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.
"For those basic uses, it's simple to set up and manage, and it seems to do a fine job."
"The best feature is its ease of installation and integration within a current infrastructure."
"This solution has a very good user interface, with simple administration/management."
"We can lose a site or even two of our three, and we would lose no data and have no outage."
"Having the ability to scale horizontally if needed is a huge plus for future growth."
"The failover protection and the ability to expand storage and nodes with no downtime are by far the best physical features we have benefited from."
"The management was very easy and I was able to find all that I need in the software dashboard."
"StarWind Virtual SAN offers high availability and data resilience features to prevent data loss if hardware fails."
"Easily facilitates remote work opportunities with storage and compute resources."
"It increases efficiency, decreases the cost, and manages the network in one single way. That's the most important thing."
"The most valuable feature for our company is that it works internally. We have a lot of internal projects for optimization."
"Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is simple to use, user-friendly and has been best for our purposes."
"The compute storage and virtualization come all in one box."
"The compression and deduplication are very high. Therefore, we can use the size of the product more efficiently than other storage solutions."
"Great integration with backup software."
"The workload can handle anything and has an extended capacity."
"I have used VMware for 15 years and I never had any problems with stability."
"Very good VCG notification feature."
"There is not a lot of maintenance required."
"Technical support is good."
"Technical support has been very good. They respond pretty fast, especially if we have a critical issue. Their responses have been great."
"You get the benefit of local storage, but you have the protection of shared storage."
"It is very well known in the industry, and there are a lot of technical resources around it. This is a big thing for me because, at the end of the day, when you implement it, you need to support it."
"The lower skill cost of maintaining it meant that we could do more with the people that we had."
"Sometimes documentation on their site can be out of date."
"If there was one feature I would like to see it would be a built-in subsystem for managing UPS backups shutdown procedures providing a way to initiate VM shutdown on all host servers, shut down the host servers, then put the fault-tolerant mirroring in standby, and finally shut down the StarWind SANs."
"The documentation could be a little more concise, but, for the most part, it just works."
"The console is something that I feel could be improved. There is nothing technically wrong with it, but it can be jazzed up and/or made to be a little more intuitive."
"This is a great product."
"The console is something that I believe could be enhanced."
"It runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear."
"StarWind Virtual SAN architecture is slightly complex and requires the team to carefully identify and study how the solution integrates with VMware vSphere."
"The initial setup is very complex because there were some issues. It is not clear to how set up this solution."
"I would like to see them expand onto the cloud."
"The documentation could be substantially better, but the product itself does everything it needs to do."
"Cisco should combine its features with its prices."
"The initial setup can be complex."
"It needs more detailed documentation."
"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."
"In the next release, I would like to see them able to connect to the public cloud."
"Ease of administration is one area where vSAN could be improved."
"If the support could be provided more quickly, it would be very helpful."
"I would have liked it to have been more scalable. It's scalable but not as much as, for example, the ScaleIO systems were or the Kaminario"
"We would like to see additional backup and recovery options added. In particular, integration with popular applications like databases."
"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."
"The customer service is good but there is a cost for it. It does not come free."
"Hardware load balancing is available on the enterprise version of the solution, however, it's extremely expensive and therefore out of our budget."
"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."
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.
See our list of best HCI vendors.
We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.