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Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series vs VMware vSAN comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 2024

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

Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series
Ranking in HCI
18th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
3
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware vSAN
Ranking in HCI
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
230
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the HCI category, the mindshare of Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series is 0.8%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware vSAN is 15.6%, down from 18.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

Adeel Hashmi - PeerSpot reviewer
With an easy deployment phase, the tool offers good scalability and stability
Suppose you don't compare Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series with the newest features available in the other variants of the product, then everything is pretty standard, so I cannot pinpoint any areas of issue in particular. With Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series, the firmware from VMware or Nutanix takes time to be made available compared to other products that we use in our company's IT environment. If you want to go to a certain version of VMware and check what Nutanix offers, you see that both the offerings don't go hand in hand, and you have to wait for a quarter or two quarters until you see the same versions of both being made available for the other products, like Dell or HPE. There is a delay in the availability of similar versions of firmware from both the products, which are VMware and Nutanix for Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series, due to the delayed releases from both products, maybe by a quarter or so. The aforementioned area can be considered for improvement in a solution. In future releases of the product, I may want some improvements to be made in the products from Nutanix and VMware.
Yves Sandfort - PeerSpot reviewer
Gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources
Stability can be improved. Adding all these new features is nice, but we are now at the level where most of the features you need in production are there. The stability is not from a day-to-day operations perspective, but more from a supportability perspective, because currently some of the support scenarios require you to completely evacuate hosts or the complete cluster. That sometimes can be a stretch. This would clearly be an improvement if the support teams were given additional tools to make that easier. Upgradability could be a bit easier sometimes. We are now where vSAN can be updated without ESXi, but there is still enough dependency. So that would be good if that actually would be uncoupled even more. Dashboards are there, and we use vROps as well. So, we have all the beauty of capacity planning and everything over there. That's not really something where we need a lot of other things.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The initial setup is simple. We were able to deliver the hyper-convergence solution in a very good time."
"The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that the product's deployment phase is pretty easy."
"The most valuable features of the Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series are the ease of use and simple configuration."
"The feature that I have found most valuable is that it is easy to deploy. It is easy to create and delete virtual servers. It is easy to create the load balancing and the clustering."
"It is very well known in the industry, and there are a lot of technical resources around it. This is a big thing for me because, at the end of the day, when you implement it, you need to support it."
"Overall the solution is very good."
"It's stable and scalable. Also, you can virtualize SAN so that you don't have to have a separate storage area network and can have your computer and storage on the same box or computer."
"The solution's unified administration is its most valuable aspect."
"It completely removes the need for a storage network and for a storage administrator and all of that infrastructure and the costs that are involved with them."
"The setup is straightforward."
"Provides good performance as well as integration with deployment tools."
 

Cons

"Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series could improve by having better integration with the solutions from VMware and vCenter"
"There is a delay in the availability of similar versions of firmware from both the products, which are VMware and Nutanix for Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series, due to the delayed releases from both products, maybe by a quarter or so."
"Here in Nigeria, the only challenge that we have, which I think is also experienced globally is the delay in bringing in the spare parts. This is a challenge facing our country, such as the Forex market. However, this is beyond the control of Lenovo themselves."
"The technical support, it's not satisfactory. Whenever we raise a ticket it takes a lot of time to have an engineer get involved sometimes, or we receive a less experienced engineer. We then have to repeat the situation to the next engineer which all takes time."
"I would like to see the availability of more template based VMware systems. Combined with the ability to check and measure multiple and converging data segments. Another issue I've seen is that the tool seems to be slow when first starting up."
"There's already a concern with VMware with ransomware and security issues. VMware could focus on improving security."
"It would be ideal if the solution offered some intelligent monitoring."
"VMware vSAN could improve by having faster reload time and a single point of failure. Resynchronization of many hardware could be better. If you have an outage of a disc or a full system, the replication time is too slow. This has room for improvement."
"The architecture of vSAN is not good. vSAN works with objects, such as disks, and it causes problems with availability."
"External storage would be a good thing to have in the next release, something other than iSCZI, something a little more, not HA, a little more production-oriented, than iSCZI."
"Hackers are able to manage to leak information or data from the product using some corrupt files, making it an area of major concern where improvements are required."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"When comparing this solution to other OEM solutions it is relatively inexpensive."
"Price-wise, it is a pretty good product. The product's price was one of the main criteria that made my company choose it over the other products in the market."
"The cost is expensive. I purchased two servers. The hardware cost was $19,000. The software cost for these two servers, including the vSAN, was $30,000, which is $11,000 more than the hardware. Then I had to pay another $5,000 for installation and implementation for professional services. In total, it was $54,000 for two vSAN Servers."
"VMware is not a cost effective solution, especially if you have a Microsoft shop. In this case, you would have to purchase the VMware license when there are already Hyper-V solutions that could do it for much cheaper."
"With the new pricing model, it's expensive for the customer."
"The product's price is not high. The tool is available at a normal price."
"The current pricing needs to meet the customers' expectations, posing significant issues."
"We have increased our user productivity."
"Cost-wise, the Nutanix licenses were cheaper, but in terms of the hardware, there was some contention around it. So, in terms of implementation, the way Nutanix was projecting the implementation on their end was that there were a lot of open-source admin platforms. vSAN is a licensed product in VMware, and Nutanix was proposing a KVM solution, which is open source. That's why their pricing was a bit cheaper, but when we were trying to compare it with an enterprise version of their management platform, it boiled down to the VMware vSAN being most effective in the long run."
"I'd love for this product to be cheaper."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
15%
Retailer
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Educational Organization
51%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series?
The most valuable feature of the solution stems from the fact that the product's deployment phase is pretty easy.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series?
Price-wise, it is a pretty good product. The product's price was one of the main criteria that made my company choose it over the other products in the market.
What needs improvement with Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series?
Suppose you don't compare Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series with the newest features available in the other variants of the product, then everything is pretty standard, so I cannot pinpoint any areas of ...
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...
Which would you choose - Nutanix Acropolis AOS or VMware vSAN?
We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface that allows you to talk directly to your VM from the present software. We fou...
How does HPE Simplivity compare with VMware vSAN?
HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We researched VMware vSAN but found HPE was a better option for us. HPE SimpliVity has ...
 

Also Known As

Lenovo HX Series, ThinkAgile HX Series
vSAN
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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Find out what your peers are saying about Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series vs. VMware vSAN and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
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