Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure vs VMware vSAN comparison

Red Hat and VMware are both solutions in the HCI category. Red Hat is ranked #25, while VMware is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.7. Red Hat holds a 0.7% mindshare in HCI, compared to VMware’s 15.9% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Red Hat users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of VMware users who would recommend it.

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infr...

Read 6 Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure reviews

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100% willing to recommend

VMware vSAN

Read 230 VMware vSAN reviews

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12,292 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infr...

VMware vSAN

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 2024

VMware vSAN and Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure compete in the hyper-converged infrastructure market with distinct advantages depending on organizational needs. VMware vSAN has an edge in features, while Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure excels in flexibility and technology integration, potentially making it a superior choice for some environments.

Features: VMware vSAN offers seamless integration within the VMware ecosystem, comprehensive storage functionalities, and optimized management for VMware environments. It is ideal for organizations heavily invested in VMware technologies. Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure leverages its open-source nature, allowing extensive customization and integration with a wide array of software ecosystems, catering to enterprises with diverse IT landscapes.

Room for Improvement: VMware vSAN can enhance its flexibility across non-VMware environments and improve ease of deployment for those unfamiliar with VMware ecosystems. It could also benefit from more competitive pricing. Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure could improve by simplifying its deployment process, tightening integration with legacy systems, and expanding its support resources to match the scale and scope of closed-source competitors.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware vSAN integrates smoothly within VMware environments, providing a streamlined deployment process with extensive support resources. Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure offers a more adaptable but potentially complex deployment, supported by Red Hat's community support and documentation. While VMware vSAN enables a straightforward setup for VMware users, Red Hat's comprehensive support aids in managing complex, custom environments.

Pricing and ROI: VMware vSAN typically involves a higher upfront cost but provides significant ROI in VMware-centric data centers due to its seamless integration. Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure offers a more appealing cost-to-value ratio for those utilizing open-source solutions, leading to competitive ROI, particularly in environments exploiting its flexibility to reduce licensing expenses.

To learn more, read our detailed Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure vs. VMware vSAN Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure vs. VMware vSAN

March 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

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infr...

Ranking in HCI

25th

Average Rating

8.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VMware vSAN

Ranking in HCI

2nd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.6

Number of Reviews

230

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2025, in the HCI category, the mindshare of Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is 0.7%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware vSAN is 15.9%, down from 18.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

HCI

Featured Reviews

systemar777972

System Architect at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

Comes in a small, compact model that does not have any separate management but it is not so stable

This product is not so stable. Maybe it is just not mature enough in its development. When we upgrading from one version to another, there have been some hiccups. There have been a few times where upgraded features cause changes that make problems with existing implementation on the deployment side. I'm not sure if I really need any new features in this product at this point. For us, it is a fixed solution. It's not a full-blown solution and doesn't need to be. It is not really a cloud product, but we use it like some kind of cloud in a box. It is very limited in our use case. It has limited capability in general. You can not really have something like private security domains. Or there are so few servers that you can not really use the different kinds of applications you could with different physical servers. So you cannot select the kind of security that you can have on a cloud with separate layers.

Read full review

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 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."

"It is stable and scalable."

"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."

"I like that you can add other types of services."

"The solution is easy to use."

"Overall the solution is very good."

"In my opinion, vSAN is the most natural way to migrate to a fully hyperconverged solution. If a customer needs a more scalable solution with consolidated management, vSAN is excellent."

"As a function of our core business, it's a sought after tool that helps us provide analytical support across a wide spectrum of client needs. It's allowed us to test out in our connected restaurant - "TheWorks" - a fully-functional restaurant experience center that allows our clients to discover the value of our connected solutions firsthand. We deploy vSAN in this customer-like environment within a hyperconvergent infrastruction (HCI) to give our clients a better understanding and help optimize data and the end-users' experience."

"It allows us to put our infrastructure in remote locations and still get the same performance we get from our onsite SAN solutions."

"Good performance, reliable and agile."

"Storage policies are used to perform operations in the VMs. This feature allows you to create storage policies for VMs to get performance, high availability, I/O policies, etc."

"It completely removes the need for a storage network and for a storage administrator and all of that infrastructure and the costs that are involved with them."

More VMware vSAN pros

Cons

"It should be more user-friendly, in my opinion."

"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."

"This product is not so stable. Maybe it is just not mature enough in its development."

"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."

"The cloud deployment could be improved."

"We would really like them to look at what Nutanix did for day-one/day-two operations deployment: Bringing in the equipment, getting it deployed, getting it setup, and ease of use of one-click for deploying our 30-node solution. With vSAN we had to go into each one individually and set it up."

"They should make the software updates easier. We should be able to upgrade it more easily."

"The integration could be improved. I would like to see integration with other platforms."

"The platform's cost affects the business. This particular area needs improvement."

"There are certain shortcomings in the stability of the product where improvements are required."

"If one node out of your ten nodes fails, it takes a lot of time to replicate and rebalance VMware vSAN. This time can be reduced. When a node fails and the data is not accessible, vSAN has to be rebalanced to make the redundancy level of two again. However, if it is taking a lot of time and any other hardware fails during that time, then we have a problem. Two disk failures mean that all data will be lost, and we may have to recover it from the backup. So, the number of threads that run to do the rebalancing could be more so that the time taken to make it fully redundant again is not so much."

"The stability needs to be improved."

"If we have some complicated issues, you have to use the command lines interface. Not everything is possible to be fixed in the GUI. This is a drawback, that some things have to be fixed via command-line interface and should be able to be done in the GUI."

More VMware vSAN cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is quite pricey."

"Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is an open-sourced, low-cost solution with full features."

"We are using the VMware vSAN ROBO which allows us to have a maximum of 25 virtual machines. The approximate cost is €10,000 for a perpetual license."

"If you compare the price of VMware vSAN with other players like Nutanix and Cisco, its price is good, but could still have some improvement."

"Clients have to pay for VMware vSAN licensing based on the number of CPUs. The purchases would be lifetime or perpetual, but you need to have support, e.g. the support is negotiated from one, two, three, or four years."

"The only problem I have with VMware is the price. It is a good product, but it is expensive."

"Users may also start off with the demo version of the tool. After you learn to use the solution, you can buy it if it is beneficial."

"I would like to use more advanced models of the solution but the price needs to be reduced. There are some extra costs for this solution including a license."

"The first 1-2 years of purchasing vSAN will be expensive. Thereafter, the longer you are running it, the more cost savings you will have."

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

More VMware vSAN pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

22%

Manufacturing Company

15%

Computer Software Company

11%

Real Estate/Law Firm

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

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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...

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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 ...

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HPE SimpliVity vs Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure

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Compared 17% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs VMware vSAN

Compared 16% 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

More VMware vSAN Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

HCI

March 2025

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure report

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Buyer's Guide

VMware vSAN

March 2025

Download VMware vSAN product report

Also Known As

Red Hat HCI, Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Virtualization

vSAN

Overview

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure - based on our leading OpenStack and virtualization platforms - provides co-located, scalable, software-defined compute and storage, driven by Red Hat Ansible Automation on economical, industry-standard hardware.

Red Hat

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

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Buyer's Guide

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure vs. VMware vSAN

March 2025

Free Report: Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure vs. VMware vSAN

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