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.
"Being hardware agnostic is a must and definitely scored points for us."
"We test live failovers every week, and so far, everything has been running smoothly without anything unexpected."
"You can turn your local disk storage into high-availability iSCSI storage."
"The product creates opportunities with hybrid on-premise solutions."
"StarWind Virtual SAN offers high availability and data resilience features to prevent data loss if hardware fails."
"Quick setup, great support, stability is great"
"The virtual tapes can be uploaded to the object storage of your choice with object locking/governance which gives you an extra layer of protection."
"I save both physical and virtual space."
"It is helpful as a backup solution."
"The most valuable feature was the backup - it was easy to back up. It was also very easy to administrate and manage the system; much easier and faster. Finally, it was easy to extend the disk capacities."
"The most valuable features of this solution are scalability, performance, and reliability. It scales well inside of a large data center."
"The technical support has been very good for this solution."
"Deduplication is a valuable feature available in Cisco HyperFlex."
"The most valuable feature is full integration with Cisco API and UCS, which means you can have complete networking and storage from Cisco."
"By configuring networks, we are saving power."
"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."
"The product's initial setup phase was very straightforward."
"vSAN provides default HA configurations, where if any host goes down, the VM moves around within the host. Even though the disks are local, the VMs moves around with the vSAN disk and vSAN provides a high availability on its own."
"This product has very good performance when it comes to virtualization storage and works well with solutions such as SAP HANA, Exadata, Hadoop, and Big Data Analytics."
"It is easier to deploy than the traditional SAN."
"Since the storage space is local to the hosts, it reduces the overall response time and improves the performance."
"Very easy to implement in any existing environment."
"It is very easy to set up and very easy to use. It is very useful."
"The features of vSAN allow us to reduce our operational complexity to a large degree."
"I would like to see different levels of support offered."
"This product would benefit from having automated alerting functionality."
"I am expecting to see it more user-friendly in the future."
"Ability to to test the virtual storage are network area and storage speed from StarWind Management Console."
"They require more media visibility."
"The interface of the management console of the StarWind Virtual SAN is complex, and it's difficult for the novice user to interact with the management having less knowledge or training in the product."
"I would like them to invest time in reducing the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure."
"A better overall view of the different deployments could be beneficial, although this is difficult due to how flexible the solution is."
"The infrastructure team thinks that there are a lot of issues."
"I would like to see them expand onto the cloud."
"The architecture separates data, computing, memory, and storage into different parts."
"The initial setup could be faster, due to the prerequisites."
"I have been receiving a memory overflow message every day when I use the solution."
"The solution's price could be affordable."
"The additional feature I would like to see included in the next release of this solution is more security. We want to add more data servers to all the hosts all over the world. We have 140 hosts that connect to one data center in Manila."
"HyperFlex could be improved by reducing the minimum number of nodes supported from three to two."
"I have used the VMware Replication but I can't get it to work properly. The process should be simplified."
"I'd like to see better integration with the Update Manager, with respect to firmware updates for hardware."
"Troubleshooting tools could be improved."
"The solution functions as the marketing says, as long as you follow certain rules."
"he list of hardware supported should be increased in the future."
"The integration could be improved. I would like to see integration with other platforms."
"I would like for the next release to be a bit cheaper."
"Based on my testing, I would like to expand deduplication to include hybrid deployments and not just for all-flash deployments."
Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is ranked 8th in HCI with 90 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 226 reviews. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is rated 8.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series 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 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. See our Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series vs. VMware vSAN report.
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