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.
"The top-notch support before, during, and after deployments are better than any other vendor I have come across."
"The most valuable feature is the reliable storage replication, which enables me to create a robust infrastructure to run our business."
"It has a nice, simple control panel. You can clearly see the state and health of storage along with the synchronization."
"The configuration is so much simpler than that of a traditional SAN with fewer points of failure to worry about."
"The StarWind VSAN is always up and allows us to move VMS to other nodes for maintenance, without interruption to service."
"StarWind vSAN was very easy to integrate into our system and ran flawlessly during our entire use time."
"The available GUI is excellent for monitoring and operating the system in an easy and direct way."
"It allows you to use ANY consumer or enterprise HDDs and SSDs, and that's a really great thing!"
"The flexibility is its most valuable feature; the ability to quickly deploy a number of help machines. It is not constrained by what we want to do."
"By configuring networks, we are saving power."
"The solution scales extremely well."
"Overall, the solution is extremely easy, flexible and secure."
"On the VDI side, because the storage is local to the HyperFlex, it was very easy and convenient. The performance is exceptional."
"This is not the only product we use, so we have other solutions to compare it with. We can compare different products and different vendors and tell our customers which products have which advantages and disadvantages so that they can leverage these products in their own environment. This product helps us to understand the customer's needs and what issues they can run into."
"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 most valuable feature for our company is that it works internally. We have a lot of internal projects for optimization."
"Being able to perform upgrades and check the system through the VxRail Manager has been very helpful."
"VxRail has high performance and has great efficiency. There is a single place for us to manage all of our virtual machines. The ability to right-size instead of overcommit VMs is a large benefit."
"The most valuable feature is that it is VMware-embedded. VxRail HCI is on VMware, and we can use VMware vCenter and vSphere. Our infrastructure consists of servers and VMware, and by using VxRail, our experience and familiarity have not changed because VxRail HCI is on VMware."
"The update process is very convenient."
"It's a turnkey solution, which is good for customers, because they are buying into stability."
"VxRail is a simple, efficient solution. It's easy to upgrade and scale the solution. If we increase our user base, we can easily scale it out. We have several thousand using it now."
"VxRail can be used for application modernization."
"The stability is very good. We haven't had any issues at all. There aren't bugs or glitches. There aren't system crashes or anything of that nature."
"They need to invest more in the support documents for real issues happening when integrating the solution with the hypervisor."
"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."
"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."
"For me, the product could be improved by it being made cheaper."
"I wish the sync after a failure, such as hardware failure or power-related issues, for example, was faster."
"An extended trial period would serve as a way to get clean insights into the technology's adaptability and alignment with their specific needs before committing to long-term integration."
"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"
"I wish they would improve the documentation for the beginner level as it's not very clear on the web page."
"Stability is really poor, especially the storage stability. We lost data. There were disruptions of clusters and that's one big pain point of the solution. It's not stable enough, the documentation is not good, there's not much documentation available. For every call we need a tech engineer."
"We need to be able to scale out and not just up. When you want to scale up or scale out, you are quite limited."
"The infrastructure team thinks that there are a lot of issues."
"Cisco should combine its features with its prices."
"One aspect that really needs to be looked at, is to fix the bugs issue."
"We would like to see better integration in the next release of this solution."
"Sometimes when there are multiple technologies involved in a support case, this is when there is a bit of a lag."
"Does not support the stretch cluster, and the interface is not good."
"What I find very valuable is VxRail's life cycle management. The life cycle management takes care of everything from firmware to the actual upgrading of the hypervisor and keeps everything up to level."
"It needs faster deployment of security patches."
"They need to keep upgrading the environment and improving automation so that the solution keeps getting better and better."
"Obtaining support was hindered by the frequent changes to the hotline numbers."
"The price could be better. The backup mechanism could also be better. Some of our clients prefer to work with backup software from a different vendor. They don't do a built-in backup solution. It would be better if they had guidelines on proper sizing and the whole life cycle from the requirement collection. If there aren't any proper guidelines, how do I go to the customer and evaluate their existing infrastructure? How can you do appropriate sizing to migrate to a hyper-converged environment? I think this is a requirement because most of our clients are migrating to a hyper-converged environment. In the next release, they can improve absolutely anything you can think of to improve the product in general—for example, the clusters and backup software."
"It can be a bit complex for engineers who are new to it. There's a learning curve involved. They have to learn to operate it."
"The requirements need improvement. Some of the managers of VMs are a little sensitive to where they need to be placed in the environment and what names they need to have. I would like a little more control over that so that it fits into our naming scheme and it fits our organizational structure within vSphere."
"They should have better compatibility with other processors, such as AMD processors."
More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Pricing and Cost Advice →
Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] is ranked 8th in HCI with 90 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 117 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. See our Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] vs. VxRail report.
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