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.
"It also provides a high degree of mobility, as the virtual SAN can be moved relatively painlessly between on-site devices and the cloud."
"Being hardware agnostic is a must and definitely scored points for us."
"It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it."
"The install itself is easy as pie."
"The instant failover, with vSAN copying data to the second node, allowed for the continuous availability of our applications."
"StarWind vSAN is easy to deploy and administer."
"The best feature is its ease of installation and integration within a current infrastructure."
"Given the high availability of the server cluster, we were able to reduce separate physical servers onto one hyper-converged cluster - this saved in OPEX and CAPEX costs immediately, along with licensing costs of the Windows Server licenses."
"The price of the solution is good, especially when it comes to complex network solutions, such as UCS and Connect."
"It is a solution that best suits thre needs of our organization."
"Scalability is easy and simple."
"By configuring networks, we are saving power."
"The scalability of the product is quite good overall - as long as you plan correctly from the outset."
"The possibility to share the workload is one of its most valuable features. We have many applications which have need of workloads only a few times in a month, so we share HyperFlex with them."
"It saves space for data centers, which is good."
"I like Cisco Intersight."
"Being hyperconverged, it simplifies what equipment we have to buy."
"The most valuable feature for our customers is vMotion. It allows them to shut down virtual machines and migrate them to others servers."
"I like vSAN because they release features incrementally, every year, and you don't have to upgrade your hardware to get those features. If you bought a traditional SAN, you would have to upgrade your hardware constantly, every three years: You would get it, and it is how it is for three years. But on vSAN, you upgrade when you have to, when your hardware gets old or when you need more capacity. It's great, you get new features constantly."
"The solution is quite stable."
"To me, VMware is a leader of the visualizations. I think everyone just follow VMware."
"The migration of servers feature makes server rack maintenance easy."
"The scalability is very good and the solution is stable and reliable."
"The valuable features of vSAN are that you can get it up and running quickly, you get redundancy built-in, and it's pretty much the perfect solution for a cluster."
"Management of VSAN itself could be improved. A Web UI for management would be great rather than an application installation. StarWind is testing a command center virtual appliance that I have installed in my environment."
"It took a bit of knowledge and support to put in place but once installed it works fine. Migration (HyperV) from one server to another sometimes takes longer than expected but there is no data loss even if the host crashes."
"It would be great if it provided thin provisioned virtual disks."
"Updates seem to be non-existent."
"They need to improve the speed of the interfaces, thus allowing for better traffic on the network."
"A central management console may be nice to see all nodes."
"The StarWind Management Console is available only for Microsoft Windows/Windows Server, and should also be available for Linux and macOS, as it would reduce implementation costs."
"When StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere nodes go offline unexpectedly, the nodes have to re-sync disks fully which takes a long time. We had a power failure and when both nodes came online, VMware vSphere didn't see StarWind disks before I manually re-scanned them form ESXi administration console even though it should happen automatically"
"Lacks some integration and documentation could be improved."
"Unlike other options, you need to pay a subscription to Cisco yearly instead of paying for the hardware outright, which makes it more expensive in the long run."
"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."
"Does not support the stretch cluster, and the interface is not good."
"Cisco's technical support originally was outstanding, but it has declined over the last 12 months. I've heard they're trying to do better, but I haven't been overly impressed with their support recently for HyperFlex."
"Their technical support is very bad. We had an issue where instead of an engineer we got a PDF "doctor" that didn't know anything about our problem which was very frustrating."
"The architecture separates data, computing, memory, and storage into different parts."
"Its price could be better."
"The price for the hard drive, for vSAN, is very expensive."
"Better options would be clustered nodes, or even cloud configuration. There is room for improvement in cloud configuration, we typically do web browsing for management."
"The solution functions as the marketing says, as long as you follow certain rules."
"It could have some automation. We haven't involved ourselves in a lot of automation around the vSAN environment capabilities. We're still running it using a very traditional setup. So, there could be some plugins to automate it using third-party environments, such as Jenkins."
"There is room for improvement in vSAN's ability to debug. When it's not working well, debugging becomes quite challenging. Identifying issues when it's lagging or not functioning properly can be difficult."
"If we have some complicated issues, you have to use the command lines interface. Not everything is possible to be fixed in the GUI. This is a drawback, that some things have to be fixed via command-line interface and should be able to be done in the GUI."
"Perhaps they could provide encryption without having to use an encryption manager."
"We do see weird things crop up every now and again. It will say that a drive gets kicked off even though it's fine, and we have to re-add it."
Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is ranked 8th in HCI with 90 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 226 reviews. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is rated 8.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series 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 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. See our Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series vs. VMware vSAN report.
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