We performed a comparison between Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes and VxRail based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The failover protection and the ability to expand storage and nodes with no downtime are by far the best physical features we have benefited from."
"It has allowed us to save a lot of time and money by letting us create a vSAN within a Windows VM on the environment it controls."
"Training is also easy as it is just one system to learn."
"It has allowed me to effectively and confidently manage the maintenance of hosts where I can power off a host and have its VMs migrate to another one."
"It allows you to use ANY consumer or enterprise HDDs and SSDs, and that's a really great thing!"
"The configuration is so much simpler than that of a traditional SAN with fewer points of failure to worry about."
"It includes every feature that a traditional SAN offers and so much more."
"It eliminates the use of expensive physical shared storage."
"Dell EMC VxFlex Ready Nodes can support what we call a heterogeneous environment. So you can have VMware workloads, Hyper-V workloads, bare metal Red Hat workloads, Kubernetes workloads all on the same cluster. You're not pigeonholed into either all bare metal or all virtualized. So it supports basically any platform."
"The most valuable features of Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes are the ease of acquisition."
"One-click upgrade is valuable because upgrading an environment that is considered a traditional one is something that we never do or are never going to complete. It is very time-consuming for my team. With the one-click upgrade, it is much quicker. There are preparation stages, but it takes less time, so we are also saving time in the daily administration."
"VxRail has given us a lot of tools in a one-stop-shop environment."
"Enterprise is a complete solution that includes performance, backups and disaster recovery."
"Updating the product has been very easy."
"I like the managed updates. They are really nice in VxRail. Everything comes packaged and the updates are much easier than with other solutions that I've had to work with."
"There are so many features, but if I have to choose, I would go for scale-out upgrades and performance. Scale-out upgrades are very valuable. Typically, when customers engage in virtualization, they're committing themselves to run many virtual machines on a fewer number of hosts. They'll have five or six hosts, and they will run all their virtualization on vSphere. They could be having anywhere from 50 to 100 or even more virtual machines. Once all these go into production, getting downtime or getting planned maintenance windows is extremely difficult. It is something that typically businesses will frown upon. With VxRail, you can just go ahead and add a node without disrupting the existing environment, which works very well. That's why scale-out upgrades are a key feature. Its performance is also valuable. It delivers a very high number of IOPS for a hybrid configuration or an all-flash configuration. The processors that are available in the Xeon family are very powerful. They are multi-core with typically 2 gigahertz, 2.4 gigahertz, or higher frequency, so the performance is very much appreciated."
"Homogeneity is most valuable. The truth is that having everything in a single cluster helps a lot."
"One beneficial feature is that the solution can handle complex environments."
"Having more support plan options would be nice."
"The software monitoring should be web-based to be reachable from any VLAN workstation."
"If there was one feature I would like to see it would be a built-in subsystem for managing UPS backups shutdown procedures providing a way to initiate VM shutdown on all host servers, shut down the host servers, then put the fault-tolerant mirroring in standby, and finally shut down the StarWind SANs."
"I found that certain browsers are not fully compatible with the administration web access portal."
"For improvement, I would like to see how the software determines which networks to use for which purpose. It seems like the naming terminology changes a bit from here to there."
"The documentation could be better."
"We don't really have any issues with this product."
"Being able to run StarWind vSAN on top of any free UNIX operating system to build a resilient iSCSI/FTP/SMB storage system would be useful."
"From a technical perspective, it's a pretty rock solid solution. I would say the only area for improvement is around its price."
"Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is a little less sophisticated than some of the other solutions out there. A full-blown cloud foundation has a lot more to it."
"The solution should facilitate the separate expansion of computing and storage."
"I would like to see integration with vCenter if possible."
"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."
"The fact that is based on vSAN is the main issue of this solution."
"You have to buy a new server if you want to scale up."
"The solution should offer more integration with other virtual software. VxRail runs just with VMware, however, maybe it should integrate with Hyper-V or with KVM as well."
"You cannot install another operating system such as Microsoft or Hyperflex or Nutanix. We have also had a hardware problem."
"We would like to see integrating with Nutanix. Currently, we are working on integrating the two to see if there is any value in doing so."
Earn 20 points
Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is ranked 20th in HCI while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 121 reviews. Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is rated 9.0, while VxRail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes writes "Single platform for a mix of virtualized and physical workloads". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is most compared with VMware vSAN and HPE Alletra dHCI, whereas VxRail is most compared with Dell PowerFlex, VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and HPE Alletra dHCI. See our Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes vs. VxRail report.
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