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.
"It has a nice, simple control panel. You can clearly see the state and health of storage along with the synchronization."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a highly flexible solution, as it can be deployed on physical servers or on top of virtual machines running on hypervisors such as VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V."
"A great feature is that I basically set it and forget it, as everything is automatic."
"The most valuable feature is the fact that the nodes are Active/Active, and allow us to do upgrades on any node without any downtime."
"StarWind vSAN was very easy to integrate into our system and ran flawlessly during our entire use time."
"It has reduced the amount of switching, network connections, etc., because the converged StarWind Virtual SAN allows us to connect high-speed network interfaces between different boxes instead of having to connect SANs via the network, then connect those two clusters together."
"Using our own choice of HW allowed us to price our service to answer our customers' needs."
"Without the need for any downtime, enterprises can simply grow their storage infrastructure using StarWind Virtual SAN by adding new servers or disks to the current infrastructure."
"Cisco HyperFlex is helping us to put everything in centrally so that we can manage in one place."
"The solution scales extremely well."
"Deduplication is a valuable feature available in Cisco HyperFlex."
"The product is easy to manage and flexible for upgrading without major changes."
"The most valuable feature of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is its performance."
"The integration between the storage and the server applications is the most valuable feature of this solution. It cuts down on the necessity to buy a secondary storage system.. It saves money in the long-run."
"It saves space for data centers, which is good."
"The initial setup is easy."
"The product's initial setup phase was very straightforward."
"The product’s most valuable features are performance and expandability."
"I like the orchestration feature."
"When we do to do more scaled load testing, we can run more dense workloads and still have the same results across all specific nodes"
"The feature we have found most valuable is the compatibility of VMware products with VCF and VMware Cloud Foundation."
"It is very easy to set up and very easy to use. It is very useful."
"vSAN is one of the easiest implementations of any VMware product. It's almost like click it to enable it, then you're almost done."
"The scalability is very good and the solution is stable and reliable."
"Some of the documentation seems to be a bit older and refers to deprecated items."
"I would like to see an extensive set of cmdlets that could allow for easier automation as well as status management."
"Maybe in the future, the replication will be supported in more cloud providers."
"I wish they would improve the documentation for the beginner level as it's not very clear on the web page."
"The product can include a more simple way of synchronization after a forced shutdown as the current process has a few more steps to check that hosts have synchronized and this can be automated."
"I'm sure it needs bug fixes..."
"Performance when in storage-separate configuration needs to be improved."
"In the next release, they could make some graphs of the real-time loading, speed of storage, and interfaces. Of course, these can be viewed in other places. But, in the event of a malfunction or troubleshooting, this would be convenient."
"The infrastructure team thinks that there are a lot of issues."
"They can't get a POC to work because there are big latencies between the two sites we have. Even though we have a private fiber connection and everything else works well, they can't get the two products to talk to each other. They are not able to build it up. It looks like it's a firmware issue. They said it isn't but now it's looking like it is. I hope we can sort it out."
"If we could have just a single pane of glass, where everything can be managed through that one app, rather than have multiple apps, it would be great."
"This solution is lacking in replication and backup abilities that I would like to see in a future release similar to HPE SimpliVity."
"It would have been nice if the product provided some cloud integrations."
"I have been receiving a memory overflow message every day when I use the solution."
"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 solution could improve by having more customization."
"One area that could be improved is the management feature."
"The technical support, it's not satisfactory. Whenever we raise a ticket it takes a lot of time to have an engineer get involved sometimes, or we receive a less experienced engineer. We then have to repeat the situation to the next engineer which all takes time."
"The pricing model is sometimes a challenge for us because their licenses are very costly."
"More focus has to be put on deduplication and compression with a hybrid architecture."
"A vSAN cluster must have compression and deduplication to be an all-flash array, but it's not supported with a hybrid array. Deduplication and compression work better with an all-flash array, so I think that VMware should give customers the option to activate and support this feature for hybrid arrays. Other products like Nutanix support this."
"If the support could be provided more quickly, it would be very helpful."
"It needs to be vanilla. There shouldn't be any custom drivers, any custom anything. It should just be, "Hey, you know what? These drivers are going to work for this version, the next version, and the following version after that." That's the difficulty in this. It takes too much upkeep... The main issue is drivers. Every time we move to a new vSAN version, we're having problems finding the correct drivers for the vendor."
"Pricing is something of a concern."
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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