Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] vs VMware vSAN comparison

Cisco and Broadcom are both solutions in the HCI category. Additionally, 89% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of Broadcom users who would recommend it.

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [...

Read 90 Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] reviews

89% willing to recommend

VMware vSAN

Read 234 VMware vSAN reviews

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10,091 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [...

VMware vSAN

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 2, 2025

VMware vSAN and Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series compete in the hyper-converged infrastructure market. VMware vSAN appears to have a slight advantage due to its broader deployment options and strong integration with VMware products.

Features: VMware vSAN is known for its high performance, easy scalability, and strong integration with VMware solutions like vMotion and Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS). Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series offers complete integration of computing, storage, and networking, providing high availability and a single platform for management.

Room for Improvement: VMware vSAN users desire enhanced management tools, better deduplication, and broader hardware compatibility. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series users suggest improvements in integration with cloud platforms, better documentation, and pricing optimization.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware vSAN provides broader deployment options, including private and hybrid clouds. It offers good technical support, though response times could improve. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series has responsive support and is well-regarded, though users report mixed experiences with licensing and customer service.

Pricing and ROI: VMware vSAN is considered expensive due to licensing tied to CPU cores, but provides long-term cost savings and significant ROI. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series also has a high initial cost, increased by subscription fees, but justifies the expense through comprehensive integration and operational benefits.

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [...

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VMware vSAN

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

6.1

Number of Reviews

234

Ranking in other categories

HCI (2nd)

Featured Reviews

Nuno Mendes

IT Manager - Resp.Department at Parvalorem

High performance solution that makes it easy to efficiently manage VM resources

In our case as a credit recovery company working with the state, our infrastructure is fixed and stable as we don't have the same need for growth as other types of companies. That said, one of the biggest problems with HyperFlex HX is that if you want to adjust your solution in terms of processing power, memory, or disk capacity, you have to buy completely new hosts. From a financial perspective, it can be very expensive to do so, and from a legal perspective, there are all kinds of compliance issues we would have to sort out before buying any new solution or application. Since we as a company will only be operating for perhaps the next ten years, when our HyperFlex solution comes to its end-of-life in 2024 our next step will likely not be with HyperFlex or any other solution from Cisco. Instead, from a financial point of view, we will likely turn toward a cloud solution because, that way, we won't have to spend so much money on physical infrastructure. We are, after all, only a small company and HyperFlex can be very expensive for other companies of our size, whether in Portugal or elsewhere like the United States. One other area for improvement is in regard to HyperFlex's integration with VMware. HyperFlex integrates with a specific version of VMware in such a way that HyperFlex doesn't always resolve security issues with VMware at the same pace as what you see in native implementations of VMware. This has happened in one or two situations in the past. On the other hand, the integration is otherwise adequate, especially in terms of availability and virtualization features (such as being able to split up each of our four hosts within VMware).

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ShyamikaThamel

Associate Tech Specialists at Seatrium

Managing mixed RAID workloads has improved data protection and delivers strong performance

VMware vSAN can be improved in certain areas. In cases involving our large data stores with large VMs, we experience some latency, not during normal operation, but during database backup operations. We observed latency due to buffer issues from the top-of-the-rack switches. These issues are mostly network-related because all storage data traffic travels through the network. I have recently used Nutanix, and I observed that Nutanix provides better performance than VMware vSAN due to its data locality features. VMware vSAN is now providing data locality, but we did not use that option. If VMware vSAN provides additional features in the next release, such as the VM balancing feature called DRS on the cluster that VMware previously had, it would be beneficial. With DRS, VMs can move easily from one node to another within the same cluster. Nutanix does not provide that flexibility. When placing a VM on a cluster in Nutanix, the placement uses a balancing component. After that, the VM remains on the same host. If any contention occurs on the CPU or memory side, the VM stays in place until contention happens. If issues occur, the VM migrates to another host while transferring all objects to the same host. This is how their data locality is maintained. When a VM moves to any host, it moves with all VM objects. VMware vSAN does not currently offer this option. If a VM moves to another host, it accesses the disk object through the network, which increases latency. VMware vSAN now offers an option to select data locality, but it does not function like Nutanix. This is why some latency remains. If VMware vSAN can improve this feature, it would be very helpful and VMware would regain its top position.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"Offers very good data protection and provides system uptime availability effectively."

"Great integration with backup software."

"The initial setup is easy."

"The most important benefits that we've seen from this solution is that it reduces the cost of management and it has easy monitoring systems."

"The scalability of the product is quite good overall - as long as you plan correctly from the outset."

"It is a solution that best suits thre needs of our organization."

"The speed, storage, and management are the most valuable features."

"This is very beneficial for our company as we own a service that should be up and running 24/7."

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] pros

"The ease of use is great."

"With the new ACI solution with the Vx Rack, and SDDC, everything is a lot more easily managed."

"I would suggest customers use VMware vSAN because VMware offers a stable solution with good hypervisors and the best features compared to other solutions."

"I advise those people that have a large amount of data and they need very fast retrievals, they must use the scalable feature of VMware vSAN."

"If we are looking for a valuable prospective, then we can go with the All-Flash vSAN cluster which will provide data compression and deduplication (i.e. actual used storage 30TB; in that case deduplication will be stored in 10TB and save 20TB storage)."

"it's easy to scale, it's easy to predict IOP needs, and you can design for low latency using all-flash... Also, for setting up new clusters for VDI quickly, it's nice. You don't have to wait on an order for a storage vendor to ship you a system and help you configure it, you do it all yourself. And the sizing guides are pretty straightforward."

"We had very good access to technical support."

"Horizon VDI is easy to use for our virtual desktop needs."

More VMware vSAN pros

Cons

"One of the biggest problems with HyperFlex HX is that if you want to adjust your solution in terms of processing power, memory, or disk capacity, you have to buy completely new hosts. From a financial perspective, it can be very expensive to do so, and from a legal perspective, there are all kinds of compliance issues we would have to sort out before buying any new solution or application."

"Cisco's technical support originally was outstanding, but it has declined over the last 12 months."

"The problem is that we always have to keep an eye out for new releases to make sure that the version we're running is up-to-date."

"The primary improvements should be made in the cluster storage controller VMs so that they don't break the upgrade process."

"The solution could improve by having more customization."

"One of the challenges we have with HyperFlex is that they have a subscription fee for the operating system that runs on it, and if I remember correctly, it costs approximately $15,000 USD per month."

"The setup was complex, especially since we usually do all the planning, sizing, and workflows before integration."

"We'd like the product to offer better integration with other products."

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] cons

"There are bugs in the SAN Health Check utility. It misreports latency issues when the hosts are actual within the correct tolerances."

"If the vSAN cluster can’t self-heal due to an internal error, we can’t repair the vSAN cluster ourselves. A case with VMware is always needed to fix the issue, resulting in an increased time to resolve."

"VMware vSAN could improve by having better integration with other vendors and the storage is limited, I prefer it to the traditional storage."

"It is not a good price for small and medium-sized businesses."

"We want see a better monitoring tool in vSAN. Monitoring is not that great as of now because it shows us false alarms in the Health status."

"The upgrading process could be simplified."

"Starting out there were some stability issues but I don't see them the same way that I did."

"I see room for improvement for vSAN just around general hardware compatibility and expanding that sort of matrix."

More VMware vSAN cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Comparable solutions with switches, storage, and services are cheaper than HyperFlex. It should be cheaper."

"The pricing is a bit expensive."

"There is a recurring cost for the VMware license and the HyperFlex licenses."

"The licensing is perpetual and the only thing that you may need to pay for on a monthly basis is if you're going to use their cloud-based management features."

"Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is expensive. It's a standard license, and we pay for it yearly. I think we pay about 700."

"The price is a bit too high."

"It is relatively expensive, but it can easily return value by freeing up other resources."

"We would not have invested if we didn't feel the return was there for our customers."

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] pricing and cost advice

"VMware vSAN is an expensive platform. We purchase its yearly license."

"From a cost perspective, it is expensive. From a usability perspective, it reduces the overhead costs attached to its users' servers."

"It is expensive. It should be cheaper. It has a perpetual license as well as a subscription-based license, but they are moving towards subscription-based licenses."

"The cost of the solution is high and if it could be reduced the customers would be very happy."

"It is cheap. It is $0.02 a gig."

"We are using the VMware vSAN ROBO which allows us to have a maximum of 25 virtual machines. The approximate cost is €10,000 for a perpetual license."

"We have increased our user productivity."

"The vSAN is somewhat expensive to license."

More VMware vSAN pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Marketing Services Firm

12%

Construction Company

Educational Organization

Manufacturing Company

11%

Computer Software Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	24
Midsize Enterprise	17
Large Enterprise	57

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	100
Midsize Enterprise	58
Large Enterprise	129

Questions from the Community

How do I choose between Cisco Hyperflex HX Series and Nutanix Acropolis AOS?

Cisco HyperFlex HS series vs Nutanix Acropolis AOS Cisco HyperFlex gives extended hyper-convergence functions from core to edge and multi-cloud environments. It helps IT and OT teams deploy hyper...

See all answers

How does VxRail compare with Cisco HyperFlex HX Series?

VxRail provides stable solutions for technical problems while at the same time not being too expensive for a company to invest in. Even if you are working with a limited budget, this platform offer...

See all answers

What Is The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail?

While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an engineered system. The choice to choose which technology depends on two major fac...

See all answers

How does HPE Simplivity compare with VMware vSAN?

HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We researched VMware vSAN but found HPE was a better option for us. HPE SimpliVity has ...

See all answers

How does VMware vSAN compare with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?

We found VMware’s vSAN was easy to set up, configure, and manage compared to other solutions we considered. It is best suited for small- to medium-sized organizations. It is easy to create load bal...

See all answers

Comparisons

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 15% of the time

VxRail vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 11% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 8% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 8% of the time

HPE Hyper Converged vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 7% of the time

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Competitors

VxRail vs VMware vSAN

Compared 15% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs VMware vSAN

Compared 11% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VMware vSAN

Compared 6% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs VMware vSAN

Compared 6% of the time

NetApp AFF vs VMware vSAN

Compared 5% of the time

More VMware vSAN Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

April 2026

Download Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware vSAN

March 2026

Download VMware vSAN product report

Also Known As

No data available

vSAN

Overview

The Cisco HyperFlex HX Data Platform is a purpose-built, high-performance, scale-out file system with a wide array of enterprise-class data management services. The data platform’s innovations redefine distributed storage technology, giving you complete hyper-convergence with enterprise storage features:

Enterprise-class data management
Continuous data optimization
Securely encrypted storage
Dynamic data placement
Clusterwide parallel data distribution
Linear and incremental scaling
API-based data platform architecture
A simplified approach

Cisco

VMware vSAN is a software-defined storage product that is used in collaboration with VMware ESXi hypervisor and that provisions and manages storage based on policies, regardless of the underlying hardware. The solution enables you to prime your business for growth through its seamless evolution (it is integrated with vSphere and requires no new tools), its flexibility, and its multi-cloud capabilities. As an industry-leading software, VMware vSAN provides high levels of performance with minimal impact on CPU and memory.

VMware vSAN Features

VMware vSAN has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Storage policy-based management (SPBM): VMware vSAN supports storage policy-based management for automated management of storage profiles.

Software-defined data-at-rest encryption: With this VMware vSAN feature, you can prevent unauthorized access of data at rest.

Multiple nodes: VMware vSAN provides clusters that can include as few as 2 nodes or as many as 64 nodes.

High security and availability: VMware vSAN offers stretched clusters, allowing more than one virtualization host server to be used in the same setup, promoting higher security as well as availability.

Deduplication: VMware vSAN’s deduplication compresses data to ensure efficient storage management and security.

HCI mesh updates: VMware vSAN clusters can share storage capacity with non-HCI Sphere clusters and can adopt HCI without having to scale computing resources and storage or replace existing servers.

Simplified file services: With VMware vSAN’s file services, backup of file shares is simplified. You can use APIs that allow backup and recovery software vendors to integrate with your VMware vSAN file services, which enables backup software to track new data and add scalability enhancements to files.

VMware vSAN Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing VMware vSAN. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO): VMware vSAN helps you reduce upfront costs for businesses because it can be easily deployed on inexpensive x86 servers. In addition, its highly scalable infrastructure and quick deployment also save organizations time and money, making it an efficient storage solution.

Good manageability: VMWare vSAN is easy to set up, manage, and provision, without sacrificing performance.

Scalability: VMware vSAN is agile and allows administrators to scale storage on demand, quickly, and efficiently via policies and rules.

Simplicity: VMWare vSAN is simple to configure since it is embedded in the vSphere hypervisor. Installing it using the vSphere Web Client can be done quickly.

Reduced risk: VMWare vSAN reduces the risk associated with digital transformations by utilizing existing tools, skill sets, and solutions.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the VMware vSAN solution.

PeerSpot user Yves S., CEO, Cloud Evangelist at Comdivision Consulting GmbH, says, “vSAN gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources. We have an overall larger host infrastructure, and we split that up for specific customer test and use cases. In that specific scenario, we can easily add more hosts or reduce the number of hosts in the environment.”

A reviewer who works in Infrastructure Security explains, “The ease of use is great. The initial setup and upgrade process was pretty straightforward. And, technical support is great.”

Laurent N., Director at Softlogic, comments, "The feature that I have found most valuable is that it is easy to deploy. It is easy to create and delete virtual servers. It is easy to create the load balancing and the clustering."

Broadcom

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