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.
"User friendly interface and straight forward implementation."
"The top-notch support before, during, and after deployments are better than any other vendor I have come across."
"Integration with Microsoft clustering has been perfect, allowing us to leverage our investment in MS server licensing to the fullest."
"It also provides a high degree of mobility, as the virtual SAN can be moved relatively painlessly between on-site devices and the cloud."
"We like their high availability. It reduces the downtime for our entire organization's environment."
"We have been able to use more on-prem hardware to reduce cost and also use old disks that we do not trust enough for ordinary RAID or usage."
"We test live failovers every week, and so far, everything has been running smoothly without anything unexpected."
"The installation of StarWind Virtual SAN was pretty easy, and the configuration was done in no time."
"It's easy to get the tool started."
"The speed, storage, and management are the most valuable features."
"The automation is a valuable feature, it's interesting."
"The most valuable feature is that you can manage the whole cluster from the traffic interconnect."
"Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is simple to use, user-friendly and has been best for our purposes."
"I find the usability very valuable."
"The possibility to share the workload is one of its most valuable features. We have many applications which have need of workloads only a few times in a month, so we share HyperFlex with them."
"It is a stable and scalable solution."
"The most valuable feature is that it is software-defined storage. Also, being able to do maintenance on the fly is a real benefit: migrating off, updating, and then moving the guest back on to the nodes."
"The scalability of the solution is most valuable."
"Storage virtualization software with a good storage management feature. It's a scalable and stable software."
"The most valuable feature for our customers is vMotion. It allows them to shut down virtual machines and migrate them to others servers."
"The most valuable features are ease of deployment, and ease of management. If you compare it to other software-defined storage products, it's much easier. It's a checkbox. It's lot easier to manage."
"VMware comes with different stacks like VMware Cloud Foundation, which is integrated with different VMware modules. There's interoperability between VMware products."
"The solution is easy to use."
"One of the most valuable features of this solution is that it is stable."
"The management console of StarWind Virtual SAN is pretty complex."
"I'd love to see native export of metrics (via Prometheus or something of that nature) to allow us to get more metrics available on our existing dashboard software."
"It would be helpful if StarWind provided more precise and detailed documentation explaining how to configure the solution in various scenarios, including the advantages and disadvantages of each."
"It took a bit of knowledge and support to put in place but once installed it works fine. Migration (HyperV) from one server to another sometimes takes longer than expected but there is no data loss even if the host crashes."
"A great feature would be a wizard and to include a new disk in the SAN. At the moment, including a new disk requires several steps - some that must be done at the OS level and others in each node."
"One main thing this product needs to work on is reporting."
"I would like to see some additional, and possibly clearer, implementation videos with some slower and possibly more detailed descriptions of what the various steps of implementation are for someone who is unfamiliar with high availability and failover clustering in Windows."
"It would be great to have more automated tooling around managing the iSCSI connections in Windows"
"We would like HyperFlex to connect the storage directly into Fabric Interconnect along with the features of the solution. We have enough ports in HyperFlex. We don't want to buy another set of switches to connect to Fabric Interconnect, complicating the solution."
"There is a VMware plugin for HyperFlex, which sometimes it hangs up in our environment, and doesn't function well."
"The scalability could use improvement."
"The architecture separates data, computing, memory, and storage into different parts."
"Lacks some integration and documentation could be improved."
"I have been receiving a memory overflow message every day when I use the solution."
"When it comes to customer needs, the licensing price could be better."
"We'd like the product to offer better integration with other products."
"Customers who are using Essentials Plus or even Essentials have to pay for technical support. However, they should not have to pay for support."
"I would love for this product to be cheaper and easier to configure."
"Its installation should be easier, and its price should be cheaper. It would be good for the product if they can include the data locality feature."
"I would like to see a little bit more documentation on the initial setup, and a little bit more explanation on the expandability: How to extend out your vSAN much more simply through the console because, a lot of the time, you have to do it through the command line."
"Disaster recovery needs to be improved, when there is a crisis, there is a problem with what is the quickest way to get out of it."
"One thing in vSAN that I would like to improve is using vSAN as a repository for files or other things. For example, with Horizon, maybe we can save profiles with UEM on there. That would be a good feature that I would like."
"The pricing model is sometimes a challenge for us because their licenses are very costly."
"We are facing some problems with updates with the VMware vSAN. When we upgraded from version 6.5 to 7, we have been faced with many problems. They have been deploying many hotfixes for this version, and they need to continue to improve this version."
Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is ranked 8th in HCI with 90 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 226 reviews. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is rated 8.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series 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 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. See our Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series vs. VMware vSAN report.
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