VxRail Reviews

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'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 provisioning the applications for customers. There are no specific sets of installations for using the solutions. We meet the customers' needs through their requests. 

It is easily scalable, easy to manage, and has rapid provisioning. 

In the future, they could provide faster performance. 

VxRail has many components integrated into one solution. Instead of integrating many components, having a single component with VMware as a solution; this could be useful.

We have been using the solution for around three years now.

It is a stable product.

It is an easily scalable product. It is a perfect fit for use in small and medium businesses. For the larger enterprise, you can use it, but again it depends on the use case. If you have a specific use case that fuels for VxRail, definitely it can be used.

The technical support is good but could be better.

We have used other solutions in the past like Nutanix and SimpliVity but VxRail definitely has more advantages. Mainly it uses the VMware vSAN technology, and it is ever-evolving. It integrates with a large ecosystem of solutions. When you consider a large enterprise, these organizations require solutions that include security, scalability, and all the network components in place and integrated. VxRail is more capable of handling these complexities than any other product.

The setup is very simple.

We provided the deployment service and depending on if all the prerequisites are met, we can have it all completed in one day.

The price would be in the middle to the expensive range. It is not cheap. There are different licensing models as well which can meet the requirements of the customer.

I would recommend VxRail, it works for most of the use cases. 

It is good to understand you can't have 100% of all the applications installed. It's never possible with a product like this. At the end of the day, it's a good solution. Whenever there is a need for IT infrastructure requirements, you can definitely consider VxRail. 

If there are very specific requirements or things that are very specific to traditional infrastructure, they can go with that, or for intensive cloud-native applications, they can go with cloud. VxRail comes in the middle. It can extend to use all the applications but do have a proper study to get the right solution for you. 

I rate VxRail an eight out of ten.

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.

Our whole company uses it. We have VxRail in our solution center, which designs software and hardware solutions for our customers' new opportunities. For example, recently, we were asked to develop a Kubernetes environment that the customer wanted to use and researched several different organizations, such as Red Hat's OpenShift.

We wanted to test capabilities on Tanzu, and VxRail was a great home for that, so we brought all the software into the VxRail and showed the inner workings of the data flows for this new capability to the customer. In the end, they didn't necessarily need a VxRail, but that's the beauty of it. It's a vanilla platform to reside modernized software on.

The VxRail is built on two specific platforms that have been in the industry for the last 15 to 20 years: the 1-U socket and the 2-U socket platforms from Dell. They're in their sixteenth generation of those platforms, I believe, so they're very stable. 

VxRail is in its third generation, I think, and I know there are consistent updates to that material on nearly a monthly basis. Most of my customers are federally focused, which means some of this material comes into an environment where few people will have access to that environment.

I would like to see Dell take a crack at simplifying the process of moving from a node to a cluster and assembling everything into the appliance. It would be great if Dell could provide a pathway where a customer could actually install it without the certifications. Of course, I can't say how you would dumb down something so complex. That's a challenge, but it would be valuable.

It would also be helpful if they added some warnings to prevent users from making mistakes when upgrading stuff with VMware, like a notification that says, "Hey, this upgrade should be done through the VxRail manager." Those could steer customers off the path of decoupling that cluster or pulling a node offline when it doesn't need to be.

These things have room to grow in the industry. As more organizations look to develop what they currently have, Dell could provide a pathway to taking integrating the older hardware with the new hardware. I think that would be valuable, too. There are a couple of things that I'd also like to see them improve upon. One could be to actually deliver a cluster to the customer from their manufacturing facility that is already put together. That might be a good opportunity for them.

The VxRail platform is stable. Anytime you're dealing with technologies, you'll find a bug somewhere. There's always a challenge that must be overcome, but once the initial cluster has been stood up, we find it's one of the most stable platforms today.

If you want to scale VxRail, you buy another node and add it to the cluster. That process is straightforward. It will re-image the new node, give it the same firmware, and provide the same orchestration as the rest of the node. Scalability is probably one of the biggest reasons people choose VxRail.

I've contacted Dell tech support on many occasions for VxRail. I always put in a case with Dell on all the service tags of the nodes before taking on any support mechanism. I recommend starting that process early. One of the main reasons we put in a case is to do some maintenance or make some changes.

We always consult with Dell on best practices initially. It helps to provide them with as much information as possible about the health and wellness of that initial cluster. It generally depends on the service agreement you get from Dell, but we'll get a response in five or 10 minutes after putting in that initial case.

I've never had problems with Dell support, but I always recommend pro support from my customers and organization. Depending on the size of your organization and how much Dell hardware you have, they'll assign a technical account manager to your team or to the Dell team, so you always have a consistent point of contact if things don't go as planned. That's helpful if you have a technical account manager assigned to your organization.

VxRail is a hyper-converged system that's automated and consists of nodes. Those nodes are one or two U-servers depending on the requirement. Bringing the VMware automation and lifecycle management platform together is difficult, so we recommend having a certification to do that assemblage. 

It assembles these servers into nodes in an appliance. Once the appliance is set up, it's simple to manage the solution and the box. However, assembly and automation are complex. You want to make sure that the firmware is all the same between the nodes.

We've seen situations where we had a five-node cluster, and one firmware was not mapped to the others. We recommend working with Dell on those challenges, but our architects are also really well versed in those nuances. And if you want to deep dive into a technical requirement, I have several that have done that for a living.

I rate VxRail eight out of 10. I would say it is the go-to solution for hyper-converged infrastructure. 

The scripts that bring all of those servers into a node and cluster situation are proprietary to Dell. Anytime you're using that proprietary stuff, you need to be trained on it. Let's say, for example, you are in one of those systems, and you're working with some software that may not be acting like it should. Or it may have a feature that you want in a new generation. In some cases, there may be some dependencies on vCenter, vSAN, or Vsphere, which are all part of that integration.

One might be tempted to start to upgrade it outside of the lifecycle management that's inherent to the VMware platform. I've seen architects go ahead and update it right from the VMware console when they should be using the VxRail manager. Knowing how to do those upgrades is very important to getting the clusters to see the proper nodes together.

We have some virtual machines for the active directory, some virtual machines for security like firewalls, and some for other security. We have some other solutions here that are on virtual machines, such as our web page. Its applications and some functions are on virtual machines, too. 

Some solutions are internal solutions and I think they are going to setup a SaaS solution here in our cluster. We have about three more clusters here and it's around 20 terabytes.

The integration with VMware is great. I like it so much because it is so much cleaner and the VMware modeling with the VxRail Manager is very nice. The solution is very good. It is easier. We haven't had any issues with it.

We have three nodes and we had an issue with one of the nodes once and the response time from their support was very nice. When they fixed the part that was bad in the cluster, it began functioning again very nicely and very quickly. It was a great solution. We didn't have any outage or crash due to this failure.

It has a tool called RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines, and I liked it so much because it allows for business continuity, and I can replicate virtual machines from one appliance to another. Normally, there are all these rules that we have to have in VMware. We are just implementing this in the first one and the second one. I have the end unit of this distributed solution. It's going to be good but at the moment, we are just deploying it. We made some tests and RecoverPoint for Virtual Machines was very nice.

It would be an improvement if VxRail could be integrated with some other hypervisors and not just with VMware.

I have been using VxRail for almost three years at my office. It's a great solution.

The stability is very nice. We haven't had any issues with the cluster. The cluster is very stable. No problems with slowness. Everything has been stable. It was well-architectured.

The scalability of VxRail is very good because they told me that it scales up to 64 nodes, but at this time we haven't had the need for that kind of scale. We can scale it on disks but we don't have to scale it. We don't have a node. It is cheaper to scale it up with disks while we need some space. We are okay with the CPU and all of that, so the disk solutions are very nice. Its scaling is very nice because we can scale it up with only disks. When we need to scale a computer or something, we need to buy another node if we run out of the disks.

Our organization has about 100 people.

Technical support is very nice. I think it's the best support that I have tested because I have some other solutions with HP which were okay. Before we had VxRail, we had a solution that is called Simplivity. I didn't like it very much. It was a two-node solution. It was very bad. We had some issues with both the support and the solution, so we had to change it.

The initial setup was very easy. It took about one and a half days and then another three or four days, maximum, with the tuning and everything else.

We had to energize each node and I did it a week before they went to implement the process. They asked about everything. They asked about IP addresses, everything that was technical. They made some assessments and the day that we implemented VxRail, they had everything set. They just wrote all the addressing and everything of our root and our network. The implementation goes so fast. Almost a day. That was what it took to implement that machine.

The next day, they migrated from virtual machines with the VMware Converter. They used two RecoverPoints for Virtual Machines, I think. It didn't take too much time. Only a few hours, maybe half of the day, and it was okay. We started planning it and we made some tests over a day and a half on the timing and stability of the system and we had the process standard because we needed to have a hybrid solution.

My advice to other people looking to implement VxRail is that it is a very nice solution. It's an integrated solution so we don't have to jump into several providers because it is only one point of contact. We don't have to call VMware or another vendor. We only have one point of contact.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give VxRail a nine.

Our goal is to deploy a new CITRIX environment - migration from actual legacy model (hardware) to this new solution.

Still waiting deliverance - delayed due SARs-COV2 restrictions.

The solution is good in terms of being resilient with resources. For example, it can process memory well.

We are packaging it with an HCI solution from VMware which pairs well with VxRail. It improves the solution. 

The pricing is very, very good.

The overall performance is going to be elevated, giving the customers a better experience.

I can't speak to any missing features or weak aspects of the system just yet. We haven't had a chance to really dig in.

Currently we're still in the process of implementation .

The solution is stable. We haven't really worked on it yet, however.

We plan to scale the solution to 3,000 users and therefore we have a good idea of how much it can scale for us. We are pretty happy with it's potential to scale.

Technical support has been very good. We're very satisfied with the level of support they give us.

We previously used an older version of the solution. We switched so that we could change the load solution.

The solution hasn't really arrived yet. We're still in the process of the implementation strategy. We're working with our reseller in order to implement everything.

We're not sure how long deployment will take us in the end. That's yet to be seen.

We are going to deploy the solution in perhaps three months, we expect. At this point, we're going to plan the installation, plan the rollout of our actual solution between HPE Blade and the old solution. We're going to install VxRail, deploy Citrix environment, and so on.

We're getting our reseller to also implement the solution for us. Dell EMC offers installations and we've opted to let them handle it.

I wasn't involved in the negotiation of terms, therefore it's hard to discuss the ROI we expect.

We've found the pricing to be pretty good.

For the license option, we're buying a five-year solution. It's a full box. We buy the hardware and software solution for five years. Therefore, there's that VMware solution, licensing for five years, and the hardware valid five years of warranty. At this moment, there are no other fees.

We evaluated two other options before choosing this product. The first was Nutanix and SimpliVity from HP.

We're a customer of Dell.

We have knowledge about the VMware solution. With VxRail, we will be increasing our knowledge. Therefore, we're expecting to improve our internal solutions and the overall solutions for our internal consumers.

While we haven't implemented it yet, we're expecting it will improve our environment a lot. We're excited to be working with it.

Overall, from what I have seen so far, I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We use it for our applications, which are all homeward applications and on a Windows-based server. VxRail has performed well so far. 

With VxRail, there is a single vendor with the hardware, software, and maintenance. Thus, there is a single vendor with whom we can contact. With other products of HPE, you have to procure different vendors and pay the hardware to HPE, the software to VMware, and the maintenance to someone else.

• They should add automation and activation going forward.
• VxRail is missing some of the features that Nutanix has in its product.
• Next release, we would like to see online applications.

It is very stable.

It is scalable. When you are buying it, you have to buy a minimum of three nodes. After that, if you want to add more nodes, you can buy can buy them. You can also add-on additional compute and storage.

The technical support is very helpful and answers questions whenever we have issues with the product.

The initial setup was straightforward.

Compare the VxRail product to Nutanix. Nutanix has more features, but its pricing is higher.

We went with Dell VxRail because we have a good relationship with Dell EMC. The second reason was the price. We procured a very limited edition of VxRail. 

We are currently looking at buying a full featured edition of a hyper-converged product. For example, we are considering buying Nutanix, HPE SimpliVity, VxRail (the third edition), or Cisco HyperFlex solution.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Stability
• Scalability
• Technical background of the company
• Price.