VxRail Reviews

We use VxRail to manage capacity issues. It is very scalable and solved a lot of our challenges. We are an international company and provide services and platforms to customers based in South America, Latin America, and North America.

It improved from an operations standpoint as we reduced failures compared to a previous vendor. The hardware that we previously used had a lot of issues with components failing regularly.

This solution is very scalable and you can add extra nodes to the cluster and bring it online without any interruption to production systems.

When it comes to maintenance, it takes 16 hours to upgrade a 12-node VxRail plus. This could be improved in the system. 

We have used this solution for two and a half years.

The customer support team for this solution are very good at responding to cases. I would rate them a nine out of ten. 

The initial setup was a little lengthy but straightforward. To deploy a 12 node plus it took two months.

We partnered with Dell Technologies and they helped us implement the solution. We provided the required data for networking and firewall rules for them to roll out the solution. Four senior engineers were involved in the deployment.

We have seen a return on investment. It reduced the need for manpower in keeping our hardware up and running.

The pricing for this solution is on the high end but we do get good value for money based on performance.

I would advise those considering this solution to take a closer look at their workload and design clusters needed to meet that workload. Typically it is easy to deploy large clusters and it becomes tedious to maintain a large cluster. Scaling back on the number and nodes in the cluster is something I would recommend considering during implementation.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

I'm the software system team leader. 

The valuable features for us are the VDI, UCC, and HCI.

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

I've been using this solution for almost a year. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable.

Customer support has been good so far. It's possible the good service is somewhat related to the license agreement we have, I'm not sure. 

The initial setup is straightforward. We have close to 1,000 end users who connect directly to the VDI and to the UCC solution. 

We generally procure a three-year license with a support agreement from the supplier. 

I recommend this solution, it's a good product. We recommend it to our customers.

I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

In the last deployment, I had VxRail connected to Dell EMC Isilon storage and it increases the complexity of what you're doing and you need to have a team that can manage it.

I have used VxRail within the last 12 months.

I did not have any issues with the stability of VxRail. 

VxRail ability to expand was good, I don't remember what it maxes out at but the one deployment that I was working on and assisting with is one where they were running out of storage too quickly. However, this does not matter if it's HCI or if it's a traditional storage array that you're connecting via iSCSI or Fiber Channel or ports. Running out of storage is a lack of knowledge of utilizing the tools, such as vRealize or Turbonomic, and it is important to do capacity planning. When comparing VxRail to Nutanix, Nutanix had similar scalability capabilities.

The technical support from Dell was very good.

I have used other solutions, such as Nutanix.

The implementation of a VxRail, it's straightforward, but the ongoing utilization, and integration, are where it can start to become difficult if you're not used to doing it.

I rate the Dell price a four out of five.

The price of VxRail highly depends on your design and your configuration. For example, if I connect Pure Storage directly to ESXi hosts and bypass Fiber Channel switches and I will save on money. However, it reduces my redundancy and makes it not as robust of deployment and easy to manage. An HCI environment, it's more cost-effective than utilizing a traditional SAN. With storage and computing altogether, you don't necessarily have to involve the networking team as much. I don't necessarily need somebody that understands Brocade's or Cisco Fiber Channel Switches, because I have it all right there.

One of the most important aspects of implementing VxRail is the capacity planning and understanding of what kind of expansion is going to be needed over a period of 12, 24, and 36 months. No matter what the solution is, you'll start off with a minimum of three nodes, and growing from there, it's very difficult to go back and get more capital. 

Make sure that you understand using an RV tools exporter or something similar to understand when you are designing the solution. This will help make sure that I've allowed for 20, 30, or 40 percent growth over a period of 12 months, or 24 months, depending on the use case. 

It is important to manage budgets, such as OpEx and CapEx. You will always have a certain amount of money that you can spend and not need to go back and attempt to gather more capital, capacity planning is critical.

All right. Overall for the VxRail, how would you scale it from one to ten? If ten was the best and one was the worst.

I rate VxRail an eight out of ten.

I'm not a direct user. I'm a team manager, and we are using it in our company. We are using it as our new-generation virtualization platform. Currently, we are just building the environment, and we still have things to do directly with Dell.

We are very happy with the purchase, and it works well. It is fast. We went with the full-flash version, meaning that we have SSDs. So, we can build a Windows virtual machine in two minutes. We were surprised when we first tried to do that. So, currently, we are very happy with it.

The best features of HCI are the reliability and no need to have additional storage models and storage administrators. All the things—such as virtualization models, storage models, and networking—are in one environment. So, a single hardware administrator can access and support everything. I like HCI because of being able to have all components of virtualization in one cluster and in one place. There is no SAN and storage. It brings simplicity to hardware maintenance.

We have some issues, but they are possibly out-of-the-box issues. There was a host that was dead on arrival, and there were some file issues on other hosts. We're currently working actively with Dell to resolve all these issues. Once they are resolved, the product should be stable.

In terms of the additional features, we still need to adopt what we have. It has lots of features, and we need to start using it heavily. I might have something to add in a year or so, but currently, I don't have anything.

We have been using this solution since December. It has been two full months.

We are having some out-of-the-box issues, and we're actively working with Dell to resolve those issues. Once those issues are resolved, it should be stable, but as a virtual environment, it has never failed. These are only single-node or single-component issues that don't affect the whole virtual environment, which is great and which is why I love HCI.

It is scalable. Currently, we have 12 people who are working with this solution, but there will be more.

A vendor did the whole implementation. We have purchased it as a service. So, we had a third-party vendor who installed and configured everything. My technicians were watching and learning. So, we were not the ones who were primarily responsible for configuring things. The process took some time, but the result is very satisfying.

It is reasonable. Compared to the legacy hardware that we had so far, we are not paying way more, but we have very good performance. Its price is good.

I would rate it a nine out of 10 because of those out-of-the-box issues. They are a bit annoying, but I believe we will be able to resolve them quickly, and then it would be a 10.

The environment is easy to manage.

The compute is good and we have not had any issues with the vSAN.

VxRail requires VMware support. When an issue occurs in VMware vSphere, for example, you would have to log a complaint with VMware support, and sometimes Dell Support can resolve the problem, but you will also have to log a complaint with VMware support internally, and the support agent will work with us to resolve the problem. Hardware support is adequate. They are capable of resolving the issues. We believe Dell's vShpere support falls short of the mark.

In the next release, I would like to see our graphical user interface allow us to manage VxRail clusters and everything on a single pane of glass where I can monitor and shut down the server, similar to a VxRail manager.

I have been working with VxRail for one year.

VxRail is very stable. It is working very well.

VxRail is very scalable. It can scale out to 64 hosts.

In our company, we have eight to ten people who are using this solution.

The automatic creation of support tickets Whenever an issue arises, ESRS and VxRail are present and automatically forward the complaints to Dell. These are fantastic features.

Technical support is not very good, but it's not bad.

We were not working with pre-configured appliances. We were using servers that we configured. We used VMware and vSAN. 

VxRail is easy to set up. It was very easy.

The complete configuration and powering of VxRail took a couple of days to set up the servers and infrastructure, as well as the cabling. When we power up the servers, VMware and vSAN were already applied to it. We will only need to buy the license to configure the appliances.

VxRail has a great return on investment.

When compared with others, the price is very reasonable.

It's a very good product. I would recommend this solution to others who are considering it.

I haven't used any other product that I can compare it with, but so far it has been good.

I would rate VxRail an eight out of ten.

We were using VMWare and Dell products from long time. We wanted reliable technology partner who can provide technology, solution and support during migration. We use Microsoft technology.

We are not just purchased the server, we transformed our infrastructure into Powerful and Efficient, agile, flexible and scalable, polished and proven technology solution build with VMWare. New HCI - VxRail replaced with our existing 42U rack devices consists of BladeCenter, storage and other rack mountable servers into simple, more powerful 4 node VxRail device

which saves power and maintenance cost very drastically.

We are in the process of exploring more options which is bundle with this solution.

We have been using VxRail for two years.

It is a stable product, deploy appliance with ease, update all software in single click, monitor using dashboards for health, events and physical views. And maintain with direct access to support, articles and community.

The solution is scalable.

Whenever there are any technical or hardware issues, we contact Dell. They will attend to us immediately. On a scale of one to five, I would give them a five.

Positive

We switched to VxRail because our previous solution was at the end of service life. We had used it for more than six years. We wanted new technology with new scalability. power, technology and easy maintenance.

We migrated from our older hardware consists of multiple servers, storage and switches to simple and more powerful HCI - 4 node VxRail device.

Studying current and future Business requirement, validating multiple solution which suits our requirement, which is agile, easily scalable and more power to suite our future plans.  It took almost six plus months to freeze the VxRail solution.  Post finalization, releasing the order and receiving to hardware it took almost 6 months to complete the migration to new setup.  Delay was due to lockdown, travel restrictions otherwise it would have been completed within three months.  Complete migration was very smooth and very minimal downtime without any Business impact.

In-house team with OEM Support.

Identifying and freezing the solution by multiple tech discussions and negations. Finalizing solution with hardware is bundled with license. Closing the order with Five-year Support and migration support from OEM.

We evaluated couple of other solutions, also gone through Nutanix demo. Nutanix is a very good solution, but they don't have their own hardware, we have to depend on third party people like Dell, HP or IBM. We were long time Dell product user and preferred the Dell.

I would rate this solution 10 out of 10.

Just buying the product is not important, along with solution on-time support is very crucial for Business-critical applications.  We are using Dell products, solutions and services from more than 10years.  From my experience with Dell, their technology, support and services which plays a critical role to select Dell as our products and solution vendor.

All of our servers run on this system and we are also able to use it for file servers, domain controllers, print servers, SQL servers, etc.

I have two teams - one in Copenhagen with about 400 people and one in New York with about 200 people. Their roles are mainly architects and administration.

It would be nice if the update process was shortened and that patching would be simpler.

I have been using the solution for a year and a half.

It's so reliable that we haven't had one breakdown since we got it. It's very stable.

It is very scalable. You can scale compute or storage or both. I am looking to expand my New York cluster this quarter.

Initially, they had a lot of issues when I bought it as they were understaffed. So, it was a little bit hard to get support. But now, a year and a half later, it's so much better and very good.

We were originally using VMware and SAN. We switched so that it can be administered and managed in a centralized format.

The initial setup was straightforward. It took about a week initially, plus three weeks to move all my VMs to the new system.

I was able to perform this myself with the assistance of a consultant.

Fees vary by license type.

First and foremost, I would advise people to purchase this solution mainly for the simplicity of the system. And it's all managed in one place, which is nice compared to Nutanix where you had to administrate multiple places. And, the support now is very good.

Our whole company uses it. We have VxRail in our solution center, which designs software and hardware solutions for our customers' new opportunities. For example, recently, we were asked to develop a Kubernetes environment that the customer wanted to use and researched several different organizations, such as Red Hat's OpenShift.

We wanted to test capabilities on Tanzu, and VxRail was a great home for that, so we brought all the software into the VxRail and showed the inner workings of the data flows for this new capability to the customer. In the end, they didn't necessarily need a VxRail, but that's the beauty of it. It's a vanilla platform to reside modernized software on.

The VxRail is built on two specific platforms that have been in the industry for the last 15 to 20 years: the 1-U socket and the 2-U socket platforms from Dell. They're in their sixteenth generation of those platforms, I believe, so they're very stable. 

VxRail is in its third generation, I think, and I know there are consistent updates to that material on nearly a monthly basis. Most of my customers are federally focused, which means some of this material comes into an environment where few people will have access to that environment.

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. That's a challenge, but it would be valuable.

It would also be helpful if they added some warnings to prevent users from making mistakes when upgrading stuff with VMware, like a notification that says, "Hey, this upgrade should be done through the VxRail manager." Those could steer customers off the path of decoupling that cluster or pulling a node offline when it doesn't need to be.

These things have room to grow in the industry. As more organizations look to develop what they currently have, Dell could provide a pathway to taking integrating the older hardware with the new hardware. I think that would be valuable, too. There are a couple of things that I'd also like to see them improve upon. One could be to actually deliver a cluster to the customer from their manufacturing facility that is already put together. That might be a good opportunity for them.

The VxRail platform is stable. Anytime you're dealing with technologies, you'll find a bug somewhere. There's always a challenge that must be overcome, but once the initial cluster has been stood up, we find it's one of the most stable platforms today.

If you want to scale VxRail, you buy another node and add it to the cluster. That process is straightforward. It will re-image the new node, give it the same firmware, and provide the same orchestration as the rest of the node. Scalability is probably one of the biggest reasons people choose VxRail.

I've contacted Dell tech support on many occasions for VxRail. I always put in a case with Dell on all the service tags of the nodes before taking on any support mechanism. I recommend starting that process early. One of the main reasons we put in a case is to do some maintenance or make some changes.

We always consult with Dell on best practices initially. It helps to provide them with as much information as possible about the health and wellness of that initial cluster. It generally depends on the service agreement you get from Dell, but we'll get a response in five or 10 minutes after putting in that initial case.

I've never had problems with Dell support, but I always recommend pro support from my customers and organization. Depending on the size of your organization and how much Dell hardware you have, they'll assign a technical account manager to your team or to the Dell team, so you always have a consistent point of contact if things don't go as planned. That's helpful if you have a technical account manager assigned to your organization.

VxRail is a hyper-converged system that's automated and consists of nodes. Those nodes are one or two U-servers depending on the requirement. Bringing the VMware automation and lifecycle management platform together is difficult, so we recommend having a certification to do that assemblage. 

It assembles these servers into nodes in an appliance. Once the appliance is set up, it's simple to manage the solution and the box. However, assembly and automation are complex. You want to make sure that the firmware is all the same between the nodes.

We've seen situations where we had a five-node cluster, and one firmware was not mapped to the others. We recommend working with Dell on those challenges, but our architects are also really well versed in those nuances. And if you want to deep dive into a technical requirement, I have several that have done that for a living.

I rate VxRail eight out of 10. I would say it is the go-to solution for hyper-converged infrastructure. 

The scripts that bring all of those servers into a node and cluster situation are proprietary to Dell. Anytime you're using that proprietary stuff, you need to be trained on it. Let's say, for example, you are in one of those systems, and you're working with some software that may not be acting like it should. Or it may have a feature that you want in a new generation. In some cases, there may be some dependencies on vCenter, vSAN, or Vsphere, which are all part of that integration.

One might be tempted to start to upgrade it outside of the lifecycle management that's inherent to the VMware platform. I've seen architects go ahead and update it right from the VMware console when they should be using the VxRail manager. Knowing how to do those upgrades is very important to getting the clusters to see the proper nodes together.