We performed a comparison between Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes and VxRail based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI.
"Immediately we noticed huge performance gains, even on older hardware and once we implemented a 10GB link between both servers, the sync was near-instant after the initial sync was complete."
"We test live failovers every week, and so far, everything has been running smoothly without anything unexpected."
"The installation of StarWind Virtual SAN was pretty easy, and the configuration was done in no time."
"The failover protection and the ability to expand storage and nodes with no downtime are by far the best physical features we have benefited from."
"The features that I found most valuable are ease of use of the software that StarWind offers - with the first setup being a bit painful."
"With an uptime of 384 days, StarWind has improved overall server reliability."
"The user interface for this application is amazing."
"The best part is the easy way it operates with a very clear GUI without any unnecessary items."
"Dell EMC VxFlex Ready Nodes can support what we call a heterogeneous environment. So you can have VMware workloads, Hyper-V workloads, bare metal Red Hat workloads, Kubernetes workloads all on the same cluster. You're not pigeonholed into either all bare metal or all virtualized. So it supports basically any platform."
"The most valuable features of Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes are the ease of acquisition."
"You don't have to worry too much about the hardware and you don't have to work on integrating a storage device. We instead have this as an all-in-one solution and everything is available as a box."
"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."
"VxRail has high performance and has great efficiency. There is a single place for us to manage all of our virtual machines. The ability to right-size instead of overcommit VMs is a large benefit."
"The stability is very nice. We haven't had any issues with the cluster. The cluster is very stable. No problems with slowness. Everything has been stable. It was well-architectured."
"VxRail is a simple, efficient solution. It's easy to upgrade and scale the solution. If we increase our user base, we can easily scale it out. We have several thousand using it now."
"We like the design and that it meets data storage needs."
"The stability of VxRail is good, we have not had any issues."
"It supports VDI deployment, enabling easy use for running different platforms in similar environments."
"StarWind currently has a Windows native application that it uses for management. There is not a web-based GUI at this time."
"I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues."
"vSAN's free version does not have a graphical user interface."
"Updates seem to be non-existent."
"Improvements in documentation and support resources could enhance the user experience."
"It runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear."
"For improvement, I would like to see how the software determines which networks to use for which purpose. It seems like the naming terminology changes a bit from here to there."
"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."
"From a technical perspective, it's a pretty rock solid solution. I would say the only area for improvement is around its price."
"Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is a little less sophisticated than some of the other solutions out there. A full-blown cloud foundation has a lot more to it."
"My main issue so far is that the installation created a default datacenter name of "Marvin" and it cannot be changed."
"It's not really flexible with different use cases."
"We used an integrator team for the implementation of the solution. The one person who takes care of the maintenance of VxRail, such as upgrading the software. The upgrading takes too long. We have many nodes which takes a long time, they need to improve the speed of the upgrades"
"When using hybrid nodes, such as VxRail, there should not be compression and deduplication, only in All-Flash nodes."
"We have some issues, but they are possibly out-of-the-box issues. There was a host that was dead on arrival, and there were some file issues on other hosts. We're currently working actively with Dell to resolve all these issues. Once they are resolved, the product should be stable."
"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."
"Right now, it's difficult for a non-technical person to participate in using the product. It could be made more consumer-friendly."
"Pricing could be improved."
Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is ranked 20th in HCI while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 117 reviews. Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is rated 9.0, while VxRail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes writes "Single platform for a mix of virtualized and physical workloads". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". Dell VxFlex Ready Nodes is most compared with HPE Alletra dHCI, VMware vSAN and Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and Rackspace OpenStack.
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