We compared VxRail and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes based on our user's reviews in several parameters.
VxRail is praised for its excellent performance, support, pricing structure, and positive ROI, while Dell vSAN Ready Nodes are valued for their high performance, scalability, and efficient storage management. Users highlight VxRail's flexibility and customer service, while Dell vSAN Ready Nodes receive praise for their ease of use and data protection. Suggestions for improvement include enhancing scalability and compatibility for VxRail and improving performance optimization and installation process for Dell vSAN Ready Nodes.
Features: The valuable features of VxRail include excellent performance, seamless integration with existing systems, and highly scalable and flexible infrastructure solution. On the other hand, Dell vSAN Ready Nodes offer high performance, scalability, ease of use, efficient storage management, reliable data protection, and seamless integration with existing infrastructure. Users also appreciate the nodes' ability to handle demanding workloads, expand storage capacity as needed, and effortlessly fit into their existing IT environment.
Pricing and ROI: According to user experiences, VxRail offers reasonable setup costs and flexible licensing options. Users have reported that Dell vSAN Ready Nodes also have reasonable setup costs and a straightforward setup process. Both products are praised for their easily obtained and managed licensing., The VxRail product offers increased efficiency, improved performance, lower total cost of ownership, scalability, ease of use, and reliability. On the other hand, Dell vSAN Ready Nodes provide improved data storage and management capabilities, seamless integration, cost-effectiveness, and user-friendly features.
Room for Improvement: Some areas for improvement in VxRail include scalability, flexibility, compatibility, setup process, monitoring/reporting capabilities, customer support, and troubleshooting documentation. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes could benefit from enhancements in performance optimization, compatibility, storage options, installation/configuration process, reliability, and efficiency.
Deployment and customer support: The user reviews suggest that there are varying timeframes for deployment, setup, and implementation phases for both VxRail and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes. Some users spent three months on deployment and an additional week on setup for both, while others required only a week for both., Customers have expressed satisfaction with the customer service for both VxRail and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes. However, VxRail is praised for its helpfulness and responsiveness, while Dell is commended for its prompt and efficient assistance.
The summary above is based on 34 interviews we conducted recently with VxRail and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"VSAN works great; it's very easy to install, configure, and manage."
"With an uptime of 384 days, StarWind has improved overall server reliability."
"Speed and high availability have been the most valuable for us."
"We are able to execute maintenance on one server while the other is still running."
"The primary purpose of this software is to create a virtual SAN between local storage on Hyper-V hosts. I find this feature most valuable since it accomplishes this quite well."
"Recovery and maintenance are now less stressful and most importantly, it allows our users to keep working."
"We are running Hyper-V on twin servers in failover, and being able to manage servers from anywhere I need to, virtually, has been a game changer."
"I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"We find the initial implementation process simple and straightforward."
"The most valuable feature is the set of user tools that are available."
"I have found the most important features of Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes are the capacity to manage the storage because the storage is built in the servers. The type of profiles you can attribute to the storage is a benefit. You can manage the storage by profiles. Overall the solution is a good speed and performance."
"The most valuable feature of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is the flexibility of the nodes. Additionally, if there are any critical issues they update us through emails. The issues are taken care of remotely on the system."
"Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes is scalable"
"The most valuable feature of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is file sharing."
"If I consider the overall product, I would say that it is an excellent solution that offers very good performance and stability."
"They are heading in the right direction and moving to integrate everything with a hybrid cloud, and moving workloads back and forth."
"VxRail is an agile solution with easily scalable, simplify operations with software driven automation and lower operational cost."
"The stability is very good. We haven't had any issues at all. There aren't bugs or glitches. There aren't system crashes or anything of that nature."
"I like that there is a dependency on the storage controller."
"The initial setup is simple."
"This solution optimizes our clients' resources."
"The most compelling aspect of VxRail lies in its unwavering guarantee of sustained performance for my systems, regardless of their geographical distribution."
"This product has given us clear visibility into what we need technology-wise to grow."
"For me, the most valuable feature is in relation to the software updates."
"A central management console may be nice to see all nodes."
"The management console of StarWind Virtual SAN is pretty complex."
"With data verification, I would like to know how does the solution perform validation of data being synced between two VSANs."
"I'd love to see more clarification for us folks who are smart enough to do some damage yet not smart enough to use CLI."
"I would like to see more user-friendly dashboards in future versions."
"It runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear."
"Initially, when we first started, the sync was horrible."
"Currently, the StarWind management console is a bit clunky to navigate and isn't the most user-intuitive interface."
"This product is not sufficiently scalable."
"Compatibility with other hardware nodes needs to be improved."
"The Dell VxRail solution is based on vSAN Ready Nodes, but the Dell VxRail is fully automated. It would be helpful if this automation feature could be added to the Dell vSAN Ready Nodes. For example, we need to install VMware ESXi, and manually expand the cluster."
"Scalability is an area that could be improved. We are looking at a maximum of 32 nodes now in a cluster, but going to 64 or 128 would be a major advantage."
"Dell vSAN Ready Nodes must be flexible since it is complex in designing concepts. It needs to improve stability. The product should integrate with the public cloud."
"The deployment is done by doing it one by one and could be simplified."
"The solution doesn't scale."
"There is room for improvement in the maintenance pricing. Maintenance isn't difficult, but the prices are high and ridiculous. Some customers feel it is better to go with a new solution rather than renew this one."
"The initial setup was not that easy, it was a medium difficulty level."
"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."
"I would like them to include an easier solution to host its own DNS. When they changed to version 6.5, they took out the easy features of letting the rail be its own DNS. You can still trick the system and make the VxRail Manager another one of the rail-required VMs become the DNS, but it's a lot of extra work. I'd like to see it put back into the UI."
"When using hybrid nodes, such as VxRail, there should not be compression and deduplication, only in All-Flash nodes."
"Its price could be better."
"It needs faster deployment of security patches."
"We would like to see integrating with Nutanix. Currently, we are working on integrating the two to see if there is any value in doing so."
"There is limited support for SAP HANA with this solution."
Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is ranked 11th in HCI with 14 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 117 reviews. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is rated 8.6, while VxRail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes writes "Offers good performance and 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 vSAN Ready Nodes is most compared with VMware vSAN, Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series, Dell PowerFlex, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series. See our Dell vSAN Ready Nodes vs. VxRail report.
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