NetApp HCI [EOL] vs VxRail comparison

NetApp and Dell Technologies are both solutions in the HCI category. Additionally, 88% of NetApp users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Dell Technologies users who would recommend it.

NetApp HCI [EOL]

Read 32 NetApp HCI [EOL] reviews

88% willing to recommend

VxRail

Read 135 VxRail reviews

14,006 Views
13,306 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

NetApp HCI [EOL]

VxRail

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between NetApp HCI [EOL] and VxRail based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Broadcom, Nutanix and others in HCI.

To learn more, read our detailed HCI Report (Updated: April 2026).

Buyer's Guide

HCI

April 2026

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

NetApp HCI [EOL]

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

5.6

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VxRail

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

6.8

Number of Reviews

135

Ranking in other categories

HCI (1st)

Featured Reviews

Massimiliano Bartolozzi

Chief Information Officer at Lucart S.p.A.

Crashed continuously, complex to deploy, and bad after-sales support - NETAPP FIXED the problems in 2022

Their after-sales support, SLA, and third-parties availability should be improved. NetApp's support is very difficult to engage. We have an SLA of onsite support within 24 hours. but they don't respect the SLA. Its stability was very bad. It has been crashing continuously. In one year, we got three crashes, which is unbelievable for an appliance that is guaranteed for 10 years without any crashes. In 2022, NetApp Italy, driven by the country manager Davide Marini, fixed all our issues and added additional computation power for free. This is a great example of customer care. They could have done it right the first time of course, but admitting the errors and putting in place such a remediation plan has been a very professional behavior.

Read full review

Saleh Khalid

computer scientist at Imam University

Experience improved integration and cost-efficiency while facing support challenges

The best features of VxRail are its compatibility with VMware, its hyper-converged solution capabilities, and its single line of support. These are the most beneficial aspects of VxRail. I switched from the previous HP solution to Dell solution because it was a good decision. With HP servers, we dealt with a vendor for the compute servers, another vendor for the storage servers, and another vendor for the networking, which required us to manage multiple vendors. Now, we have a single team who can handle VxRail and a single line of support. We don't need anything other than that, and these are the differences we noticed after we switched.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"I like how the solution gives you the ability to basically grow compute and storage separately, and there is no compute processing used for storage IO so that means that the compute is purely satisfying user workloads."

"We're trying to move to a much more API-driven management of all of our products, and NetApp's product is, from all the SDS providers we have seen, the most fully-baked API out there."

"It is scalable, and NetApp Deployment Engine (NDE) makes its deployment easier."

"HCI has helped with storage persistence across private and hybrid clouds for the last year. It's faster and more reliable with minimal downtime, as it doesn't require any maintenance."

"HCI definitely improved how flexible we scale, and our entrance into the cloud. The features are very rich, in terms of both avenues. It's helped us flexibly move and shift our workloads around, back and forth."

"The NetApp Deployment Engine that comes with it makes the actual deployment and usage very easy. That's our primary focus and it's hyper-converged. That's something that we want to use as well."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is the SolidFire interface."

"The solution is very scalable."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] pros

"The most valuable feature in the VxRail solution is the software that binds the management portal and its ease of use of managing the environment. The guys don't have to worry about getting multiple solutions specialist. You can have one person looking at and managing the whole environment."

"The technical support is very helpful and answers questions whenever we have issues with the product."

"We are not just purchased the server, we transformed our infrastructure into Powerful and Efficient, agile, flexible and scalable, polished and proven technology solution build with VMWare."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is the performance."

"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."

"It's a turnkey solution, which is good for customers, because they are buying into stability."

"VxRail is a hyper-converged infrastructure that delivers a solution with full performance, is scalable and easy to maintain, with great replication capabilities, is user-friendly and easy to navigate, and we have had zero problems so far as it is quite reliable."

"We were able to speed up our gaming software, which was a big plus."

More VxRail pros

Cons

"There are some legacy applications which still cannot be migrated. That is why we have to keep two environments: legacy and the new one."

"There are some legacy applications which still cannot be migrated. That is why we have to keep two environments: legacy and the new one. We would like to see more compatibility to move stuff."

"I would like to have the ability to replicate to multiple sites."

"I would like to see the implementation process improved."

"If you want to have a really dense data center then it's hard to have a big chunk of cabling going through everything."

"They could improve the packaging."

"Quality of Service (QoS) and capacity efficiency are the two things that I want to resolve in my customer's environment."

"We went with a different solution and having run that for a while, I would say that there is a lot more than they could do to make it more streamlined."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] cons

"I would like to see integration with vCenter if possible."

"The product is very, very expensive, even when you are renewing."

"When it comes to maintenance, it takes 16 hours to upgrade a 12 node VxRail plus. This could be improved in the system."

"The major issue with VxRail is the razoring process, which can only be performed by Dell."

"I would like to see VxRail add duplication features to its hybrid solution."

"The support charges for VxRail should be optimized and made cheaper."

"We have some issues, but they are possibly out-of-the-box issues. There was a host that was dead on arrival, and there were some file issues on other hosts. We're currently working actively with Dell to resolve all these issues. Once they are resolved, the product should be stable."

"The solution is okay to scale vertically but a bit difficult to expend horizontally. For example, increasing RAM."

More VxRail cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its price is aligned with the market. In addition to the standard licensing fees, there is an integrator cost."

"Its price is comparable to the competitors in the market."

"There are the overall infrastructure costs. Even though the initial costing was higher, we calculated for year-to-year for five years. That brought us into a position where we decided, we have to go for HCI rather than having distributor systems."

"This solution saved our organization time (35 percent) and money. We have a hefty group of developers, and if you multiply that by 30 to 35 percent, that is quite a bit of money."

"You still have to pay for the licensing for VMware and Red Hat licenses separately. It's not all inclusive at this point."

"Where we lost nearly 75 percent of our infrastructure due to a malicious attack and were able to recover two and a half hours into it due to the integration, it saved us and all of our customers. Because we were able to recover so fast from the attack, the solution paid for itself right there."

"Its pricing is lower than our previous solution."

"This solution reduced our maintenance costs. We were going to have to pay one to two million dollars to put in compute nodes. We are avoiding those costs."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] pricing and cost advice

"The solution is on the higher end of the price range."

"There is an administrative cost savings. Instead of having seven to 15 separate boxes that someone has to administer on 15 different terminals, you can do the majority of it from one interface. Therefore, it saves on manpower costs."

"The price point needs improvement, certainly for smaller SMBs. The cost of it is still quite painful. I think all vendors should do a product which is capped either by terabytes, IOPs, or VM instances. It should be an SMB solution that's going to make hyper-converged solutions easier for SMBs to get hold of. It's fine for those big guys that have billions of dollars of budget, but not for customers who have barely a 100,000 dollars or pounds in budget."

"The price of VxRail highly depends on your design and your configuration. For example, if I connect Pure Storage directly to ESXi hosts and bypass Fiber Channel switches and I will save on money. However, it reduces my redundancy and makes it not as robust of deployment and easy to manage. An HCI environment, it's more cost-effective than utilizing a traditional SAN. With storage and computing altogether, you don't necessarily have to involve the networking team as much. I don't necessarily need somebody that understands Brocade's or Cisco Fiber Channel Switches, because I have it all right there."

"The pricing is very accurate, and we haven't had any problems with the licensing costs."

"VxRail is an expensive solution."

"It is expensive as compared to other products in the same category."

"Though somewhat expensive. But in terms of performance and stability, it's worth it."

More VxRail pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

14%

Marketing Services Firm

12%

Comms Service Provider

Wholesaler/Distributor

Manufacturing Company

13%

Government

11%

Computer Software Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	8
Midsize Enterprise	9
Large Enterprise	19

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	42
Midsize Enterprise	43
Large Enterprise	57

Questions from the Community

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What Is The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail?

While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an engineered system. The choice to choose which technology depends on two major fac...

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What are the major differences between VxRail and Dell EMC PowerFlex?

VxRail vs. Dell EMC PowerFlex VxRail provides stable solutions for technical problems while at the same time not being too expensive for a company to invest in. Even if the user is working with a l...

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Comparisons

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 30% of the time

VMware vSAN vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 16% of the time

HPE Alletra dHCI vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 11% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 10% of the time

StarWind Virtual SAN vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 9% of the time

More NetApp HCI [EOL] Competitors

Dell PowerFlex vs VxRail

Compared 22% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VxRail

Compared 15% of the time

VMware vSAN vs VxRail

Compared 15% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs VxRail

Compared 9% of the time

Dell vSAN Ready Nodes vs VxRail

Compared 4% of the time

More VxRail Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

NetApp HCI [EOL]

April 2026

Download NetApp HCI [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

VxRail

April 2026

Download VxRail product report

Also Known As

No data available

VCE VxRail

Overview

NetApp HCI is the only true enterprise-scale hyper converged cloud infrastructure. NetApp HCI comes in a 2 RU chassis with 4 node expansion slots.

NetApp

VxRail is a hyper-converged infrastructure appliance co-engineered by Dell Technologies and VMware, designed to optimize VMware environments by simplifying compute, storage, virtualization, and management.

Built on VMware vSAN software, VxRail ensures high performance, reliability, and flexibility. It supports a broad array of workloads, from business-critical applications to next-generation use cases. VxRail simplifies infrastructure management with powerful integration and seamless scalability, offering centralized management and user-friendly interfaces. Streamlined updates, robust lifecycle management, and one-click upgrades facilitate a user-centric experience that minimizes deployment complexity and staffing needs. However, its performance with disk deduplication, integration with public clouds, and processor support can be enhanced, along with pricing and licensing improvements.

What features define VxRail?

High Performance: Optimized for superior efficiency in VMware environments.
Seamless Scalability: Scales effortlessly to accommodate growing demands.
Centralized Management: Simplifies control through unified interfaces.
Effortless Integration: Easily integrates with VMware tools and services.
Automated Updates: Ensures ongoing system availability through streamlined updates.

What benefits should users consider in reviews?

Resource Efficiency: Reduces staffing requirements and optimizes resource use.
Flexibility: Supports a variety of use cases and workloads.
Reliable Support: Provides robust support to ensure operational continuity.
Reduced Complexity: Facilitates ease of deployment and minimized setup times.

Organizations across sectors such as finance, telecommunications, education, and manufacturing utilize VxRail for its scalability, ease of deployment, and infrastructure management capabilities. It aids in server and application hosting, storage, and virtualization management, often employing VMware integration. The platform is valued for its ability to consolidate IT components, support VDI solutions, and enhance cloud readiness and resource allocation.

Dell Technologies

Sample Customers

American Showa, Children's Mercy, Coca-Cola, Consultel Cloud, Evangelische Landeskirche in Wurttemberg, Imperva, Surface Mount Technology

World Wide Technology Inc, Renault Sport Formula One Team, 8x8 Inc, Brownes, Canadian Pacific, Canopy, Denton, EDF, Unilin, Xerox

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, Broadcom, Nutanix and others in HCI. Updated: April 2026.

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