We performed a comparison between NetApp HCI [EOL] and VxRail based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI."The main benefit is that StarWind is almost maintenance-free."
"The features that I found most valuable are ease of use of the software that StarWind offers - with the first setup being a bit painful."
"It also provides a seamless and efficient solution for personal storage requirements, showcasing the versatility and scalability of my Virtual SAN configuration."
"StarWind allows us to move virtual machines from one physical host to another, which greatly reduces the downtime required for maintenance."
"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 biggest benefit was that it allowed us to provide SAN services on a limited hardware budget."
"The management and monitoring have been very easy since the solution's dashboard is very simple and user-friendly."
"The support team is available to solve any problem efficiently."
"When you are doing lifecycles for your equipment, you can just swap out pieces of equipment. We used to do one big iron to another big iron, and that's a major migration hassle. Whereas, with this environment, you can go with small nodes, one at a time, and do a refresh."
"The solution integrates well with all the other applications that we use on our environment."
"Simple setup and having the storage and compute right on one deployment is the most valuable aspect of this solution. They're able to get set up and ready to go and start having their DevOp team deploy to that environment."
"It has reduced our hypervisor footprint by around 20%."
"NetApp HCI is a stable solution."
"HCI definitely improved how flexible we scale, and our entrance into the cloud. The features are very rich, in terms of both avenues. It's helped us flexibly move and shift our workloads around, back and forth."
"Our goal with NetApp HCI is to have no single point of failure."
"The solution is very scalable."
"We enjoy the ease of management since all of the resources are located on one box — one single point of support."
"The pricing is very, very good."
"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."
"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."
"I like the new releases that Dell EMC is doing with VMware. They are allowing for flexibility across the hybrid cloud. This allows organizations to use containers and to be able to move into the public cloud, but also not have lock-in. They can come back to the private cloud when they want to, so it's creating a lot of flexibility across the stack."
"The implementation was quick, we used a checklist and it took approximately one hour."
"VxRail's integration with VMware environments is very good. Our VxRail is built on VMware, and the integration is seamless. We haven't faced any challenges. We can migrate VMs between servers in real-time and replicate them to our DR site without any problems."
"One beneficial feature is that the solution can handle complex environments."
"I am expecting to see it more user-friendly in the future."
"Initially, when we first started, the sync was horrible."
"I would like additional documentation regarding possible networking configurations with 10GbE switching."
"It could have a dashboard so that you can check all servers' SAN health and performance."
"This is a great product."
"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."
"I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit."
"Proper training sessions should be included with the licensing."
"It would be great if they took something like kernel storage and integrated straight into the NetApp as well."
"The deployment process has room for improvement. I would like for it to be a cookie-cutter deployment."
"It would be nice to have better access to tutorials and a test environment for simulations."
"My biggest pain point is the installation part. I would like to see the appliance itself remove the entire switch that goes behind it and figure out how to do all the cluster interconnects within the box itself."
"I would like to see higher level graphics support because we are going to be doing some virtual desktop for our CAD software, and I want to be able to support AutoCAD and Cantillo on remote desktop machines."
"To improve the product, they should make it more flexible."
"The vCenter keeps crashing, meaning that there is no stability in our environment."
"I would like for them to fall a little closer to like the VMware release model. The new features and new solutions tend to come from the VMware side. I would like for NetApp to follow along closely with VMware's release schedule."
"The version upgrade process should be simplified."
"I would like to have a unified platform where I, for example, can manage my 50 stores from a single portal in VxRail and be able to apply all the updates at once. I want to unify them into a centralized console."
"The initial setup was not that easy, it was a medium difficulty level."
"Having a native replication would be an improvement."
"Sometimes during implementation, you can some scripting errors. And there are some issues when we update the version. There are some issues like the version will not get updated or stable at some time. Dell needs to resolve these problems, we don't waste time fixing them."
"Technically speaking, the vCenter and the administration of the integration of the vCenter could be improved."
"It would be an improvement if VxRail could be integrated with some other hypervisors and not just with VMware."
"In the next release, I would like to see our graphical user interface allow us to manage VxRail clusters and everything on a single pane of glass where I can monitor and shut down the server, similar to a VxRail manager."
Earn 20 points
NetApp HCI [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in HCI with 32 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 121 reviews. NetApp HCI [EOL] is rated 8.0, while VxRail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of NetApp HCI [EOL] writes "Ease of provisioning has allowed us to implement large installations in a very short time frame". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". NetApp HCI [EOL] is most compared with , whereas VxRail is most compared with Dell PowerFlex, VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and HPE Hyper Converged.
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