We performed a comparison between Cisco Hyperflex HX series and VxRail based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: In our comparison, VxRail is the preferred solution. VxRail is easy to use and performs well without causing undue stress to operating systems. The competitive price and overall cost-effectiveness make it an easy choice for many organizations.
"The most important feature is the ability to experience the loss of one node or one storage device, and not lose the entire cluster."
"StarWind allows us to move virtual machines from one physical host to another, which greatly reduces the downtime required for maintenance."
"The product gave us a cost-effective way to deploy a highly available server environment."
"We are able to do maintenance by bringing down one node at a time, rather than having to schedule a complete shutdown."
"StarWind is very easy to use, even if you have had no experience using a SAN before."
"StarWind Virtual SAN (vSAN) offers a significant breadth of features."
"This product now allows us to migrate virtual machines between nodes as if we had a dedicated $100,000 SAN in the mix without the additional cost and management of the SAN."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a highly flexible solution, as it can be deployed on physical servers or on top of virtual machines running on hypervisors such as VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V."
"The most valuable feature of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is the integration with everything in a much smoother, such as in physical and virtual environments. VMware NSX is a simpler solution but, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is more robust compared to VMware NSX."
"Deduplication is a valuable feature available in Cisco HyperFlex."
"It has reduced the time it takes to put the servers in production by half the time."
"The integration between the storage and the server applications is the most valuable feature of this solution. It cuts down on the necessity to buy a secondary storage system.. It saves money in the long-run."
"Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is simple to use, user-friendly and has been best for our purposes."
"The software defines networking, storage, and processing."
"It is scalable and easy to use."
"The solution is stable."
"When we have a resource contention, we can easily increase the capacity."
"It is scalable. When you are buying it, you have to buy a minimum of three nodes. After that, if you want to add more nodes, you can buy can buy them. You can also add-on additional compute and storage."
"The solution has simplified our operations."
"There is no in-depth config involved nor third-party needed, saving us time and money."
"Dell owns the EMC, EMC owns VMware, and there are many other interconnections throughout the industry which allows a fully integrated solution from a technical perspective."
"Being able to perform upgrades and check the system through the VxRail Manager has been very helpful."
"My customers use it for VDI. It has been very usable and very fast to use with VDI. On the VxRail side also, it has been very fast."
"The stability of VxRail is good, we have not had any issues."
"It would be helpful to have a little more insight into what kind of performance the VSAN cluster is utilizing; something that would be more proactive on our side, versus their ProActive Support."
"It would be nice if we could designate pools, or tiers, for storage of different speeds, and then assign rules to new VMs that would automatically place them into the proper pool."
"You have to do a "full" sync on write-back cache disks instead of a quick sync if there is an issue."
"This product would benefit from having automated alerting functionality."
"The GUI deserves a little love."
"I'm sure it needs bug fixes..."
"StarWind currently has a Windows native application that it uses for management. There is not a web-based GUI at this time."
"It should be improved in the way it detects the right filesystem image after a complete shutdown of the system or in the case of disaster recovery."
"We would like to have the ability to not have to reboot while doing updates. Being able to work through updates with as minimal amount of impact to users."
"I would rate the installation of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series an eight out of ten. It can be complex."
"The problem is that we always have to keep an eye out for new releases to make sure that the version we're running is up-to-date."
"The solution's price could be affordable."
"The pricing is pretty expensive."
"I would like it to be easier to manage the server, create VMs, and manage the VMs on the client."
"Technical support is very good. Not excellent, but good. There's still not enough data available on the web. For example, for the integration to VMware, I had a case recently and I searched for more information but didn't find any."
"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."
"What I find very valuable is VxRail's life cycle management. The life cycle management takes care of everything from firmware to the actual upgrading of the hypervisor and keeps everything up to level."
"I would prefer it if each cell had a tool geared toward billing clients."
"I would like better integration with VCF from VMware, which is the Cloud Foundation tool set, so we can easily provision servers very quickly."
"The way that the VxRail is licensed could be improved."
"We have some issues, but they are possibly out-of-the-box issues. There was a host that was dead on arrival, and there were some file issues on other hosts. We're currently working actively with Dell to resolve all these issues. Once they are resolved, the product should be stable."
"If we could have some out of the box ideas in integration, I think that would be a great feature."
"Sometimes during the upgrade process of VxRail, we experience errors that have nothing to do with reality and I cannot troubleshoot them without calling Dell and bringing in an engineer to figure it out."
"The update for the graphics integration and the media drivers isn't included in the VxRail update."
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 VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 121 reviews. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] is rated 8.0, while VxRail is rated 8.6. 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 VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] is most compared with VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, whereas VxRail is most compared with Dell PowerFlex, VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and HPE Hyper Converged.
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