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 solution provides great performance for the price it is listed with."
"Training is also easy as it is just one system to learn."
"It allows me to configure High Availability and failover clustering with some fault tolerance, at a cost point that doesn’t break the bank for a small business budget."
"The ability for us to manage all of our nodes from the same console makes systems administration very easy."
"It has improved our organization in terms of its uptime as our main cluster has never been offline due to a SAN failure."
"Besides being 80% cheaper than the other alternatives, the simplicity makes reconfiguration and support much easier."
"It includes every feature that a traditional SAN offers and so much more."
"StarWind allows us to move virtual machines from one physical host to another, which greatly reduces the downtime required for maintenance."
"Overall, the solution is extremely easy, flexible and secure."
"The most valuable feature is that it is something small that can be more easily deployed than a full data center set of servers."
"It consumes a smaller footprint when I compare it with other competitors."
"It is a complete package. For any kind of on-premises hyper-converged solution, we usually have to separate networks, but Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is a complete solution. It has its own network and storage. The storage part is the most valuable feature."
"We used to have a single customer-facing data center, which was vulnerable to failure. This product has allowed us to create high availability between two private data centers."
"The possibility to share the workload is one of its most valuable features. We have many applications which have need of workloads only a few times in a month, so we share HyperFlex with them."
"Cisco technical support is very skilled. From what I've had to access, there were quick responses and the necessary escalation."
"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."
"We enjoy the ease of management since all of the resources are located on one box — one single point of support."
"There is a single vendor with the hardware, software, and maintenance. Thus, there is a single vendor with whom we can contact."
"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 initial setup is simple."
"Valuable features for us are the VDI, UCC, and HCI."
"It's somewhat hard to speak about specific features, but I like VxRail's simplicity and ease of use. It's a decent solution for customers with a small footprint. If you're operating a big data center, it's not easy to position VxRail or HCI solutions, but when you have a small customer managing many different components, it's easier to work only with one solution."
"It improved from an operations standpoint as we have reduced failures compared to a previous vendor. The hardware that we previously used had a lot of issues with components failing regularly."
"For me, VxRail's most valuable feature is its life-cycle management."
"The configuration can a bit cumbersome."
"I wish the sync after a failure, such as hardware failure or power-related issues, for example, was faster."
"There is a general lack of documentation, especially up-to-date documentation to get started."
"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 system performs as expected, but we're always looking for performance improvements regarding the best utilization of NVMe disks."
"The setup and documentation for the installation with the free version could definitely be improved."
"A better overall view of the different deployments could be beneficial, although this is difficult due to how flexible the solution is."
"StarWind Command Center's single-pane management solution only works with Hyper-V."
"The initial setup of profiles and templates could be improved. Maybe some end profiles that you can use based on your type of deployment would be good."
"Does not support the stretch cluster, and the interface is not good."
"It needs more detailed documentation."
"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."
"They should have more blade options and more configuration flexibility. Also, the price is expensive. It should be cheaper but it is worth the price."
"Cisco should combine its features with its prices."
"We would like to have the ability to not have to reboot while doing updates. Being able to work through updates with as minimal amount of impact to users."
"Deployment on-prem was quite difficult."
"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."
"The SCL database sends out a warning and you have to download the adjacent file from the Dell website. You have to upload it and retest it. We cannot always connect our systems to the internet which means we sometimes miss these important updates."
"If we could have some out of the box ideas in integration, I think that would be a great feature."
"It would be nice if the update process was shortened and that patching would be simpler."
"The solution is vendor-locked and Dell is the only supplier of VxRail."
"We do not use the storage part of VxRail, we use Pure Storage to map out the VxRail because the disk performance from Pure Storage was far better than the performance of the disk on the inside of VxRail."
"One area of the product that could be improved is the support."
"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."
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 VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 119 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.
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