Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] vs VxRail comparison

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Mar 31, 2022

We performed a comparison between Cisco Hyperflex HX series and VxRail based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.

Ease of Deployment: Cisco Hyperflex HX series users feel that the setup can be a bit complex and that some technical expertise and know-how are necessary. VxRail reviewers consistently tell us that deployment is simple and easy to carry out.

Features: Cisco Hyperflex HX series users like that you can manage the whole cluster from the traffic interconnect. The solution is very stable, secure, and scales very well. Cisco Hyperflex HX series offers great performance and great integration options. Many users say that Cisco Hyperflex HX series is very heavy and uses a lot of memory and hardware resources. Users would like to see better replication and backup abilities.

VxRail users like that you are able to seamlessly deploy to a hybrid cloud and you can easily create developer-ready Kubernetes platforms. Users feel VxRail provides fast data center modernization, excellent integration, and powerful performance and reliability. Some users would like better support for SAP HANA and better documentation and feel that everyone should have access to the simulator.

Pricing: Cisco Hyperflex HX Series users feel that although there are several pricing options, the solution is still quite expensive. VxRail users are satisfied with the flexible pricing options available and feel it is a very cost-effective economical solution.

Service and Support: Users of both of these solutions are extremely happy with the support and service they receive.

Comparison Results: In our comparison, VxRail is the preferred solution. VxRail is easy to use and performs well without causing undue stress to operating systems. The competitive price and overall cost-effectiveness make it an easy choice for many organizations.

To learn more, read our detailed HCI Report (Updated: July 2024).

Buyer's Guide

HCI

July 2024

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Categories and Ranking

StarWind Virtual SAN

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2024, in the HCI category, the mindshare of StarWind Virtual SAN is 2.1%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] is 1.9%, down from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VxRail is 21.5%, down from 22.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

HCI

Unique Categories:

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

9.2%

No other categories found

Q&A Highlights

Netanya Carmi

Content Manager at PeerSpot (formerly IT Central Station)

Oct 26, 2021

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 offers freedom of choice and a number of different options. In contrast, Cisco HyperFlex HX does run on the more expensive side and cannot offer the same level of cost-effective solution. VxRail is able to provide both an ability to upgrade the system with an ever-growing library of resources as well as to provide powerful processors. This is something that I greatly appreciate. Being able to simply add upgrades to the system without necessarily having to worry about the system being bogged down is invaluable. The ability that it provides to apply updates to the system with ease is something worthy of note. If you add this to the fact that VxRail runs on multiple cores at 2 gigahertz or higher, then that means that in terms of ability, the VxRail is difficult to match. In terms of usability, it is hard to argue that VxRail delivers. It is pretty simple and easy to both set up and manage. Once the system is set up, all of the management tools are centrally located to assist in providing ease of use. The Cisco Hyperflex HX Series is both stable as well as reasonably easy to set up. Cisco has a step-by-step program guide that leads you through the process. Once it is set up, it is not prone to glitching or freezing. However, the pricing model that Cisco applies to this product requires users to pay a yearly subscription. This can end up being rather expensive in the long run. Conclusion Both systems offer stable solutions. Ultimately, VxRail is more cost-effective.

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Featured Reviews

Felix E.

Technischer IT-Berater at ITC GmbH

Mar 8, 2024

Good monitoring and configuring capabilities but disaster recovery documentation is sparse

My impression has been mostly positive. However, there have been some pitfalls. For example, it runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear. This consequently follows a long learning curve and can take some time until this can be done efficiently. The feature log-structured file system has been removed. While I have not used it, I know some colleagues who have reported some performance benefits under certain circumstances. Additionally, vSAN does not offer extended SAN features like inline deduplication, compression, or S3-compatible access, which is part of most modern SAN feature sets, also in hyper-converged scenarios.

Read full review

Enterpridf49

Enterprise Architect at a aerospace/defense firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

Jan 29, 2019

It is flexible and can quickly deploy machines

The product's disadvantage is that it is not necessarily open as I would like it to be. The main platform has some closed features that I would rather not see. For example, I need a mechanism to orchestrate services and an infrastructure as a service model, which is how we are deploying it. We would like to orchestrate it using an open, non-Cisco tool. While there is an API, in order to deploy it, we need to indicate it with a higher layer Network Services Orchestrator. This requires a lot of work to be done. If it could support a more open model, where we have standardized blueprints, templates, or virtual machines, it would be nice. This is an industry problem, not necessarily specific to Cisco. I would like a lighter product; something which can be carried by a mere human. The typical size still looks like a stack of data center-sized servers, which is typically fine, but not so good if you want to carry it around.

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FreddyGonzalez

Virtualization Engineer, SME at Dawson Federal

Dec 14, 2020

Provides centralized management that is easy to manage and easy to update, and the support is excellent

I have been in contact with technical support and they are excellent. I would rate them a nine out of ten on support because there is always room for improvement, but they do a good job. Sometimes, when passing on tickets to other techs because people leave on vacation or for other reasons, they don't follow up quickly enough in my opinion. I have found that sometimes, I've had tickets open and two days later, I don't hear anything and it's because the person was out and nobody else took over the ticket. Other than that, they are on point.

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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

"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."

"Before VSAN, hypervisor configuration changes and updates resulted in VM outages. Now, downtime is dramatically reduced."

"In addition to the main functions of the software, I want to note the excellent work of technical support."

"The ROI is great on this product."

"Active-active HA provides top performance and redundancy."

"The solution provides great performance for the price it is listed with."

"The fact that we can expand our storage and add on to our compute nodes easily and how amazing the StarWind technical support team is really adding value to our purchase."

"StarWind vSAN has a lot of great features and is a perfect solution for mirroring internal disks and flash between servers."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pros

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

"It is helpful as a backup solution."

"I find the usability very valuable."

"It is a stable solution...It is a scalable solution."

"Cisco HyperFlex HX has improved the way our organization functions on the storage side by having one big storage space for hosting VMs. We do not have to provision other ones. That's a positive aspect of it."

"The technical support has been very good for this solution."

"Easy to spin up and operate virtual machines without the overhead of managing a storage network."

"The most valuable feature of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is the integration with everything in a much smoother, such as in physical and virtual environments. VMware NSX is a simpler solution but, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is more robust compared to VMware NSX."

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] pros

"The support has been excellent, especially if you compare it to IBM."

"The technical support from Dell was very good."

"There is a single vendor with the hardware, software, and maintenance. Thus, there is a single vendor with whom we can contact."

"VxRail is very cost-effective and affordable in the long term. It is more recommended when it comes to financial life, but it may depend upon the license. VxRail comes with VMware licensing, which may not be that cost-effective as compared to others. With VMware, it's an auto check competition. VMware is an expensive solution, especially for Nutanix. Nutanix have their own hypervisor called Acronis, which is very cost-effective against the VMware. Nutanix is cheaper for the hardware but not for the software. If you ask the Nutanix partners to deploy Nutanix over Cisco servers or Dell EMC servers, the cost will be higher. Nutanix wants to compete financially. Therefore, they propose their software over the Supermicro server, which is a very cheap Chinese server. In fact, I don't like their terms of service. HyperFlex has the highest price, and it is very expensive. I don't know why. It may be because this is a UCS system, which comes from Cisco and is already expensive. When it comes to HyperFlex, they need the labor to deploy Hyper-V, Citrix, or any other hypervisor."

"It's a turnkey solution, which is good for customers, because they are buying into stability."

"The solution is perfect for the lifecycle management of hardware."

"We were able to speed up our gaming software, which was a big plus."

"There is no in-depth config involved nor third-party needed, saving us time and money."

More VxRail pros

Cons

"The software monitoring should be web-based to be reachable from any VLAN workstation."

"The documentation could be clearer in terms of explaining the installation."

"A better overall view of the different deployments could be beneficial, although this is difficult due to how flexible the solution is."

"While we had little to no issues in setting up StarWind and received excellent support from the StarWind technicians, we would have appreciated a clearer guideline for a setup with the free version of StarWind Management Console or, in other words - for the setup with the PowerShell."

"The reconnection of the attached drives upon a reboot could be improved."

"We just need more integration with Veeam."

"I am expecting to see it more user-friendly in the future."

"They need to improve the speed of the interfaces, thus allowing for better traffic on the network."

More StarWind Virtual SAN cons

"Its price could be better."

"Unlike other options, you need to pay a subscription to Cisco yearly instead of paying for the hardware outright, which makes it more expensive in the long run."

"This solution is lacking in replication and backup abilities that I would like to see in a future release similar to HPE SimpliVity."

"Does not support the stretch cluster, and the interface is not good."

"We would like to have the ability to not have to reboot while doing updates. Being able to work through updates with as minimal amount of impact to users."

"The storage layer seems to be a little better on the VMware than on HyperFlex side."

"We would like to move off the GUI."

"The initial setup of the Cisco HyperFlex HX platform was medium-level difficult. It's a little bit different from traditional servers. It takes getting used to the learning curve."

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] cons

"The licensing needs to be improved upon."

"It should not be deployed on one hypervisor. There should be multiple hypervisors supported like Hyper-V or KVM."

"VxRail should try to improve the pricing."

"Right now, it's difficult for a non-technical person to participate in using the product. It could be made more consumer-friendly."

"Its price needs to be improved. It is very expensive. NSX should be licensed together. It will make the network virtualization layer more usable. It would be better if they come together in a bundle, not separately."

"The initial setup between the different Dell departments is fragmented. The engineers who come to rack/stack and do the initial config should be trained on all the areas and work with the different Dell departments whilst they are onsite to give a smoother install and better experience for customer."

"I would love to see license migration from one host to another."

"I can't speak to any missing features or weak aspects of the system just yet. We haven't had a chance to really dig in."

More VxRail cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We evaluated other options and this one was the most cost-effective."

"I think the bang for the buck is much better with StarWind Virtual SAN."

"The setup cost is very low. The pricing is great."

"I think that purchasing StarWind Virtual SAN Professional Edition would be optimal for most."

"The support contract is well worth it. The price for it was very reasonable and their team has been very engaged whenever we reach out."

"For two nodes, it cost us $10,000, and we spend $2,000 a year on support."

"The licensing is a bit weird. If you license the standard version of StarWind, it allows you four terabytes. Then, they have a pro version, but with the pro version, the only difference is it doubles the terabytes to eight."

"Once you buy the license, you are free to build your own hardware solution based on your needs."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pricing and cost advice

"The price is a bit too high."

"Our licensing costs are large, but it is combined between all of the Cisco products that we have."

"We negotiated with Cisco and we got some price benefit from that."

"It's roughly $30,000 per Hyperflex license, so that would be about $60,000 a year."

"When we negotiated with Cisco for the HyperFlex solution, they gave us a good price because they wanted to break into the market in Portugal for the first time. However, in general, I think it's a very expensive solution. It's a huge amount of money to acquire this kind of infrastructure."

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

"Initially HyperFlex was a little costly, it was higher, but Cisco wanted to get into our company, so they gave us a fair discount."

"I would like the pricing to be cheaper."

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

"The hardware cost associated is a bit high"

"A typical node that I would sell to a customer has a list price be between $80,000 and $100,000 per node. Organizations typically start with four nodes. That's the hardware, software, VMware licensing, everything. Customers typically pay about half of that - approximately $45,000 to $50,000 a node. On average, it costs about $200,000 to get your foot in the door."

"We were expecting Dell EMC to bring us something that would work very quickly and easily, but also be at a reasonable price point, and they did."

"The licensing costs can vary depending on the number of processors and specific requirements, which may result in considerable expenses."

"The licensing aspect is the most painful for some of our customers. Customers go for a VMware license that's standard and then they find they have to go with the enterprise solution and adjust the license. If you have a limited budget, that's difficult."

"The price is rather on the high side."

"The price point needs improvement, certainly for smaller SMBs. The cost of it is still quite painful. I think all vendors should do a product which is capped either by terabytes, IOPs, or VM instances. It should be an SMB solution that's going to make hyper-converged solutions easier for SMBs to get hold of. It's fine for those big guys that have billions of dollars of budget, but not for customers who have barely a 100,000 dollars or pounds in budget."

More VxRail pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

19%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

26%

Government

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

10%

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about StarWind Virtual SAN?

It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combin...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?

Make the most of your 30-day trial license, and if needed, you should contact the sales department of StarWind to ext...

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What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?

The dashboard is functional, but it could benefit from a more modern and visually appealing design. A facelift would ...

See all answers

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 ...

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 ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series?

It's easy to get the tool started.

See all answers

How does HPE Nimble Storage compare to VxRail?

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI Vs. VxRail One of the best things about the HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is the three, two, one, z...

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 e...

See all answers

What are the major differences between VxRail and Dell EMC PowerFlex?

VxRail vs. Dell EMC PowerFlex VxRail provides stable solutions for technical problems while at the same time not bein...

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Comparisons

VMware vSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 32% of the time

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 17% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 16% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 14% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 2% of the time

More StarWind Virtual SAN Competitors

VMware vSAN vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 30% of the time

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

Compared 16% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 9% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 6% of the time

Dell vSAN Ready Nodes vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 5% of the time

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Competitors

Dell PowerFlex vs VxRail

Compared 27% of the time

VMware vSAN vs VxRail

Compared 23% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VxRail

Compared 17% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs VxRail

Compared 7% of the time

More VxRail Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

StarWind Virtual SAN

June 2024

Download StarWind Virtual SAN product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

July 2024

Download Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

VxRail

June 2024

Download VxRail product report

Also Known As

StarWind SAN & NAS

No data available

VCE VxRail

Learn More

StarWind

Cisco

Dell Technologies

Overview

StarWind Virtual SAN provides high availability and fault tolerance for virtualized environments without the need for dedicated SAN hardware. It allows for real-time replication between servers, shared storage for Hyper-V clusters, and enables vMotion and High Availability features for VMware vSphere. The solution reduces costs and leverages existing hardware while providing a scalable and reliable infrastructure. Valuable features include ease of use, scalability, top-tier support, hardware agnosticism, and the ability to use off-the-shelf standard servers to increase storage space. StarWind VSAN has helped organizations improve performance, data availability, and data security while reducing downtime and providing cost-saving storage options.

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

VxRail is a hyper-converged appliance based on VMware virtual SAN Software and is jointly engineered and built with VMware, for VMware, to enhance Vmware. VxRail software-defined architecture simplifies compute, storage, virtualization, and management. It will safeguard performance, reliability, and flexibility across your organization with a broad range of workloads and applications from business-critical to next-gen. With VxRail, you are covered.

VxRail is a single turn-key appliance that is a validated, fully integrated, pre-configured, pre-tested solution and offers non-disruptive scaling. Every node includes compute storage and IO. All-flash configurations can contain between 12-28 cores per node. The storage capacity options run from 7.6 TB to 19TB with either 256 GB or 512GB of memory. Hybrid appliances may have 6-20 cores per node, 3.6 TB to 10 TB of storage capacity, and 24GB to 256 GB of memory.

VxRail offers high availability fail-over, an active/active stretch cluster, and VSan Kernal integration. VxRail is a power-edged server with APIs built on automation. There are over 15 million different combinations of hardware available with VxRail. VxRail provides a simple, cost-effective solution that solves a large range of use cases. Additionally, you also get a mixed workloads automated system that is backed with fully automated system updates, and complete end-to-end lifecycle management all in a single two-rack appliance.

VxRail is a value-added suitable solution for distributed small to mid-sized enterprises, remote offices, private clouds, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). You choose the deployment option that best suits your organizational needs, from appliance to integrated rack offerings, with or without networking, and it will be delivered to you, ready to deploy out-of-box.

If you know VMware, you know VxRail.

VxRail Features and Benefits

Seamlessly accelerate deployment to a hybrid cloud
Fast data center modernization
Create developer-ready Kubernetes platforms

Powerful performance and reliability
Improve and simplify operational efficiency
Excellent integration
Save time
Reduce costs

Reviews from Real Users

VxRail is an all-in-one solution: "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."

VxRail is remarkable: “The cover points feature in VxRail is remarkable. It's unique. It has an intervention failover system as well as an automatic failover system, reaching clusters existing in VxRail…”

VxRail is a powerful performer: “...VxRail 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.”

Sample Customers

Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School

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

World Wide Technology Inc, Renault Sport Formula One Team, 8x8 Inc, Brownes, Canadian Pacific, Canopy, Denton, EDF, Unilin, Xerox

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI. Updated: July 2024.

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