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 15.6% 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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11,516 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 April 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 15.6%, down from 18.6% 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."

"Both the scalability and stability of this solution are excellent."

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

"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."

"It is stable and scalable."

"The solution has high performance."

"vSAN is integrated into VMware."

"VMware comes with different stacks like VMware Cloud Foundation, which is integrated with different VMware modules. There's interoperability between VMware products."

"Everyone uses virtualization to more efficiently utilize hardware resources. That's the main point of vSAN and VMware."

"VMware vSAN is an easy to use and easy to manage storage solution. Deploying and upgrading are easy. Technical support is very good."

"The most valuable features are secure IOPs and LAN security."

"We didn't only choose vSAN; we chose VMware because of SR-IOV, which is more on the hypervisor level and not on the vSAN storage. It's part of the whole system."

"The most valuable features of VMware vSAN are that it receives updates frequently, has good compression, optimized storage, and they provide webinars on what is new. Additionally, the integration with third-party products is good and it is easy to manage."

More VMware vSAN pros

Cons

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

"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."

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

"The cloud deployment could be improved."

"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."

"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."

"Enterprise customers get discounts on the solution's licensing pricing, but it is too expensive for SMB customers."

"The main problem we had was hardware compatibility, finding the right hardware that was certified."

"It is an expensive solution."

"The customer service is good but there is a cost for it. It does not come free."

"The UI could certainly be better. The inside into what's actually going on with vSAN would be nice to know."

"As a software-based product, it requires a lot of system resources."

"There is always a challenge with their firmware."

"The solution must provide better customization."

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."

"VMware vSAN is a little bit expensive and we pay annually. We have an educational institute where we receive discount prices from VMware. We do receive a reasonable discount but it's still expensive."

"It is fairly cost-effective for entry to mid-level performance based on the underlying hardware components."

"The solution requires a license. The payment is on a yearly basis and It is not overly expensive."

"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."

"Cost-wise, the Nutanix licenses were cheaper, but in terms of the hardware, there was some contention around it. So, in terms of implementation, the way Nutanix was projecting the implementation on their end was that there were a lot of open-source admin platforms. vSAN is a licensed product in VMware, and Nutanix was proposing a KVM solution, which is open source. That's why their pricing was a bit cheaper, but when we were trying to compare it with an enterprise version of their management platform, it boiled down to the VMware vSAN being most effective in the long run."

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

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

"Every product is licensed with full support for a certain number of years. The licensing could be cheaper."

More VMware vSAN pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

19%

Manufacturing Company

16%

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...

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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

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VxRail vs Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Compared 10% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Compared 10% of the time

SteelFusion vs Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Compared 9% of the time

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VxRail vs VMware vSAN

Compared 18% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs VMware vSAN

Compared 16% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VMware vSAN

Compared 8% of the time

Dell PowerFlex 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

Download Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure product report

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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