VxRail and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes compete in the hyper-converged infrastructure market. VxRail has an edge due to its seamless upgrades and single-point support from Dell, which enhances user satisfaction.
Features: VxRail boasts robust management capabilities with VxRail Manager, offering seamless upgrades and system checks. It efficiently integrates storage, reducing space requirements and simplifying management with high availability through vSAN. Users value its performance and the unified support from Dell. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes provide valuable storage management, high availability, and flexibility, leveraging vSAN's specific profiles to enhance storage capabilities and management tools.
Room for Improvement: VxRail's installation process can be complex, with some users facing issues with naming conventions and compatibility with newer systems. The update process may benefit from improvements to resolve errors more smoothly. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes encounter challenges in automation and scalability, with suggestions for better integration features and improved firmware cycles to reduce upgrade dependencies.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VxRail users report consistent experiences with both on-premises and hybrid cloud deployments, highlighting rapid scalability and effective management of hybrid environments. Dell support is generally rated high, though response time variations exist depending on regional and issue complexity. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes primarily serve on-premises, with customer satisfaction in technical support, though slower responses for complex issues are noted. Both products benefit from dedicated account representatives enhancing customer satisfaction.
Pricing and ROI: VxRail offers an all-inclusive, high-performance solution, often seen as expensive but justifiable due to its support and efficiency. It supports a subscription model, which may include VMware licenses. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes are competitively priced, albeit sometimes viewed as costly compared to alternatives. Both products deliver positive ROI, particularly in power and space savings, with VxRail's flexibility and scalability providing a stronger ROI over time.
The OPEX benefits are around 30 to 40% because the same engineer who manages vSphere can handle Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, eliminating the need for additional support engineers.
There is always room for improvement in terms of response time and reaching knowledgeable staff quickly.
Whether we have pro support plus or just the basic level, they are helpful and reliable as long as we provide the necessary details.
A key area for improvement for VMware would be response time.
The support is all provided by Dell, and it is quite good.
With VCF we have significant automation built-in within the VCF console within SDDC manager as the primary management console.
I would rate scalability around seven because when customers want to expand capacity but all the drive slots are full, they are forced to buy new servers or nodes which adds more costs with licenses and hardware.
There are limitations, such as the inability to upgrade from a single to dual CPU in certain configurations.
Scalability is easy with VxRail.
A disk group for five disks can be problematic, and customers need to tolerate downtime if the disk is not available.
It is a very stable and mature product, with centralized management and upgrades being perfect for us.
The product is very stable, and I rate its stability as nine out of ten.
A faster firmware lifecycle with the release of validated firmware catalogs more quickly would be a desired improvement.
Dell vSAN Ready Nodes are useful as a product, but the lack of expansion with VMware has led customers to refrain from further upgrades.
In some cases, we have seen hardware failures and performance issues where performance suddenly deteriorates.
It requires a very clean environment to proceed without issues.
Stabilizing the update procedure further would make it better.
The major issue with VxRail is the razoring process, which can only be performed by Dell.
As a group under Comcast, we receive very good pricing from Dell due to our considerable business dealings.
Previously, the cost was higher, however, recent changes in VMware pricing have reduced it.
Purchasing VxRail is quite expensive compared to a simple Dell server.
The cost varies for us as a large company because we receive special offers from Dell.
The ability for single-team management without requiring a separate storage team for managing arrays and fiber channel switches is also a valuable feature.
Second is the storage policies, with different flavors available all within a single management console when we want to configure different sets of policies as per workload requirements.
Dell's technical support is generally very good.
Customers prefer the single pane of glass management and integration with VMware, which makes it easier for them to proceed with decisions involving VMware products.
The most valuable feature of VxRail is the VxRail Manager, which centralizes resources like storage built with vSAN.
The features of VxRail that we find most useful for our customers include the easy update mechanism and the support for both VMware and hardware.
Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes are pre-configured building blocks that reduce deployment
risks with certified configurations, improve storage efficiency by up to 50%1
, and can help
you build or scale your vSAN cluster faster.14 Whether you're just getting started, and/or
expanding your existing VMware environment, Dell EMC is here for you every step of the
way with consulting, education, deployment and support services for the entire solution.
VxRail is a hyper-converged appliance based on VMware virtual SAN Software and is jointly engineered and built with VMware, for VMware, to enhance Vmware. VxRail software-defined architecture simplifies compute, storage, virtualization, and management. It will safeguard performance, reliability, and flexibility across your organization with a broad range of workloads and applications from business-critical to next-gen. With VxRail, you are covered.
VxRail is a single turn-key appliance that is a validated, fully integrated, pre-configured, pre-tested solution and offers non-disruptive scaling. Every node includes compute storage and IO. All-flash configurations can contain between 12-28 cores per node. The storage capacity options run from 7.6 TB to 19TB with either 256 GB or 512GB of memory. Hybrid appliances may have 6-20 cores per node, 3.6 TB to 10 TB of storage capacity, and 24GB to 256 GB of memory.
VxRail offers high availability fail-over, an active/active stretch cluster, and VSan Kernal integration. VxRail is a power-edged server with APIs built on automation. There are over 15 million different combinations of hardware available with VxRail. VxRail provides a simple, cost-effective solution that solves a large range of use cases. Additionally, you also get a mixed workloads automated system that is backed with fully automated system updates, and complete end-to-end lifecycle management all in a single two-rack appliance.
VxRail is a value-added suitable solution for distributed small to mid-sized enterprises, remote offices, private clouds, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). You choose the deployment option that best suits your organizational needs, from appliance to integrated rack offerings, with or without networking, and it will be delivered to you, ready to deploy out-of-box.
If you know VMware, you know VxRail.
VxRail Features and Benefits
Reviews from Real Users
VxRail is an all-in-one solution: "You don't have to worry too much about the hardware and you don't have to work on integrating a storage device. We instead have this as an all-in-one solution and everything is available as a box."
VxRail is remarkable: “The cover points feature in VxRail is remarkable. It's unique. It has an intervention failover system as well as an automatic failover system, reaching clusters existing in VxRail…”
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