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 product creates opportunities with hybrid on-premise solutions."
"One of the most valuable features is the way it sets up the virtual SAN, because we don't have to buy a separate appliance for storage. It uses the existing storage on the servers, which is definitely a cost savings for us."
"The StarWind VSAN is always up and allows us to move VMS to other nodes for maintenance, without interruption to service."
"The product gave us a cost-effective way to deploy a highly available server environment."
"The management interface on the software is very simple. It is insanely simple compared to most SANs. The interface is also powerful when used to complete tasks that an IT administrator needs to complete."
"StarWind vSAN is a great solution to create a redundant two-node-only Hyper-V cluster, both for domain or workgroup scenarios."
"StarWind vSAN has a lot of great features and is a perfect solution for mirroring internal disks and flash between servers."
"I've had to open a few support cases over the years due to administrator errors, and the support received was top-notch."
"The technical support has been helpful. We are always able to get through to the right person."
"I like Cisco Intersight."
"With our four HyperFlex HX hosts (consisting of processor, memory, and disk), the performance is very fast and we have no problems at all. In all of the five years that we have been using HyperFlex, we haven't needed to increase our budget to buy additional hosts."
"It is a complete package. For any kind of on-premises hyper-converged solution, we usually have to separate networks, but Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is a complete solution. It has its own network and storage. The storage part is the most valuable feature."
"Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is simple to use, user-friendly and has been best for our purposes."
"Easily facilitates remote work opportunities with storage and compute resources."
"It is a stable solution...It is a scalable solution."
"The compute storage and virtualization come all in one box."
"The ability to have an HA cluster in the absence of a shared storage device or SAN."
"I like the scalability and the fact that it reduces your total cost for storage over several years."
"You get the benefit of local storage, but you have the protection of shared storage."
"If we decide to expand, vSAN could offer us some flexibility. We are researching ways to set this up from a new data center, which is located somewhere different from the current location right now."
"It is easy to work with, easy to handle, and easy to manage."
"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."
"The scalability of the solution is most valuable."
"The product’s most valuable features are performance and expandability."
"I did not see any indication that StarWinds vSAN is a usable solution with non-GUI instances of Hyper-V."
"When you will cease your contract with StarWind (for support) your product won't be updated and that is a big selling point, especially for us, as we have loads of products from StarWind."
"There should be publicly available tutorials on YouTube or other platforms that help the users to integrate this solution with other platforms, for example."
"Performance when in storage-separate configuration needs to be improved."
"In all areas the product could be made faster."
"We have, in rare cases, received conflicting guidance between different support folks within StarWind."
"Updating the software can be a bit tricky."
"Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer."
"We would like HyperFlex to connect the storage directly into Fabric Interconnect along with the features of the solution. We have enough ports in HyperFlex. We don't want to buy another set of switches to connect to Fabric Interconnect, complicating the solution."
"The deployment could be made a little bit easier, as we still seem to struggle with it a little bit for a day or so to get it running."
"I have been receiving a memory overflow message every day when I use the solution."
"I would rate the installation of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series an eight out of ten. It can be complex."
"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."
"We are moving further out with more cloud solutions, so we need HyperFlex to be more cloud-connected. They should develop more connection to Amazon Web Services and Google cloud because our customers use their services and are moving in that direction."
"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 can be complex."
"There needs to be an increase in the supported memory and hard disk space, as it is an area where the product currently has certain shortcomings."
"In a future release, they can bring in the object storage capabilities to this solution. Currently, there is not any compatibility."
"The updating process could be easier."
"We would like to see even more storage capacity."
"Based on my testing, I would like to expand deduplication to include hybrid deployments and not just for all-flash deployments."
"I would like to see more comprehensive lifecycle management. The current path and process for upgrading or updating the firmware, as well as the storage controller software to interact with that firmware, is fairly manual and not very well documented. A little more time and effort spent on the documentation of the lifecycle management for vSan would be really great."
"The price for the hard drive, for vSAN, is very expensive."
"VMware vSAN could improve by having faster reload time and a single point of failure. Resynchronization of many hardware could be better. If you have an outage of a disc or a full system, the replication time is too slow. This has room for improvement."
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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