We performed a comparison between FlexPod XCS and VxRail based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, NetApp, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others in Converged Infrastructure."We enjoy the standardization and having things consistent across the whole data center sphere."
"It has never fallen out from under us when we were trying to do a critical push."
"When our clients choose to call NetApp or Cisco directly, the cooperative support model means they can get passed back and forth between the two organizations freely. It works really well."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the stability."
"I like the combination of the brands that they decided to include, in terms of its compatibility, e.g., they integrated UCS into this solution."
"FlexPod's unified support for the entire stack is very important. Before, the customers would log a ticket by Cisco and a ticket by NetApp. It's better when vendors can parter and look for a solution together."
"It simplifies infrastructure from edge to port to cloud. It proves that deployment is easy and straightforward. There isn't any need to do extra work."
"Everything is preconfigured. We can ship it and manage it remotely from any server. It is all in a box."
"The installation process is very quick. When you purchase it, it's up and running without much delay. Adding any additional components is simple, allowing for easy and fast scaling without adding complexity. The centralized management portal makes it easy to manage the entire system."
"VxRail performs well in the VDI environment."
"The stability is very good. We haven't had any issues at all. There aren't bugs or glitches. There aren't system crashes or anything of that nature."
"The technical support is very helpful and answers questions whenever we have issues with the product."
"It supports VDI deployment, enabling easy use for running different platforms in similar environments."
"The technical support from Dell was very good."
"VxRail does not require fiber switches or external storage. It's easy to replace and manage. It's centralized management through VxRail Manager."
"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."
"The solution could be improved by including automation for user updates."
"FlexPod can improve with a single control management interface to manage all aspects and components of the solution."
"Something that we struggle with because we're a relatively small scale organization and the administrative effort is spread across so many different pieces of infrastructure, it would be nice to have a set of tools that enables us to get a little bit more information out of our system."
"The interface is a little convoluted."
"I would also like to feel more support. NetApp has been pretty good, for the most part, but Cisco has more work to do. I've had very good experience with NetApp. Instead of having to call three different areas and saying, "I'm a FlexPod customer." It would be nice if it could be just one that gets routed. I know it would require three large companies to work together, but that's what would make this product a ten. They could definitely use with making it more user-friendly."
"I think they can always improve, whether it's dedupe or compression, those algorithms; and flash through better SSDs."
"If you have expertise setting up such environments, then you are good, but for customers or novices, it becomes a nightmare and stuff may actually be left out."
"Not a ten because it could always be cheaper, it could always be faster."
"It could be improved by having more information on the integration portion of ACI."
"One challenge customers face with VxRail is the high cost of scalability. The price is higher if they want to add memory or capacity after purchasing the tool for three or five years. Each drive and RAM module is licensed separately, making the architecture costly. It would benefit Dell to review this licensing model and make it more cost-effective and flexible for customers."
"This solution needs to have the capability where even older versions of hardware can be seamlessly utilized and additional expansion becomes so much easier."
"The licensing is a bit too costly."
"If we could have some out of the box ideas in integration, I think that would be a great feature."
"There is a limitation on the number of nodes."
"We do not use the storage part of VxRail, we use Pure Storage to map out the VxRail because the disk performance from Pure Storage was far better than the performance of the disk on the inside of VxRail."
"I can't speak to any missing features or weak aspects of the system just yet. We haven't had a chance to really dig in."
FlexPod XCS is ranked 2nd in Converged Infrastructure with 295 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 121 reviews. FlexPod XCS is rated 8.6, while VxRail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of FlexPod XCS writes "Integrates everything so you are using fewer tools". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". FlexPod XCS is most compared with Dell PowerFlex, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Oracle Exadata, Dell VxBlock System and Dell PowerEdge VRTX, whereas VxRail is most compared with Dell PowerFlex, VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI).
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