VxRail Reviews

We're using three nodes appliance.

VxRail is a hyper-converged infrastructure that delivers a solution with full performance. It's scalable and easy to maintain. 

The replication capabilities have been great.

We find the solution easy to manage. 

The product is user-friendly and easy to navigate.

We have had zero problems so far with this product. It's quite reliable.

There is good support on offer. 

It's a very quick product.

Updating the product has been very easy. Often, they let us know that there is an update pending so we can expect it. 

The features are very powerful.

There are a lot of great features on offer. 

We've found the scalability to be very good.

The solution is stable. 

The cost is quite high. It's a very expensive solution to run.

We purchased the solution originally in 2017. We've been using it for about four years or so at this point. 

The stability of the product is great. We have not had any issues whatsoever and find it to be very reliable. The performance is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

VxRail is easy to scale out. That said, from 2017 until now we're using just three nodes. We haven't upgraded our VxRail to scale. Therefore, we haven't personally scaled. 

Dell EMC support is very, very good. They offer lots of useful information and are very friendly. We find them to be helpful and supportive. We're quite satisfied with the level of service they provide. They offer very good after-sales support. YOu can even invest in premium support.

The product is very, very expensive, even when you are renewing. It's a problem for us as management is complaining about the price. 

I'm a customer and an end-user.

I'd recommend this solution to others. It has a lot going for it in that the performance is good and it's reliable. They have great after-sales support and is generally easy to maintain. However, it is a very expensive option and a company needs to be prepared for the price tag.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten, however, if the pricing was a bit more reasonable, I would rate it higher. 

Overall, I'm very impressed with the product.

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. 

We are using this solution for our business-critical application.

VxRail solution provides hassles free deployment for small IT team. It also provided High Availability and Scalability for future extensions.

I have found that the professional deployment services from Dell EMC, monitoring Services likes Secure Remote services , and the many others services such as patch updates. Additionally, the deployment team has demonstrated the best practice approach for the appliances.

I have been using the solution for one month.

The solution is quite efficient for scaling horizontal  but will a bit difficult to expand vertical where on the certified engineer can authorized. For example, increasing RAM and storage.

The installation was straightforward and took approximately five days to implement the whole stack.

We used Dell EMC team together with local vendor team to implement the solution and we have two engineers to do the maintenance. Their knowledge and skills are outstanding.

There is a license required for this solution.

I would recommend this solution to others. This solution is for people who want to simplify the whole virtual data center. Initially, if you want to use virtual data center, you need to buy hardware and the license separately. After combining everything together, if anything happened to each product, you need to do a lot of troubleshooting and communicate with different parties . With this solution, it is quite straightforward. You can have a deployment team come and install it for you within a week if you provide the correct configuration. This will save you a lot of time.

I rate VxRail an eight out of ten.

It is used for server virtualization. Most of my work is around server virtualization. There has been a lot of interest lately in virtual desktop interfaces but not much is happening there. Most of the customers come for server virtualization. They generally have three-tier architecture running VMware vSphere, and they are looking to upgrade their technology for different reasons, such as performance or hardware being the end of life. Our customers are mostly using the new versions of this solution.

There are so many features, but if I have to choose, I would go for scale-out upgrades and performance.

Scale-out upgrades are very valuable. Typically, when customers engage in virtualization, they're committing themselves to run many virtual machines on a fewer number of hosts. They'll have five or six hosts, and they will run all their virtualization on vSphere. They could be having anywhere from 50 to 100 or even more virtual machines. Once all these go into production, getting downtime or getting planned maintenance windows is extremely difficult. It is something that typically businesses will frown upon. With VxRail, you can just go ahead and add a node without disrupting the existing environment, which works very well. That's why scale-out upgrades are a key feature.

Its performance is also valuable. It 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.

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.

I have been off and on working with VxRail for more than three years.

It is fairly stable. There are no showstoppers as such.

It is easy to scale, but typically, it involves adding more nodes. So, there is an investment from the customer side. They have to have the budget for it, and then scalability is not an issue.

We are focused on all segments. Some of our customers start off with something as small as a three-node cluster, and we also have large enterprise customers who start off with 10 or 12 nodes.

I don't interact with their technical support.

Its installation can be a little complex, but it is not bad. If you plan it well and stay in touch with the customer about requirements, it is not difficult. For an implementation project, it is a standard practice for us to work very closely with the customer. It is definitely not as complicated as deploying a three-tier architecture with SAN storage, SAN switches, and those kinds of things.

In terms of maintenance, it usually requires version upgrades. When a VxRail cluster is already in production and in use, these things are discussed very deeply with the customer, and whether to go for an upgrade or skip it is decided based on the consultation with the customer. It depends on a whole lot of things, and the customer is the key in deciding such things. You have to consider the following:

• What is the business cycle at that point in time?
• What is the workload on the virtual machine?
• Is this the right time to carry out the upgrade?
• Is the upgrade really necessary?
• Is the upgrade going to impact any of their applications?

I would definitely recommend VxRail. If you have a heavy investment in VMware software infrastructure, it is definitely useful.

I would rate VxRail an eight out of ten.

We implement VxRail E560F for our customers who are based in the Middle East. We are
Dell partners and I'm a system engineer. The customer has scalability requirements and
wants an easily adoptable solution for their data center which can be integrated into their HO IT Infrastructure and can be managed remotely, with the least amount of OpEx at the branch office.

The most important thing for our customers is the CapEx and OpEx. As a single point of
administration hyper-converged infrastructure, all the solution components, Servers,
vSAN (Storage), Virtualization, backup management, future expansion, and upgrades
can be managed very easily, and the solution is out-of-the-box. Dell EMC provides comminuted support for the upgrades and patch management for hardware, whether it
is related to firmware, operating system, hypervisor layer as well as the applications
also, VMware. It'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.

VxRail is a closed system with an out-of-the -box solution approach, it has basic 3 layers,
Hardware, Network, Storage, Software, (Virtualizing) Applications. Release notes and
improvement tips, patches from the back office, the business units, should be frequent
and up to the patches which are coming from different vendors as far as the operating
system application and also the technology itself is concerned. It's sometimes difficult if
you have to decommission and add a new node, especially when you go for the
qualification of the new node through the python script, there are multiple checks which
are always on, and sometimes they are already covered and the script is focused on
those. It is mandatory to resolve this issue and call the technical support back office team to suppress the checks and do the expansion or the break-off for a new node.
This is my main concern because sometimes we are not able to get to the right
engineer especially when you are in a different time zone. I generally catch them at the
end of a shift and a new engineer takes a handover from the previous, then you have to explain everything a second time and the new engineer would resolve the issue with a different approach. Or sometimes he is dependent on Engineering team advice. There are
multiple things to be considered and we are dependent mostly on the vendor.

The licensing aspect is the most painful for some of our customers. Customers go for a
VMware license that's standard and then they find they have to go with the enterprise
solution and adjust the license. If you have a limited budget, that's difficult.

I rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

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. 

We use VxRail for VDI and for our production environment hosted on VMware. Within our organization, there are roughly 3,000 employees that use this solution.

We enjoy the ease of management since all of the resources are located on one box — one single point of support. 

I host a lot of other clients on my premises, the ACR, and I need to charge them for the services I provide. I would like it if there were tools that provided the billing costs. In other words, this infrastructure or this resource will cost you X amount of dollars. In short, I would prefer it if each cell had a tool geared toward billing clients.

The initial setup for the VxRail economy requires a minimum of three nodes. We might consider building a new cluster with a minimum of four, as not all customers can sponsor for the sub-training number of nodes. In short, to implement VxRail, you need a minimum of three nodes for the initial setup; and the initial setup isn't cheap. 

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

VxRail is very stable — it scales up and spins out.

I am very satisfied with the customer support.

For the HCI it's quite straightforward; however, in regard to the switches, there is no GUI implemented with the top-rack switches which can make things difficult. Overall, deployment took one week.  

We evaluated HyperFlex and NetApp. The best part aboutHyperFlex is that it operates on the CDM layer to integrate the VM-ware reports which need an extra 20% of the resources that the box or the production data needs. However, I would say that HyperFlex is more complicated to install than VxRail.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of nine.

We primarily use the solution for hyper-converged infrastructure.

It's a four-node cluster that has internal storage and the solution has combined all four nodes via vSAN. vSAN is software, a software-defined storage software from which we can combine our four-node storage and other resources into one virtual storage tool. It's a software-defined model.

We are using it for surrounding applications, not for core applications. For core applications, we are using Power Systems and IBM Cloud Storage.

The product is a very good software-defined solution.

The product has been simplified so that it's very easy to use.

VxRail is a good product and since Dell acquired VMware and went hyper-converged infrastructure, it's been great. It's a very robust solution.

The main thing is that vSAN software is built-in, inside the hypervisor. It's an excellent way of doing things and it's common sense. If we are talking about other hypervisors, such as, let's say, Cisco HyperFlex, HP SimpliVity, and Nutanix, the difference is where vSAN is built on the VMware. You don't need to create a VM for vSAN. It's built-in, in its hypervisor.

When VMware was acquired by Dell, the hardware and software were combined together, which has been very good.

The support has been excellent, especially if you compare it to IBM.

The solution is very good for smaller entities, such as small or medium-sized organizations.

You can scale the solution quite well.

From a security point of view, the solution is pretty good.

The licensing is a bit too costly. They should work on lessening the overall price.

I've been using the solution for the last two years or so. It hasn't been for that long.

The solution is very good for small and medium-sized organizations. 

The product can scale. When we go for an upgrade, all the upgraded software is combined in a one-bundle unit.

We've just extended our solution. We have four-node clusters, and recently we acquired more resources. We just extended this cluster to eight nodes. We are waiting for the delivery of the equipment. We already replaced some of it.

We've had a good experience with technical support.

The support mechanism of Dell EMC offers a very quick response. They give us the attention we need when we say there's an issue. The engineer will come online immediately and provide support. We've been quite satisfied with their level of service overall.

The solution is expensive and it could be a bit more reasonably priced for its customers. We hope it's something that will get worked on.

VxRail is the product of Dell, with both hardware and software combined together. It's a very good product.

We bought this VxRail for our VMware-certified applications. Those applications only run on VMware-certified systems. That's why we procured VxRail. Otherwise, we have Hyper-V as well, Microsoft Hyper-V. Hyper-V is an American-based company, which always offers hyper-converged infrastructure solutions. On Edge we are using Hyper-V, It is also a software-defined box.

We have our own private Cloud as well for converged infrastructure. We have the Lenovo Blade series and the external storage is connected to the chassis which we are using for our surrounding applications. This is our private Cloud. It is also on Microsoft Hyper-V.

We aren't using the latest version of the solution. We are using the version before.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We've been very happy with it.