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.
"The top-notch support before, during, and after deployments are better than any other vendor I have come across."
"Highly available storage is the most valuable feature. The entire rollout is hyper-converged and requires no extra storage further than the hosts in which Hyper-V is running. Another feature that has been great is the support from StarWind in general. We have their proactive support package on the main cluster that employs Starwind Virtual SAN."
"VSAN works great; it's very easy to install, configure, and manage."
"We test live failovers every week, and so far, everything has been running smoothly without anything unexpected."
"The price was right."
"The ROI is great on this product."
"The StarWind VSAN is always up and allows us to move VMS to other nodes for maintenance, without interruption to service."
"The fact that the solution is vendor-agnostic allows it to be used with any virtualization vendor while remaining a powerful abstraction over storage."
"It's a very complete product with residencies to protect data and secure it end-to-end. It includes storage, computing, and networking, offering a fully ten-key solution."
"The most valuable feature was its time to delivery."
"It is a stable solution...Those who want flexibility, ease of use, and a simple support system can opt for HPE."
"It provides unmatched performance, productivity and reliability."
"The solution's most valuable features are scalability, easy migration, easy recovery, and flexible backup possibilities."
"One of the good features would be the fast backup solution Hyper Converged offers, which is more efficient compared to other vendors."
"No concerns or issues with stability."
"What I really like about this program, is that it needs little space and it works really fast, so it saves us time."
"VxRail's technical support is very good."
"The compute is good and we have not had any issues with the vSAN."
"I have found the vSAN is highly flexible. The documentation is good and the interface of the solution is responsive and fast. The interface has everything you need to manage the solution, such as the VxRail and VMware integration. You can manage the hardware from within the VMware plasma pan."
"We are very happy with the purchase, and it works well. It is fast. We went with the full-flash version, meaning that we have SSDs. So, we can build a Windows virtual machine in two minutes. We were surprised when we first tried to do that."
"It's a simple product, fast, and reliable."
"The solution is perfect for the lifecycle management of hardware."
"Valuable features for us are the VDI, UCC, and HCI."
"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."
"It is not very clear within the StarWind Management Console or the StarWind support documentation how to perform maintenance on a single node in a two-node HA cluster."
"The only point they should improve is the amount of documentation available for the user, especially in the first preliminary phase in which we were testing the product on our own."
"For the StarWind VSA vSphere solution, I would like to see a simpler and automated virtual machine installation process in terms of network settings."
"The setup and documentation for the installation with the free version could definitely be improved."
"It took a bit of knowledge and support to put in place but once installed it works fine. Migration (HyperV) from one server to another sometimes takes longer than expected but there is no data loss even if the host crashes."
"I would like additional documentation regarding possible networking configurations with 10GbE switching."
"The console is something that I feel could be improved. There is nothing technically wrong with it, but it can be jazzed up and/or made to be a little more intuitive."
"It is difficult to control all of the hardware components."
"The solution can be improved on the management side. More management features should be added to future releases."
"Providing local technical support and improving the price are areas this service needs to consider improving."
"I would like to see a more intuitive, user-friendly UI."
"We've had to do a power cycle to bring it all the way down, bring it back up for power outages, A/C shut-downs of our DC office, but it hasn't presented a problem."
"The solution needs to add a module or plugin of vCenter for clear monitoring and insights."
"I think that OneView should be replaced by something else for the management."
"If the solution could further compress the data, it would use less storage."
"Installation and setup could be easier."
"The search feature isn't good."
"The agility of the support team to provide you with better solutions should be improved. VxRail also has to be improved in terms of simplicity. Adding a simple node seemed like quite a project."
"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."
"We spend around six months waiting for a confirmation and firmware upgrade to confirm this step."
"It would be an improvement if VxRail could be integrated with some other hypervisors and not just with VMware."
"It still has some maturity to grow. It needs to be more tightly integrated with its own family of products. It has shown that it is open with the other products within the market, through its stack, but it needs to have the proof in the market (with use-cases), and it has to have the scalability with the integration."
"Its price needs to be improved. It is very expensive. NSX should be licensed together. It will make the network virtualization layer more usable. It would be better if they come together in a bundle, not separately."
"It's not really flexible with different use cases."
HPE Hyper Converged is ranked 11th in HCI with 34 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 115 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, HPE SimpliVity, Dell PowerFlex, HPE Alletra dHCI and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, 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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