VxRail Reviews

In the last deployment, I had VxRail connected to Dell EMC Isilon storage and it increases the complexity of what you're doing and you need to have a team that can manage it.

I have used VxRail within the last 12 months.

I did not have any issues with the stability of VxRail. 

VxRail ability to expand was good, I don't remember what it maxes out at but the one deployment that I was working on and assisting with is one where they were running out of storage too quickly. However, this does not matter if it's HCI or if it's a traditional storage array that you're connecting via iSCSI or Fiber Channel or ports. Running out of storage is a lack of knowledge of utilizing the tools, such as vRealize or Turbonomic, and it is important to do capacity planning. When comparing VxRail to Nutanix, Nutanix had similar scalability capabilities.

The technical support from Dell was very good.

I have used other solutions, such as Nutanix.

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.

I rate the Dell price a four out of five.

The price of VxRail highly depends on your design and your configuration. For example, if I connect Pure Storage directly to ESXi hosts and bypass Fiber Channel switches and I will save on money. However, it reduces my redundancy and makes it not as robust of deployment and easy to manage. An HCI environment, it's more cost-effective than utilizing a traditional SAN. With storage and computing altogether, you don't necessarily have to involve the networking team as much. I don't necessarily need somebody that understands Brocade's or Cisco Fiber Channel Switches, because I have it all right there.

One of the most important aspects of implementing VxRail is the capacity planning and understanding of what kind of expansion is going to be needed over a period of 12, 24, and 36 months. No matter what the solution is, you'll start off with a minimum of three nodes, and growing from there, it's very difficult to go back and get more capital. 

Make sure that you understand using an RV tools exporter or something similar to understand when you are designing the solution. This will help make sure that I've allowed for 20, 30, or 40 percent growth over a period of 12 months, or 24 months, depending on the use case. 

It is important to manage budgets, such as OpEx and CapEx. You will always have a certain amount of money that you can spend and not need to go back and attempt to gather more capital, capacity planning is critical.

All right. Overall for the VxRail, how would you scale it from one to ten? If ten was the best and one was the worst.

I rate VxRail an eight out of ten.

We are a customer of VxRail with 200 users. We use the solution for production workloads for the company workflow.

We have Dell enterprise licensing and use all the features. VxRail is a complete solution that includes performance, backups, and disaster recover.

VxRail should try to improve the pricing.

We have been using VxRail for 12 months.

Stability is good.

VxRail is vSAN, so we only need to buy a node when we need to scale, which is not a problem.

Technical support is good.

The initial setup is straightforward. Installation took approximately 2 days, but migration from the old UCS to the new infrastructure took time.

We have ten people on our in-house technical team including networking, security, and data center engineers who do storage and servers.

VxRail is doing the job we require, we are not making money from it.

VxRail is an expensive solution as we have the enterprise license that is billed annually. It has everything we need but it would be nice if they could do something about the pricing.

If you have done the research about VxRail and know what you are looking for then I recommend using it.

I rate this solution a 10 out of 10.

We're using three nodes appliance.

VxRail is a hyper-converged infrastructure that delivers a solution with full performance. It's scalable and easy to maintain. 

The replication capabilities have been great.

We find the solution easy to manage. 

The product is user-friendly and easy to navigate.

We have had zero problems so far with this product. It's quite reliable.

There is good support on offer. 

It's a very quick product.

Updating the product has been very easy. Often, they let us know that there is an update pending so we can expect it. 

The features are very powerful.

There are a lot of great features on offer. 

We've found the scalability to be very good.

The solution is stable. 

The cost is quite high. It's a very expensive solution to run.

We purchased the solution originally in 2017. We've been using it for about four years or so at this point. 

The stability of the product is great. We have not had any issues whatsoever and find it to be very reliable. The performance is good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

VxRail is easy to scale out. That said, from 2017 until now we're using just three nodes. We haven't upgraded our VxRail to scale. Therefore, we haven't personally scaled. 

Dell EMC support is very, very good. They offer lots of useful information and are very friendly. We find them to be helpful and supportive. We're quite satisfied with the level of service they provide. They offer very good after-sales support. YOu can even invest in premium support.

The product is very, very expensive, even when you are renewing. It's a problem for us as management is complaining about the price. 

I'm a customer and an end-user.

I'd recommend this solution to others. It has a lot going for it in that the performance is good and it's reliable. They have great after-sales support and is generally easy to maintain. However, it is a very expensive option and a company needs to be prepared for the price tag.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten, however, if the pricing was a bit more reasonable, I would rate it higher. 

Overall, I'm very impressed with the product.

We use it for our data center.

It helps our servers and it is very efficient. 

It's very flexible. We can add more servers as much as we want. It also includes the VMware license, I find this good. We do not waste a lot of resources because you are able to use them efficiently, depending on the usage and the processing unit that is used in a node or not. 

I cannot think of anything right now, nothing in coming to my mind.

The implementation started last December and it went on to January and February; in total, we have used it for less than one year. 

It is a stable solution.

It is very easy to add new servers, the scalability is very easy.

We did contact technical support. In the beginning, we had some tickets with them. They responded well and were very helpful.

We did the setup through the service provider because we didn't have the experience. It was something new for us, so we went through them to get help. They showed us how to migrate from the old service to the new one and we continued to do the process. The implementation took two days for the setup.

What I did not like so much was the amount of VMware that you have to put in your system related to the VxRail. This uses a lot of resources and not all of them are necessary. We did not use everything that came with VxRail to set it up so it is okay.

We also evaluated another product by Cisco.

I would recommend this product, we have another site that we need to replace the data center and we will implement the same solution.  

I would rate VxRail nine out of ten.

We use the solution for specialized customers looking for a particular infrastructure. One of our customers runs all their infrastructure on VxRail. We also have a customer in the banking industry who moved to VxRail because they needed the infrastructure that VxRail provides.

The solution is very easy to manage. It is a software-defined storage. One person can manage the whole infrastructure instead of two to three people managing the servers and the storage. Manageability is the greatest advantage of the product. Our customer chose VxRail because of its manageability. The one-click update for everything is significant for simplifying IT operations. We don't have to upgrade our VMware and other systems separately. Everything is managed from a single console.

The technical support team must improve the quality of responses.

The tool is easy to implement.

The product is expensive compared to other solutions. It is not suitable for small companies. They won’t have the budget for such infrastructure. We generally recommend the solution to banks and large enterprises. The pricing must be reduced. It will attract more customers.

For small deployments, we recommend SAN along with servers.

We haven’t scaled the tool yet. I will recommend the product to others. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

It is for small-to-medium businesses, who are looking to simplify IT effectively, reduce costs, and make it easier to maintain their whole lifecycle process.

For my customers who have it, it's reducing the complexity of IT management, single panes of glass, etc. It eliminates the three-tier architecture effectively where there is storage and storage network, then compute.

It is a pre-architected solution, so it's an off-the-shelf solution designed by Dell EMC engineers who work with VMware. 

It's a turnkey solution, which is good for customers, because they are buying into stability.

I would like it to tier to the cloud effectively, making sure that cold data can be pushed out to some sort of Bitbucket. As far as I'm aware, it's not there yet. I have heard rumors it's on the roadmap. I have customers who want to do it and got the public cloud space. They want to be able to move workloads in and out of VxRail.

So far, the stability is good.

I'm not at the stage yet where I need to expand with my customers, but it is easy to add on to.

I haven't used the technical support.

It is a logical progression for customers who are on a three-tier architecture to go with VxRail. It reduces the cost of ownership, so you don't need that storage network layer anymore. You're not buying a dedicated piece of hardware for the storage. It reduces latency, because it's bringing the storage closer to the chip, which is always going to be a good thing. Customers like lower latency and higher IOPS.

The initial setup is very straightforward. Fill out the spreadsheet and generate the JSON file, then pump it in. 

Customers like it. It's simple to deploy. 

The price point needs improvement, certainly for smaller SMBs. The cost of it is still quite painful. I think all vendors should do a product which is capped either by terabytes, IOPs, or VM instances. It should be an SMB solution that's going to make hyper-converged solutions easier for SMBs to get hold of. It's fine for those big guys that have billions of dollars of budget, but not for customers who have barely a 100,000 dollars or pounds in budget.

There is only Dell EMC in my world. In hyper-converged, I do a lot of storage spaces as well, like Microsoft storage spaces. Obviously, customers who already bought into the VMware product line will want to stay down the hypervisor route, and customers who are already Microsoft customers will want to stay down the Hyper-V route.

We like the design and that it meets data storage needs.

My customers want more storage for university databases.

We've been using this solution for approximately one year.

The technical support needs to be improved, and I would give them a six out of ten. They could assign more digital architects to the support team.

Neutral

We used a reseller for the implementation. It took about two months to deploy the solution.

VxRail is deployed in one location, and we have about 22 people who use the solution.

The price is good.

I tell customers that VxRail solves a lot of storage problems, and I would rate it a five on a scale from one to ten.

Today, we completed the first stage with one customer. We finished our POC and sold six VxRail systems to the customer. The customer usually uses standard VxRail systems for data storage and servers. 

The customer wants to do some implementation to replace an old system. They are a manufacturing company that wants to improve their system with a more valuable storage area because they have a lot of data stored across various products. For example, they have 10 terabytes of information on one storage platform and another 2 terabytes on the other, etc. 

We faced competition from HPE SimpliVity and won. Yesterday, we got the good news from the customers, who were pleased with licensing for virtualization. The VxRail system provides some good benefits, and the customers are happy. We have two more projects lined up, but they are waiting for the new year, especially because they are arranging budgeting issues. We expect to see some new business in the first quarter. 

We deploy VxRail systems to provide our customers with a distributed information solution. The customer was impressed because we delivered a serious data reduction. For example, we showed them that 10 terabytes on their traditional storage solution could be reduced to 1.5 terabytes in the VxRail systems. That's why the customers also like it so much,

One of the biggest VxRail features our customers require is hardware redundancy. Customers have good network products like Cisco for their local networks, so they were ready when they did the POC work. The other thing is application completion, VxRail's most effective feature.

Dell wants to implement the disaster recovery site in the new year, but they haven't decided yet. I hope we will have the opportunity to sell VxRail with this disaster recovery site. It is not really clear at the moment, but hopefully, we will get some good news from the customers in the new year. Maybe in the second quarter, we will start to work for the disaster recovery site, I hope so. I think we have to implement the new systems, and maybe we can talk about what can happen in the future after that. 

We've been using VxRail for the last two years.

VxRail's stability is amazing. The performance is always effective and good.

VxRail is a scalable product. Of course, it depends on the business and the markets, but the scalability is usually excellent.

Dell's support in Turkey has helped us so much in the project, especially the salesperson. He supported us so much, and we are so appreciative.

We haven't fully deployed VxRail because we only got our first order for the systems today, and we will go to the setup, but the demo system was easy to use and set up.

I rate VxRail nine out of 10. I'd like to add something about the market for this product. A bank or a company like that can easily use VxRail. Another benefit is that customers don't need to close the systems without updates. For example, it's easy to upgrade the firmware upgrades. VxRail is really effective in a banking or insurance company that doesn't need to close the systems. However, it is not possible in our sector. We really work a lot on this project. We spend so much time with the customers and the project.