VxRail and Azure Stack HCI compete in the hyper-converged infrastructure market. VxRail is favored for deployment ease and customer support, while Azure Stack HCI shines with its robust feature set, appealing to users valuing extensive functionality.
Features: VxRail integrates seamlessly with VMware environments, offers advanced automation, and provides efficient lifecycle management. It supports high performance and centralized management, making it suitable for VMware users. Azure Stack HCI, on the other hand, aligns well with Microsoft Azure services, providing powerful hybrid cloud capabilities, flexibility in service integration, and support for containerized applications with Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
Room for Improvement: VxRail could enhance its scalability options and reduce initial deployment complexity for those needing extensive customization. It also requires better support for non-VMware ecosystems. Azure Stack HCI can improve deployment simplicity and reduce its reliance on comprehensive Microsoft ecosystem knowledge. It should streamline integration processes for less technical users and enhance its customer interface design.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VxRail is praised for straightforward deployments and responsive customer service, making it ideal for quick implementations and easy troubleshooting. It simplifies lifecycle management through VxRail Manager. Azure Stack HCI, while reliable, involves more complexity due to extensive service features and requires familiarity with Microsoft's ecosystem, though its support remains robust.
Pricing and ROI: VxRail has a higher initial setup cost but offers quick returns with minimal management overhead and faster deployment times, attracting organizations needing immediate value. Azure Stack HCI presents a more flexible pricing model reflecting Azure services, benefiting hybrid environments. Its ROI is more pronounced with prolonged Azure integration, catering to long-term strategies centered on cloud adaptation.
There has been some return on investment in terms of just time usability and reduction of footprint.
A key area for improvement for VMware would be response time.
There are limitations, such as the inability to upgrade from a single to dual CPU in certain configurations.
Scalability is easy with VxRail.
It is a very stable and mature product, with centralized management and upgrades being perfect for us.
The product is very stable, and I rate its stability as nine out of ten.
Hyper V seems to lag behind compared to VMware.
It requires a very clean environment to proceed without issues.
The major issue with VxRail is the razoring process, which can only be performed by Dell.
The licensing is quite expensive because it's per call.
Previously, the cost was higher, however, recent changes in VMware pricing have reduced it.
The cost varies for us as a large company because we receive special offers from Dell.
The integration with Azure using Azure Arc is excellent.
Customers prefer the single pane of glass management and integration with VMware, which makes it easier for them to proceed with decisions involving VMware products.
The most valuable feature of VxRail is the VxRail Manager, which centralizes resources like storage built with vSAN.
Azure Stack HCI efficiently integrates software-defined networking and Azure Kubernetes Service, offering a streamlined hybrid setup for VM management while maintaining top performance.
Azure Stack HCI enhances data center operations with high-end processors and storage, optimal Kubernetes support, and integration with Azure Arc and Azure Site Recovery. High application density in four-node configurations improves both time and infrastructure efficiency. Despite its strengths, the platform can improve in areas like software-defined networking, operational management, and simplifying deployments, which currently rely on PowerShell. Users often desire better training and integration with Microsoft Azure Portal, along with multi-cluster capabilities and storage architecture enhancements. Improvements in Hyper V virtualization are also needed to match competitors like VMware.
What are the key features of Azure Stack HCI?In sectors like government, Azure Stack HCI is crucial for running secure on-premise services with selectable Azure features to ensure data privacy. Businesses leverage the platform for VM creation, management, and monitoring through Windows Center, alongside Kubernetes production environments. Connectivity with Azure allows for smoother cloud transitions, appreciated for its dashboard manageability and substantial network capacity.
VxRail is a hyper-converged appliance based on VMware virtual SAN Software and is jointly engineered and built with VMware, for VMware, to enhance Vmware. VxRail software-defined architecture simplifies compute, storage, virtualization, and management. It will safeguard performance, reliability, and flexibility across your organization with a broad range of workloads and applications from business-critical to next-gen. With VxRail, you are covered.
VxRail is a single turn-key appliance that is a validated, fully integrated, pre-configured, pre-tested solution and offers non-disruptive scaling. Every node includes compute storage and IO. All-flash configurations can contain between 12-28 cores per node. The storage capacity options run from 7.6 TB to 19TB with either 256 GB or 512GB of memory. Hybrid appliances may have 6-20 cores per node, 3.6 TB to 10 TB of storage capacity, and 24GB to 256 GB of memory.
VxRail offers high availability fail-over, an active/active stretch cluster, and VSan Kernal integration. VxRail is a power-edged server with APIs built on automation. There are over 15 million different combinations of hardware available with VxRail. VxRail provides a simple, cost-effective solution that solves a large range of use cases. Additionally, you also get a mixed workloads automated system that is backed with fully automated system updates, and complete end-to-end lifecycle management all in a single two-rack appliance.
VxRail is a value-added suitable solution for distributed small to mid-sized enterprises, remote offices, private clouds, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). You choose the deployment option that best suits your organizational needs, from appliance to integrated rack offerings, with or without networking, and it will be delivered to you, ready to deploy out-of-box.
If you know VMware, you know VxRail.
VxRail Features and Benefits
Reviews from Real Users
VxRail is an all-in-one solution: "You don't have to worry too much about the hardware and you don't have to work on integrating a storage device. We instead have this as an all-in-one solution and everything is available as a box."
VxRail is remarkable: “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…”
We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
