Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] vs VxRail comparison

Cisco and Dell Technologies are both solutions in the HCI category. Additionally, 89% of Cisco users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 93% of Dell Technologies users who would recommend it.

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [...

Read 90 Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] reviews

89% willing to recommend

VxRail

Read 130 VxRail reviews

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15,141 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [...

VxRail

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and VxRail are two notable hyper-converged solutions. While Cisco HyperFlex stands out for flexibility and all-in-one integration, especially appealing to environments requiring expansive scalability, VxRail is more favored for seamless VMware integration, presenting a compelling choice for VMware-centric users due to its robust features and ease of use.

Features: Cisco HyperFlex is renowned for its integrated computing, storage, and networking, flexibility in deployment especially in virtual desktop infrastructure, and ease of scaling. VxRail offers exceptional VMware integration, high availability, and efficient deduplication features, making it highly desirable for VMware environments.

Room for Improvement: Cisco HyperFlex is critiqued for its closed platform and high costs for smaller setups, and there's a call for simpler integration and deployment process. VxRail users highlight vendor lock-in and high pricing, as well as the need for more efficient upgrade processes and better cloud platform integration.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco HyperFlex is easy to deploy in integrated environments but may challenge new users familiarizing with Cisco systems, occasionally leading to complex support interactions. VxRail is recognized for efficient deployment, especially with VMware systems, although complex integration can sometimes hinder support.

Pricing and ROI: Cisco HyperFlex is seen as an expensive choice due to its comprehensive offerings, though it offers good ROI in the long term. VxRail, while also costly, is often seen as good value due to its seamless VMware integration, fitting well in VMware-heavy ecosystems. Both solutions promise cost-saving management, but VxRail might present more financial benefits for VMware-focused scenarios.

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February 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [...

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VxRail

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

130

Ranking in other categories

HCI (1st)

Q&A Highlights

Netanya Carmi

Content Manager at PeerSpot

Oct 26, 2021

How does VxRail compare with Cisco HyperFlex HX Series?

VxRail provides stable solutions for technical problems while at the same time not being too expensive for a company to invest in. Even if you are working with a limited budget, this platform offers freedom of choice and a number of different options. In contrast, Cisco HyperFlex HX does run on the more expensive side and cannot offer the same level of cost-effective solution. VxRail is able to provide both an ability to upgrade the system with an ever-growing library of resources as well as to provide powerful processors. This is something that I greatly appreciate. Being able to simply add upgrades to the system without necessarily having to worry about the system being bogged down is invaluable. The ability that it provides to apply updates to the system with ease is something worthy of note. If you add this to the fact that VxRail runs on multiple cores at 2 gigahertz or higher, then that means that in terms of ability, the VxRail is difficult to match. In terms of usability, it is hard to argue that VxRail delivers. It is pretty simple and easy to both set up and manage. Once the system is set up, all of the management tools are centrally located to assist in providing ease of use. The Cisco Hyperflex HX Series is both stable as well as reasonably easy to set up. Cisco has a step-by-step program guide that leads you through the process. Once it is set up, it is not prone to glitching or freezing. However, the pricing model that Cisco applies to this product requires users to pay a yearly subscription. This can end up being rather expensive in the long run. Conclusion Both systems offer stable solutions. Ultimately, VxRail is more cost-effective.

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Featured Reviews

Nuno Mendes

IT Manager - Resp.Department at Parvalorem

High performance solution that makes it easy to efficiently manage VM resources

In our case as a credit recovery company working with the state, our infrastructure is fixed and stable as we don't have the same need for growth as other types of companies. That said, one of the biggest problems with HyperFlex HX is that if you want to adjust your solution in terms of processing power, memory, or disk capacity, you have to buy completely new hosts. From a financial perspective, it can be very expensive to do so, and from a legal perspective, there are all kinds of compliance issues we would have to sort out before buying any new solution or application. Since we as a company will only be operating for perhaps the next ten years, when our HyperFlex solution comes to its end-of-life in 2024 our next step will likely not be with HyperFlex or any other solution from Cisco. Instead, from a financial point of view, we will likely turn toward a cloud solution because, that way, we won't have to spend so much money on physical infrastructure. We are, after all, only a small company and HyperFlex can be very expensive for other companies of our size, whether in Portugal or elsewhere like the United States. One other area for improvement is in regard to HyperFlex's integration with VMware. HyperFlex integrates with a specific version of VMware in such a way that HyperFlex doesn't always resolve security issues with VMware at the same pace as what you see in native implementations of VMware. This has happened in one or two situations in the past. On the other hand, the integration is otherwise adequate, especially in terms of availability and virtualization features (such as being able to split up each of our four hosts within VMware).

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Rami Jadallah

Data Center Solution Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Streamline management and integration with seamless upgrades

The primary reasons customers choose VxRail include ease of management, ease of upgrades, and integration with VMware. The hyper-converged infrastructure simplifies software and hardware upgrades. 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.

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"Deduplication is a valuable feature available in Cisco HyperFlex."

"Cisco technical support is very skilled. From what I've had to access, there were quick responses and the necessary escalation."

"The most valuable feature of Cisco HyperFlex HX is that it is self-contained."

"It is scalable and easy to use."

"It is helpful as a backup solution."

"Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series is simple to use, user-friendly and has been best for our purposes."

"The management from the switches to the hyper-convergence solutions are quite good and well-developed."

"It is a hyper-converged solution which integrates with the network instead of the product."

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] pros

"The technical support from Dell was very good."

"The scalability of VxRail is very good."

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

"The product is very stable, and I rate its stability as nine out of ten."

"Offers zero-day deployment"

"I can roll out the system in thirty minutes and the customer can work with it."

"What I like the most in terms of features is the fact that the VxRail update can be done in one week. It takes much less time to do a whole server upgrade and an infrastructure update as well."

"Valuable features for us are the VDI, UCC, and HCI."

More VxRail pros

Cons

"It needs improvements in terms of I/O. Sometimes I have felt it is slightly slow while we are trying to provision VMs or access VMs."

"The infrastructure team thinks that there are a lot of issues."

"Its price could be better."

"When it comes to customer needs, the licensing price could be better."

"In the next release, I would like to see them able to connect to the public cloud."

"Cisco is a bit more challenging in terms of deployment. The admin must be knowledgeable in order to complete the task. Without that knowledge, it will be difficult to complete."

"The utilization needs to be better. It needs more options."

"We are operating two clusters for site resiliency. I would like to support running redundant/resilient vCenter server instances on each rather than a supported external server."

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] cons

"I would love to see license migration from one host to another."

"The licensing costs are too expensive. They should work on their pricing model."

"I would like to see integration with vCenter if possible."

"VxRail could be easier to set up. It's tricky to configure the network properly and match the requirements."

"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."

"We would like to see integrating with Nutanix. Currently, we are working on integrating the two to see if there is any value in doing so."

"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."

"We used an integrator team for the implementation of the solution. The one person who takes care of the maintenance of VxRail, such as upgrading the software. The upgrading takes too long. We have many nodes which takes a long time, they need to improve the speed of the upgrades"

More VxRail cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Cisco is quite expensive, but not in the initial first buy."

"It's roughly $30,000 per Hyperflex license, so that would be about $60,000 a year."

"There is a 30 percent additional premium that all the companies are charging for Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series because of the lack of chips and bottlenecks in the market. The cost of the solution is high right now."

"One of the challenges we have with HyperFlex is that they have a subscription fee for the operating system that runs on it, and if I remember correctly, it costs approximately $15,000 USD per month."

"HyperFlex is a little pricey."

"It's much more expensive than rack servers. It was an issue, but when you compare it to the number of people who were administrative assistants before, it's on the positive ROI side. It's much cheaper."

"I would like the pricing to be cheaper."

"Its price is rather fair when compared with other solutions like VxRail, vSAN, and HPE SimpliVity. We got a fair amount of discount from Cisco for Cisco HyperFlex. It is cost-effective. We have renewed storage till next year, and we have already paid the vendor. When we talk about HyperFlex or any HCI solution, storage is the part where we can reduce a lot of costs. At the current moment, we are already using NetApp storage, which did not allow us to go for a full Cisco HyperFlex setup. We are planning to go to a larger scale next year. Then we will be able to see how cost-effective it really is for us."

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] pricing and cost advice

"The cost was cheaper compared to other virtualization solutions."

"VxRail is still more expensive than its competitor solutions."

"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."

"Fees vary by license type."

"It's a mandatory cost with everything included"

"A typical node that I would sell to a customer has a list price be between $80,000 and $100,000 per node. Organizations typically start with four nodes. That's the hardware, software, VMware licensing, everything. Customers typically pay about half of that - approximately $45,000 to $50,000 a node. On average, it costs about $200,000 to get your foot in the door."

"It is just as cheap to move over to an HCI solution as it is to maintain a legacy system."

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

More VxRail pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

27%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

How do I choose between Cisco Hyperflex HX Series and Nutanix Acropolis AOS?

Cisco HyperFlex HS series vs Nutanix Acropolis AOS Cisco HyperFlex gives extended hyper-convergence functions from core to edge and multi-cloud environments. It helps IT and OT teams deploy hyper...

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How does VxRail compare with Cisco HyperFlex HX Series?

See all answers

What do you like most about Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series?

It's easy to get the tool started.

See all answers

How does HPE Nimble Storage compare to VxRail?

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI Vs. VxRail One of the best things about the HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is the three, two, one, zero rule. That means I need three copies of my data on two different types of me...

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What Is The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail?

While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an engineered system. The choice to choose which technology depends on two major fac...

See all answers

What are the major differences between VxRail and Dell EMC PowerFlex?

VxRail vs. Dell EMC PowerFlex VxRail provides stable solutions for technical problems while at the same time not being too expensive for a company to invest in. Even if the user is working with a l...

See all answers

Comparisons

VMware vSAN vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 32% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 22% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 13% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

Compared 8% of the time

More Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] Competitors

Dell PowerFlex vs VxRail

Compared 32% of the time

VMware vSAN vs VxRail

Compared 22% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VxRail

Compared 12% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs VxRail

Compared 6% of the time

HPE Hyper Converged vs VxRail

Compared 6% of the time

More VxRail Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL]

February 2025

Download Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series [EOL] product report

Buyer's Guide

VxRail

February 2025

Download VxRail product report

Also Known As

No data available

VCE VxRail

Overview

The Cisco HyperFlex HX Data Platform is a purpose-built, high-performance, scale-out file system with a wide array of enterprise-class data management services. The data platform’s innovations redefine distributed storage technology, giving you complete hyper-convergence with enterprise storage features:

Enterprise-class data management
Continuous data optimization
Securely encrypted storage
Dynamic data placement
Clusterwide parallel data distribution
Linear and incremental scaling
API-based data platform architecture
A simplified approach

Cisco

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

Seamlessly accelerate deployment to a hybrid cloud
Fast data center modernization
Create developer-ready Kubernetes platforms

Powerful performance and reliability
Improve and simplify operational efficiency
Excellent integration
Save time
Reduce costs

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…”

VxRail is a powerful performer: “...VxRail 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.”

Dell Technologies

Sample Customers

BluePearl Veterinary Partners, Ready Pac Foods, Bryant University, Bellevue Group, KPIT Technologies, City Harvest

World Wide Technology Inc, Renault Sport Formula One Team, 8x8 Inc, Brownes, Canadian Pacific, Canopy, Denton, EDF, Unilin, Xerox

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI. Updated: February 2025.

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