We performed a comparison between Cisco Hyperflex HX Series and VMware vSAN based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: VMware vSAN wins out in this comparison. The main difference between the two solutions is that Cisco Hyperflex HX Series users find deployment to be difficult, and also say the solution uses a lot of memory and hardware resources. In addition, they do not mention an ROI.
"The product's core feature of virtualizing our storage is by far the most valuable."
"StarWind allowed us to deploy highly available shared storage within our budget."
"I like StarWind's high availability. The failover is almost immediate, so the end users have no idea the guest VM moved at all. We can failover all guest VMs onto a single hypervisor, place it into maintenance mode, install updates, and reboot a hypervisor all during the daytime and remotely, with confidence the process will be successful."
"As the client had acquired another company some distance away, they were concerned about having a single SAN in one location or the other. StarWind vSAN allowed us to keep a copy of the data local to each site without asking the client to pay for two SANs in addition to the two new servers they needed."
"The StarWind VSAN is always up and allows us to move VMS to other nodes for maintenance, without interruption to service."
"The most important feature is the ability to experience the loss of one node or one storage device, and not lose the entire cluster."
"User friendly interface and straight forward implementation."
"StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution."
"The price of the solution is good, especially when it comes to complex network solutions, such as UCS and Connect."
"Cisco HyperFlex is helping us to put everything in centrally so that we can manage in one place."
"On the VDI side, because the storage is local to the HyperFlex, it was very easy and convenient. The performance is exceptional."
"The solution is easy to use and to learn. It is well integrated with VMware."
"The product is easy to manage and flexible for upgrading without major changes."
"The most valuable features of this solution are scalability, performance, and reliability. It scales well inside of a large data center."
"The most valuable feature for our company is that it works internally. We have a lot of internal projects for optimization."
"It increases efficiency, decreases the cost, and manages the network in one single way. That's the most important thing."
"vSAN Health is a feature designed to monitor the health and performance of the vSAN environment. It's crucial for us and our customers to frequently check on this to ensure everything is operating smoothly."
"It allows us to put our infrastructure in remote locations and still get the same performance we get from our onsite SAN solutions."
"The most valuable features of vSAN are its simplicity to deploy and that we can use commodity disks in our servers without complexity or need for external storage arrays or storage specialists on our teams."
"The most valuable feature is the simplification of storage. We no longer need to deal with Fibre Channel and the external storage arrays."
"IOPS is comparatively best to run VDI solution."
"Provides good performance as well as integration with deployment tools."
"The features of vSAN allow us to reduce our operational complexity to a large degree."
"It is scalable, overall. If you need to add storage, it makes it easy to scale by adding additional hard drives into the existing servers or you can add storage by just adding more servers."
"There is no IPv6 support. That is our only issue at this time."
"It would be good to have a little more access to control certain aspects within the UI."
"There is a general lack of documentation, especially up-to-date documentation to get started."
"When you will cease your contract with StarWind (for support) your product won't be updated and that is a big selling point, especially for us, as we have loads of products from StarWind."
"I would like them to invest time in reducing the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure."
"The product can include a more simple way of synchronization after a forced shutdown as the current process has a few more steps to check that hosts have synchronized and this can be automated."
"If there was a way to automatically put disks in maintenance mode when shutting the host down and exit maintenance mode automatically, that would simplify things."
"The platform needs to improve user management and the web console."
"We would like to see better integration in the next release of this solution."
"Deployment scripts can be improved since several clans need to be created before the deployment effectively works."
"The initial setup can be a bit complex."
"I haven't been too impressed with the Cisco HyperFlex HX, honestly. It's a hard concept."
"Cisco is quite expensive but not in the initial first buy."
"Stability is really poor, especially the storage stability. We lost data. There were disruptions of clusters and that's one big pain point of the solution. It's not stable enough, the documentation is not good, there's not much documentation available. For every call we need a tech engineer."
"The initial setup of the Cisco HyperFlex HX platform was medium-level difficult. It's a little bit different from traditional servers. It takes getting used to the learning curve."
"It would have been nice if the product provided some cloud integrations."
"he list of hardware supported should be increased in the future."
"It could have some automation. We haven't involved ourselves in a lot of automation around the vSAN environment capabilities. We're still running it using a very traditional setup. So, there could be some plugins to automate it using third-party environments, such as Jenkins."
"vSAN does not have online dedup. When opening the inline dedupe, the performance will be lower than off inline."
"I lose a node in a cluster vSAN, which is also used as a cluster HA. I lose not only the storage part, which is not necessarily serious (depending on the configuration of the vSAN cluster), but on the other hand, I lose also a node of Compute, which can make things complicated quickly."
"It would be much improved if we could somehow integrate a better backup with it. Right now, we're using Veeam and it's okay, but I would like more of a VDP vSAN solution. That would be excellent. The VDP, at least the last time we looked at, it was just not quite there."
"As a software-based product, it requires a lot of system resources."
"We would like to see additional backup and recovery options added. In particular, integration with popular applications like databases."
"I have used the VMware Replication but I can't get it to work properly. The process should be simplified."
More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Pricing and Cost Advice →
Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in HCI with 90 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 226 reviews. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] is rated 8.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] writes "A fast and easy deployment that allows secure access to our medical applications ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] is most compared with VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray.
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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.
