NetApp HCI [EOL] vs VMware vSAN comparison

NetApp and VMware are both solutions in the HCI category. Additionally, 88% of NetApp users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of VMware users who would recommend it.

NetApp HCI [EOL]

Read 32 NetApp HCI [EOL] reviews

88% willing to recommend

VMware vSAN

Read 231 VMware vSAN reviews

19,027 Views
12,177 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

NetApp HCI [EOL]

VMware vSAN

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between NetApp HCI [EOL] and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI.

To learn more, read our detailed HCI Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

HCI

July 2025

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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

NetApp HCI [EOL]

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

5.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VMware vSAN

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

231

Ranking in other categories

HCI (2nd)

Featured Reviews

Massimiliano Bartolozzi

Chief Information Officer at Lucart S.p.A.

Crashed continuously, complex to deploy, and bad after-sales support - NETAPP FIXED the problems in 2022

Their after-sales support, SLA, and third-parties availability should be improved. NetApp's support is very difficult to engage. We have an SLA of onsite support within 24 hours. but they don't respect the SLA. Its stability was very bad. It has been crashing continuously. In one year, we got three crashes, which is unbelievable for an appliance that is guaranteed for 10 years without any crashes. In 2022, NetApp Italy, driven by the country manager Davide Marini, fixed all our issues and added additional computation power for free. This is a great example of customer care. They could have done it right the first time of course, but admitting the errors and putting in place such a remediation plan has been a very professional behavior.

Read full review

Pramod-Talekar

Sr Service Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Enables efficient multi-environment cluster deployment and resource management with versatile features

While VMware vSAN is quite comprehensive, if we are running multiple infrastructures, applications, databases, and other elements, having a diagnostic tool to identify the actual problem area, whether application-side or infrastructure-side, would be beneficial. A proper monitoring tool that encompasses both applications and infrastructure would help in quickly resolving issues.

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 most valuable feature of this solution is the SolidFire interface."

"The most valuable feature is the convergence."

"The ease of deployment is a positive feature that allows us to scale easily."

"NetApp HCI is a stable solution."

"HCI definitely improved how flexible we scale, and our entrance into the cloud. The features are very rich, in terms of both avenues. It's helped us flexibly move and shift our workloads around, back and forth."

"It's an all-flash solution. NetApp guarantees 3-to-1 or more than 3-to-1. It has guaranteed performance, like 15K IOPS per node."

"It has reduced our hypervisor footprint by around 20%."

"It has automated a lot of workloads. It has automated us from ticketing a large number to a very small number."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] pros

"By eliminating dependency on that back-end storage, we now depend on everything that's in the VMkernel with vSAN. We eliminate the middleman."

"Very easy to implement in any existing environment."

"The lower skill cost of maintaining it meant that we could do more with the people that we had."

"vSAN is integrated into VMware."

"vSAN is easy for deploying and maintenance, so some customers can do service themselves."

"Allows us to implement more quickly, and to ease the maintenance."

"Scalability in vSAN has been really good. It's very easy to add nodes in, to automatically generate the drives and the disk groups. It has been a piece of cake, surprisingly so."

"The solution has high performance."

More VMware vSAN pros

Cons

"There's a limitation with a block in the file. That's where I see that it's not very efficient for upgrades and for management."

"I would like to have the ability to replicate to multiple sites."

"I would like to see a better upgrade process, like the one that ONTAP has."

"Because I like block mode, I'd like to see SAN connectivity. I would like to be able to easily put it into my current environment."

"It would be nice to have better access to tutorials and a test environment for simulations."

"At the moment, I am not looking for new features. Quality of Service (QoS) and capacity efficiency are the two things that I want to resolve in my customer's environment. QoS improves the performance of each tenancy, and with capacity efficiency, the customer can achieve more capacity as compared to the normal capacity."

"The price should be lowered. It's a little expensive."

"I'm not a fan of how they don't log you out properly from some of their web tools for management."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] cons

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

"The server files are larger than before."

"As no product is 100% perfect, the price for VMware vSAN could still be improved, though it is good when compared to some of its competitors."

"It would be much improved if we could somehow integrate a better backup with it. Right now, we're using Veeam and it's okay, but I would like more of a VDP vSAN solution. That would be excellent. The VDP, at least the last time we looked at, it was just not quite there."

"he list of hardware supported should be increased in the future."

"The biggest room for improvement I see in vSAN is the lack of SAN connectivity. I've kind of joked around that there is no "SAN" in vSAN. And it's something that we've worked to try and introduce some options for, and we're going to continue to work towards that."

"This is quite an expensive solution."

"Lacks an integrated backup solution."

More VMware vSAN cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its pricing is lower than our previous solution."

"This solution saved our organization time (35 percent) and money. We have a hefty group of developers, and if you multiply that by 30 to 35 percent, that is quite a bit of money."

"Licenses run on a yearly basis, and there aren't any additional fees other than the standard licensing fee."

"Where we lost nearly 75 percent of our infrastructure due to a malicious attack and were able to recover two and a half hours into it due to the integration, it saved us and all of our customers. Because we were able to recover so fast from the attack, the solution paid for itself right there."

"The price of the solution is okay but could improve."

"You still have to pay for the licensing for VMware and Red Hat licenses separately. It's not all inclusive at this point."

"All the licenses are included when you buy the program."

"Its price is aligned with the market. In addition to the standard licensing fees, there is an integrator cost."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] pricing and cost advice

"It is an expensive solution. There should be more flexible with licensing to allow small businesses the essentials of the solution's features."

"Due to recent changes in VMware's licensing approach by Broadcom, the cost has increased significantly, making it less attractive from a cost perspective."

"What made us go with this solution was price point. When you can utilize existing storage infrastructure, and not have to continually purchase new SAN products out there that are going up in price as time goes by, then it's a wonderful thing."

"The price is okay."

"It is slightly expensive. They can be more competitive in terms of pricing."

"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."

"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."

"We did consider other hyperconverged solutions. It usually came down to price. vSan was the most cost effective thing."

More VMware vSAN pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Real Estate/Law Firm

19%

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

12%

Comms Service Provider

Educational Organization

20%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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Which would you choose - Nutanix Acropolis AOS or VMware vSAN?

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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 ...

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Comparisons

No data available

VxRail vs VMware vSAN

Compared 18% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs VMware vSAN

Compared 15% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VMware vSAN

Compared 8% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs VMware vSAN

Compared 7% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs VMware vSAN

Compared 6% of the time

More VMware vSAN Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

NetApp HCI [EOL]

June 2025

Download NetApp HCI [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware vSAN

June 2025

Download VMware vSAN product report

Also Known As

No data available

vSAN

Overview

NetApp HCI is the only true enterprise-scale hyper converged cloud infrastructure. NetApp HCI comes in a 2 RU chassis with 4 node expansion slots.

NetApp

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

American Showa, Children's Mercy, Coca-Cola, Consultel Cloud, Evangelische Landeskirche in Wurttemberg, Imperva, Surface Mount Technology

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