VxRail Reviews

I am working for a service provider, we provide IT services for our customer in Egypt. I have deployed this solution in approximately 10 companies. The solution provides many components into one box for data centers.

When it comes to valuable features there are two different areas. From the business perspective, it is a lot cheaper, simple to manage, and easy to store in a small data center. You will only need small preparations for all the credential from the data center. From a technical perspective, you are able to manage all your data centers from one portal.

Dell owns the EMC, EMC owns VMware, and there are many other interconnections throughout the industry which allows a fully integrated solution from a technical perspective. If you open a ticket related to hardware or software it is from the same portal.

Additionally, we do not have a lot of issues with the customers related to the workloads or any sort of business related to this solution, we do not have issues with compatibility.

There is limited support for SAP HANA with this solution. Sometimes there are customers we have that want a solution based on SAP HANA and it is not compatible. 

I have been using this solution for three years.

We have found the solution to be stable.

The solution has scaled well for us. When you need to scale up all you need to have is additional nodes to insert, power them on, pre-configure, and it is in production.

The support was very fast at responding and resolving issues in all the tickets we created with them.

The installation is very straightforward. You forward your IP, password, and some other information then you are done.

The deployment is based on two scenarios, the budget and the software that would be running over the virtual machines in VMware and on this solution. 

There are multiple series within this solution, we have to select the right sizing for the customer needs. If the company needs to implement SAP, Oracle, or regular infrastructure, based on this information we provide the solution business series. There are many things to consider, what is the nodes needed for the configuration, this could be three, four, five, etc. Which license is required with VMware, either standard or enterprise. Staying within the budget is important, this solution can be expensive and is based partially on the workloads that they will work on.

The solution is priced well for businesses.

One of the issues I come across when we implement the solution is our customer's technical team do not have the knowledge of VMware and the technical operational components. They need to be trained very well before they start using the solution.

If you are wanting to improve your data centers this solution is one small box that can be used in a data center providing low power consumption and requiring minimal administration. You are almost able to combine all the business into one.

I rate VxRail a ten out of ten.

We use VxRail to host our SAP ERP system.

I have been working with VxRail for two months.

The stability is okay and we haven't had a problem.

We have approximately 500 people who use this product and we have not tried to scale it.

I have not been in contact with technical support.

The initial setup was very easy. Part of the process was migrating the virtual machines to the new server.

We used the Dell team to help with our deployment.

This is an expensive product and that should be considered a point to be improved.

Overall, this is a good product and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

It is part of the VMware stack for our data center and cloud.

I'm one of the architects for hybrid cloud. I like the new releases that Dell EMC is doing with VMware. They are allowing for flexibility across the hybrid cloud. This allows organizations to use containers and to be able to move into the public cloud, but also not have lock-in. They can come back to the private cloud when they want to, so it's creating a lot of flexibility across the stack.

Looking at the modernization and flexibility with VCM and VCF into the cloud.

We would like to see tighter integration with Pivotal, because we're looking for end-to-end transformation and tight integration. So, we would like to see the Dell EMC family have stronger integration with their products, as this would be the best thing.

It still has some maturity to grow. It needs to be more tightly integrated with its own family of products. It has shown that it is open with the other products within the market, through its stack, but it needs to have the proof in the market (with use-cases), and it has to have the scalability with the integration.

It is a lot more stable than it used to be.

It's a lot more scalable than it was. With the combination of the stack, I just recently went to training two weeks ago. For somebody who had been certified in VMware, then sort of stopped using it, I'm back as a proponent of using the solutions across the hybrid cloud and within the data center consolidation and hybrid cloud solutions.

I have not used technical support. I've just been going to technical training as a partner.

It should be straightforward. That's what we're trying to do. We are trying to make it straightforward.

I lead the largest integrator group that we're partnering with.

The real ROI is the benefit of being able to do a true hybrid cloud, not having to move from CAPEX to OPEX in a pure break. 

It is also being able to have the flexibility without having lock-in. By being able to use skills that you already have within your data center, you can optimize those as you are adding-on public cloud skills. Then, you can continue to build upon those skills with flexibility and immediate use them within the market.

Although, everybody tries to say that public cloud can be more cost-effective. By having that flexibility that fits your business need, there is a greater business case and value case for the business to create that flexibility. By going with the VxRail and full speed of VCM and VCF, it's a much greater investment and creates a greater flexibility and scalability for the customer.

Dell has a really strong set of solutions, probably the best in the market.

The first thing they should do is look at their overall enterprise architecture. Don't immediately follow the advice and take the jump to move. What they want to do is look at the investments that they've already made, and look at what the future state is that they want to go to, not just for that one simple solution. They need to look at what's their entire enterprise architecture future state, then consider everything: skills, interoperatability, integration, and future scalability. Then, look at the solution that they want to go with because they want that flexibility. They should be able to not only move to the public cloud, but be able to move back to the private cloud, and understand what's the cost of their legacy.

They should be looking at replace, refactor, and retire. How long is it going to take them to retire? You don't want to just rush into retiring your applications or replacing them if they're applications that are not coasting a lot to maintain, or you don't do a lot with them. Then, retiring those applications should be a thoughtful, longer process. It's okay to consolidate them and continue to run them on your VMware environment.

The primary use case is that it is used as a tools pod where we can easily deploy our tools for any particular client on-premise. These tools include server management tools, storage management tools, network management tools (like SolarWinds), and other types of products (like Nagios), so we can put them in one place. We also work with Red Hat Satellite, WSUS, and all the particular tools that our teams need to manage to operate environments for clients.

Because of the quicker deployment, we don't have to ask each team, what do you need? Then finding a VMware farm to put an instance of this on is much faster now. We know that we need this many and can easily just put it in one place and on one device. That's why it's a quicker deployment, because we are able to put it up very quickly for clients.

It is truly a hyper-converged infrastructure, so everything is there together. We normally go with either a two node or three node infrastructure, which is nice and small. 

Everything is there: The storage, the network, and it is all in one package, so it's easily deployable in a very quick fashion.

I would like better integration with VCF from VMware, which is the Cloud Foundation tool set, so we can easily provision servers very quickly.

Dell EMC could put in their own monitoring tool set for this environment, or if they wanted to, they could use it to expand into other environments.

No problems with it at all. All the different layers of architecture have worked quite well: network, storage, and compute. Everything has worked quite fine.

We haven't really gone beyond what we started off with: three nodes. However, we're looking at other clients where we will be doing upwards of four to 15 nodes.

I have never used the technical support.

It can easily be put on one rack. You only need a very small area of the rack, so it's definitely much cheaper to run from a power standpoint. 

You can easily deploy it very quickly. So, it's cheap to manage.

It's cheap to be sitting on an on-premise data center.

Nobody else was on our shortlist, because Dell EMC is our strategic partner. We were expecting them to bring us something that would work very quickly and easily, but also be at a reasonable price point, and they did.

We use this solution to ensure our hardware is supported. 

This is a good solution if you want to deploy an ACI Environment but don't have all the necessary resources.

VxRail is an expensive solution. It could be improved by having more information on the integration portion of ACI. 

This is a stable solution. We have migrated our old systems on the new ACI station and have experienced no issues. 

This is a scalable solution but this comes at a cost. 

The initial setup was quick and involved medium complexity. It requires help from the vendor to scale. 

We received technical support from Dell as part of the deployment implementation plan and contract.

I would recommend adjusting pricing of this solution to suit your infrastructure.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

We implement VxRail E560F for our customers who are based in the Middle East. We are
Dell partners and I'm a system engineer. The customer has scalability requirements and
wants an easily adoptable solution for their data center which can be integrated into their HO IT Infrastructure and can be managed remotely, with the least amount of OpEx at the branch office.

The most important thing for our customers is the CapEx and OpEx. As a single point of
administration hyper-converged infrastructure, all the solution components, Servers,
vSAN (Storage), Virtualization, backup management, future expansion, and upgrades
can be managed very easily, and the solution is out-of-the-box. Dell EMC provides comminuted support for the upgrades and patch management for hardware, whether it
is related to firmware, operating system, hypervisor layer as well as the applications
also, VMware. It's a very good solution with multiple options with VxRail series like
based on customer requirements whether they're focused on compute, storage, scalability and high performance, etc. Whether a customer you are going to start your IT Infrastructure
footprint with a limited budget, you have freedom of choice and non-disruptive expansion
in the future, whether in the main data center or branches. Any idea coming in system admins mind to run this setup continuously and keep service 100% 24/7 is possible in this
product line. Hyper-converged appliances allow a datacenter in a box approach, with G, E P, Vand P series.

VxRail is a closed system with an out-of-the -box solution approach, it has basic 3 layers,
Hardware, Network, Storage, Software, (Virtualizing) Applications. Release notes and
improvement tips, patches from the back office, the business units, should be frequent
and up to the patches which are coming from different vendors as far as the operating
system application and also the technology itself is concerned. It's sometimes difficult if
you have to decommission and add a new node, especially when you go for the
qualification of the new node through the python script, there are multiple checks which
are always on, and sometimes they are already covered and the script is focused on
those. It is mandatory to resolve this issue and call the technical support back office team to suppress the checks and do the expansion or the break-off for a new node.
This is my main concern because sometimes we are not able to get to the right
engineer especially when you are in a different time zone. I generally catch them at the
end of a shift and a new engineer takes a handover from the previous, then you have to explain everything a second time and the new engineer would resolve the issue with a different approach. Or sometimes he is dependent on Engineering team advice. There are
multiple things to be considered and we are dependent mostly on the vendor.

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.

I rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

The primary use case for this solution is that we usually propose this to consolidate the compute and storage into the same hardware, basically moving away from traditional infrastructure to a more elastic cloud-based infrastructure.

The most valuable feature in the VxRail solution is the software that binds the management portal and its ease of use of managing the environment. The guys don't have to worry about getting a multiple solutions specialist. You can have one person looking at and managing the whole environment.

From a hardware and software perspective, there could be an improvement in the sales cycle, as there are a lot of hoops to go through to get pricing on a solution.

It's very stable. The guys are always at the forefront of updating and trying to improve the performance and the efficiency of the solution especially when it comes to the data management side of it.

The scalability is excellent. 

The scalability is built into the whole design of the solution and you don't have to worry about replacing the whole entire environment. You can scale up or scale down depending on what your requirements are for that time in your business.

The experience with Dell services and support has always been good as it is one of the best value adds when providing Dell solutions.

The initial setup of VxRail is straightforward, especially if you know what you are doing. It is quite simple because the solution is pretty intuitive in the way that Dell has set it up, as most of the planning is done upfront before deployment starts.

We support solution providers as we are part of the distribution track. 

We are consultants to solution providers and set up talks with the end user customers to get the product into the field. 

We don't see ROI directly but we can gauge it from when we are talking to our customers. They do realize an ROI and specifically on the operations side of things. They don't have to employ or outsource that many specialists in their support teams, as it's easier to manage than traditional solutions.

Most of the licensing cost is built into the solution since it's an appliance. You don't have to worry about additional licensing or support add-ons.

With VxRail, the vendor choice is always Dell. The main reason being is because of the comprehensive hardware and software support as well as the deployment features. When proposing a solution, we need to look at the full package available by a single vendor rather than going with multiple different vendors to get a similar solution.

For anyone interested in deploying VxRail, I'd say the first step would be to make sure to engage the Dell solutions engineer to ensure that the solution is scoped correctly. Doing this off the bat will always help when you are looking at the right solution at the right time rather than having to plan for future growth up front.

On a scale from one to ten, one being the worst and ten being the best, I'd rate this product a nine because of the simplicity of deploying it as well as the ease of management of VxRail being implemented. 

Customers can get many benefits with utilizing VxRail and all the innovations that are coming up. Specifically being able to move VxRail workloads into the various public cloud solutions. The simplest way to modernize and extend your VMware environment.

Our primary use case for VxRail right is deploying management systems. We are trying to consolidate some infrastructure.

VxRail has improved out organization because we are trying to be a little more proactive and elastic. We are trying to change our conventional approach to development. So this kind of solution is very suitable for data and that approach.

It could be very interesting to integrate VxRail with vSAN Ready Nodes, which we also use. Both solutions were built by Dell. vSAN Ready Nodes is another family of products, but with the same building blocks as VxRail, I think. VxRail easier to manage and deploy, but it is a little more expensive, and vSAN Ready Nodes would work better for some of our clients' use cases. 

It would be good to have both of these solutions on the same dashboard. We don't want to have two management domain. It would be great for us to have these two Dell solutions integrated. 

Dell could do more to help customers understand the real value proposition of this solution, especially related to deployment and scaling. A lot can be done with this solution. For example, it can be used for coverage bonds for virtual machines or as a solution for disaster recovery. This is important for customers with critical infrastructures. 

In-person training and online training tools could be great, as well. Including training in the bundle with the equipment would be beneficial for us. 

We have been using VxRail for two years. 

Ecuador is a small market, so we do not have much access to local tech support. There are a lot of local commercial channels and partners, but not so much technical support. I think we only have two or three channels. 

Before switching to VxRail, we had a very common solution that utilized Blade servers. We switched because we wanted something more elastic and scalable.

Deployment was not initially straightforward for us. We had an incompatibility issue that was very difficult for Dell Professional Service to solve. We had people from different countries trying to solve it. We were deploying the regional product but something with the version was inconsistent. It was a special case, but was very difficult to identify and to solve. It took us about two days.

Once we solved that issue, deployment was very easy. It took maybe an hour and was really easy. 

The impression we got from the technical papers was that it would be very easy and quick to deploy this solution, but it was not. However, after we dealt with those issues, the solution was very solid, very easy. It wasn't easy to configure, but right now it's very stable. We are happy with that.