We performed a comparison between HPE Alletra dHCI and VxRail based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."StarWind vSAN was very easy to integrate into our system and ran flawlessly during our entire use time."
"It has great free trials that allow end users to test a large variety of their products before deciding to buy the full product."
"The product has improved the ability to mimic physical SAN environments to demo scenarios and troubleshoot problems."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to grow rapidly while still providing flexibility and reliability."
"The ability to run the software virtually on every virtualization platform and the ability to eliminate all storage vendor locking are the most valuable features."
"Ten gigabit Ethernet compatibility, support, ease of use, and management are some positive features."
"This software lets us maintain storage redundancy across both of our Hyper-V hosts, so if one goes down the environment fails over to the other and we have minimal to no downtime."
"Virtual SAN runs on iSCSI, which is free and easy to configure. It's easy to manage from StarWind's GUI console, and it only required a few extra switch ports."
"Artificial intelligence is built into the product. If there's a failure, HP support will proactively call the client about the issue."
"The nice thing about it is that it truly integrates with the cloud, so I can move my volumes bi-directionally in and out of the cloud."
"The solution works well."
"Nimble DHCI is really user friendly and not complex"
"With regards to performance, configuration, and longevity it is upgradeable, which means it has a good TCO rate. These are valuable aspects to me."
"HPE's InfoSight software, which does the comparative analysis and artificial intelligence built-in in the box, and with Nimble they do well against the competition. Additionally, the dashboards are good."
"The technical support services are good."
"We have the ability to increase the storage without any additional costs."
"We are very happy with the purchase, and it works well. It is fast. We went with the full-flash version, meaning that we have SSDs. So, we can build a Windows virtual machine in two minutes. We were surprised when we first tried to do that."
"The stability is very good. We haven't had any issues at all. There aren't bugs or glitches. There aren't system crashes or anything of that nature."
"The major advantage is the blueprint. You do not need to separately manage the sand or network part because it all gets virtualized."
"VxRail can manage the whole cluster at the same time, so it's easy to expand. VxRail has more features vSAN ReadyNodes that make it easier to implement from scratch."
"It helps simplify the management of VMware."
"This is a good solution for medium-sized installations especially when it will be coupled with VMware."
"The implementation was quick, we used a checklist and it took approximately one hour."
"It supports VDI deployment, enabling easy use for running different platforms in similar environments."
"I found that certain browsers are not fully compatible with the administration web access portal."
"Feature-wise we are only waiting for the release of a "planned disaster" feature that would allow us to patch a hypervisor node without having to take the full storage offline."
"Ability to to test the virtual storage are network area and storage speed from StarWind Management Console."
"Performance when in storage-separate configuration needs to be improved."
"Besides not being able to use any filesystem, I do not have any additional cons."
"I see no need for major improvements but there could be some improvements in the form of notifications and the simplifying of maintenance mode."
"We ran into an issue with alerts."
"The management console of StarWind Virtual SAN is pretty complex."
"The product is expensive."
"Sometimes the technical support would get back to us in two hours, but other times it would take them two or even three days to respond."
"The solution could improve by providing better file-level restoration and DVX system options."
"The only issue I'm really running into is we have a SQL server that we're having a lot of high IO latency on one of my drives and it's my data drive from my SQL server. It's not really giving me any good information as to where that latency is coming from, so that's what I'm trying to track down and troubleshoot."
"The product does not support file services."
"Software upgrade is still more complicated than the competitors, so that's an area of improvement."
"Their documentation needs to be simpler to read yet more detailed so it's easy to compare models and easier for clients to pick."
"It can be made cheaper."
"The licensing costs are too expensive. They should work on their pricing model."
"When it comes to maintenance, it takes 16 hours to upgrade a 12 node VxRail plus. This could be improved in the system."
"One challenge customers face with VxRail is the high cost of scalability. The price is higher if they want to add memory or capacity after purchasing the tool for three or five years. Each drive and RAM module is licensed separately, making the architecture costly. It would benefit Dell to review this licensing model and make it more cost-effective and flexible for customers."
"If they can provide deduplication compression through the traditional hard drives, as Cisco does in the HyperFlex system, it will be very cost-effective, especially when it comes to archiving workload. VxRail doesn't allow the mixing of old flash clusters and hyper clusters. When I'm starting with an old flash cluster and it comes to archiving workload, I will also need to attend the new cluster. So, I either manage two different clusters, or I pay and upload my work with the archiving mobile hard drive, which is not cost-effective at all. The main key is to allow mixing between two types of clustering, like Nutanix, or allow deduplication of completion over the period of shared hard drive on SAV. It will be much better."
"If we could have some out of the box ideas in integration, I think that would be a great feature."
"It can be a bit complex for engineers who are new to it. There's a learning curve involved. They have to learn to operate it."
"The initial setup between the different Dell departments is fragmented. The engineers who come to rack/stack and do the initial config should be trained on all the areas and work with the different Dell departments whilst they are onsite to give a smoother install and better experience for customer."
"All updates are supposed to be done through VxRail, however, the vCenter actually showed that there was an update it needed. I've just started using the product. I didn't know what I was doing. I actually updated my vCenter and that actually threw the VxRail system offline. We had to spend some time trying to get that working again. If possible, they should make the process a bit more clear so we don't make mistakes like this in the future. There should maybe be some sort of pop-up that can direct you."
HPE Alletra dHCI is ranked 12th in HCI with 24 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 120 reviews. HPE Alletra dHCI is rated 8.2, while VxRail is rated 8.6. The top reviewer of HPE Alletra dHCI writes "Independently scalable solution with the highest resiliency, low latency and intelligence ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". HPE Alletra dHCI is most compared with VMware vSAN, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex and HPE Hyper Converged, whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and Rackspace OpenStack. See our HPE Alletra dHCI vs. VxRail report.
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