NetApp HCI [EOL] vs VxRail comparison

Why PeerSpot?

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

18,530 Views
17,604 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, Nutanix, Broadcom and others in HCI.

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

Buyer's Guide

HCI

October 2026

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Helped 917,382 peers since 2012

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

AlexOltean

Technical architect at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Streamlines resource management through centralized automation and automatic upgrades

The most valuable feature of VxRail is the VxRail Manager, which centralizes resources like storage built with vSAN. It provides a unified way to access these resources, making management straightforward. Another benefit is the fully automated upgrade process, which is completed with just one click through the VxRail Manager. This centralization and automation enhance efficiency significantly.

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

"It's simple, flexible, powerful; we've been able to move most of our workload to it and we've seen increased performance across the board."

"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."

"Scalability was another thing I was looking at. The solution, by its very nature, is designed to be expandable and flexible, so you don't have to buy performance you don't need today, but you're also not stuck with something you can't expand."

"The most valuable feature, currently, is the density of the system as hardware. I'm able to leverage the density of the product and remove bigger hardware which requires more space, cooling, and power costs, obviously. There are cost savings, obviously."

"The scalability is great, because it can scale independently."

"We like SnapMirror and we've been using it for many years. We also like the object storage tools, as well as cloud sync for customers wanting to integrate between the cloud and local."

"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."

"Simple setup and having the storage and compute right on one deployment is the most valuable aspect of this solution. They're able to get set up and ready to go and start having their DevOp team deploy to that environment."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] pros

"Scalability is easy with VxRail, and I would rate it almost a ten out of ten."

"I like the managed updates; they are really nice in VxRail, everything comes packaged, the updates are much easier than with other solutions that I've had to work with, and anything through the update manager will be guaranteed to work as VMware is integrated into the hardware side of it to validate that the patches they provide will work, so there is less risk."

"With VxRail, you can just go ahead and add a node without disrupting the existing environment, which works very well."

"We enjoy the ease of management since all of the resources are located on one box — one single point of support."

"If you're looking for simplification of operations, this is a great solution to implement."

"An HCI environment is more cost-effective than utilizing a traditional SAN, because with storage and computing altogether, you don't necessarily have to involve the networking team as much and you don't necessarily need somebody that understands Brocade's or Cisco Fiber Channel switches, because you have it all right there."

"Better performance, smaller footprint, lower heat, and power dissipation, faster to deploy and easier to manage."

"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."

More VxRail pros

Cons

"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."

"The problem is that it needs to be much more stable, for example, when I want to do the upgrade to 1.7 that just released, I also need to issue a ticket to the support guy in India and he asked me to deploy another mlock. There are a lot of manual steps compared with other products."

"I would like for them to fall a little closer to like the VMware release model. The new features and new solutions tend to come from the VMware side. I would like for NetApp to follow along closely with VMware's release schedule."

"I'd like to see some additional graphics capabilities because I'd like to look at some virtual desktop integration for CAD software."

"I would like to see higher level graphics support because we are going to be doing some virtual desktop for our CAD software, and I want to be able to support AutoCAD and Cantillo on remote desktop machines."

"The initial setup is very painful. It's not straightforward, requires a lot of knowledge to get it going."

"Because of the repeated failure of the motherboard that we experienced, we have doubts about the stability of the solution, but I'm sure that in the near future it will be a great, reliable solution for us."

"There's a limitation with a block in the file. That's where I see that it's not very efficient for upgrades and for management."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] cons

"Lifecycle management (LCM) should be enhanced"

"The technical support team must improve the quality of responses."

"One challenge customers face with VxRail is the high cost of scalability. The price is higher if they want to add memory or capacity after purchasing the tool for three or five years. Each drive and RAM module is licensed separately, making the architecture costly. It would benefit Dell to review this licensing model and make it more cost-effective and flexible for customers."

"If they continue developing their product regarding VMware, it will be one of the best products in the HCI space. In terms of additional features, there is nothing missing because, for data protection, they also have the CDP option for VM. They can protect the VM at any point in time."

"My only complaint about this solution is that it's vendor-locked with Dell being the only supplier for VxRail."

"There are still some features which aren't built into Cisco, like virtualized networking, that use its applications. However, these can be purchased through another product as an additional licensing cost to us."

"One area of the product that could be improved is the support. In the first year, it was not that fast."

"In the version that I was working with, the integrations are in need of improvement."

More VxRail cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"All the licenses are included when you buy the program."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The licensing fees are renewed annually."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] pricing and cost advice

"Compare the VxRail product to Nutanix. Nutanix has more features, but its pricing is higher."

"It is just as cheap to move over to an HCI solution as it is to maintain a legacy system."

"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."

"The solution is very expensive."

"VxRail has a subscription model usually tagged with the appliance box only."

"The price could be lower."

"Most of hyper-converged solutions require additional licenses for the virtualization layer (like VMware)."

"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."

More VxRail pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Construction Company

20%

Outsourcing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

13%

Government

10%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

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 24% of the time

VMware vSAN vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 12% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 11% of the time

HPE Alletra dHCI vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 7% of the time

StarWind Virtual SAN vs NetApp HCI [EOL]

Compared 6% of the time

More NetApp HCI [EOL] Competitors

Dell PowerFlex vs VxRail

Compared 26% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VxRail

Compared 13% of the time

VMware vSAN vs VxRail

Compared 11% 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]

October 2026

Download NetApp HCI [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

VxRail

September 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, Nutanix, Broadcom and others in HCI. Updated: October 2026.

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