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.
"We are running Hyper-V on twin servers in failover, and being able to manage servers from anywhere I need to, virtually, has been a game changer."
"It has a nice, simple control panel. You can clearly see the state and health of storage along with the synchronization."
"It has reduced the amount of switching, network connections, etc., because the converged StarWind Virtual SAN allows us to connect high-speed network interfaces between different boxes instead of having to connect SANs via the network, then connect those two clusters together."
"The license price is one of the cheapest in the market."
"The management was very easy and I was able to find all that I need in the software dashboard."
"You can build cheap, reliable, replicated virtual machines clusters using simple servers with an all flash disk or SAS\SATA hybrid tiered by performance storage."
"Training is also easy as it is just one system to learn."
"Virtual SAN runs on iSCSI, which is free and easy to configure. It's easy to manage from StarWind's GUI console, and it only required a few extra switch ports."
"The solution scales extremely well."
"I like Cisco Intersight."
"I love the Cisco design, the visual interface to manage and use the platform."
"It is helpful as a backup solution."
"Offers very good data protection and provides system uptime availability effectively."
"It is very scalable. It is also easy to scan."
"The most valuable features are scalability and the easy operation - if it works. You can configure everything from just one window."
"It allows us to authorize our residents to come in using their own personal devices to access any of our clinical applications and ensure that the PHI is secure and protected."
"Technical support is good."
"VMware vSAN is an easy to use and easy to manage storage solution. Deploying and upgrading are easy. Technical support is very good."
"The solutions best feature is that it is easy to use."
"Very good VCG notification feature."
"The technical support is good."
"One of the valuable features for us is the ability to restrict the performance capacity per client. Other solutions don't have this feature."
"It helped us survive power outages in one of our data centers, then continued to function without a hitch."
"It is very well known in the industry, and there are a lot of technical resources around it. This is a big thing for me because, at the end of the day, when you implement it, you need to support it."
"It would be great if it provided thin provisioned virtual disks."
"There is no Italian-language version of the software available."
"For someone entering the IT sector with little knowledge of storage, iSCSI, and virtual disks, they might not find the GUI immediately obvious."
"It should reclaim white spaces after big files are deleted."
"To enable the proactive support capability that is part of our support agreement, I would ask that the terms and conditions be revised and made acceptable to corporate security."
"Sometimes documentation on their site can be out of date."
"I struggled when bit figuring out how to go about doing the evaluation."
"I had issues locating the documentation that applied to my version of StarWind vSAN."
"Lacks some integration and documentation could be improved."
"I would like a lighter product; something which can be carried by a mere human. The typical size still looks like a stack of data center-sized servers, which is typically fine, but not so good if you want to carry it around."
"We would like to see better integration in the next release of this solution."
"They should give us a little more information about how to use the CLI and offer more commands."
"We are working with a lot of different technologies and trying to manage them with one tool. The API could be improved for better integration with other systems."
"The solution could improve by having more customization."
"The solution's price could be affordable."
"I would have liked it to be able to back up the system to a cloud, to be able to work from any other place"
"The customer service is good but there is a cost for it. It does not come free."
"I would like a better Hardware Certification List (HCL). The HCL should a little easier to deal with."
"Based on my testing, I would like to expand deduplication to include hybrid deployments and not just for all-flash deployments."
"I would love to see vSAN integrate Persistent Memory and NVDIMMs. I know they're supposed to be working on an elastic tier so that we don't have the issues with destaging from the cache to the capacity. Those are the things that I'm interested in."
"If we have some complicated issues, you have to use the command lines interface. Not everything is possible to be fixed in the GUI. This is a drawback, that some things have to be fixed via command-line interface and should be able to be done in the GUI."
"It could be cheaper."
"There is a lot that VMware could improve from a marketing perspective. The cloud is still new for many people, so extending storage should be effortless. It shouldn't be so complicated to extend the storage so workloads can access it no matter where they go."
"vSAN itself is a great storage platform, but one of the issues with it is that you have to be fully locked into the VMware package to use it. We're going to be deploying 72 Kubernetes nodes, and we're not going to buy VMware licenses for 72 of them, just so they can access vSAN. That's what we're using the Pure for. Opening it up so you could have vSAN as a data store, use it as a data lake, hit it with an NFS, S3 from outside the VMware ecosystem, would be great."
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 227 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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