We performed a comparison between Azure Stack HCI and VxRail based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."Being hardware agnostic is a must and definitely scored points for us."
"A typical system administrator with minimal experience in Hyper-V, VMware, or Windows can do VSAN configuration and maintain VSAN operations."
"It has great free trials that allow end users to test a large variety of their products before deciding to buy the full product."
"With an uptime of 384 days, StarWind has improved overall server reliability."
"It's quite easy to manage."
"The iSCSI protocol is quite simple to configure."
"PowerShell library is pretty good feature as I created with APC PowerChute a script to put volumes on maintenance mode then turning off the StarWind nodes together with the VM and Hosts when UPS reaches 15 percent, this way after a blackout or electrical problems when turning servers on again, there is no issues for syncing or data loss due to energy interrupts."
"The product's core feature of virtualizing our storage is by far the most valuable."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is its ability to manage VMs."
"The solution has the latest processor."
"In my hybrid cloud setup, there are three features I've found very efficient. The first is software-defined networking. Similar to Azure where you create virtual networks and software load balancing, Azure Stack HCI lets you configure them with a drag-and-drop experience on the on-premises cluster. That's one of the good feature."
"We were able to speed up our gaming software, which was a big plus."
"It has a valuable deduplication feature."
"The solution is easy to use. When turning on a server or a machine that is required for, deployment or quality assurance, the dynamic deployment of resources is good."
"My customers use it for VDI. It has been very usable and very fast to use with VDI. On the VxRail side also, it has been very fast."
"The most compelling aspect of VxRail lies in its unwavering guarantee of sustained performance for my systems, regardless of their geographical distribution."
"The updating of the features was one aspect of the solution that made us decide to use it."
"VxRail is an agile solution with easily scalable, simplify operations with software driven automation and lower operational cost."
"It is very powerful. We find that to be the most valuable aspect. The movement of devices between nodes is very easy."
"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."
"Performance when in storage-separate configuration needs to be improved."
"I would like to see some additional, and possibly clearer, implementation videos with some slower and possibly more detailed descriptions of what the various steps of implementation are for someone who is unfamiliar with high availability and failover clustering in Windows."
"The system performs as expected, but we're always looking for performance improvements regarding the best utilization of NVMe disks."
"The main thing I would like to see improved is the level of documentation."
"I would like an automated installation/configuration despite the fact that their service is very collaborative, a customer should be able to deploy the solution by themselves."
"StarWind currently has a Windows native application that it uses for management. There is not a web-based GUI at this time."
"I wish they would improve the documentation for the beginner level as it's not very clear on the web page."
"There are a lot of areas for improvement. Since I've been working very closely with this product, there are many areas, especially in software-defined networking. We had to improve multiple areas because we depended on the service fabric cluster to manage the software-defined network. That means we're already running a hypervisor inside a VM, and we're managing the control plane of the software-defined network. That's another cluster. So, multiple layers make the complexity more. So, from an operational perspective, it's very difficult to manage."
"The product's initial setup phase can be a bit complex, making it an area where improvements are required."
"We faced multiple problems with the product’s stability."
"The licensing is a bit too costly."
"I wish for the performance environment to be improved."
"In the version that I was working with, the integrations are in need of improvement."
"VxRail could be easier to set up. It's tricky to configure the network properly and match the requirements."
"Integration could be improved."
"Pricing could be improved."
"The solution should facilitate the separate expansion of computing and storage."
"I would love to see license migration from one host to another."
Azure Stack HCI is ranked 17th in HCI with 3 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 121 reviews. Azure Stack HCI is rated 8.4, while VxRail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Azure Stack HCI writes "Performs well, provides good features, and has the latest processor". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". Azure Stack HCI is most compared with VMware vSAN and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, whereas VxRail is most compared with Dell PowerFlex, VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and HPE Hyper Converged. See our Azure Stack HCI vs. VxRail report.
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