We performed a comparison between Cisco Hyperflex HX Series and VMware vSAN based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: VMware vSAN wins out in this comparison. The main difference between the two solutions is that Cisco Hyperflex HX Series users find deployment to be difficult, and also say the solution uses a lot of memory and hardware resources. In addition, they do not mention an ROI.
"StarWind allows us to move virtual machines from one physical host to another, which greatly reduces the downtime required for maintenance."
"The ability to choose our own hardware and our own vendors for this was hugely beneficial, as we had pre-existing relationships with vendors we wanted to maintain."
"The best part is the easy way it operates with a very clear GUI without any unnecessary items."
"As the client had acquired another company some distance away, they were concerned about having a single SAN in one location or the other. StarWind vSAN allowed us to keep a copy of the data local to each site without asking the client to pay for two SANs in addition to the two new servers they needed."
"The management and monitoring have been very easy since the solution's dashboard is very simple and user-friendly."
"In the three years that we have been using StarWind, the product has yet to cause us any problems."
"Having the ability to scale horizontally if needed is a huge plus for future growth."
"We have been able to use more on-prem hardware to reduce cost and also use old disks that we do not trust enough for ordinary RAID or usage."
"It has reduced the time it takes to put the servers in production by half the time."
"Our customers have seen ROI in terms of the time they save troubleshooting."
"The ROI we have seen from the high performance that has saved us time and money."
"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 possibility to share the workload is one of its most valuable features. We have many applications which have need of workloads only a few times in a month, so we share HyperFlex with them."
"The initial setup was straightforward. With our partners and the consultancy that we had, we knew what we wanted to do. Therefore, we didn't have any problems with the installation and parametrization."
"The product is stable. No one complains about the stability, which is fabulous."
"The integration between the storage and the server applications is the most valuable feature of this solution. It cuts down on the necessity to buy a secondary storage system.. It saves money in the long-run."
"The ability to have a disaster recovery option for our end-users by being able to use VDI and the vSANs, and the ability to do replication across multiple data centers, are valuable to us."
"Overall the solution is very good."
"VMware vSAN is easy to configure, with basic functionality and the customer can maintain the solution."
"We had very good access to technical support."
"Storage virtualization software with a good storage management feature. It's a scalable and stable software."
"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."
"The product's initial setup phase was very straightforward."
"VMware vSAN is easy to implement in a VMware environment and it is not expensive."
"Pricing is a bit high."
"The configuration can a bit cumbersome."
"I'm sure it needs bug fixes..."
"It would help us if the vendor continues to release software updates for earlier versions of the Windows operating systems."
"The gathering of monthly consumption and performance reports for future dissemination to concerned parties is very important. Unfortunately, StarWinds vSAN doesn't offer this functionality."
"While it is possible to implement disk encryption in StarWind using Windows Bitlocker, such a solution can be a little tricky to manage."
"The console is something that I believe could be enhanced."
"They need to invest more in the support documents for real issues happening when integrating the solution with the hypervisor."
"They should have more blade options and more configuration flexibility. Also, the price is expensive. It should be cheaper but it is worth the price."
"Cisco HyperFlex should decrease the amount of memory needed from the Controller VM that controls the physical discs. They control the discs by using the virtual VM over every ESXi host and the VM consumes memory and consumes more hardware resources. They have to improve that by decreasing the amount of required memory and CPUs to control this disc on the server."
"The infrastructure team thinks that there are a lot of issues."
"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."
"The deployment could be made a little bit easier, as we still seem to struggle with it a little bit for a day or so to get it running."
"I would like for them to develop integration with other technologies, like SD Access. It's still lacking an enhancement management player."
"The initial setup can be a bit complex."
"It is quite new solution, so it is not very stable."
"Hackers are able to manage to leak information or data from the product using some corrupt files, making it an area of major concern where improvements are required."
"VMware vSAN could improve by adding NAS and object storage."
"Hardware load balancing is available on the enterprise version of the solution, however, it's extremely expensive and therefore out of our budget."
"When we talk about improvements for vSAN, there is some way to go from a at least stability perspective. Adding all these new features is nice, but we are now at the level that most of the features you need in production are there."
"I would like to see it be more hardware-agnostic. Other than that, the only other complication is - and it has gotten better with the newer versions - that lately, once you're running an all-flash, if you need to grow or scale down your infrastructure, it's a long process. You need to evacuate all data and make sure you have enough space on the host, then add more hosts or take out hosts. That process is a little bit complex. You cannot scale as needed or shrink as needed."
"The UI could certainly be better. The inside into what's actually going on with vSAN would be nice to know."
"There is a room for improvement on the latest version of compatibility with the VMware product, especially for vSAN and with other vendors on their motherboards and driver configurations."
"I would like more integration with the hardware when it comes to disc types and supporting the newer types of storage."
Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is ranked 8th in HCI with 90 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 226 reviews. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is rated 8.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series writes "A fast and easy deployment that allows secure access to our medical applications ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is most compared with VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series vs. VMware vSAN report.
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