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.
"The solution offers easy one-click PowerShell scripts that are ready to run."
"It's quite easy to install."
"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."
"The management and monitoring have been very easy since the solution's dashboard is very simple and user-friendly."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a very easy-to-use solution that can be quickly and easily deployed and configured without intimate and specific knowledge in the virtualization sphere."
"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."
"Their support staff is comprised of true experts who can also communicate clearly."
"Having the ability to scale horizontally if needed is a huge plus for future growth."
"It is a stable solution...It is a scalable solution."
"Offers very good data protection and provides system uptime availability effectively."
"Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is simple to use, user-friendly and has been best for our purposes."
"The management feature is the solution's most valuable aspect."
"The solution scales extremely well."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the connectivity, consistency, and that we now have fewer vulnerabilities on the network."
"I love the Cisco design, the visual interface to manage and use the platform."
"It is a stable and scalable solution."
"Stretched Cluster is one of the big features that we use across multiple data centers."
"Instead of going for SAN storage, customers can use the scale-up and scale-out features of VMware vSAN."
"IOPS is comparatively best to run VDI solution."
"We don't have to order a storage system, we can just use whatever we have on hand and roll it into our virtualization system."
"Allows us to implement more quickly, and to ease the maintenance."
"The vSAN features we've found most helpful are live application migrations and storage policies. It has storage, policies, application, and DRS policies. Automation is there."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"Technical support is good."
"Scaling the product is fairly easy except for the computing aspect. It would entail another appliance. While not a show stopper, it isn't as easy as dropping in a few extra SSDs."
"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 can be better for the free tier."
"StarWind offers the Enterprise-level high availability (HA), deployed and easily configured .maintain and update and with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings a the cost of a Highly Available HCI solution down to a very cost effective point" Having used Starwind Virtual SAN for many years both for clients and for internal systems it has always done exactly what it set out to do, provide a cost effect way to run a HCI storage platform for almost any hypervisor, but it is most effective with Hyper-V, simple, easy to use, -.software monitoring should be web based to be reachable from any workstation in VLAN."
"I would like to see more user-friendly dashboards in future versions."
"StarWind Virtual SAN could benefit from better integration with other tools and technologies, such as backup and disaster recovery solutions."
"The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us."
"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."
"They should give us a little more information about how to use the CLI and offer more commands."
"The documentation could be substantially better, but the product itself does everything it needs to do."
"The scalability could use improvement."
"Lacks some integration and documentation could be improved."
"I would like for them to develop integration with other technologies, like SD Access. It's still lacking an enhancement management player."
"Maybe a better version is required to gather all of the information to allow HyperFlex to bring everything online more rapidly."
"I would like to see more analytics. It could use better infographs in the HyperFlex Connect on how traffic is running in the network. If you were reaching any capacity issues on the Fabric Interconnects, it should be able to cool all of the servers and Fabric Interconnects, then possibly integrate it with, e.g., Nexus Series switches. This should all be available in a single pane of glass."
"Its price could be better."
"I have used the VMware Replication but I can't get it to work properly. The process should be simplified."
"In a future release, they can bring in the object storage capabilities to this solution. Currently, there is not any compatibility."
"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."
"They should make the software updates easier. We should be able to upgrade it more easily."
"Reporting currently depends on third party applications and that could be improved."
"There are certain shortcomings in the stability of the product where improvements are required."
"The platform's cost affects the business. This particular area needs improvement."
"I would like to see some of the more traditional SAN functions that are out the now. I can list them: being able to Snapshot on the back-end, better de-dupe, and better compression. Those are the major ones."
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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