We compared VxRail and HPE Hyper Converged based on our user's reviews in several parameters.
Overall, VxRail is praised for its excellent performance and highly scalable infrastructure, with positive feedback on customer service and support. On the other hand, HPE Hyper Converged stands out for its seamless integration and ease of management, along with efficient customer service and support. Both products offer favorable pricing, but VxRail users emphasize flexibility and customization options, while HPE Hyper Converged users highlight scalability and efficiency. Areas for improvement include system scalability, performance enhancements, and user interface design for HPE Hyper Converged, while VxRail users call for better scalability, easier deployment, and improved customer support and documentation.
Features: VxRail is praised for its excellent performance, seamless integration, and scalability. In contrast, users appreciate HPE Hyper Converged for its simplified management, reliability, and user-friendly interface, among other features.
Pricing and ROI: The setup costs for VxRail and HPE Hyper Converged products have been regarded favorably by users. However, VxRail is noted for its flexible licensing options, while HPE Hyper Converged is praised for its ease of setup and straightforward licensing process., VxRail has shown positive ROI with increased efficiency, improved performance, lower TCO, scalability, ease of use, and reliability. Users praise its value in accelerating processes and meeting goals. On the other hand, users of HPE Hyper Converged have also reported positive ROI.
Room for Improvement: User feedback suggests that VxRail could improve scalability, compatibility, setup process, monitoring capabilities, customer support, and troubleshooting documentation. In contrast, users of HPE Hyper Converged desire enhanced scalability, performance, user interface, technical support, and documentation.
Deployment and customer support: Based on user reviews, the duration required to establish a new tech solution varies for VxRail and HPE Hyper Converged. Some users of VxRail spent three months on deployment and one week on setup, while others completed both in just a week. For HPE Hyper Converged, one user took three months for deployment and another one week for setup, while another user completed both in just one week. These differences in timeframes suggest that the two products have different implementation processes., Customers have expressed satisfaction with the customer service of both VxRail and HPE Hyper Converged products. They appreciate the helpfulness, responsiveness, and professionalism of the support teams, as well as their knowledge and willingness to address concerns.
The summary above is based on 35 interviews we conducted recently with VxRail and HPE Hyper Converged users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"Starwind support is excellent. They are very fast and have very good knowledge of Starwind and Hyper-V Cluster software."
"This was a great implementation for a small to mid-size business."
"It has a nice, simple control panel. You can clearly see the state and health of storage along with the synchronization."
"The Windows-based StarWind GUI is easy to use and understand and integrates seamlessly with VMware's vSphere portal as well."
"The management interface on the software is very simple. It is insanely simple compared to most SANs. The interface is also powerful when used to complete tasks that an IT administrator needs to complete."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a very easy-to-use solution that can be quickly and easily deployed and configured without intimate and specific knowledge in the virtualization sphere."
"StarWind vSAN is a great solution to create a redundant two-node-only Hyper-V cluster, both for domain or workgroup scenarios."
"We test live failovers every week, and so far, everything has been running smoothly without anything unexpected."
"It is a scalable solution."
"The most valuable feature was its time to delivery."
"There are multiple advantages. Typically, being an all-flash storage, which is available through either SimpliVity or dHCI, the performance is much better because the IOPS goes high, so it's more powerful in terms of performance. Secondly, if I'm talking of SimpliVity Hyper Convergence solution from HPE, unlike the competition, even if three hard drives fail, you are still running the solution."
"The HA, which means I have a copy of the VMs always available, and the moment a VM is down, the system tries to power it on again."
"It is a scalable solution."
"The most valuable features of this solution are fast deployment, security, and it is easy to upgrade."
"Ease of management, as I come from a software background, and I'm responsible for IT overall. I can get in there and turn some nuts and bolts and make things happen without any trouble."
"Hyper Converge is easier to manage and performs better than traditional infrastructure."
"It helps our servers and it is very efficient."
"It is the most valuable Software Defined Storage ever to manage all storage workloads, and also offers high availability."
"The low latency and response times and having a virtualized environment within a single computer are valuable. I have no physical elements, and I can optimize or balance my data depending on the sales volume that I have in a specific store."
"First and foremost, I would advise people to purchase this solution mainly for the simplicity of the system. And it's all managed in one place, which is nice compared to Nutanix where you had to administrate multiple places. And, the support now is so good."
"like VxRail because it's fully integrated. The other hyperconverged solutions are also well integrated. They are all highly similar to each other in that regard. But we prefer VxRail for its physical integrations or lifecycle management. It also has vCenter, which integrates the hardware lifecycle management."
"The manageability for controlling the console is the most valuable feature."
"Dell owns the EMC, EMC owns VMware, and there are many other interconnections throughout the industry which allows a fully integrated solution from a technical perspective."
"VxRail can be used for application modernization."
"I had to buy upgraded support, which was not a problem, but it wasn't a prorated amount, so I paid for the support, the full upgrade, but I only got a couple of months out of it because it was only good until renewal time."
"I struggled when bit figuring out how to go about doing the evaluation."
"I wish there was online support because email return takes a long time and a faster solution should be found."
"This solution should be more self-sufficient, running without creating domains or failover clusters."
"Other vendors such as VMware vSAN have a bigger community of users, so it is easier to find more pre-sale or post-sale information from users."
"High availability for direct attached hardware drives could be useful for increasing the performance of a storage appliance."
"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."
"The Command Center, a free guest VM for management and monitoring, leaves something to be desired. It could have more accurate real-time information and better reporting visuals, which seem to be an afterthought."
"A software-only version of the solution, without the hardware, would be nice."
"Scalability is an issue because it becomes very expensive. When you need to upgrade memory, you have to upgrade memory across the nodes. Suppose a customer has gone with a three-node HCI solution, then to increase the memory, you have to do it across the three nodes."
"In my country, the biggest issue is probably pricing."
"I would like to see improvement in the hardware underneath it. Currently, it's a Gen9 DL380. One day, there will be a Gen10 DL380 and maybe they will have bigger or smaller sizes."
"Its technical support services could be faster."
"The product must provide more storage capability."
"Scalability requires using additional nodes."
"This solution is very costly."
"One challenge customers face with VxRail is the high cost of scalability. The price is higher if they want to add memory or capacity after purchasing the tool for three or five years. Each drive and RAM module is licensed separately, making the architecture costly. It would benefit Dell to review this licensing model and make it more cost-effective and flexible for customers."
"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."
"The way that the VxRail is licensed could be improved."
"The only issue which is every now and again is that when you log in it will tell you that there's an issue with VxRail when there actually isn't. All that's required is a refresh or reload. The solution itself works but you may get some bad reports every now and again. Probably once every couple of months; there is no effect to the solution's capabilities."
"We'd like to see more automation capabilities in the future."
"If we could have some out of the box ideas in integration, I think that would be a great feature."
"The initial setup was not that easy, it was a medium difficulty level."
"Obtaining support was hindered by the frequent changes to the hotline numbers."
HPE Hyper Converged is ranked 10th in HCI with 34 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 120 reviews. HPE Hyper Converged is rated 8.2, while VxRail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of HPE Hyper Converged writes " Ensures end-to-end data security with redundancy measures and provides visibility into the system but node expansion challenges". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". HPE Hyper Converged is most compared with VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity, HPE Alletra dHCI and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes. See our HPE Hyper Converged vs. VxRail report.
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