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.
"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."
"Without the need for any downtime, enterprises can simply grow their storage infrastructure using StarWind Virtual SAN by adding new servers or disks to the current infrastructure."
"The Windows-based StarWind GUI is easy to use and understand and integrates seamlessly with VMware's vSphere portal as well."
"The most valuable feature is the reliable storage replication, which enables me to create a robust infrastructure to run our business."
"The product has improved the ability to mimic physical SAN environments to demo scenarios and troubleshoot problems."
"It is extremely stable."
"Training is also easy as it is just one system to learn."
"The StarWind Virtual SAN management console is intuitive and easy to use."
"I find the usability very valuable."
"The management from the switches to the hyper-convergence solutions are quite good and well-developed."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the connectivity, consistency, and that we now have fewer vulnerabilities on the network."
"Deduplication is a valuable feature available in Cisco HyperFlex."
"It's very easy to use and quite a mature product."
"It is a stable solution...It is a scalable solution."
"The most important benefits that we've seen from this solution is that it reduces the cost of management and it has easy monitoring systems."
"The compute storage and virtualization come all in one box."
"VxRail's technical support is very good."
"The pricing is very, very good."
"The scalability of VxRail is very good."
"The VxRail is built on two specific platforms that have been in the industry for the last 15 to 20 years: the 1-U socket and the 2-U socket platforms from Dell. They're in their sixteenth generation of those platforms, I believe, so they're very stable."
"It helps simplify the management of VMware."
"The tool's price is competitive and it is easy to use."
"When we have a resource contention, we can easily increase the capacity."
"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 most disappointing side of the application is the free edition. There used to be GUI attached. That has recently changed to only CLI management of the application."
"The logs can also become very noisy when there is an issue, which is very infrequent."
"The product can include a more simple way of synchronization after a forced shutdown as the current process has a few more steps to check that hosts have synchronized and this can be automated."
"I wish the sync after a failure, such as hardware failure or power-related issues, for example, was faster."
"The initial setup got a little confusing at a few points with differences between the VMware version in documentation vs the latest, etc."
"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."
"Improvements in documentation and support resources could enhance the user experience."
"StarWind Command Center's single-pane management solution only works with Hyper-V."
"Cisco is quite expensive but not in the initial first buy."
"I would have liked it to be able to back up the system to a cloud, to be able to work from any other place"
"Sometimes when there are multiple technologies involved in a support case, this is when there is a bit of a lag."
"One aspect that really needs to be looked at, is to fix the bugs issue."
"Some of our customers do not want to adopt the Cisco ACI solution. They want to manage Cisco HyperFlex by integrating it with their own management solution."
"A stretch function is really needed. Germans think that because of the high availability and the security that two data centers are better but we want edge all in one cluster. This is a needed feature, the cluster feature, and we'd also like to see a possibility for ROBO offices."
"We are operating two clusters for site resiliency. I would like to support running redundant/resilient vCenter server instances on each rather than a supported external server."
"The pricing is pretty expensive."
"Its price needs to be improved. It is very expensive. NSX should be licensed together. It will make the network virtualization layer more usable. It would be better if they come together in a bundle, not separately."
"Having a native replication would be an improvement."
"There could be better documentation and they should allow everyone to access the simulator."
"We'd like to see more automation capabilities in the future."
"VxRail is a closed system with an out-of-the -box solution approach, it has basic 3 layers, Hardware, Network, Storage, Software, (Virtualizing) Applications. Release notes and improvement tips, patches from the back office, the business units, should be frequent and up to the patches which are coming from different vendors as far as the operating system application and also the technology itself is concerned."
"I would like to see Dell take a crack at simplifying the process of moving from a node to a cluster and assembling everything into the appliance. It would be great if Dell could provide a pathway where a customer could actually install it without the certifications. Of course, I can't say how you would dumb down something so complex."
"Lacks integration of licenses so that it's an expensive solution."
"My main issue so far is that the installation created a default datacenter name of "Marvin" and it cannot be changed."
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 120 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 VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and HPE Hyper Converged.
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