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

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

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [...

Read 90 Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] reviews

89% willing to recommend

VMware vSAN

Read 231 VMware vSAN reviews

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7,923 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [...

VMware vSAN

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

VMware vSAN and Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series compete in the hyper-converged infrastructure market. VMware vSAN appears to have the upper hand due to its strong integration with VMware solutions and robust support network, despite needing improvements in management functionality.

Features: VMware vSAN is known for its vMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), and robust integration with VMware solutions, coupled with centralized storage and easy scalability. It provides high performance and cost savings. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series offers strong integration and high availability within a hyper-converged setup, with ease of management being a key aspect.

Room for Improvement: VMware vSAN needs enhancements in its management platform, including better dashboards and improved hardware compatibility. Users desire software-based disk-level encryption and deduplication for better resource management. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series could improve by enhancing integration with other platforms, scalability, and its user interface. Pricing and its reliance on the Cisco ecosystem are notable concerns.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware vSAN is considered easy to deploy with strong community and technical support, providing prompt issue resolution. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series varies in deployment ease, depending on user familiarity with Cisco's ecosystem. While its technical support is generally responsive, experiences can be mixed for complex issues. VMware is noted for its robust support structure.

Pricing and ROI: VMware vSAN is expensive upfront with complex licensing but is valued for reduced IT costs over time. It is appreciated for offering cost benefits compared to traditional systems. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, although costly, provides long-term value through integration and scalability but requires a higher initial investment. VMware focuses on flexible growth, while Cisco emphasizes integrated solutions despite higher costs.

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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

7.2

Number of Reviews

231

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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Pramod-Talekar

Sr Service Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Enables efficient multi-environment cluster deployment and resource management with versatile features

While VMware vSAN is quite comprehensive, if we are running multiple infrastructures, applications, databases, and other elements, having a diagnostic tool to identify the actual problem area, whether application-side or infrastructure-side, would be beneficial. A proper monitoring tool that encompasses both applications and infrastructure would help in quickly resolving issues.

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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

"Great integration with backup software."

"It increases efficiency, decreases the cost, and manages the network in one single way. That's the most important thing."

"It is a stable and scalable solution."

"I like Cisco Intersight."

"Cisco offers very good quality."

"It consumes a smaller footprint when I compare it with other competitors."

"The price of the solution is good, especially when it comes to complex network solutions, such as UCS and Connect."

"The solution can scale up and out."

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] pros

"I like that we could choose whatever hardware we wanted, rather than having to use one particular vendor."

"One of the valuable features for us is the ability to restrict the performance capacity per client. Other solutions don't have this feature."

"The deduplication and compression are excellent."

"Flexibility, growth, and expansion are probably the more important features for us. As our environment grows, the more users come on, the more VDI workstations that we need, we can easily expand either horizontally or vertically with the environment"

"When we do to do more scaled load testing, we can run more dense workloads and still have the same results across all specific nodes"

"VMware vSAN is easy to configure, with basic functionality and the customer can maintain the solution."

"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."

"VMware vSAN is a global solution, so we can manage all the storage solutions in one place. It's embedded in VCI solutions."

More VMware vSAN pros

Cons

"The product does not have a cloud version...The product should be made more flexible in terms of integration capabilities."

"If we compare it with VMware, the VMware product is basically very open, and it can be easily integrated with any platform. VMware product is also available on the cloud and is not an appliance-based product, whereas Cisco HyperFlex is an appliance-based product. Companies that want to use HCI as a platform or as a service would prefer something without an appliance. A SaaS-based product is better for a customer who is using the cloud and has multiple resources, workflows, and devices on the cloud and wants to go for a hyper-converged solution. This is where improvement is needed. In addition to an appliance-based product, Cisco should provide a SaaS-based product. Its price should be lower. Cisco needs to work on the pricing model for this product. Its price is a big road blocker when competing against Nutanix and VMware, which are its main competitors."

"When it comes to customer needs, the licensing price could be better."

"The initial setup is very complex because there were some issues. It is not clear to how set up this solution."

"I would rate the installation of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series an eight out of ten. It can be complex."

"Its price could be better."

"We had a bit of complexity to think about how to migrate our legacy infrastructure into Cisco HyperFlex."

"I would have liked it to be able to back up the system to a cloud, to be able to work from any other place"

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] cons

"Improvements are also needed as per the customer's requirements."

"This is quite an expensive solution."

"VMware vSAN could improve by adding NAS and object storage."

"We would really like them to look at what Nutanix did for day-one/day-two operations deployment: Bringing in the equipment, getting it deployed, getting it setup, and ease of use of one-click for deploying our 30-node solution. With vSAN we had to go into each one individually and set it up."

"In a future release, they can bring in the object storage capabilities to this solution. Currently, there is not any compatibility."

"The monitoring feature in VMware vSAN could be better."

"I would love to see vSAN integrate Persistent Memory and NVDIMMs. I know they're supposed to be working on an elastic tier so that we don't have the issues with destaging from the cache to the capacity. Those are the things that I'm interested in."

"It could have some automation. We haven't involved ourselves in a lot of automation around the vSAN environment capabilities. We're still running it using a very traditional setup. So, there could be some plugins to automate it using third-party environments, such as Jenkins."

More VMware vSAN cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"If you don't look at the costs of the systems, the scalability is quite good."

"We are on an annual subscription and the price is fair."

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

"Pricing is better if you buy more Cisco products."

"There is a 30 percent additional premium that all the companies are charging for Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series because of the lack of chips and bottlenecks in the market. The cost of the solution is high right now."

"For customers in the private sector, this product can have a very high return on investment."

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

"We have a yearly license."

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

"vSAN has many versions with standard and advanced including Enterprise and Enterprise Plus. Regarding the Enterprise and the Advanced, it could be lower."

"It is too expensive."

"It is slightly expensive. They can be more competitive in terms of pricing."

"Perhaps a bundle, like Essentials, would allow more businesses to make the leap to the product."

"The vSAN is somewhat expensive to license."

"In comparison with other solutions, such as HP or Cisco, I find the solution to be quite pricey."

"It is an expensive solution. There should be more flexible with licensing to allow small businesses the essentials of the solution's features."

"It is not a subscription model. It is a purchase model, but it is very important that you also buy technical support from VMware. This is probably the only disadvantage of vSAN. It depends on the use case, but it can be very expensive."

More VMware vSAN pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

23%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

24%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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...

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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 do you like most about Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series?

It's easy to get the tool started.

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

Which would you choose - Nutanix Acropolis AOS or VMware vSAN?

We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface that allows you to talk directly to your VM from the present software. We fou...

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

Comparisons

HPE SimpliVity vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 47% of the time

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

Compared 30% of the time

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Competitors

VxRail vs VMware vSAN

Compared 18% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs VMware vSAN

Compared 15% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VMware vSAN

Compared 8% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs VMware vSAN

Compared 7% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs VMware vSAN

Compared 6% of the time

More VMware vSAN Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

June 2025

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Buyer's Guide

VMware vSAN

June 2025

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."

VMware

Sample Customers

BluePearl Veterinary Partners, Ready Pac Foods, Bryant University, Bellevue Group, KPIT Technologies, City Harvest

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