There are components of VxBlock that are not managed or supported by Dell because some of the components are from Cisco. Thus, when there are problems with compute nodes, though Dell was managing the interaction, we had to rely on Cisco to solve the issue. When Cisco was not responding as quickly as Dell would for their components, it made it difficult for us because we needed to have the failed nodes back up and running. As such, the disparate ownership of components in the equipment is an issue.

This solution does not support Hyper-V, and we would like the new version to be supported and certified to work with Hyper-V. It only supports VMware. We need this as a virtualization solution for the hardware.

The solution lacks some flexibility with third-party applications.

I'd like to see hardware improvement and the ability to support different kinds of mixed applications - a mixed workload support. The technical support could also be improved. 

One thing that it lacks is multiple user interfaces. It has a single interface that is used to access multiple layers and there are different levels of management. We are hoping that Nutanix will simply this.

Scalability is an area that needs to be improved.

The solution could use a clearer description of working methods to tell people more about its use cases.

It is a good product, but for us, it is like a black box. We are not really sure about its internal components, and how to do the terminal upgrade, and how to make sure about the security of the device. We understand how it works, but in order to do the upgrades, we have to get help from the company. We cannot do it ourselves. In another model that we had, the internal team could do the upgrade but not in this one. There is no clear process for a new upgrade or update. They should provide a software intelligence tool that has a dashboard where you can see the current firmware, the latest firmware, and the documentation and the process for the upgrade. 

For VxBlock, we have different management consoles. There is no single management console that you can use to manage all components inside VxBlock. Their scale up and scale out process is also not clear. Their support is also a little bit slow in responding to the cases.

It's a good product but the price could be lowered. It's expensive. The total cost of ownership is a very important figure against quality and performance and pricing. It should be the total package and that is the reason why I think this is a very good product.

The only thing that I can say is when you procure the VxBlock, obviously you have to complete detailed questionnaires about your architecture including the configuration, et cetera. If you make a mistake on the implementation, then you need to rebuild the entire VxBlock. That is just a point of consideration rather than a flaw. You need to be absolutely sure and validate the upfront configuration information that you provide due to the fact that your VxBlock comes delivered and built according to that exact information.

For VxBlock, the consistency of disc quality could be improved. 

We are finding it a bit challenging in terms of the management of a specific VxBlock component. Currently, we have different units as a part of the block storage. We have one for Cisco equipment and one for Dell. When we have an issue in the infrastructure, Dell EMC VxBlock System should automatically detect it and send a notification to VC support, but, unfortunately, it is doing that only for one unit. It is not working for Cisco components. We have informed them about this area of improvement, and they are working on this.

The way different parts are integrated should be improved. We should have one console to log in to see all the infrastructure in terms of each machine and hardware.

I want to get more information from the vendors. The hardware lifecycle is not documented very well. For example, now you can buy a piece of equipment, but you don't know if the hardware will still be in production next month or next year. Most customers expect to run this hardware and still be supported for the next five years or so. I think the projections about the lifetime of the hardware and the systems need to be better documented.