scenarios require you to completely evacuate hosts or the complete cluster. That sometimes can be a stretch. This would clearly be an improvement if the support teams were given additional tools to make that easier. 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 be uncoupled even more. Dashboards are there, and we use vROps as well. So, we have all the beauty of capacity planning and everything over there. That's not really something where we need a lot of other things.

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

"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."

"The initial setup is straightforward."

"Its technical support is excellent."

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

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

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

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct pros

"It scales well. We have plenty of room to grow."

"You get the benefit of local storage, but you have the protection of shared storage."

"The solution's technical support is good."

"Provides good performance as well as integration with deployment tools."

"vSAN has just one datastore. so customers do not need to think where to put their VMs, how to design the physical disk RAID, the LUN size, the LUN mapping, etc. when they use NetApp/EMC/HDS or other storage systems."

"The most valuable features are its price point and that you can use existing storage; no specific storage requirements are needed."

"It helped us survive power outages in one of our data centers, then continued to function without a hitch."

"It is more stable now than it was before. It's not like it was in the first year. Now it is stable, and we trust it more."

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 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."

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

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

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

"Documentation management could be improved"

"It is difficult to get a hardware compatibility certification for the solution."

More Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct cons

"The vSan product uses a software system called Vsphere to monitor the system. It is sometimes difficult to manage the PCs within the systems."

"Virtual machines disk size cannot cap more than a single node. For a VDI user, it may not save enough to hold a file server or exchange server on a single node storage space."

"Some intelligence can be added to the newest version to provide more flexibility between storage tiers."

"I would like a better Hardware Certification List (HCL). The HCL should a little easier to deal with."

"A vSAN cluster must have compression and deduplication to be an all-flash array, but it's not supported with a hybrid array. Deduplication and compression work better with an all-flash array, so I think that VMware should give customers the option to activate and support this feature for hybrid arrays. Other products like Nutanix support this."

"Maybe incorporation of automation to build clusters in a more automated way would be beneficial."

"I would like compression and deduplication to be offered for offloading hardware, instead of doing it with software. That would be nice."

"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."

More VMware vSAN cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The solution is expensive."

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

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

"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."

"The vSAN licensing is not an inexpensive product. It does cost more than hypervisor."

"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."

"The product is quite expensive, regarding the open source solution."

"The product's price has been increasing lately...VMware vSAN is expensive."

"In comparison with other solutions, such as HP or Cisco, I find the solution to be quite pricey."

"Its reasonable, compare with other storage vendors"

"Enterprise customers can customize their licenses according to their own needs and budget."

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 5% 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 18% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs VMware vSAN

Compared 8% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VMware vSAN

Compared 8% 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

February 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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