We compared VxRail and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes based on our user's reviews in several parameters.
VxRail is praised for its excellent performance, support, pricing structure, and positive ROI, while Dell vSAN Ready Nodes are valued for their high performance, scalability, and efficient storage management. Users highlight VxRail's flexibility and customer service, while Dell vSAN Ready Nodes receive praise for their ease of use and data protection. Suggestions for improvement include enhancing scalability and compatibility for VxRail and improving performance optimization and installation process for Dell vSAN Ready Nodes.
Features: The valuable features of VxRail include excellent performance, seamless integration with existing systems, and highly scalable and flexible infrastructure solution. On the other hand, Dell vSAN Ready Nodes offer high performance, scalability, ease of use, efficient storage management, reliable data protection, and seamless integration with existing infrastructure. Users also appreciate the nodes' ability to handle demanding workloads, expand storage capacity as needed, and effortlessly fit into their existing IT environment.
Pricing and ROI: According to user experiences, VxRail offers reasonable setup costs and flexible licensing options. Users have reported that Dell vSAN Ready Nodes also have reasonable setup costs and a straightforward setup process. Both products are praised for their easily obtained and managed licensing., The VxRail product offers increased efficiency, improved performance, lower total cost of ownership, scalability, ease of use, and reliability. On the other hand, Dell vSAN Ready Nodes provide improved data storage and management capabilities, seamless integration, cost-effectiveness, and user-friendly features.
Room for Improvement: Some areas for improvement in VxRail include scalability, flexibility, compatibility, setup process, monitoring/reporting capabilities, customer support, and troubleshooting documentation. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes could benefit from enhancements in performance optimization, compatibility, storage options, installation/configuration process, reliability, and efficiency.
Deployment and customer support: The user reviews suggest that there are varying timeframes for deployment, setup, and implementation phases for both VxRail and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes. Some users spent three months on deployment and an additional week on setup for both, while others required only a week for both., Customers have expressed satisfaction with the customer service for both VxRail and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes. However, VxRail is praised for its helpfulness and responsiveness, while Dell is commended for its prompt and efficient assistance.
The summary above is based on 34 interviews we conducted recently with VxRail and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"The best feature is its ease of installation and integration within a current infrastructure."
"The ability to keep data accessible even in the event of hardware failures is highly valued, as it ensures business continuity."
"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."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support. They are excellent and you can learn a lot from the support team."
"StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere is a software-defined storage solution that has reduced administration time for storage. It's pretty straightforward to install and setup it and so far it has been robust and worked as advertised from StarWind."
"The primary purpose of this software is to create a virtual SAN between local storage on Hyper-V hosts. I find this feature most valuable since it accomplishes this quite well."
"Active-active HA provides top performance and redundancy."
"The solution is also quite flexible. As an example, other vSAN solutions that we looked at had more stringent requirements regarding mixed HDD/SSD storage which wouldn't have worked in our environment."
"Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes is scalable"
"No concerns regarding the footprint in the data center."
"It is easy to install."
"The product is useful for DR and other things."
"The most valuable feature of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is file sharing."
"You don't have to spend much time evaluating the hardware. It can be deployed in a short time. The tool is also easy to upgrade."
"The tool's most valuable feature is high availability."
"I have found the most important features of Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes are the capacity to manage the storage because the storage is built in the servers. The type of profiles you can attribute to the storage is a benefit. You can manage the storage by profiles. Overall the solution is a good speed and performance."
"It helps simplify the management of VMware."
"The compute is good and we have not had any issues with the vSAN."
"It is scalable. When you are buying it, you have to buy a minimum of three nodes. After that, if you want to add more nodes, you can buy can buy them. You can also add-on additional compute and storage."
"The low latency and response times and having a virtualized environment within a single computer are valuable. I have no physical elements, and I can optimize or balance my data depending on the sales volume that I have in a specific store."
"I would recommend VxRail, it works for most of the use cases."
"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."
"I like that there is a dependency on the storage controller."
"We enjoy the ease of management since all of the resources are located on one box — one single point of support."
"StarWind Virtual SAN architecture is slightly complex and requires the team to carefully identify and study how the solution integrates with VMware vSphere."
"The software could benefit from more tooling to help with initial deployment."
"Proper training sessions should be included with the licensing."
"The documentation could be clearer in terms of explaining the installation."
"Updates seem to be non-existent."
"Perhaps more reporting features on the utilization, usage, and performance of the configured high-availability images and underlying physical disks would be helpful."
"The number of different ways you can set it up can make it a little daunting."
"Ongoing improvements in read and write performance would help meet increasingly demanding workloads."
"There is room for improvement in the maintenance pricing. Maintenance isn't difficult, but the prices are high and ridiculous. Some customers feel it is better to go with a new solution rather than renew this one."
"The Dell VxRail solution is based on vSAN Ready Nodes, but the Dell VxRail is fully automated. It would be helpful if this automation feature could be added to the Dell vSAN Ready Nodes. For example, we need to install VMware ESXi, and manually expand the cluster."
"The solution should provide daily task alerts for data recovery maintenance, usage, and other instructions to ensure the systems are in a good status."
"Dell vSAN Ready Nodes' deployment is complex."
"The power switch on the hardware is located in a poor location where it can accidentally be pushed. In an update, they should solve this issue so people do not push it accidentally to have their service go down. A possible solution is the switch should be inside."
"The product's price is an area of concern where improvements are required. The price of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes could be lowered."
"Upgrades are carried out manually."
"Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes is a great hyper-converged system that is a perfect platform for supporting any kind of workload. The only workload that it's not designed to support is big data."
"You cannot install another operating system such as Microsoft or Hyperflex or Nutanix. We have also had a hardware problem."
"You have to buy a new server if you want to scale up."
"The configurations of VxRail can be difficult. However, it has improved in the newer version. From version 6 to 7, there has been a lot of changes."
"One area of the product that could be improved is the support."
"In the version that I was working with, the integrations are in need of improvement."
"The version upgrade process should be simplified."
"The licensing is a bit too costly."
"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."
Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is ranked 12th in HCI with 14 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 115 reviews. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is rated 8.6, while VxRail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes writes "Offers good performance and is easy to use". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is most compared with VMware vSAN, Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series, Dell PowerFlex, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and Fujitsu PRIMEFLEX, whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series. See our Dell vSAN Ready Nodes vs. VxRail report.
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