VxRail Reviews

We use it for storing all the information for our gaming and distribution software.

We were able to get past drives. We were also able to speed up our gaming software, which was a big plus.

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.

It runs better than our previous solution.

We have plenty of scalability and can add more nodes, if needed.

We had one node that failed, and the technical support was very good about helping us.

We switched because the previous solution was seven years old. We could no longer get support on it.

This is a better SAN solution than the one that we used to use.

The initial setup was straightforward for us, because the Dell EMC team did all the work.

We used Dell EMC to install it. We are very happy with it.

We did have issues with the migration.

We evaluated CDW and Insight. We went with CDW because it seemed to be the better option of the two companies.

I would recommend the solution, as we have been very happy with it.

The primary use case is that it is used as a tools pod where we can easily deploy our tools for any particular client on-premise. These tools include server management tools, storage management tools, network management tools (like SolarWinds), and other types of products (like Nagios), so we can put them in one place. We also work with Red Hat Satellite, WSUS, and all the particular tools that our teams need to manage to operate environments for clients.

Because of the quicker deployment, we don't have to ask each team, what do you need? Then finding a VMware farm to put an instance of this on is much faster now. We know that we need this many and can easily just put it in one place and on one device. That's why it's a quicker deployment, because we are able to put it up very quickly for clients.

It is truly a hyper-converged infrastructure, so everything is there together. We normally go with either a two node or three node infrastructure, which is nice and small. 

Everything is there: The storage, the network, and it is all in one package, so it's easily deployable in a very quick fashion.

I would like better integration with VCF from VMware, which is the Cloud Foundation tool set, so we can easily provision servers very quickly.

Dell EMC could put in their own monitoring tool set for this environment, or if they wanted to, they could use it to expand into other environments.

No problems with it at all. All the different layers of architecture have worked quite well: network, storage, and compute. Everything has worked quite fine.

We haven't really gone beyond what we started off with: three nodes. However, we're looking at other clients where we will be doing upwards of four to 15 nodes.

I have never used the technical support.

It can easily be put on one rack. You only need a very small area of the rack, so it's definitely much cheaper to run from a power standpoint. 

You can easily deploy it very quickly. So, it's cheap to manage.

It's cheap to be sitting on an on-premise data center.

Nobody else was on our shortlist, because Dell EMC is our strategic partner. We were expecting them to bring us something that would work very quickly and easily, but also be at a reasonable price point, and they did.

It is for small-to-medium businesses, who are looking to simplify IT effectively, reduce costs, and make it easier to maintain their whole lifecycle process.

For my customers who have it, it's reducing the complexity of IT management, single panes of glass, etc. It eliminates the three-tier architecture effectively where there is storage and storage network, then compute.

It is a pre-architected solution, so it's an off-the-shelf solution designed by Dell EMC engineers who work with VMware. 

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

I would like it to tier to the cloud effectively, making sure that cold data can be pushed out to some sort of Bitbucket. As far as I'm aware, it's not there yet. I have heard rumors it's on the roadmap. I have customers who want to do it and got the public cloud space. They want to be able to move workloads in and out of VxRail.

So far, the stability is good.

I'm not at the stage yet where I need to expand with my customers, but it is easy to add on to.

I haven't used the technical support.

It is a logical progression for customers who are on a three-tier architecture to go with VxRail. It reduces the cost of ownership, so you don't need that storage network layer anymore. You're not buying a dedicated piece of hardware for the storage. It reduces latency, because it's bringing the storage closer to the chip, which is always going to be a good thing. Customers like lower latency and higher IOPS.

The initial setup is very straightforward. Fill out the spreadsheet and generate the JSON file, then pump it in. 

Customers like it. It's simple to deploy. 

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.

There is only Dell EMC in my world. In hyper-converged, I do a lot of storage spaces as well, like Microsoft storage spaces. Obviously, customers who already bought into the VMware product line will want to stay down the hypervisor route, and customers who are already Microsoft customers will want to stay down the Hyper-V route.

The primary use case for this solution is that we usually propose this to consolidate the compute and storage into the same hardware, basically moving away from traditional infrastructure to a more elastic cloud-based infrastructure.

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 a multiple solutions specialist. You can have one person looking at and managing the whole environment.

From a hardware and software perspective, there could be an improvement in the sales cycle, as there are a lot of hoops to go through to get pricing on a solution.

It's very stable. The guys are always at the forefront of updating and trying to improve the performance and the efficiency of the solution especially when it comes to the data management side of it.

The scalability is excellent. 

The scalability is built into the whole design of the solution and you don't have to worry about replacing the whole entire environment. You can scale up or scale down depending on what your requirements are for that time in your business.

The experience with Dell services and support has always been good as it is one of the best value adds when providing Dell solutions.

The initial setup of VxRail is straightforward, especially if you know what you are doing. It is quite simple because the solution is pretty intuitive in the way that Dell has set it up, as most of the planning is done upfront before deployment starts.

We support solution providers as we are part of the distribution track. 

We are consultants to solution providers and set up talks with the end user customers to get the product into the field. 

We don't see ROI directly but we can gauge it from when we are talking to our customers. They do realize an ROI and specifically on the operations side of things. They don't have to employ or outsource that many specialists in their support teams, as it's easier to manage than traditional solutions.

Most of the licensing cost is built into the solution since it's an appliance. You don't have to worry about additional licensing or support add-ons.

With VxRail, the vendor choice is always Dell. The main reason being is because of the comprehensive hardware and software support as well as the deployment features. When proposing a solution, we need to look at the full package available by a single vendor rather than going with multiple different vendors to get a similar solution.

For anyone interested in deploying VxRail, I'd say the first step would be to make sure to engage the Dell solutions engineer to ensure that the solution is scoped correctly. Doing this off the bat will always help when you are looking at the right solution at the right time rather than having to plan for future growth up front.

On a scale from one to ten, one being the worst and ten being the best, I'd rate this product a nine because of the simplicity of deploying it as well as the ease of management of VxRail being implemented. 

Customers can get many benefits with utilizing VxRail and all the innovations that are coming up. Specifically being able to move VxRail workloads into the various public cloud solutions. The simplest way to modernize and extend your VMware environment.

We use this solution for middle customers and headquarters. It's very scalable and works fine. I can roll out the system in thirty minutes and the customer can work with it. 

The most valuable feature is the quick installation. I build the system for the customer and then it is quick and easy to manage. The price is a little bit on the higher side but the system and management are so quick and easy that it's worth it for the customer. 

I would like to see integration with vCenter if possible.

In terms of stability, it's an easy solution. 

I can start with two systems for a robot, or I can start with a bigger system that has twelve or more nodes, and I can add the customer's workload. 

We had a big project in Germany that started with one cluster. It expanded over a year and a half to a fourteen cluster system.

In the beginning, we had to put in a lot of requests with their technical support. Now, we have fewer tickets. The support is okay.

The initial setup of this solution is not complex. Take it out of the package and implement; it's very easy.

We implement the systems ourselves.

We use Dell EMC products and this solution was the best one for our customers and projects.

We typically use G Series, but for a certain customer, we have the P Series to handle the application workload. The P Series has more performance which you may need for your application. All of the other clusters are G Series. 

I have some colleagues who also use this solution. This is a good product of the future.

I would rate it a ten out of ten. I love it.

I use VxRail in my DR site, so it houses my virtual infrastructure. I also use it for storage.

One way VxRail has improved my organization is in the way that I am now able to replicate the virtual because I'm using vSAN. I use the code point for VMware. I'm able to replicate my Unity appliance in my production environment to the vSAN which I wasn't able to do when I was using the older solution. I can replicate my production servers into the vSAN which is in the VxRail using the recover points of a VM. That's a great improvement. 

The most valuable feature is the fact that the storage is integrated with the VxRail so I don't have to go in between systems when I have to monitor my storage.

The second valuable feature would be the space. Because they're all combined I save a lot of space when it comes to the rack. I was able to consolidate two racks into one and the one is only used in about half a rack. The storage and the VMware servers are all in the same infrastructure.

If they can improve the HTML client that would be great because the HTML client is a lot more responsive. It's a lot smoother than the flash that it comes with and flash updates every minute and every time flash updates I can't open my web client. You should update and make sure the HTML client works. If it does then you have a product that gives you an excellent 9.5/10 from most vendors with no problem.

Everybody complains that for 6.5 and 6.7 there's no desktop client for V7. Everyone misses the desktop client. I don't like the web client. If they can bring back the desktop client for the next release of the VxRail that would be great.

The solution itself is pretty stable. We've been using it for about two and a half years and I don't think it has ever gone down.

The only issue which is every now and again is that when you log in it will tell you that there's an issue with VxRail when there actually isn't. All that's required is a refresh or reload. The solution itself works but you may get some bad reports every now and again. Probably once every couple of months; there is no effect to the solution's capabilities. 

The scalability is pretty good. Currently, we are looking at expanding. We're down to 50 terabytes and we plan on bringing on a lot more storage. We're speaking to Dell EMC. We need to buy another add-on and we can expand, it won't take on a lot more space. With a few more drives it will be huge. It's pretty scalable; it's going to grow with no problem.

I have used technical support several times. I have two tickets open right now. They are usually pretty responsive. They know how to grasp and gather information. They do a lot of back and forth emailing. Sometimes I have to request a Webex so I can see what's happening. They tend to go back and forth for days.

Before VxRail we used the VNX system, which is old technology with a lot more discs. We were looking to consolidate space. We're off-site, so we have a couple of racks and we were running out of space. We needed something that would compact everything, so we started looking around. We looked at XtremIO. Then we looked into using VMware, and they have this solution that integrates with the storage, VxRail, which is VMware and vSAN. We decided to try it out. We took a look and figured we already use the product, we already have a million things with Dell EMC so we thought it would be easier just to keep going with Dell EMC. The integration purchase went smoothly. We negotiated a reasonable price, and then after that, we set it up and its been going for the last two and a half years without any issues.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. Once the storage was up, EMC did the actual deployment, configuring, and setting up the initial part of it and then the reseller took over and did the more advanced configuration. 

Deployment took a week to get everything set up with EMC, deployed, powered on and configured. Then the reseller took over and did all the migration and more complex tasks.

We used a reseller for the initial deployment. The deployment was good. It took around a month to get everything up and running. Then we had to copy the data from the old storage to the new one. That didn't take too long.

We have seen a return on our investment. We see it mainly in the fact that we are saving money in space and storage. We can use two and a half racks for something else, and we haven't had to replace discs which cost money. We also cut down on power consumption because now we have an empty rack that isn't powered on. Before we had VNX in two of them and you have to plug those into a power source. Power in those data centers isn't cheap and the fact that VxRail is dual power, it takes up probably a quarter of the energy than we were using before. That's a saving every month. We haven't had to replace it. We haven't had to fix it. We haven't had to do anything that has cost us any money.

We 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. 

We evaluated XtremIO which is also a Dell EMC product. We chose this because of the integration with VxRail. It integrates the vSAN and VMware and that was the big selling point, the fact that we could run our own vCenter right off of the storage. We know the support and we know what they are going to give us.

I evaluated for a storage increase and it's an add-on whereas with VxRail it is built in and I'm not adding on anything. It's built for both V7 and the vSAN; it works well doing both things. 

On a scale from one to ten, with one being the worst and ten being the best I would give VxRail a solid nine. It's not something that has disappointed. Every time they have a release it's a new version and there are more features added. 

To make it a perfect ten they should improve the HTML client. There's an HTML client that works well in the web client since you don't have the desktop client. It works better than flash, and if they improve that, they might get a 10. Other than that, the product hardware is pretty good. 

I would tell someone considering this solution that it is a product to look over. You can test other solutions like Pure Storage and XtremIO. The fact that VxRail integrates with VMware gives it an edge. 

In my other office, I run VMware by itself and I use Unity which is another Dell product. We are thinking about turning our Unity and VMware into a VxRail, combining and saving space and storage. It's not the cheapest solution but sometimes cheaper is not always better. It's a solution that if you pay for it, you don't have to look at it again. I can't tell you the last time I got an alert.

A hyper-converged solution, for SME and entry-level business, easy and fast to deploy and can be used for many use cases.

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

The most valuable features are:

• vSAN
• DRS
• FT
• Unicast network
• Power consumption rate
• Orchestration
• HA
• Disk groups concept.

• Networking to be included
• A single upgrade button for all the environment including network resources.

Our primary use case is company growth, where storage an compute is growing fast. VDI is due to be deployed imminently

We are opening new properties. This product has given us clear visibility into what we need technology-wise to grow.

ESRS: This gives us the confidence that when we are not monitoring our environment, then Dell Tech is, and can make us aware of any failures/pending issues before those issues impact us globally. We do not have the manpower to monitor 24/7, so this saves us significant costs on support contracts.

RecoverPoint: It give us peace of mind knowing any corruption or server issue can be rectified very quickly, making sure the business impact is minimal. It has also allowed us during our setup to failover an entire cluster. This is a significant improvement for our system availability.

Expansion: Our business is growing rapidly with new hotels being built and acquired. We need to scale our data centre quickly and easily. There is no in-depth config involved nor third-party needed, saving us time and money.

Support - fantastic! as we try to automate the business and the mundane processes , the support element with VXrail has helped us along this journey. We are having to make fewer calls chasing different Storage /Server / VMware / Network vendors , we now make 1 call!

The initial setup between the different Dell departments is fragmented (ESRS Team, onsite deployment team, RecoverPoint team, etc.). 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.

At present, VxRail is a hyperconverged state of the art product being installed in a legacy way. We need hyperconverged install teams.

Before we had VxRail, we had stability issues. After installing VxRail, we did not experience issues.

Before we had VxRail, we had scalability issues. After installing VxRail, we did not experience issues.

I would rate technical support as a 10 out of 10.

We switched from converged to HCI for the ease of management and business growth.

The initial setup could have been easier. There were too many cooks with all the Dell departments.

Compare it to what you spent on your last solution. Look at other costs: Power, IT staff, time to manage the system, cost of expansion for the future versus current (all costs: human/power/kit).

We evaluated Nutanix, Nimble, Cisco... We went with Dell VxRail, as Dell were already a trusted partner, and it has great support and products.

• Look at your pain points.
• Look at where your business is and where it is going.
• Look at the time currently invested by IT personnel to carry out mundane firmware and software upgrades.
• Look at how you currently log support calls for different entities.