"Speed and high availability have been the most valuable for us."
"Quick setup, great support, stability is great"
"It has been extremely stable for the three years we've been running it."
"This solution enables us to make better cost-effective use of our existing hardware and leverage the current infrastructure at a higher level than we could before."
"PowerShell library is pretty good feature as I created with APC PowerChute a script to put volumes on maintenance mode then turning off the StarWind nodes together with the VM and Hosts when UPS reaches 15 percent, this way after a blackout or electrical problems when turning servers on again, there is no issues for syncing or data loss due to energy interrupts."
"Having the ability to scale horizontally if needed is a huge plus for future growth."
"StarWind allows us to move virtual machines from one physical host to another, which greatly reduces the downtime required for maintenance."
"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."
"The catalog of APIs for automation has been most valuable, although they are quite limited."
"We've had no issues with scaling the solution."
"It is easy to use for management and operations teams because the tools are in one place."
"The initial setup is simple."
"VxRail alleviates the operational constraints within an organization."
"The compute is good and we have not had any issues with the vSAN."
"like VxRail because it's fully integrated. The other hyperconverged solutions are also well integrated. They are all highly similar to each other in that regard. But we prefer VxRail for its physical integrations or lifecycle management. It also has vCenter, which integrates the hardware lifecycle management."
"There are so many features, but if I have to choose, I would go for scale-out upgrades and performance. Scale-out upgrades are very valuable. Typically, when customers engage in virtualization, they're committing themselves to run many virtual machines on a fewer number of hosts. They'll have five or six hosts, and they will run all their virtualization on vSphere. They could be having anywhere from 50 to 100 or even more virtual machines. Once all these go into production, getting downtime or getting planned maintenance windows is extremely difficult. It is something that typically businesses will frown upon. With VxRail, you can just go ahead and add a node without disrupting the existing environment, which works very well. That's why scale-out upgrades are a key feature. Its performance is also valuable. It 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."
"The scalability of VxRail is very good."
"Management of the hardware and software in one console is the most valuable feature. It's also compatible with vSAN."
"The stability is very nice. We haven't had any issues with the cluster. The cluster is very stable. No problems with slowness. Everything has been stable. It was well-architectured."
"This product would benefit from having automated alerting functionality."
"We just need more integration with Veeam."
"If there was a way to automatically put disks in maintenance mode when shutting the host down and exit maintenance mode automatically, that would simplify things."
"Management tools could be improved, sometimes the usage seems to be slowed down and confusing. A native web interface could also be an option. I love to see in the future port of the software on a general Linux distribution like RedHat or Ubuntu in order to avoid windows license costs. I would also like to see features like erasure coding implemented. On the VSAN software, I would like to see some improvements in the storage pools (eliminate the usage of the file as a data container and use the raw partition)."
"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."
"Updating the software can be a bit tricky."
"The logs can also become very noisy when there is an issue, which is very infrequent."
"The console is something that I feel could be improved. There is nothing technically wrong with it, but it can be jazzed up and/or made to be a little more intuitive."
"We've had some issues around the licensing."
"The installation is complex."
"It would be great to get earlier access to beta builds because we have to develop providers on our own. The APIs and enablers for custom automation could also be improved."
"I wish for the performance environment to be improved."
"A more containerized approach in regards to the interface would be better."
"When it comes to maintenance, it takes 16 hours to upgrade a 12 node VxRail plus. This could be improved in the system."
"A disadvantage is that the initial first deployment can be complicated."
"The licensing needs to be improved upon."
"This solution needs to have the capability where even older versions of hardware can be seamlessly utilized and additional expansion becomes so much easier."
"If VxRail could also offer file services in addition to virtualization, that would be nice because sometimes people want to complement their environment with file services, and you don't have that in VxRail."
"It could be improved by having more information on the integration portion of ACI."
Try it today
Dell PowerFlex is ranked 13th in Hyper-Converged (HCI) with 3 reviews while VxRail is ranked 3rd in Hyper-Converged (HCI) with 84 reviews. Dell PowerFlex is rated 7.6, while VxRail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Dell PowerFlex writes "Stable with good technical support and the capability to scale". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VxRail writes "Good automation makes this solution practical". Dell PowerFlex is most compared with VMware vSAN, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, Nutanix Acropolis AOS, HPE SimpliVity and Rubrik, whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and HPE Hyper Converged. See our Dell PowerFlex vs. VxRail report.
See our list of best Hyper-Converged (HCI) vendors.
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