VMware vSAN vs VxRail comparison

VMware and Dell Technologies are both solutions in the HCI category. VMware is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.8, while Dell Technologies is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.4. VMware holds a 16.4% mindshare in HCI, compared to Dell Technologies’s 20.8% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of VMware users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Dell Technologies users who would recommend it.

VMware vSAN

Read 229 VMware vSAN reviews

18,927 Views
13,554 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

VxRail

Read 130 VxRail reviews

24,621 Views
15,933 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

VMware vSAN

VxRail

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 2024

VMware vSAN and VxRail compete in the hyperconverged infrastructure market. User feedback gives VxRail an edge due to its seamless integration and advanced features, making it more favorable for VMware users.

Features: VMware vSAN is appreciated for scalability, cost-effectiveness, and efficient storage policies, offering benefits like vMotion and Distributed Resource Scheduler. It works well with commoditized hardware, providing easy management and impressive performance. VxRail, on the other hand, is noted for comprehensive performance and streamlined integration, particularly for VMware environments. Its advanced automation tools and ease of deployment make it a preferred choice for simpler integration into existing systems.

Room for Improvement: vSAN users report limited deduplication and encryption, wanting better monitoring, hardware compatibility, and stability. They seek more protocol support and customization for improved usability. VxRail users mostly praise performance but suggest support scalability and cost enhancements, alongside smoother VMware update integration.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Deploying vSAN is praised for its simplicity and cloud compatibility, but technical support responsiveness needs improvement. VxRail offers a unified deployment with reliable, immediate support, crucial for implementation, though installation may involve complex coordination in large deployments.

Pricing and ROI: Pricing is critical; both solutions are costly. vSAN attracts scrutiny for licensing costs, increasing with scale, despite reducing hardware needs and IT costs long-term. VxRail's pricing, though high, is more predictable in financial planning, offering clear ROI through reduced operational costs and better infrastructure efficiency.

To learn more, read our detailed VMware vSAN vs. VxRail Report (Updated: December 2024).

Buyer's Guide

VMware vSAN vs. VxRail

December 2024

Download the complete report

Helped 824,154 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

VMware vSAN

Ranking in HCI

2nd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.0

Number of Reviews

229

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VxRail

Ranking in HCI

1st

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

130

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of January 2025, in the HCI category, the mindshare of VMware vSAN is 16.4%, down from 18.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VxRail is 20.8%, down from 21.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

HCI

Q&A Highlights

Miriam Tover

Service Delivery Manager at PeerSpot

Sep 28, 2021

What Is The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail?

Quite simply, VxRail is a vSAN appliance. It's a Dell based server node fully integrated with a pre-loaded VMware vSphere and vSAN software stack. Since it's integrated, the hardware is optimized to take full advantage of all the features and functions associated with vSAN.This is the best choice for someone who is interested in deploying hyper-converged infrastructure but doesn't currently have one in place. The VxRail nodes can be simply slid into the racks, connected and zoned. vSAN, on the other hand, is purely a software solution. It's best for a data center that's already using VMware and would like to introduce storage management elements into their infrastructure. The benefit of this approach is that the configuration is customizable and feature elements can be added as needed.

See all answers

Featured Reviews

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

Sushil MIshra

AG at SIS.

Trouble-free architecture, we don't have to juggle multiple components like in a traditional three-tier architecture

I like the caching mechanism. Frequently used data is stored, so it definitely improves performance. VxRail's integration with VMware environments is very good. Our VxRail is built on VMware, and the integration is seamless. We haven't faced any challenges. We can migrate VMs between servers in real-time and replicate them to our DR site without any problems.

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 features for us are the ability to scale out the nodes independently, and the flexibility of the nodes. We can put almost any type of server in there with our connectivity and everything works great."

"The solution is stable."

"The performance of VMware vSAN is very good."

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

"it's easy to scale, it's easy to predict IOP needs, and you can design for low latency using all-flash... Also, for setting up new clusters for VDI quickly, it's nice. You don't have to wait on an order for a storage vendor to ship you a system and help you configure it, you do it all yourself. And the sizing guides are pretty straightforward."

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

"All orchestration and monitoring are routed to the cloud."

"Adding new nodes and expanding vSAN forward is simple and non-disruptive for a lot of our customers."

More VMware vSAN pros

"The feature that I have found most valuable with VxRail is its upgrade. Because if you talk about the normal ESX process you have to upgrade the firmware, the bios, and you have to manage the compatibility. You have to do a lot of things. But in the case of VxRail, it's a single upgrade, end to end. You simply upload the bundle, click next, it will do some pre-checks, if those pre-checks pass, it will update everything one by one. It will put one ESX in the maintenance and move other VM's to another mode. There is no downtime to the VM's."

"It supports VDI deployment, enabling easy use for running different platforms in similar environments."

"It gives us tons of flexibility. We can create new machines, then destroy them if they don't work out. We test a lot of use cases that may or may not play out. We can build all types of scenarios into virtual machines that we may or may not use. If we don't use them, we just turn them off, no using up resources."

"The solution is stable and reliable. This is one of the main reasons why we purchased this solution."

"It helps simplify the management of VMware."

"I like the managed updates. They are really nice in VxRail. Everything comes packaged and the updates are much easier than with other solutions that I've had to work with."

"We are very happy with the purchase, and it works well. It is fast. We went with the full-flash version, meaning that we have SSDs. So, we can build a Windows virtual machine in two minutes. We were surprised when we first tried to do that."

"VxRail performs well in the VDI environment."

More VxRail pros

Cons

"It could be more robust. The latency is also an issue for us, and the reliability. I would like it to be faster and a little more flexible."

"The solution must provide better customization."

"When designing the implementation for vSAN, I have noticed that it requires a minimum of six nodes, and this creates a problem when it comes to maintenance. If, out of the six nodes, I put one node in maintenance mode, then vSAN does not create other VM components."

"The pricing model is sometimes a challenge for us because their licenses are very costly."

"I would like to see more comprehensive lifecycle management. The current path and process for upgrading or updating the firmware, as well as the storage controller software to interact with that firmware, is fairly manual and not very well documented. A little more time and effort spent on the documentation of the lifecycle management for vSan would be really great."

"The solution could be improved by having more filtered and multiple view volumes instead of a single view."

"They can package it in a way that is specific to the hardware infrastructure and the hardware platform. It should stay fairly up to date with the drivers and the manufacturer issues. The problem with uncoupling the proprietary technology and component capabilities is that by uncoupling them, you run into some concerns or challenges over the poor performance model. These concerns really come when you start talking about high performance, high bandwidth, and high availability types of environments. While vSAN is a leader, in a critical view, it is not about being cost-effective. It is more about the immediate impact of money loss to the business in critical applications where we want to maintain a continuous operational 59 model. It is, however, good for QA/QC tasks. I don't necessarily know how it works in regards to VDI or virtual desktop infrastructure."

"The solution could maybe improve failure protection."

More VMware vSAN cons

"It might offer better integration with other products."

"They should add automation and activation going forward."

"The initial setup was not that easy, it was a medium difficulty level."

"I would like to see integration with vCenter if possible."

"If we could have some out of the box ideas in integration, I think that would be a great feature."

"One challenge customers face with VxRail is the high cost of scalability. The price is higher if they want to add memory or capacity after purchasing the tool for three or five years. Each drive and RAM module is licensed separately, making the architecture costly. It would benefit Dell to review this licensing model and make it more cost-effective and flexible for customers."

"What I did not like so much was the amount of VMware that you have to put in your system related to the VxRail."

"The version upgrade process should be simplified."

More VxRail cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"I feel the pricing to be reasonable."

"The cost is expensive. I purchased two servers. The hardware cost was $19,000. The software cost for these two servers, including the vSAN, was $30,000, which is $11,000 more than the hardware. Then I had to pay another $5,000 for installation and implementation for professional services. In total, it was $54,000 for two vSAN Servers."

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

"This is a cost-effective product. It's a bit cheaper than the other solutions."

"This solution is expensive. Nutanix provides us with Acropolis Operating System (AOS) along with its hardware, while VMware provides vSAN, vCenter, and vSphere which all have separate licenses and costs."

"Basically, vSAN is a license in addition to that of the classic VMware Vsphere, which is also mandatory."

"The price of VMware vSAN is expensive and there is an annual license required."

More VMware vSAN pricing and cost advice

"Be mindful of your storage needs now and for the future."

"The solution can be pricey depending on the project."

"Most of hyper-converged solutions require additional licenses for the virtualization layer (like VMware)."

"It is expensive as compared to other products in the same category."

"The current VxRail pricing structure is quite opaque for me, especially considering the recent changes."

"The licensing costs can vary depending on the number of processors and specific requirements, which may result in considerable expenses."

"We most likely pay yearly for support. The cost was justified by now because it stays up and I don't have to constantly open tickets. I probably rebooted the system once or twice. We haven't replaced any discs in the storage, we haven't had to do any disc replacements, so it just runs. You pay a little more but you cut down on the maintenance."

"There is a permanent vSAN license included since it is required, but vCenter\ESXi host licensing should be validated in the purchase process."

More VxRail pricing and cost advice

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which HCI solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

824,154 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Answers from the Community

Miriam Tover

Service Delivery Manager at PeerSpot

Sep 28, 2021

What Is The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail?

2 out of 20 answers

it_user849069

Senior System Engineer with 51-200 employees

Feb 6, 2019

VxRail is an complett and Automatiatet Solutions and is Build on vSAN Vmware and is a part from the Solution , This Solution will build your complet VMware Infrastruktur incl. Hardware. and iDRAC. This is the Software defined Datacenter. You ned special Hardware from DellEMC vSAN is just the Software defined Storage Solution from VMware, this can build with vSAN Ready Hardware nodes.

Read full answer

Siku Philip

Enterprise Solutions Consultant with 51-200 employees

Feb 6, 2019

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 factors – • Skillsets available internally for validating, testing and roll out. • The time available for an organization to roll out the infrastructure. Given the above two criteria, if an organization has lot of internal skillsets within the organization and enough time to choose the relevant hardware and test/validate each in terms of type of processor, memory, hard drives, HBA, NIC etc and have the relevant drivers and patches, then vSAN would be a more economical options. The advantages with vSAN is that you have more flexibility in choosing your brand and hardware and more economical compared to a pre-engineered system. The disadvantages are time to roll out will be more as lot of testing and validation needs to be done. Secondly, upgrade to future vSpehre versions might involve lot of complexities and time consuming forcing many customers to stick with the current version. Of course, there are exceptions to this where customers have also migrated successfully but the journey was not an easy one. On the other hand, VxRail comes as an pre-engineered system that is plug and play. Few clicks and input of IP address gets you up and running in few minutes. Roll of the infrastructure is fast as no testing and validation from a hardware perspective is needed as it is already done by Dell EMC at the factory. Management and upgradation to new vSphere versions are very easy and not complicated. Disadvantages will be the flexibility to choose your brand or choice of hardware is very limited and would be slightly more costlier than building your own vSAN nodes. In conclusion, if you have the budget and want less headache in management, automation and up-gradation, choose VxRail. If you have limited budget and is ready to spend long time in solving complexities - you can opt for vSAN.

Read full answer

See all 20 answers

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Educational Organization

52%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What Is The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail?

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

How does HPE Nimble Storage compare to VxRail?

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI Vs. VxRail One of the best things about the HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is the three, two, one, zero rule. That means I need three copies of my data on two different types of me...

See all answers

What are the major differences between VxRail and Dell EMC PowerFlex?

VxRail vs. Dell EMC PowerFlex VxRail provides stable solutions for technical problems while at the same time not being too expensive for a company to invest in. Even if the user is working with a l...

See all answers

How does VxRail compare with Cisco HyperFlex HX Series?

VxRail provides stable solutions for technical problems while at the same time not being too expensive for a company to invest in. Even if you are working with a limited budget, this platform offer...

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs VMware vSAN

Compared 15% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VMware vSAN

Compared 9% 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

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs VMware vSAN

Compared 4% of the time

More VMware vSAN Competitors

Dell PowerFlex vs VxRail

Compared 33% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VxRail

Compared 14% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs VxRail

Compared 7% of the time

HPE Hyper Converged vs VxRail

Compared 6% of the time

Dell vSAN Ready Nodes vs VxRail

Compared 4% of the time

More VxRail Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

VMware vSAN

December 2024

Download VMware vSAN product report

Buyer's Guide

VxRail

December 2024

Download VxRail product report

Also Known As

vSAN

VCE VxRail

Learn More

VMware

Dell Technologies

Overview

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."

VxRail is a hyper-converged appliance based on VMware virtual SAN Software and is jointly engineered and built with VMware, for VMware, to enhance Vmware. VxRail software-defined architecture simplifies compute, storage, virtualization, and management. It will safeguard performance, reliability, and flexibility across your organization with a broad range of workloads and applications from business-critical to next-gen. With VxRail, you are covered.

VxRail is a single turn-key appliance that is a validated, fully integrated, pre-configured, pre-tested solution and offers non-disruptive scaling. Every node includes compute storage and IO. All-flash configurations can contain between 12-28 cores per node. The storage capacity options run from 7.6 TB to 19TB with either 256 GB or 512GB of memory. Hybrid appliances may have 6-20 cores per node, 3.6 TB to 10 TB of storage capacity, and 24GB to 256 GB of memory.

VxRail offers high availability fail-over, an active/active stretch cluster, and VSan Kernal integration. VxRail is a power-edged server with APIs built on automation. There are over 15 million different combinations of hardware available with VxRail. VxRail provides a simple, cost-effective solution that solves a large range of use cases. Additionally, you also get a mixed workloads automated system that is backed with fully automated system updates, and complete end-to-end lifecycle management all in a single two-rack appliance.

VxRail is a value-added suitable solution for distributed small to mid-sized enterprises, remote offices, private clouds, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). You choose the deployment option that best suits your organizational needs, from appliance to integrated rack offerings, with or without networking, and it will be delivered to you, ready to deploy out-of-box.

If you know VMware, you know VxRail.

VxRail Features and Benefits

Seamlessly accelerate deployment to a hybrid cloud
Fast data center modernization
Create developer-ready Kubernetes platforms

Powerful performance and reliability
Improve and simplify operational efficiency
Excellent integration
Save time
Reduce costs

Reviews from Real Users

VxRail is an all-in-one solution: "You don't have to worry too much about the hardware and you don't have to work on integrating a storage device. We instead have this as an all-in-one solution and everything is available as a box."

VxRail is remarkable: “The cover points feature in VxRail is remarkable. It's unique. It has an intervention failover system as well as an automatic failover system, reaching clusters existing in VxRail…”

VxRail is a powerful performer: “...VxRail delivers a very high number of IOPS for a hybrid configuration or an all-flash configuration. The processors that are available in the Xeon family are very powerful. They are multi-core with typically 2 gigahertz, 2.4 gigahertz, or higher frequency, so the performance is very much appreciated.”

Sample Customers

Read Some Case Studies At Home Cloud CaribCINgroupDiscovery Check out the Rest of our Customer Stories Here

World Wide Technology Inc, Renault Sport Formula One Team, 8x8 Inc, Brownes, Canadian Pacific, Canopy, Denton, EDF, Unilin, Xerox

Buyer's Guide

VMware vSAN vs. VxRail

December 2024

Free Report: VMware vSAN vs. VxRail

Find out what your peers are saying about VMware vSAN vs. VxRail and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.

DOWNLOAD NOW

824,154 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our VMware vSAN vs. VxRail report.

See our list of best HCI vendors.

We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.