VxRail Reviews

We mainly use the solution for our data center equipment. 

As with SimpliVity, the solution concerns itself with storage, networking and virtualization resources.

The price of the solution is rather on the high side, not generally speaking but only as concerns VxRail. Dell Strava has exactly the same kind of price when it comes to HPE. VxRail starts at a higher price, so we tend to use SimpliVitity solutions concerning small companies. 

The full solution is not completely included as a bundle, such as we see with SimpliVity.  VxRail lacks a backup solution.

I have been using VxRail for around five years. 

VxRail's technical support is very good.

As with SimpliVity, the initial setup took two days. 

The price is rather on the high side. 

There is no licensing fee. One can buy HPE, all fully included, with either a three or five year license covering full support. 

The solution is deployed mostly on-cloud, although some of the bigger environments prefer do so on-premises. 

I would recommend this solution to others. 

I do not know the exact number of customers who are using the solution. I believe this number to be 15 or 20 in France, although there are more who use the SimpliVity solutions because of the lower price. 

I rate VxRail as an eight or nine out of ten. 

A valuable feature of the solution is that it allows everything to be integrated into a single model, comprised of hardware and software. 

When using hybrid nodes, such as VxRail, there should not be compression and deduplication, only in All-Flash nodes. So, it's about improvement. It's good to see deduplication in hybrid nodes.

I have been working with VxRail for around one year. 

I am satisfied with the stability. To my knowledge, our customers don't have any problems with the solution.

As I am not an engineer, I am not in a position to talk about the installation. I do not have familiarity with implementation. 

I do not believe that the price should be lower. I feel it to be reasonable. This is because we can compare blade with blade server, MX7000 for example, when it comes to buying VMware products, meaning it will not act like a true hyper converged infrastructure. 

I prefer VxRail to that of HyperFlex, because the VMware facilitates the configuration of two or more disk groups. Yet, HyperFlex offers one test drive and separate capacity drives, so this group only handles one load.

My knowledge of HyperFlex is limited, which is why I am in the process of comparing it with the solution.

Everything is balanced in the solution. The hardware is integrated with VMware. 

VxRail is a good solution. It offers easy administration, including updates, along with a central console enabling complete visibility of management, administration and monitoring. 

I rate VxRail as a ten out of ten. 

I don't know which version we are using. 

I use VxRail as a VDI solution in my environment. 

We use the solution to solve our performance problems in the environment. In spite of the great expense, I needed to deploy a good alternate solution for our VDI clients, as there was a need to address the slow pace of the VDI and other deployment issues. 

I wish for the performance environment to be improved. 

We have been using VxRail for approximately one month.

The stability is fine. 

We may need more nodes next year. At the present time, the solution is fine as we support only 200 users. However, I will need to have these capabilities for approximately 1,500 users, although I cannot specify the exact number. 

For the moment, the support is okay. 

I am not in a position to assess the difficulty or duration of the deployment as this is done with our partner, who sends it to us only after the implementation and deployment are completed. 

The solution is very expensive. 

We support 200 users.

VxRail performs well in the VDI environment. We feel it to be a good solution.

I rate VxRail as a ten out of ten. 

I like the simplicity of the orchestrating network, storage, and compute under one umbrella.

The footprint is very minimal too. For management operations, the VxRail appliance is easy to use.

I like that there is a dependency on the storage controller.

I would like to see how they work with multiple vendors and not just with their own branded hardware.

One of the complications in teaming is the number of patches that are required, which is too high. 

This is also a challenge when your infrastructure might be legacy and you want the latest platform installed. Most of the ports might already be consumed and you have very few ports available for your new deployment, and due to the SEI, you are required to have a high port density.

I would love to see license migration from one host to another.

I have been working with this solution for a year.

We are using the latest version.

For now, it has been stable. 

We have posted a really critical application and so far it's been great.

I have not dealt with technical support from VxRail yet. We have not had any issues.

The initial setup was straightforward.

It took less than a week to deploy, without dedicating full days. It was approximately two to three hours a day for this particular job.

It comes with preloaded ESX sites, it's about how you configure it.

I would totally recommend this product. If you have a good proportion or, if their infrastructure requirement has a higher compute, proportionally designed storage, and memory, then go for higher VxRail, which is the ACI platform. Instead, if your computing requirement is higher and the storage of memory doesn't really matter, the benefits of hyper-converged infrastructure are not for you.

I would rate VxRail an eight out of ten.

I am working for a service provider, we provide IT services for our customer in Egypt. I have deployed this solution in approximately 10 companies. The solution provides many components into one box for data centers.

When it comes to valuable features there are two different areas. From the business perspective, it is a lot cheaper, simple to manage, and easy to store in a small data center. You will only need small preparations for all the credential from the data center. From a technical perspective, you are able to manage all your data centers from one portal.

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. If you open a ticket related to hardware or software it is from the same portal.

Additionally, we do not have a lot of issues with the customers related to the workloads or any sort of business related to this solution, we do not have issues with compatibility.

There is limited support for SAP HANA with this solution. Sometimes there are customers we have that want a solution based on SAP HANA and it is not compatible. 

I have been using this solution for three years.

We have found the solution to be stable.

The solution has scaled well for us. When you need to scale up all you need to have is additional nodes to insert, power them on, pre-configure, and it is in production.

The support was very fast at responding and resolving issues in all the tickets we created with them.

The installation is very straightforward. You forward your IP, password, and some other information then you are done.

The deployment is based on two scenarios, the budget and the software that would be running over the virtual machines in VMware and on this solution. 

There are multiple series within this solution, we have to select the right sizing for the customer needs. If the company needs to implement SAP, Oracle, or regular infrastructure, based on this information we provide the solution business series. There are many things to consider, what is the nodes needed for the configuration, this could be three, four, five, etc. Which license is required with VMware, either standard or enterprise. Staying within the budget is important, this solution can be expensive and is based partially on the workloads that they will work on.

The solution is priced well for businesses.

One of the issues I come across when we implement the solution is our customer's technical team do not have the knowledge of VMware and the technical operational components. They need to be trained very well before they start using the solution.

If you are wanting to improve your data centers this solution is one small box that can be used in a data center providing low power consumption and requiring minimal administration. You are almost able to combine all the business into one.

I rate VxRail a ten out of ten.

We have deployed it in our lab in our organization for POCs. We have its latest version.

I am responsible for presales and solution architecture for HCI VxRail. It is suitable for any business, such as financial, telecom, education, etc. 

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.

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.

I have been using VxRail for four years. 

It is the most stable solution I have come across.

I have scaled it many times, and its scalability is very good. You can scale out and scale up as much as you need, which is a great thing.

It is suitable for small, medium, and large businesses. We have almost 500 users.

I have contacted them many times. The best thing about their support is that there is single support for software, hardware, and networking.

It is very straightforward, but it would be great if it can be done in 10 minutes rather than 40 minutes.

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

I would 100% recommend this solution to others. I am very happy with this product.

I would rate VxRail a ten out of ten.

VxRail alleviates the operational constraints within an organization. It really frees up resources as it requires little maintenance. If you're providing a platform that has consolidated compute, storage, and fabric, then it's basically a turnkey type of solution that organizations can use. It also has one patch, so you're not dealing with several different ecosystems, for example, one supplier for storage, one supplier for compute, and one supplier for networking. It's all bundled into one platform which reduces costs. That also makes it easier to maintain and manage as well.

I have been using VxRail for two and a half years.

It's absolutely a stable product. The reason why we chose this solution and that particular type of technology were that we were running many different private clouds within our data centers. Considering the time spent on the maintenance and the patchwork, if we've consolidated and we're offering one platform to house over 3000 clients and over a thousand private clouds, it is a very stable platform. Given the fact that it's a software-defined technology, if it resides within a software-defined data center, the analytics are very transparent and it's easy to address a singular patch across an entire landscape of clients. It's very stable. In terms of scalability, capacity, and modularity, that's the reason why we selected it.

I don't have first-hand experience with technical support. We have a support help desk. Clients can call in and we help them with VxRail. I've never had to contact their support for help with any client issues.

If you partner with Dell, they offer Dell ProDeploy support and SmartHands. We hire them to do the shipping and implementation into a client's data center, whether that's on-prem or in a third-party incumbent location, such as our data center. They have a lot of expertise behind that. from my perspective, it always runs fairly smoothly.

Generally, we procure VxRail through Dell and then we sell it back to the client within our margin. With VxRail, comes Dell's ProDeploy and SmartHands capability to ship and then install.

The way that VxRail is licensed could be improved. I'm not entirely sure, but I think what I encounter is licensing VMware as Dell. Dell and VMware go together and I think that the licensing has become quite complicated and costly. For things like vSAN especially, having those types of skews displayed and a bit easier to understand how the licensing works behind the infrastructure would be a nice change.

Licensing things like vSphere on top of the platform itself can be quite tricky to manage. For anyone wanting a subscription-based model or a perpetual model, that's always quite important to scrutinize.

Although it's really the only hyper-converged platform that I have any experience with, overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give VxRail a rating of ten. I understand the competitiveness between Nutanix and NetApp and other hyper-converged platforms. But I think that given the strengths behind Dell and their acquisition of VMware, it makes for a very solid platform — it's very reliable. We've benchmarked our whole company off of hyper-converged Dell. 

Our primary use case for VxRail right is deploying management systems. We are trying to consolidate some infrastructure.

VxRail has improved out organization because we are trying to be a little more proactive and elastic. We are trying to change our conventional approach to development. So this kind of solution is very suitable for data and that approach.

It could be very interesting to integrate VxRail with vSAN Ready Nodes, which we also use. Both solutions were built by Dell. vSAN Ready Nodes is another family of products, but with the same building blocks as VxRail, I think. VxRail easier to manage and deploy, but it is a little more expensive, and vSAN Ready Nodes would work better for some of our clients' use cases. 

It would be good to have both of these solutions on the same dashboard. We don't want to have two management domain. It would be great for us to have these two Dell solutions integrated. 

Dell could do more to help customers understand the real value proposition of this solution, especially related to deployment and scaling. A lot can be done with this solution. For example, it can be used for coverage bonds for virtual machines or as a solution for disaster recovery. This is important for customers with critical infrastructures. 

In-person training and online training tools could be great, as well. Including training in the bundle with the equipment would be beneficial for us. 

We have been using VxRail for two years. 

Ecuador is a small market, so we do not have much access to local tech support. There are a lot of local commercial channels and partners, but not so much technical support. I think we only have two or three channels. 

Before switching to VxRail, we had a very common solution that utilized Blade servers. We switched because we wanted something more elastic and scalable.

Deployment was not initially straightforward for us. We had an incompatibility issue that was very difficult for Dell Professional Service to solve. We had people from different countries trying to solve it. We were deploying the regional product but something with the version was inconsistent. It was a special case, but was very difficult to identify and to solve. It took us about two days.

Once we solved that issue, deployment was very easy. It took maybe an hour and was really easy. 

The impression we got from the technical papers was that it would be very easy and quick to deploy this solution, but it was not. However, after we dealt with those issues, the solution was very solid, very easy. It wasn't easy to configure, but right now it's very stable. We are happy with that.