We compared VxRail and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes based on our user's reviews in several parameters.
VxRail is praised for its excellent performance, support, pricing structure, and positive ROI, while Dell vSAN Ready Nodes are valued for their high performance, scalability, and efficient storage management. Users highlight VxRail's flexibility and customer service, while Dell vSAN Ready Nodes receive praise for their ease of use and data protection. Suggestions for improvement include enhancing scalability and compatibility for VxRail and improving performance optimization and installation process for Dell vSAN Ready Nodes.
Features: The valuable features of VxRail include excellent performance, seamless integration with existing systems, and highly scalable and flexible infrastructure solution. On the other hand, Dell vSAN Ready Nodes offer high performance, scalability, ease of use, efficient storage management, reliable data protection, and seamless integration with existing infrastructure. Users also appreciate the nodes' ability to handle demanding workloads, expand storage capacity as needed, and effortlessly fit into their existing IT environment.
Pricing and ROI: According to user experiences, VxRail offers reasonable setup costs and flexible licensing options. Users have reported that Dell vSAN Ready Nodes also have reasonable setup costs and a straightforward setup process. Both products are praised for their easily obtained and managed licensing., The VxRail product offers increased efficiency, improved performance, lower total cost of ownership, scalability, ease of use, and reliability. On the other hand, Dell vSAN Ready Nodes provide improved data storage and management capabilities, seamless integration, cost-effectiveness, and user-friendly features.
Room for Improvement: Some areas for improvement in VxRail include scalability, flexibility, compatibility, setup process, monitoring/reporting capabilities, customer support, and troubleshooting documentation. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes could benefit from enhancements in performance optimization, compatibility, storage options, installation/configuration process, reliability, and efficiency.
Deployment and customer support: The user reviews suggest that there are varying timeframes for deployment, setup, and implementation phases for both VxRail and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes. Some users spent three months on deployment and an additional week on setup for both, while others required only a week for both., Customers have expressed satisfaction with the customer service for both VxRail and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes. However, VxRail is praised for its helpfulness and responsiveness, while Dell is commended for its prompt and efficient assistance.
The summary above is based on 34 interviews we conducted recently with VxRail and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"The ability for us to manage all of our nodes from the same console makes systems administration very easy."
"Speed and high availability have been the most valuable for us."
"The most valuable feature is the managed service, which has been an important part of monitoring our critical infrastructure."
"Being hardware agnostic is a must and definitely scored points for us."
"It's quite easy to install."
"StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution."
"The instant failover, with vSAN copying data to the second node, allowed for the continuous availability of our applications."
"The most valuable feature for us is having the ability to configure our local storage using a limited number of disks and using the StarWind VSAN software to keep the cluster nodes in perfect sync."
"The tool's most valuable feature is high availability."
"Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes is scalable"
"No concerns regarding the footprint in the data center."
"If I consider the overall product, I would say that it is an excellent solution that offers very good performance and stability."
"We find the initial implementation process simple and straightforward."
"The most valuable feature is the set of user tools that are available."
"The most valuable feature of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is the flexibility of the nodes. Additionally, if there are any critical issues they update us through emails. The issues are taken care of remotely on the system."
"They are heading in the right direction and moving to integrate everything with a hybrid cloud, and moving workloads back and forth."
"VxRail is very cost-effective and affordable in the long term. It is more recommended when it comes to financial life, but it may depend upon the license. VxRail comes with VMware licensing, which may not be that cost-effective as compared to others. With VMware, it's an auto check competition. VMware is an expensive solution, especially for Nutanix. Nutanix have their own hypervisor called Acronis, which is very cost-effective against the VMware. Nutanix is cheaper for the hardware but not for the software. If you ask the Nutanix partners to deploy Nutanix over Cisco servers or Dell EMC servers, the cost will be higher. Nutanix wants to compete financially. Therefore, they propose their software over the Supermicro server, which is a very cheap Chinese server. In fact, I don't like their terms of service. HyperFlex has the highest price, and it is very expensive. I don't know why. It may be because this is a UCS system, which comes from Cisco and is already expensive. When it comes to HyperFlex, they need the labor to deploy Hyper-V, Citrix, or any other hypervisor."
"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 initial setup was very easy."
"The installation process is very quick. When you purchase it, it's up and running without much delay. Adding any additional components is simple, allowing for easy and fast scaling without adding complexity. The centralized management portal makes it easy to manage the entire system."
"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."
"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 multiple solutions specialist. You can have one person looking at and managing the whole environment."
"Management of the hardware and software in one console is the most valuable feature. It's also compatible with vSAN."
"The cover points feature in VxRail is remarkable. It's unique. It has an intervention failover system as well as an automatic failover system, reaching clusters existing in VxRail. This makes all files act as a single file with a large and huge resource, and, of course, with customized administration, configuration, and resources. It provides automatic failover for redundancy and data recovery."
"Security on the ISCSI protocol could be improved by adding features like OS-type control access, especially for the data center environment."
"Our company was hoping for deduplication and encryption across HCI. That is currently not supported."
"A better overall view of the different deployments could be beneficial, although this is difficult due to how flexible the solution is."
"For someone entering the IT sector with little knowledge of storage, iSCSI, and virtual disks, they might not find the GUI immediately obvious."
"StarWind Virtual SAN architecture is slightly complex and requires the team to carefully identify and study how the solution integrates with VMware vSphere."
"It is not very clear within the StarWind Management Console or the StarWind support documentation how to perform maintenance on a single node in a two-node HA cluster."
"The initial setup got a little confusing at a few points with differences between the VMware version in documentation vs the latest, etc."
"The only way I can see this product needing improvement is the consultation level of the StarWind sales and engineers."
"Dell vSAN Ready Nodes must be flexible since it is complex in designing concepts. It needs to improve stability. The product should integrate with the public cloud."
"The solution doesn't scale."
"Upgrades are carried out manually."
"The power switch on the hardware is located in a poor location where it can accidentally be pushed. In an update, they should solve this issue so people do not push it accidentally to have their service go down. A possible solution is the switch should be inside."
"The Dell VxRail solution is based on vSAN Ready Nodes, but the Dell VxRail is fully automated. It would be helpful if this automation feature could be added to the Dell vSAN Ready Nodes. For example, we need to install VMware ESXi, and manually expand the cluster."
"This product is not sufficiently scalable."
"There is room for improvement in the maintenance pricing. Maintenance isn't difficult, but the prices are high and ridiculous. Some customers feel it is better to go with a new solution rather than renew this one."
"Compatibility with other hardware nodes needs to be improved."
"The search feature isn't good."
"At present, VxRail is a hyperconverged state of the art product being installed in a legacy way. We need hyperconverged install teams."
"I can't speak to any missing features or weak aspects of the system just yet. We haven't had a chance to really dig in."
"The support charges for VxRail should be optimized and made cheaper."
"They're getting better with their one-click upgrade. The success factor is now between 85% to 87% with the latest release. They should just continuously improve on that one-click factor and make it more seamless."
"Its price could be better."
"It needs faster deployment of security patches."
"The solution could improve by having more storage performance because in some other solutions you can have a file system that can be mounted at several places at one time."
Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is ranked 11th in HCI with 14 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 120 reviews. Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is rated 8.6, while VxRail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of Dell vSAN Ready Nodes writes "Offers good performance and is easy to use". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". Dell vSAN Ready Nodes is most compared with VMware vSAN, Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series, Dell PowerFlex, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series. See our Dell vSAN Ready Nodes vs. VxRail report.
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