VxRail Reviews

We were using VMWare and Dell products from long time. We wanted reliable technology partner who can provide technology, solution and support during migration. We use Microsoft technology.

We are not just purchased the server, we transformed our infrastructure into Powerful and Efficient, agile, flexible and scalable, polished and proven technology solution build with VMWare. New HCI - VxRail replaced with our existing 42U rack devices consists of BladeCenter, storage and other rack mountable servers into simple, more powerful 4 node VxRail device

which saves power and maintenance cost very drastically.

We are in the process of exploring more options which is bundle with this solution.

We have been using VxRail for two years.

It is a stable product, deploy appliance with ease, update all software in single click, monitor using dashboards for health, events and physical views. And maintain with direct access to support, articles and community.

The solution is scalable.

Whenever there are any technical or hardware issues, we contact Dell. They will attend to us immediately. On a scale of one to five, I would give them a five.

Positive

We switched to VxRail because our previous solution was at the end of service life. We had used it for more than six years. We wanted new technology with new scalability. power, technology and easy maintenance.

We migrated from our older hardware consists of multiple servers, storage and switches to simple and more powerful HCI - 4 node VxRail device.

Studying current and future Business requirement, validating multiple solution which suits our requirement, which is agile, easily scalable and more power to suite our future plans.  It took almost six plus months to freeze the VxRail solution.  Post finalization, releasing the order and receiving to hardware it took almost 6 months to complete the migration to new setup.  Delay was due to lockdown, travel restrictions otherwise it would have been completed within three months.  Complete migration was very smooth and very minimal downtime without any Business impact.

In-house team with OEM Support.

Identifying and freezing the solution by multiple tech discussions and negations. Finalizing solution with hardware is bundled with license. Closing the order with Five-year Support and migration support from OEM.

We evaluated couple of other solutions, also gone through Nutanix demo. Nutanix is a very good solution, but they don't have their own hardware, we have to depend on third party people like Dell, HP or IBM. We were long time Dell product user and preferred the Dell.

I would rate this solution 10 out of 10.

Just buying the product is not important, along with solution on-time support is very crucial for Business-critical applications.  We are using Dell products, solutions and services from more than 10years.  From my experience with Dell, their technology, support and services which plays a critical role to select Dell as our products and solution vendor.

All of our servers run on this system and we are also able to use it for file servers, domain controllers, print servers, SQL servers, etc.

I have two teams - one in Copenhagen with about 400 people and one in New York with about 200 people. Their roles are mainly architects and administration.

It would be nice if the update process was shortened and that patching would be simpler.

I have been using the solution for a year and a half.

It's so reliable that we haven't had one breakdown since we got it. It's very stable.

It is very scalable. You can scale compute or storage or both. I am looking to expand my New York cluster this quarter.

Initially, they had a lot of issues when I bought it as they were understaffed. So, it was a little bit hard to get support. But now, a year and a half later, it's so much better and very good.

We were originally using VMware and SAN. We switched so that it can be administered and managed in a centralized format.

The initial setup was straightforward. It took about a week initially, plus three weeks to move all my VMs to the new system.

I was able to perform this myself with the assistance of a consultant.

Fees vary by license type.

First and foremost, I would advise people to purchase this solution mainly for the simplicity of the system. And it's all managed in one place, which is nice compared to Nutanix where you had to administrate multiple places. And, the support now is very good.

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.

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.

We use it for implementing VDI solutions.

Hyperscale is the most valuable feature I found on this solution. It's the ability to utilize the resources for the VMware cluster setup on which Citrix VDA runs.

The only issue we've faced is with their Call Home Support Center. Any alert that has to be triggered, we're just currently working on to fix. Otherwise, it has been a pretty good system.

One problem we had was when we ordered the first node of cluster setup, and then we wanted to add two more nodes, we could not get the same configuration. We had to use a different configuration for the cluster setup.

Scalability becomes a problem when two or three years have passed because you don't get the same model. You get a better model and to make that model work, you need to have a different cluster setup. You tend to lose on the continuity or expansion. I would recommend having a capability where even your older versions of hardware can be seamlessly utilized and additional expansion becomes so much easier.

I've been using this solution since 2020.

The stability of VxRail is good. We are content with its stability.

This solution is scalable. We purchased two additional units the following year.

Technical support for this solution was very good, professional, and they had the skills to get it implemented.

We used Nutanix. VxRail is more economical than Nutanix. It's more cost-effective so we prefer it over Nutanix.

We used so far three different solutions. The first was not a recommended solution. It was pushed down our throats to use that particular hardware. As I was involved in that setup, I knew the first time that implementation was on the wrong hardware, against the recommendation of the partner and the implementer. We definitely did not succeed. The second was a failure again, because of not following the recommendation of the implementer or the partner. The third one, lesson learned and we had no objections to that. We got a better recommendation from someone we trusted, so we were successful with our choice.

The initial setup was straightforward. The engineers asked for what is required and they came with the same initial set.

We used a partner for the deployment. My experience with them was good. They fully supported us during the pandemic situation to get this up and running.

We evaluated Nutanix.

We're quite content with this solution for the purposes it was purchased.

Deployment was completed within two weeks.

Almost all of the people in the company used this solution since the pandemic. Now it's mostly used by the task workers.

For deployment and maintenance of this solution, we require four staff where some are admins who handle multiple storages in other systems as well. They don't do this full-time. They only spend one-third or less of their time managing deployment and maintenance.

I have no plans to increase VxRail usage in the future. The only problem with it is the usage of the cloud is being promoted to its peak, so the next expansion would be on the cloud.

The cloud has always been talked about and people have been asked to venture into it. On the cloud, you don't have to wait and implement or pay upfront for the whole hardware. For some of the cloud versions, you can pay as much as you use. You can start with 50 users and then grow. If it has to be on-prem though, I'll have to at least factor a box that can cater to 200 or 300 users. You need to pre-plan and the hardware delivery might take some time, so making it market-ready is a little time-consuming.

I'm rating this solution a ten out of ten. This is because of my previous experience with other solutions where I had three failed implementations on different hardware. They failed because of one particular reason: They're not low-maintenance. This solution, on the other hand, does not need heavy system maintenance. People prefer to use the system rather than the desktop, which makes it convenient for them to work from anywhere. There are a lot of benefits. You have your data saved on a data center. The availability is there which makes it flexible for users.

After the pandemic, when people returned to the office, we utilized this solution as an agile workspace, so people can sit and work on any desk. When they come to the office, they don't have to go to a particular desk. They can choose where they want to work, so this solution provides a lot of benefits for us.

It is used for consolidation, modernization of infrastructure, and simplification. That's what most customers are looking for with this solution.

I am using its latest release.

Our clients value being able to upgrade with one click or a few clicks. 

The ability to manage everything from a single console is one of the key advantages that our clients see. They don't have to worry about how to manage the storage, how to manage the servers, and how to manage the virtualization layer. Everything comes in a single platform. As a result, IT teams are shrinking, and very often, the budgets are no longer for people. They're more for automation.

They're getting better with their one-click upgrade. The success factor is now between 85% to 87% with the latest release. They should just continuously improve on that one-click factor and make it more seamless.

It has been about a year, but previously, I have worked on the Fujitsu equivalent for many years.

It is very reliable.

Scalability is a misunderstood notion in the hyper-converged environment. Very often, people misunderstand what and how things are being scaled within a hyper-converged environment, and this is applicable to every solution out there. So, from a scalability point of view, in terms of the technology itself, it is fairly easy, but in terms of dollars and what it means, very often, people are a little bit surprised about it. If you want to upgrade your storage, you don't necessarily upgrade just one hard drive. If you're in all-flash storage, every node has to be upgraded. There are rules around disk groups and things of that nature, so it becomes a bit of a challenge, and sometimes, it is at a price that customers do not expect. The pricing and how things are evolving over a period of time are very often misunderstood by customers.

I don't deal with them. I am more on the presales and delivery side. I'm sure there are challenges around that, but I'm not aware of any concerns at this point.

It is very straightforward.

It varies. It could be $100,000 at the smaller end and millions and millions of dollars at the higher end. 

It is a very reliable and simplified solution. If you're looking for simplification of operations, this is a great solution to implement.

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

It's somewhat hard to speak about specific features, but I like VxRail's simplicity and ease of use. It's a decent solution for customers with a small footprint. If you're operating a big data center, it's not easy to position VxRail or HCI solutions, but when you have a small customer managing many different components, it's easier to work only with one solution.

If VxRail could also offer file services in addition to virtualization, that would be nice because sometimes people want to complement their environment with file services, and you don't have that in VxRail.

I've been working with VxRail for several years.

VxRail is stable.

VxRail is not an easy tool for selling big projects or a lot of services.

VxRail is comparable to vSAN, which is the same product but more integrated. 
Nutanix offers more services, and it can behave as object storage, file server storage, or Sun storage, whereas VxRail is more of a virtualization solution. Also, Nutanix can work independently of VMware. That's an advantage for some customers because VMware is costly, so it increases your budget if you go with VMware and VCF. However, I can't say which is better for HCI. If something works with VMware, it works on VxRail. It's in the scope of VMware, so I don't see any restrictions.

Setting up VxRail is straightforward. 

I rate VxRail eight out of 10. I'm very satisfied with the product. 

The data conversion capabilities are very good.

Deduplication is excellent.

The initial setup is simple.

As of right now, I cannot think of any improvements, as it has been working very well.

It might help if there was more confidentiality between VxRail and the Data Domain for Backup. There are several issues with backup solutions. We'd like integration with Avamar.

We'd like to see more automation capabilities in the future. 

I've been using the solution for about one year.

The solution is like a rock. It's extremely stable. We've had no issues. It doesn't crash or freeze. There are no bugs or glitches. 

We haven't tested the scalability and therefore I cannot comment on its capabilities. 

Currently, we have more than 1,000 users on the solution. They are basically working with the database.

Next year, we have plans to increase usage. e plan on getting more customers and therefore will need to bill for more storage. 

For any phase-one issues, I would first go to the integrator. I can escalate straight to the vendor if I need to. So far, our experience with the integrator has been very good. We have no complaints. 

We didn't have any issues with the initial setup. It was very straightforward and not overly complex. 

Our contract partner handles any maintenance tasks. 

An integrator assisted us with the initial implementation process. They were very professional and the experience overall was positive. 

I can't speak to the licensing aspects of the solution. It's basically just a one-time purchase. 

There are very many competitors between the hyper-converged solutions, such as Nutanix and Dell, and so on. We also looked at VMware options. However, we are wanted to go with something that was more stable and we're generally attracted to Dell. 

We're just a customer and an end-user.

It's a very stable system. It's very easy to use. You just need one desktop for control over all the items of the system. As of now, it's been problem-free.

I would rate the solution at a ten out of ten.