We performed a comparison between Dell XC Appliance and VxRail based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI."When we need additional storage but want to keep the size of the SANs manageable, the StarWind Virtual SAN has allowed me to do everything needed."
"A great feature is that I basically set it and forget it, as everything is automatic."
"The most valuable feature for us is having the ability to configure our local storage using a limited number of disks and using the StarWind VSAN software to keep the cluster nodes in perfect sync."
"Active-active HA provides top performance and redundancy."
"StarWind vSAN has a lot of great features and is a perfect solution for mirroring internal disks and flash between servers."
"We are able to execute maintenance on one server while the other is still running."
"StarWind has provided us with a top-notch, well-supported, robust vSAN offering when other vendors have moved to hyper-converged solutions that are outside of our average clients' reach from a financial and resource perspective."
"With an uptime of 384 days, StarWind has improved overall server reliability."
"What I like the most is that it is easy to implement, easy deployment and that it's easy to manage."
"The most valuable feature is the low management overhead, and the lower skill set required to manage it."
"The solution's best feature is its simplicity. It's so simple to deploy it. You've got the VMware, and it's own appliance. It is really helpful. The system is online within half a day and saves so much time."
"The most valuable features are the deduplication and the compression features."
"When we compare it to normal hardware servers, I'd say it is quite easy to configure and deploy."
"The most valuable feature is that you can assign a volume to an off-shore workload on the fly."
"The solution's hardware is great."
"The most valuable feature is its high performance."
"The cover points feature in VxRail is remarkable. It's unique. It has an intervention failover system as well as an automatic failover system, reaching clusters existing in VxRail. This makes all files act as a single file with a large and huge resource, and, of course, with customized administration, configuration, and resources. It provides automatic failover for redundancy and data recovery."
"The solution is perfect for the lifecycle management of hardware."
"This solution optimizes our clients' resources."
"VxRail performs well in the VDI environment."
"The technical support from Dell was very good."
"There are so many features, but if I have to choose, I would go for scale-out upgrades and performance. Scale-out upgrades are very valuable. Typically, when customers engage in virtualization, they're committing themselves to run many virtual machines on a fewer number of hosts. They'll have five or six hosts, and they will run all their virtualization on vSphere. They could be having anywhere from 50 to 100 or even more virtual machines. Once all these go into production, getting downtime or getting planned maintenance windows is extremely difficult. It is something that typically businesses will frown upon. With VxRail, you can just go ahead and add a node without disrupting the existing environment, which works very well. That's why scale-out upgrades are a key feature. Its performance is also valuable. It delivers a very high number of IOPS for a hybrid configuration or an all-flash configuration. The processors that are available in the Xeon family are very powerful. They are multi-core with typically 2 gigahertz, 2.4 gigahertz, or higher frequency, so the performance is very much appreciated."
"Low-maintenance solution with hyperscale feature so it has the ability to utilize the resources for the VMware cluster setup on which Citrix VDA runs."
"StarWind relies on the underlying OS to manage the "SAN files" whether that would be a RAID volume, software RAID (such as LVM), etc. It would be useful if StarWind could incorporate the actual physical drive management inside of the solution, similar to Storage Spaces Direct."
"Initially, when we first started, the sync was horrible."
"I wish the sync after a failure, such as hardware failure or power-related issues, for example, was faster."
"To enable the proactive support capability that is part of our support agreement, I would ask that the terms and conditions be revised and made acceptable to corporate security."
"An update caused a syncing issue and it took over a month to resolve it"
"They need to improve the speed of the interfaces, thus allowing for better traffic on the network."
"If there was one feature I would like to see it would be a built-in subsystem for managing UPS backups shutdown procedures providing a way to initiate VM shutdown on all host servers, shut down the host servers, then put the fault-tolerant mirroring in standby, and finally shut down the StarWind SANs."
"Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer."
"Dell needs to do a lot of work to simplify the maintenance and life-cycle upgrades for the product."
"The cost of using the public cloud deployment is astronomical."
"We are not always advised of new features or updates, so we must research to stay up to date."
"The solution's storage size could be improved."
"Currently, there is no support for the servers that are not in the cluster."
"There should be more provisioning capabilities within the solution."
"In the next release, I would like to see support for Docker and containers."
"Troubleshooting can be a little more difficult than legacy systems."
"I can't speak to any missing features or weak aspects of the system just yet. We haven't had a chance to really dig in."
"The update for the graphics integration and the media drivers isn't included in the VxRail update."
"Its price could be better."
"This solution needs to have the capability where even older versions of hardware can be seamlessly utilized and additional expansion becomes so much easier."
"The configurations of VxRail can be difficult. However, it has improved in the newer version. From version 6 to 7, there has been a lot of changes."
"It might offer better integration with other products."
"I would like it to tier to the cloud effectively, making sure that cold data can be pushed out to some sort of Bitbucket."
Dell XC Appliance doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in HCI while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 117 reviews. Dell XC Appliance is rated 8.0, while VxRail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Dell XC Appliance writes "Turnkey solution with low management costs that is easy to use". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". Dell XC Appliance is most compared with , whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and HPE Hyper Converged.
See our list of best HCI vendors.
We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
