What to Look for in a vSAN Alternative
StorageSwiss.com, Friday, November 6th, 2026
Organizations leaving VMware vSAN must replace their storage layer too and should seek hardware reuse, built-in storage and easy migration.
Organizations that built hyperconverged infrastructure on vSAN face a harder VMware exit than SAN users, because their storage leaves with VMware and they must choose a new storage strategy as well as a hypervisor.
They have also been hit by Broadcom's per-core subscriptions plus per-TiB vSAN capacity licensing, which pushes many onto VMware Cloud Foundation.
The piece recommends looking for an alternative that reuses existing vSAN servers, RAM and NVMe flash, since AI demand is driving component price increases of up to 5x and supply constraints.
Other criteria include built-in server-side storage and a backup-style migration path.