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.
"The management and monitoring have been very easy since the solution's dashboard is very simple and user-friendly."
"This software lets us maintain storage redundancy across both of our Hyper-V hosts, so if one goes down the environment fails over to the other and we have minimal to no downtime."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements."
"The ability for us to manage all of our nodes from the same console makes systems administration very easy."
"The most valuable feature is the reliable storage replication, which enables me to create a robust infrastructure to run our business."
"This product now allows us to migrate virtual machines between nodes as if we had a dedicated $100,000 SAN in the mix without the additional cost and management of the SAN."
"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."
"Starwind support is excellent. They are very fast and have very good knowledge of Starwind and Hyper-V Cluster software."
"Support is very responsive."
"The management feature is the solution's most valuable aspect."
"The most valuable feature is that you can manage the whole cluster from the traffic interconnect."
"It's very easy to integrate with the ACI network."
"Stretch cluster allows us to warranty a service for the customer."
"With our four HyperFlex HX hosts (consisting of processor, memory, and disk), the performance is very fast and we have no problems at all. In all of the five years that we have been using HyperFlex, we haven't needed to increase our budget to buy additional hosts."
"Performance-wise, everything is good. So far, we haven't had any issues. There has been no downtime at all."
"I like Cisco Intersight."
"This product has very good performance when it comes to virtualization storage and works well with solutions such as SAP HANA, Exadata, Hadoop, and Big Data Analytics."
"We had very good access to technical support."
"It is very well known in the industry, and there are a lot of technical resources around it. This is a big thing for me because, at the end of the day, when you implement it, you need to support it."
"Its ease of use is most valuable. It is easy to configure, and there is a unified interface, which makes things slightly easier."
"We have found the solution to be very scalable."
"Storage virtualization software with a good storage management feature. It's a scalable and stable software."
"The valuable feature of the solution is the total hyperconverged facility."
"It is easy to work with, easy to handle, and easy to manage."
"I found that certain browsers are not fully compatible with the administration web access portal."
"Though I have learned some of the nuances with the upgrading of firmware/windows/etc., it would be nice to have a more efficient method of doing so."
"The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us."
"Security on the ISCSI protocol could be improved by adding features like OS-type control access, especially for the data center environment."
"The documentation is good. However, if compared with competitors, it could be enhanced and made more professional."
"If it's possible to make a driver/solution that does not make use of the iSCSI targets of Windows, that would be great. I don't know if that's possible, however, it could make the configuration a little easier."
"For someone entering the IT sector with little knowledge of storage, iSCSI, and virtual disks, they might not find the GUI immediately obvious."
"I would like them to invest time in reducing the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure."
"There are sometimes issues with memory failure."
"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."
"Does not support the stretch cluster, and the interface is not good."
"Lacks some integration and documentation could be improved."
"The initial setup can be a bit complex."
"The solution could improve by having more customization."
"They should give us a little more information about how to use the CLI and offer more commands."
"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."
"It would be ideal if the solution offered some intelligent monitoring."
"VMware vSAN could improve by having better integration with other vendors and the storage is limited, I prefer it to the traditional storage."
"Ease of administration is one area where vSAN could be improved."
"The pricing could be better when it comes to renewing the licenses."
"There is a lot that VMware could improve from a marketing perspective. The cloud is still new for many people, so extending storage should be effortless. It shouldn't be so complicated to extend the storage so workloads can access it no matter where they go."
"In a future release, they can bring in the object storage capabilities to this solution. Currently, there is not any compatibility."
"The stability needs to be improved."
"The only negative point relates to the licensing. If you want multiple, different servers, it costs money, but you have all the capacity for vSAN. You do not reach the data, but the processor arrays and the current architecture."
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Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is ranked 8th in HCI with 29 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 78 reviews. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is rated 7.8, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series writes "High performance solution that makes it easy to efficiently manage VM resources". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources". Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is most compared with VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity, Dell PowerFlex and FlexPod, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity and HPE Hyper Converged. See our Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series vs. VMware vSAN report.
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