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 94% of Dell Technologies users who would recommend it.

NetApp HCI [EOL]

Read 32 NetApp HCI [EOL] reviews

88% willing to recommend

VxRail

Read 132 VxRail reviews

17,453 Views
16,580 Comparison Views

94% 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, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI.

To learn more, read our detailed HCI Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

HCI

July 2025

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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

7.3

Number of Reviews

132

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.

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Rami Jadallah

Data Center Solution Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Streamline management and integration with seamless upgrades

The primary reasons customers choose VxRail include ease of management, ease of upgrades, and integration with VMware. The hyper-converged infrastructure simplifies software and hardware upgrades. 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.

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."

"The most valuable aspects are that it's an all-in-one solution and it's very self-contained."

"The solution integrates well with all the other applications that we use on our environment."

"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."

"Stability is one of the things we absolutely have to have, because if the HCI is down, our assembly lines are down, and that could potentially lead to our customer being down. If our customer is down, that's $10,000 a minute; and any time the assembly line is down, that could potentially lead to overtime. We don't get to charge one and a half times for something we billed just because you happened to build it on overtime. Any technology we bring in, has to be built for what I call "three in the morning." It can't be built for whenever everybody's in the plant, everybody can watch it, and everybody can babysit. It has to be built for three a.m. when you've got a skeletal staff there, and you just have to know that it's just running. As I stand here, right now, I don't have to check my phone, I don't have to check my email. I know it's running. Period"

"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 solution is very scalable."

"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."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] pros

"Offers zero-day deployment"

"Depending on your architecture type, it's simple to manage and implement VxRail compared to other solutions. That's why most of our customers use it."

"t's a very good solution with multiple options with VxRail series like based on customer requirements whether they're focused on compute, storage, scalability and high performance, etc. Whether a customer you are going to start your IT Infrastructure footprint with a limited budget, you have freedom of choice and non-disruptive expansion in the future, whether in the main data center or branches. Any idea coming in system admins mind to run this setup continuously and keep service 100% 24/7 is possible in this product line. Hyper-converged appliances allow a datacenter in a box approach, with G, E P, Vand P series."

"Cost-effective and easy to install."

"It offers a very solid service alongside its innovative features and capabilities."

"There is no in-depth config involved nor third-party needed, saving us time and money."

"Dell owns the EMC, EMC owns VMware, and there are many other interconnections throughout the industry which allows a fully integrated solution from a technical perspective."

"The simplicity and manageability of VxRail are most valuable. We have a very good experience with this product. Its stability and scalability are also very good."

More VxRail pros

Cons

"I would like to see a better upgrade process, like the one that ONTAP has."

"They could improve the packaging."

"The networking needs improvement."

"To improve the product, they should make it more flexible."

"The price should be lowered. It's a little expensive."

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

"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."

"The deployment process has room for improvement. I would like for it to be a cookie-cutter deployment."

More NetApp HCI [EOL] cons

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

"I would like an easier migration. This way, if a node fails like it did, the data would have been migrated and I would not have had to get up at three in the morning."

"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."

"We spend around six months waiting for a confirmation and firmware upgrade to confirm this step."

"I can't speak to any missing features or weak aspects of the system just yet. We haven't had a chance to really dig in."

"The price could be better. The backup mechanism could also be better. Some of our clients prefer to work with backup software from a different vendor. They don't do a built-in backup solution. It would be better if they had guidelines on proper sizing and the whole life cycle from the requirement collection. If there aren't any proper guidelines, how do I go to the customer and evaluate their existing infrastructure? How can you do appropriate sizing to migrate to a hyper-converged environment? I think this is a requirement because most of our clients are migrating to a hyper-converged environment. In the next release, they can improve absolutely anything you can think of to improve the product in general—for example, the clusters and backup software."

"Integration could be improved."

"It would be nice if its installation can be simplified, but it is currently not too bad. They can provide deduplication and compression in hybrid configurations. To the best of my knowledge, these features are not there, and it would be nice if these are added. Some of its competitors already have these features, so it will help VxRail to have a better feature set and compete more effectively."

More VxRail cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"The licensing fees are renewed annually."

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

More NetApp HCI [EOL] pricing and cost advice

"Price is a bit of a challenge, particularly if you want extra features or higher performance."

"Since VMware is detached from Dell, the solution's pricing is a bit higher than before."

"Licensing and price for this solution is reasonable."

"The license is a bundle with the hardware. It comes with the license and five-year support."

"The solution is priced well for businesses."

"We most likely pay yearly for support. The cost was justified by now because it stays up and I don't have to constantly open tickets. I probably rebooted the system once or twice. We haven't replaced any discs in the storage, we haven't had to do any disc replacements, so it just runs. You pay a little more but you cut down on the maintenance."

"It has a yearly subscription. It can be for one year, three years, or five years."

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

More VxRail pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Real Estate/Law Firm

19%

Financial Services Firm

19%

Computer Software Company

12%

Comms Service Provider

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

10%

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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Comparisons

No data available

Dell PowerFlex vs VxRail

Compared 27% of the time

VMware vSAN vs VxRail

Compared 24% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VxRail

Compared 13% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs VxRail

Compared 7% of the time

HPE Hyper Converged vs VxRail

Compared 6% of the time

More VxRail Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

NetApp HCI [EOL]

June 2025

Download NetApp HCI [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

VxRail

June 2025

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 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

Seamlessly accelerate deployment to a hybrid cloud
Fast data center modernization
Create developer-ready Kubernetes platforms

Powerful performance and reliability
Improve and simplify operational efficiency
Excellent integration
Save time
Reduce costs

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…”

VxRail is a powerful performer: “...VxRail 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.”

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, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI. Updated: July 2025.

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