VMware Software Defined Storage is recognized for its unified storage capabilities, offering scalability, high availability, and easy deployment. It enables shared server storage through a single management panel, providing flexibility and simple configuration for organizations.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| VMware Software Defined Storage | 2.4% |
| Red Hat Ceph Storage | 10.5% |
| DataCore SANsymphony | 6.6% |
| Other | 80.5% |
| Type | Title | Date | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Category | Software Defined Storage (SDS) | Jun 23, 2026 | Download |
| Product | Reviews, tips, and advice from real users | Jun 23, 2026 | Download |
| Comparison | VMware Software Defined Storage vs StarWind Virtual SAN | Jun 23, 2026 | Download |
| Comparison | VMware Software Defined Storage vs Nutanix Unified Storage (NUS) | Jun 23, 2026 | Download |
| Comparison | VMware Software Defined Storage vs Red Hat Ceph Storage | Jun 23, 2026 | Download |
| Title | Rating | Mindshare | Recommending | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Red Hat Ceph Storage | 4.1 | 10.5% | 82% | 27 interviewsAdd to research |
| Everpure FlashBlade | 4.4 | 3.1% | 95% | 41 interviewsAdd to research |
VMware Software Defined Storage employs vSAN Express architecture to boost performance, data security, and compliance with ISO 27001 standards. Its single management panel minimizes the need for separate storage solutions, enhancing flexibility, redundancy, and configuration simplicity. While it effectively handles scalability and minimal footprint needs for IT administrators, the platform requires improvements in performance, reporting capabilities, and integration with other storage solutions. Increasing compatibility with diverse infrastructures and reducing licensing costs remain key focuses.
What are the most valuable features?VMware Software Defined Storage is widely used across industries for optimizing resources, such as consolidating servers and enhancing database applications. Educational institutions utilize VMware vSAN for storage solutions, replicas, and high availability projects. Medium to enterprise-level organizations appreciate its ability to streamline virtualization efforts and reduce storage provisioning time, particularly when transitioning from traditional storage to hyper-converged infrastructure with disaster recovery needs.
VMware Software Defined Storage was previously known as VMware SDS.
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| Author info | Rating | Review Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Solutions Architect at QDS | 3.5 | I used VMware Software Defined Storage for server consolidation and valued its scalability, high availability, and performance. Improvements are needed in integrations and costs. It provided cost savings and effective performance compared to cloud infrastructure. I previously worked with SecureWorks, Lenovo, and others. |
| Infrastructure Architect at Grupo Protege | 4.0 | I find VMware Software Defined Storage easy to configure with good performance and a small footprint. However, improvements are needed in replication to remote sites. Despite these limitations, the solution's simplicity and manageability make it a worthwhile investment. |
| Senior Project Lead at Tetra Pak | 4.5 | I use VMware Software Defined Storage for database applications and virtualization across multiple locations. It offers high availability, redundancy, and scalability, although it needs a shared database feature in the standard version. I switched from Microsoft Hyper-V due to its customization benefits. |
| Senior Financial Executive at a consultancy with 11-50 employees | 5.0 | My organization uses VMware Software Defined Storage for vSAN storage, replication, and high availability across various sectors. The solution is easy to deploy and well-supported, but its new licensing model is costly, posing challenges for medium-sized businesses. |
| Senior Project Lead at Tetra Pak | 4.0 | I find this product offers good scalability and visibility. However, its high cost and restricted compatibility with diverse hardware and networks are significant drawbacks. Setup is complex, requiring extensive customization, though support is good. I rate it 8/10. |
| Country Head SSID & GM South at a import and exporter with 51-200 employees | 4.0 | I rate VMware SDS 8/10. It's stable with an excellent single management panel and great support, but it's expensive. I desire improved hardware compatibility and direct data migration services, as it currently relies heavily on OEMs. |
| Data Center Technical Support Team Lead at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees | 3.5 | I rate this VMware product a seven out of ten. It offers good storage flexibility and scalability, is stable and easy to use. Yet, performance, better dashboards, and executive reporting are areas that require significant improvement. |
I used Nutanix for its hyper-converged infrastructure capabilities and VMware Site Recovery for disaster recovery.
Additionally, I worked with VMware Software Defined Storage both internally and with partners to consolidate servers into one solution.
The most valuable features of VMware Software Defined Storage are scalability, high availability, and performance. Specifically, the vSAN Express architecture stands out as the best feature. The solution handles data security and compliance well. It is compliant with ISO 27001 and has security features updated regularly.
There is room for more integrations and plugins into more storages. More automation, such as using Playbook on Ansible or other automation tools, would be very helpful. Simplifying the licensing model and making it cheaper would improve the solution.
VMware Software Defined Storage promises 99.999% availability, and I have experienced it to be fully stable. However, there is always a possibility for downtime.
The solution is scalable, allowing for a conglomeration of servers where CPU, memory, and RAM scale out horizontally, not vertically.
The technical support from VMware is very satisfactory. It is among the best in the market, and I rate it nine out of ten.
Positive
Previously, I used to work with SecureWorks and Lenovo. I switched to other products but maintained a basic community knowledge about them.
The initial setup can be straightforward if it’s a first deployment or greenfield scenario, where it's a simple 'next, next, next' installation.
The number of people required for deployment can range from one to twelve engineers, depending on the workload. Maintenance is minimal and mostly involves lifecycle management activities.
I have seen savings in TCO and overall investment by using VMware Software Defined Storage compared to cloud infrastructure. Having servers on-premises can be cost-effective, depending on infrastructure size.
The price of VMware Software Defined Storage is on the pricey side, rated four out of five in cost. There is room for improvement in simplifying and reducing the licensing cost.
I have worked with Dell storage, servers, Microsoft Azure DevOps, and Microsoft Azure cloud platform. I also have experience with Red Hat OpenShift and Nutanix.
I rate VMware Software Defined Storage a solid seven out of ten. Always ensure security and compliance are up to date. The AI features, such as storage prediction, add additional value to the solution.
The solution is simple to configure and provides good performance and less footprint. Dell deployed the solution, and it's very simple to use. VMware software is widely used by IT administrators.
VMware Software Defined Storage can be improved in the replication area. The solution has some limitations in terms of replication to remote sites or cloud infrastructure, which need improvement.
The solution ran smoothly, and we didn't experience any stability issues. We have had to change some SSDs over the last four years. Even in those cases, we did not experience any problems or outages in the system.
VMware Software Defined Storage is a scalable solution. Around 2,000 users use the solution in our organization.
The deployment was done very quickly and was very simple. We just had to provide some information from our infrastructure, like IP address ranges and VLANs.
Dell deployed the solution, and it's very simple to use.
Given the solution's simplicity and ease of administration, it's worth the money.
The solution is very expensive. We can buy a full hardware solution with the money we spend on the software.
The solution's administration is done by us, but Dell does its maintenance. The solution's administration is easy. VMware is more widely adopted, and we have many professionals who are skilled in VMware environments.
Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.
VMware Software Defined Storage is used for database applications and virtualization for multiple locations.
VMware Software Defined Storage gives higher availability against data corruption. Redundancy and scalability are the other valuable features of the solution. You can scale it on the go, and if the requirement increases, you can extend the storage easily without having any hardware dependencies.
VMware Software Defined Storage should include a shared database on a standard version. Right now, it's included in the enterprise version.
VMware Software Defined Storage is a stable solution.
I rate VMware Software Defined Storage an eight out of ten for stability.
We do 20 to 25 VMware Software Defined Storage installations in different projects. So, 20 to 25 different companies use the solution.
I rate VMware Software Defined Storage a nine out of ten for scalability.
VMware Software Defined Storage's technical support is good.
Positive
I previously worked with Microsoft Hyper-V. We switched to VMware Software Defined Storage because of its customization and ease of deployment.
The solution's initial setup is easy.
It takes half a day for us to deploy VMware Software Defined Storage because we do a process-oriented deployment, where we go through all the steps very carefully.
VMware Software Defined Storage is a slightly expensive solution. We do a three-year license for the solution, then renew it after every three years. I rate VMware Software Defined Storage a seven out of ten for pricing.
Before choosing VMware Software Defined Storage, I evaluated Nutanix.
I am using the updated version of VMware Software Defined Storage.
Overall, I rate VMware Software Defined Storage a nine out of ten.
My organization uses the tool to control companies, and now we are using it at a university.
In our specific industry workflow, we use the tool for VMware vSAN storage, replica, and high availability.
The most valuable features of the solution are that it is easy to deploy and the support is really good.
The license model of the product is an area of concern where improvements are required. The tool's licensing model has been changed to a new license scheme, and the price has almost gone up by forty percent. If you are in a medium-sized business or company, the tool is not a good option right now.
I have been using VMware Software Defined Storage for almost five years. I use the solution for some of our company's big clients.
It is a stable solution. We have systems running for about three years, and there is no need to have people on that site, and it's working well.
It is a scalable solution. The tool's scalability has benefited my company, especially since we sell servers and work with Dell and Lenovo right now. We are providers of VMware tools, and we need to expand its services, so we use its scalability feature.
The solution's technical support is good, and we get it via call and email. The technical team is well-trained. I rate the technical support a six to seven out of ten.
Neutral
The product's initial setup phase was easy.
The product can be deployed by an IT architect or two.
The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.
The time required to deploy the solution depends on the infrastructure because we have complex infrastructure. For deployment, we take at least three to four days to a month.
I see that my company has been working with people who have had the tool for almost five years.
The product handles data security and compliance, and we have had some convenience there because we worked with one of our clients who uses the cloud, and they have been comfortable with the security, at least because they're using some ports to transfer data, and it is good for now in the cloud. On the on-premises part, we haven't seen any progress in terms of security.
Considering the price of the product, I would not recommend the solution to others. The product is really good, but the price is not.
Though my company uses the tool on the cloud and on-premises, we don't use AI.
I rate the tool a ten out of ten.
I'm the senior project engineer for networks and infrastructure in our company and we're a customer of VMware. We usually design the product for specific situations and then sell it. We're currently working on four different projects, it's primarily a data product.
The high visibility is a valuable feature. You can write a failure usually due to some hardware or technical issue.
The cost of the product is where an improvement could be made. It's generally very expensive and requires a lot of architecture that needs to be designed according to specific situations. If it could be designed with open architecture, it would increase the value of the product.
I would like to see a greater ability to work with any kind of infrastructure, and there are currently some restrictions. It should have the ability to be deployed on any kind of hardware and network connectors, or protocols for that matter, and it should be more open to cloud.
I've been using the product for a couple of years.
Because we don't have a huge number of operations, the solution is stable for us. For an enterprise data center it might be more challenging, but for our requirements, which includes about 80 workers, it's not that complex.
The best part of the solution is that you can actually scale up to a large number of operating systems without the requirement of additional hardware, which is the biggest advantage.
Technical support is relatively good.
The initial setup is very customized, sometimes it's straightforward but most of the time it's very complex. I believe that's because the application that eventually runs on the architecture is always different and customer requirements are different too. Somehow we have to bridge those two areas using these solutions and then provide a product that is easy to use.
Deployment probably takes three to four weeks per project and then of course we have a couple of months monitoring. We have about 35 team members involved in implementation. Each company then has its own person, sometimes two people who deal with maintenance.
Most companies prefer controlling maintenance themselves, so we then transfer the contract to them. We also provide a help center, which isn't a dedicated team, it depends on the issue.
I believe there is a yearly licensing fee of around $2000 - $5000. I don't think there are additional costs above that but it depends on the type of infrastructure you're booting. If it's very complex or quantitatively heavy with a large infrastructure, then you might need to add more licensing costs, but for us, the standard one does the job.
I would suggest to anyone considering purchasing the solution that it's important to validate your requirements first, whether you actually need it or not, before purchasing. In addition, the product can be better optimized. In the first instance, we paid more than we should have because we didn't know enough, but in subsequent projects we designed it differently, it was a better product, and we were able to save a lot of fees. You have to actually spend time customizing the solution based on your need and then it becomes more cost-effective and a more valuable solution,
I would rate this product an eight out of 10.
Our primary use case relates to the increasing number of customers moving away from traditional types of storage and trying to reduce the storage provisioning time and improve ease of use. That's the main reason customers are asking for software-defined storage.
We deal with medium to enterprise-sized customers.
The valuable feature of the product is that the customer doesn't have to buy a separate storage box and manage things separately. The single management panel is the main feature that is wonderful for the customer. The single management panel plus the fact that there is no need to buy a separate disk is most valuable. You have the disks in the servers and it serves the purpose for your shared storage in the environment.
I think VMware SDS is pretty good. It has all the ingredients that an SDS should have. I think it's the most competitive product in the market.
The OEM solutions that are being offered based on the VMware SDS solution is different to that offered by other companies. HP and Dell EMC offer the data migration service to their appliances. The data migration itself is not a big challenge. It's sort of an OEM customized solution. VMware does not offer similar equivalent the solution, they work with OEM partners, and they offer it that way. Since normally, enterprise customers won't rely on unknown brand storage. They rely on the larger players like HP, EMC, IBM, NetApp and Hitachi - VMware has an alliance with those companies.
Ideally, I'd like to see improved hardware compatibility because normally all the software-defined solutions require compatible hardware. Usually, the hardware evolution is quite fast-paced. If customers procure one class of the device or hardware and it's compatible with a certain type of software version, and later they purchase another from a different vendor, there is a catch. I think the hardware compatibility should be very open and support different kinds of hardware because the hardware is very specific.
I've been working with the solution for more than three years.
It's a stable product.
It's easy to scale and expand but the main catch is the cost. It's expensive.
The technical support is awesome. I think that's one of the main reasons people opt for VMware. Service matters to the customer, especially for the mid-tier to enterprise-sized customers who require their systems to be running all the time. Again the issue is cost. We are now looking at similar products to sell that are less expensive.
We previously tried a Chinese version that came in at a very cheap price but we didn't stick with them because they can't be trusted to provide good service and there was an issue with agreements. It's important for us to have the references and it was a challenge to sell that product. It had all the wonderful features that such a solution should have, but it was very difficult to sell it to an enterprise or medium-scale customer because of issues with reliability.
Setup is relative - if the person has good knowledge, it's relatively easy. Otherwise, it's going to be a tough job. For someone who has the knowledge base, setup can be done within a couple of hours. Most customers in Pakistan rely on the vendors to do the setup. It only takes one person, sometimes two or three for an enterprise-sized company.
Setup cost is based on the software price and licenses on sockets. A single socket costs you around US $6,000 with three years services. At a minimum, you have a three node cluster for a small or medium-scale company. It can get quite expensive because you're likely to need four to six sockets on the other site to achieve business continuity. It comes to around $30,000. If you compare it with the Microsoft solution, Linux solutions, this is more expensive.
When you deploy any of the software-defined data solutions you need hardware. Hardware vendors have their own appliances ready to sell. The main catch is if a customer is proposing a software-defined solution for one of their production systems, they may purchase software and hardware from different suppliers. There could be a conflict while troubleshooting a problem between the hardware and the software vendors. In the case of VMware or any of the brands, it's best for the customer to have a ready appliance, which comes from the hardware vendor with a software-defined data central software already installed. It would mean only one service provider for both hardware and software and hence no conflict.
All hardware vendors are currently offering the Software Defined Ready nodes. If we compare VSAN Ready nodes from hardware vender and customer solution based on compatible VSAN hardware and VSAN software, the overall price of VSAN ready node prices will be slightly on higher side possibly around US$5K - 10K per node. And that's the catch if the customer wants one windows services they have a pay higher cost. If you have enough expertise buying separate will save cost else go with the VSAN ready node solution.
VMware is better for those who don't have much experience with such tools because the locally available resources are enough to handle the solution. I think the product requires an OEM approach, purchase the hardware, software, and service from one source. The footprint of the hardware vendor should be established in the country and you need to have a very good partner in place to handle the hardware requests.
I would rate this product an 8 out of 10.
The primary use of the solution is to make better use of our resources.
The most valuable aspect of this product is unifying all of our storage in one pool that can be located on different machines easily. It is actually enhancing flexibility and scalability in the way we store data.
Performance is probably the area where VMware needs the most improvement. ScaleIO is one of the competitors for VMware Software Defined Storage. In testing, the performance is one of the places where ScaleIO was better than VMware. VMware should work more on their performance to come up to the level of their competition — in this case referring specifically to ScaleIO. This really works out to not much more than having better dashboards in the management console for performance measures.
I think it could also improve in the area of reporting. It specifically lacks executive-level reporting. So that is more levels or types of reporting and some reporting flexibility.
We have been using the product for about one year.
I can say that in our experience the product that it is pretty much stable. We had a few hiccups to get past after the initial setup. But the issues we had were not directly related to the product alone. I can say fairly that it is 98% stable. Very good, but not perfect.
I cannot say that there is a particular number of users working directly with the product because users are not the right word for how the product is used. This product is serving and assisting the infrastructure. There is no user interaction with the system and using the product is transparent so it is not really scalable in the sense of the end-user. As the system scales, in essence, the product can as well, so that makes it scalable. Certainly, there are admins who monitor the product and administrate it. It would probably take a significant change in usage to change the number of administrators.
The initial setup for the product was easy and straightforward. It was not complicated at all.
It was actually installed by the vendor itself. We were there when it was done and as we watched we could see it was obviously easy to do.
This is one of the more expensive products for this type of solution on the market. The VMware line, in general, is expensive products. The high cost is why some people are running away to use different, less expensive solutions even if that means having fewer features. For some companies, it is more important just to save some money and have basic functionality.
The product is user-friendly from an administrative standpoint and very easy to use. On a scale from one to ten where one is the worst and ten is the best, I would rate this VMware product as a seven out of ten. It is a seven and not an eight or nine because of the points which should be improved in the future like performance or added dashboard options and adding executive-level reporting and flexibility.
