We performed a comparison between Cisco Hyperflex HX Series and VMware vSAN based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: VMware vSAN wins out in this comparison. The main difference between the two solutions is that Cisco Hyperflex HX Series users find deployment to be difficult, and also say the solution uses a lot of memory and hardware resources. In addition, they do not mention an ROI.
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the support. They are excellent and you can learn a lot from the support team."
"Before VSAN, hypervisor configuration changes and updates resulted in VM outages. Now, downtime is dramatically reduced."
"StarWind Virtual SAN offers high availability and data resilience features to prevent data loss if hardware fails."
"StarWind is very easy to use, even if you have had no experience using a SAN before."
"It has a nice, simple control panel. You can clearly see the state and health of storage along with the synchronization."
"It includes every feature that a traditional SAN offers and so much more."
"Starwind support is excellent. They are very fast and have very good knowledge of Starwind and Hyper-V Cluster software."
"The most valuable feature is the managed service, which has been an important part of monitoring our critical infrastructure."
"Stretch cluster allows us to warranty a service for the customer."
"By configuring networks, we are saving power."
"Support is very responsive."
"The management feature is the solution's most valuable aspect."
"The most valuable feature of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is the integration with everything in a much smoother, such as in physical and virtual environments. VMware NSX is a simpler solution but, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is more robust compared to VMware NSX."
"Our customers have seen ROI in terms of the time they save troubleshooting."
"Cisco offers very good quality."
"It consumes a smaller footprint when I compare it with other competitors."
"It is more stable now than it was before. It's not like it was in the first year. Now it is stable, and we trust it more."
"All the features are working great."
"We find it easy to deliver this solution."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"The most valuable features are secure IOPs and LAN security."
"VMware vSAN is easy to implement in a VMware environment and it is not expensive."
"We can scale it very easily for a test environment. We were able to segment our DMZ so it wasn't connected to anything, which we really liked."
"VMware comes with different stacks like VMware Cloud Foundation, which is integrated with different VMware modules. There's interoperability between VMware products."
"Management of VSAN itself could be improved. A Web UI for management would be great rather than an application installation. StarWind is testing a command center virtual appliance that I have installed in my environment."
"I found that certain browsers are not fully compatible with the administration web access portal."
"I would like to see more advanced free versions."
"New versions of this solution should be tested more thoroughly before the release as we had a few problems with one version due to a bug."
"One main thing this product needs to work on is reporting."
"The most disappointing side of the application is the free edition. There used to be GUI attached. That has recently changed to only CLI management of the application."
"I would like additional documentation regarding possible networking configurations with 10GbE switching."
"The logs can also become very noisy when there is an issue, which is very infrequent."
"In the next release, Cisco should add more integration and management capabilities as well as some tweaks to the dashboard that make it more user-friendly. They could also add support for multiple hypervisors."
"The price could be better. I think it's more expensive than VxRail. In the next release, I would like to see a better level of protection and availability with six clients."
"Deployment on-prem was quite difficult."
"I would rate the installation of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series an eight out of ten. It can be complex."
"We need to be able to scale out and not just up. When you want to scale up or scale out, you are quite limited."
"We'd like the product to offer better integration with other products."
"Does not support the stretch cluster, and the interface is not good."
"Technical support is very good. Not excellent, but good. There's still not enough data available on the web. For example, for the integration to VMware, I had a case recently and I searched for more information but didn't find any."
"It would be ideal if the solution offered some intelligent monitoring."
"It could be cheaper."
"I would like to see more support for applications. I think currently it only supports applications between two vSAN clusters."
"In a future release, they could add micro-segmentation or security level features integrated into vSAN."
"There is a room for improvement on the latest version of compatibility with the VMware product, especially for vSAN and with other vendors on their motherboards and driver configurations."
"When we talk about improvements for vSAN, there is some way to go from a at least stability perspective. Adding all these new features is nice, but we are now at the level that most of the features you need in production are there."
"If one node out of your ten nodes fails, it takes a lot of time to replicate and rebalance VMware vSAN. This time can be reduced. When a node fails and the data is not accessible, vSAN has to be rebalanced to make the redundancy level of two again. However, if it is taking a lot of time and any other hardware fails during that time, then we have a problem. Two disk failures mean that all data will be lost, and we may have to recover it from the backup. So, the number of threads that run to do the rebalancing could be more so that the time taken to make it fully redundant again is not so much."
"We would like to see additional backup and recovery options added. In particular, integration with popular applications like databases."
More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Pricing and Cost Advice →
Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] doesn't meet the minimum requirements to be ranked in HCI with 90 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] is rated 8.0, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] writes "A fast and easy deployment that allows secure access to our medical applications ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] is most compared with VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray.
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