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.
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.
"This was a great implementation for a small to mid-size business."
"The management was very easy and I was able to find all that I need in the software dashboard."
"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."
"It provided the much-needed HA on an extremely low budget."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements."
"The fact that the solution is vendor-agnostic allows it to be used with any virtualization vendor while remaining a powerful abstraction over storage."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to grow rapidly while still providing flexibility and reliability."
"Besides being 80% cheaper than the other alternatives, the simplicity makes reconfiguration and support much easier."
"The solution is easy to use and to learn. It is well integrated with VMware."
"Overall, the solution is extremely easy, flexible and secure."
"The scalability of the product is quite good overall - as long as you plan correctly from the outset."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is that you can manage the whole cluster from the traffic interconnect."
"Great integration with backup software."
"The initial setup is very straightforward."
"The solution is stable."
"This is a good solution if you want to deploy an ACI Environment but don't have all the necessary resources."
"VxRail has given us a lot of tools in a one-stop-shop environment."
"VxRail has improved our organization by providing our admin team with an easy-to-use interface."
"The stability of VxRail is good, we have not had any issues."
"Dell owns the EMC, EMC owns VMware, and there are many other interconnections throughout the industry which allows a fully integrated solution from a technical perspective."
"You don't need to think about compatibility of components."
"We deploy VxRail systems to provide our customers with a distributed information solution. The customer was impressed because we delivered a serious data reduction. For example, we showed them that 10 terabytes on their traditional storage solution could be reduced to 1.5 terabytes in the VxRail systems. That's why the customers also like it so much,"
"VxRail's technical support is very good."
"Maybe in the future, the replication will be supported in more cloud providers."
"Besides not being able to use any filesystem, I do not have any additional cons."
"Perhaps more reporting features on the utilization, usage, and performance of the configured high-availability images and underlying physical disks would be helpful."
"I wish the sync after a failure, such as hardware failure or power-related issues, for example, was faster."
"It would be helpful if StarWind provided more precise and detailed documentation explaining how to configure the solution in various scenarios, including the advantages and disadvantages of each."
"A web management interface would be good, especially for those coming from other solutions that have one."
"Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer."
"A great feature would be a wizard and to include a new disk in the SAN. At the moment, including a new disk requires several steps - some that must be done at the OS level and others in each node."
"HyperFlex could be improved by reducing the minimum number of nodes supported from three to two."
"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."
"We need to be able to scale out and not just up. When you want to scale up or scale out, you are quite limited."
"In the next release, Cisco should add more integration and management capabilities as well as some tweaks to the dashboard that make it more user-friendly. They could also add support for multiple hypervisors."
"The initial setup can be a bit complex."
"I have been receiving a memory overflow message every day when I use the solution."
"Lacks some integration and documentation could be improved."
"When it comes to customer needs, the licensing price could be better."
"The solution is okay to scale vertically but a bit difficult to expend horizontally. For example, increasing RAM."
"We'd like to see more automation capabilities in the future."
"The initial setup was not that easy, it was a medium difficulty level."
"In the next release, I would like to see our graphical user interface allow us to manage VxRail clusters and everything on a single pane of glass where I can monitor and shut down the server, similar to a VxRail manager."
"They need to keep upgrading the environment and improving automation so that the solution keeps getting better and better."
"Lacks integration of licenses so that it's an expensive solution."
"Dell wants to implement the disaster site in the new year, but they haven't decided yet. I hope we will have the opportunity to sell VxRail with this disaster site. It is not really clear at the moment, but hopefully, we will get some good news from the customers in the new year."
"When using hybrid nodes, such as VxRail, there should not be compression and deduplication, only in All-Flash nodes."
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Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is ranked 8th in HCI with 30 reviews while VxRail is ranked 3rd in HCI with 70 reviews. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is rated 7.6, while VxRail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series writes "An all-in-one option that is stable and offers good management". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VxRail writes "Good automation makes this solution practical". Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is most compared with VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE SimpliVity, Dell PowerFlex and FlexPod, whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Dell PowerFlex, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and HPE Hyper Converged. See our Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series vs. VxRail report.
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