"The ability for us to manage all of our nodes from the same console makes systems administration very easy."
"It is extremely stable."
"Updates to server hardware are now painless and done during working hours with zero stress. We had a RAID failure a few months back, and nobody in the building even noticed and there was no after hours time used for repair."
"The solution is also quite flexible. As an example, other vSAN solutions that we looked at had more stringent requirements regarding mixed HDD/SSD storage which wouldn't have worked in our environment."
"The license price is one of the cheapest in the market."
"The fact that I can now count on a true failover solution is what is most appealing."
"StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere is a software-defined storage solution that has reduced administration time for storage. It's pretty straightforward to install and setup it and so far it has been robust and worked as advertised from StarWind."
"The ability to run the software virtually on every virtualization platform and the ability to eliminate all storage vendor locking are the most valuable features."
"The ability to size the available space in a way that matches our company's needs is most valuable. For instance, you can decide if you want 80/20, 70/30, or 60/40 space. Redundancy depends on your needs without changing the appliance. You just add space and decide the percentage of space that you need free and the percentage of space that you need for backup. It is all automatic, and you don't have to do anything. You just add space, and the system automatically configures itself with the chosen option."
"NetApp HCI is a stable solution."
"It is scalable, and NetApp Deployment Engine (NDE) makes its deployment easier."
"It is highly scalable. Their support is also extremely good."
"VxRail is easy to deploy and easy to scale up."
"VxRail has given us a lot of tools in a one-stop-shop environment."
"It's a simple product, fast, and reliable."
"Cost-effective and easy to install."
"Valuable features for us are the VDI, UCC, and HCI."
"VxRail's technical support is very good."
"The most valuable features are ease of management and ease of applying updates."
"It improved from an operations standpoint as we have reduced failures compared to a previous vendor. The hardware that we previously used had a lot of issues with components failing regularly."
"When you will cease your contract with StarWind (for support) your product won't be updated and that is a big selling point, especially for us, as we have loads of products from StarWind."
"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."
"This product would benefit from having automated alerting functionality."
"I see no need for major improvements but there could be some improvements in the form of notifications and the simplifying of maintenance mode."
"It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers."
"I would like an automated installation/configuration despite the fact that their service is very collaborative, a customer should be able to deploy the solution by themselves."
"The main issue we ran into was the documentation. We attempted to set up the product in our test environment by ourselves and ran into several areas of the documentation that were unclear to us."
"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)."
"The administration side of it needs to be improved. We expect an easier interface and a single upgrade for updating the infrastructure."
"Its stability is 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 crash."
"At the moment, I am not looking for new features. Quality of Service (QoS) and capacity efficiency are the two things that I want to resolve in my customer's environment. QoS improves the performance of each tenancy, and with capacity efficiency, the customer can achieve more capacity as compared to the normal capacity."
"A disadvantage is that the initial first deployment can be complicated."
"In the version that I was working with, the integrations are in need of improvement."
"The full solution is not completely included as a bundle, such as we see with SimpliVity."
"All updates are supposed to be done through VxRail, however, the vCenter actually showed that there was an update it needed. I've just started using the product. I didn't know what I was doing. I actually updated my vCenter and that actually threw the VxRail system offline. We had to spend some time trying to get that working again. If possible, they should make the process a bit more clear so we don't make mistakes like this in the future. There should maybe be some sort of pop-up that can direct you."
"I would like to see Dell take a crack at simplifying the process of moving from a node to a cluster and assembling everything into the appliance. It would be great if Dell could provide a pathway where a customer could actually install it without the certifications. Of course, I can't say how you would dumb down something so complex."
"When it comes to maintenance, it takes 16 hours to upgrade a 12 node VxRail plus. This could be improved in the system."
"The update for the graphics integration and the media drivers isn't included in the VxRail update."
"The most important thing that I want to be included in this solution is the VMware license. Its deployment time can be quicker so that instead of 40 minutes, it takes 10 minutes."
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NetApp HCI is ranked 18th in Hyper-Converged (HCI) with 4 reviews while VxRail is ranked 3rd in Hyper-Converged (HCI) with 85 reviews. NetApp HCI is rated 6.6, while VxRail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of NetApp HCI writes "Crashes continuously, complex to deploy, and bad after-sales support". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VxRail writes "Good automation makes this solution practical". NetApp HCI is most compared with VMware vSAN, Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, HPE Nimble Storage dHCI and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance, whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Dell PowerFlex and Sangfor HCI. See our NetApp HCI vs. VxRail report.
See our list of best Hyper-Converged (HCI) vendors.
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