Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure vs VxRail comparison

Red Hat and Dell Technologies are both solutions in the HCI category. Red Hat is ranked #24, while Dell Technologies is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.4. Red Hat holds a 0.8% mindshare in HCI, compared to Dell Technologies’s 18.4% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Red Hat users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 94% of Dell Technologies users who would recommend it.

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infr...

Read 6 Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure reviews

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353 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

VxRail

Read 132 VxRail reviews

19,200 Views
12,839 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infr...

VxRail

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 2024

VxRail and Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure compete in the hyperconverged infrastructure market. VxRail often has the upper hand in deployment convenience, while Red Hat stands out for its scalability and open-source flexibility.

Features: VxRail integrates with VMware environments and offers automated lifecycle management and simplified operations. Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure provides a flexible, scalable solution, benefiting from open-source foundations and strong customization capabilities suited for organizations prioritizing interoperability.

Room for Improvement: VxRail may be challenged by higher initial setup costs and dependency on VMware environments, which might limit flexibility for some organizations. Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure could improve by enhancing ease of deployment and reducing the complexity associated with its open-source nature. Both can benefit from refining support channels to improve customer experiences.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VxRail is known for its straightforward deployment model with reliable VMware support, offering smooth integration into existing ecosystems. Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure's deployment, while versatile, can pose challenges due to its flexible open-source nature, but benefits from community-driven support.

Pricing and ROI: VxRail often involves higher initial costs, but provides quick ROI for VMware-heavy organizations due to its seamless environment integration. Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure offers a cost-effective setup, with long-term savings through its open-source foundation leading to a lower total cost of ownership, appealing to cost-conscious organizations.

To learn more, read our detailed Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure vs. VxRail Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure vs. VxRail

April 2025

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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

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infr...

Ranking in HCI

24th

Average Rating

8.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VxRail

Ranking in HCI

1st

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

132

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the HCI category, the mindshare of Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is 0.8%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VxRail is 18.4%, down from 21.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

HCI

Featured Reviews

systemar777972

System Architect at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

Comes in a small, compact model that does not have any separate management but it is not so stable

This product is not so stable. Maybe it is just not mature enough in its development. When we upgrading from one version to another, there have been some hiccups. There have been a few times where upgraded features cause changes that make problems with existing implementation on the deployment side. I'm not sure if I really need any new features in this product at this point. For us, it is a fixed solution. It's not a full-blown solution and doesn't need to be. It is not really a cloud product, but we use it like some kind of cloud in a box. It is very limited in our use case. It has limited capability in general. You can not really have something like private security domains. Or there are so few servers that you can not really use the different kinds of applications you could with different physical servers. So you cannot select the kind of security that you can have on a cloud with separate layers.

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Rami Jadallah

Data Center Solution Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Streamline management and integration with seamless upgrades

The primary reasons customers choose VxRail include ease of management, ease of upgrades, and integration with VMware. The hyper-converged infrastructure simplifies software and hardware upgrades. Customers prefer the single pane of glass management and integration with VMware, which makes it easier for them to proceed with decisions involving VMware products.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I like that you can add other types of services."

"The size of the hardware is what we need because it is very good for small configurations."

"It is stable and scalable."

"The consolidation of the management in one control point is the most valuable. The whole infrastructure management is consolidated in just one console point. The documentation is also pretty good."

"The most useful feature is the solution's automation in terms of how we are able to spin up a certain workload in real-time when we are doing R&D."

"Both the scalability and stability of this solution are excellent."

"When we have a resource contention, we can easily increase the capacity."

"The update capability of VxRail is crucial for us."

"It's a simple product, fast, and reliable."

"The stability continues to get better and better. It's pretty reliable."

"The major advantage is the blueprint. You do not need to separately manage the sand or network part because it all gets virtualized."

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

"Homogeneity is most valuable. The truth is that having everything in a single cluster helps a lot."

"VxRail can manage the whole cluster at the same time, so it's easy to expand. VxRail has more features vSAN ReadyNodes that make it easier to implement from scratch."

More VxRail pros

Cons

"This product is not so stable. Maybe it is just not mature enough in its development."

"The cloud deployment could be improved."

"The main issue is the initial investment. It is an expensive product, and it should be cheaper. It should also be easier to use and manage. The professional service for this solution is quite complex and expensive."

"The licensing policy needs to be improved. They have a licensing policy based on the number of CPU sockets. Nowadays what has happened is that the license they are trying to move is based on the number of CPU cores. With the advancement in technology there are now more cores in a single CPU. It's been very challenging in terms of managing the license around everything. Today we have a processor with 24 and 32 cores on the same physical CPU."

"It is not user-friendly, and it is very difficult to operate. You have to have a deep understanding of the technical details of the infrastructure to implement it. When you compare it with VMware, it is totally different because the graphical user interface is not that easy to understand. It is not intuitive. To use it, you have to read a lot of documentation and even understand what is going on behind the solution. It is not for someone who has a little bit of knowledge. Currently, it is too complex. I need something that is easy to implement. It should have a basic configuration as well as a complex configuration."

"It should be more user-friendly, in my opinion."

"The initial setup is very complex."

"We do not use the storage part of VxRail, we use Pure Storage to map out the VxRail because the disk performance from Pure Storage was far better than the performance of the disk on the inside of VxRail."

"Lifecycle management (LCM) should be enhanced"

"There is an area for improvement with VxRail, specifically the upgrade process. Upgrading the is quite complex and almost exclusively requires Dell support. You can't do it alone, so you need to have support contracts running, which could be streamlined to improve the solution."

"You have to buy a new server if you want to scale up."

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

"The major issue with VxRail is the razoring process, which can only be performed by Dell."

"The price could be better. The backup mechanism could also be better. Some of our clients prefer to work with backup software from a different vendor. They don't do a built-in backup solution. It would be better if they had guidelines on proper sizing and the whole life cycle from the requirement collection. If there aren't any proper guidelines, how do I go to the customer and evaluate their existing infrastructure? How can you do appropriate sizing to migrate to a hyper-converged environment? I think this is a requirement because most of our clients are migrating to a hyper-converged environment. In the next release, they can improve absolutely anything you can think of to improve the product in general—for example, the clusters and backup software."

More VxRail cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure is an open-sourced, low-cost solution with full features."

"It is quite pricey."

"We were expecting Dell EMC to bring us something that would work very quickly and easily, but also be at a reasonable price point, and they did."

"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."

"It has a yearly subscription. It can be for one year, three years, or five years."

"Most of hyper-converged solutions require additional licenses for the virtualization layer (like VMware)."

"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."

"Since VMware is detached from Dell, the solution's pricing is a bit higher than before."

"I do not believe that the price should be lower, as I feel it to be reasonable."

"More cost-effective than Nutanix."

More VxRail pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

16%

Manufacturing Company

16%

Computer Software Company

14%

Real Estate/Law Firm

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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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...

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What are the major differences between VxRail and Dell EMC PowerFlex?

VxRail vs. Dell EMC PowerFlex VxRail provides stable solutions for technical problems while at the same time not being too expensive for a company to invest in. Even if the user is working with a l...

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Comparisons

VMware vSAN vs Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Compared 34% of the time

Azure Stack HCI vs Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Compared 13% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Compared 13% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Compared 12% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure

Compared 8% of the time

More Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure Competitors

Dell PowerFlex vs VxRail

Compared 30% of the time

VMware vSAN vs VxRail

Compared 23% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VxRail

Compared 13% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs VxRail

Compared 6% of the time

HPE Hyper Converged vs VxRail

Compared 6% of the time

More VxRail Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

HCI

April 2025

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure report

Download Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure product report

Buyer's Guide

VxRail

April 2025

Download VxRail product report

Also Known As

Red Hat HCI, Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure for Virtualization

VCE VxRail

Overview

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure - based on our leading OpenStack and virtualization platforms - provides co-located, scalable, software-defined compute and storage, driven by Red Hat Ansible Automation on economical, industry-standard hardware.

Red Hat

VxRail is a hyper-converged appliance based on VMware virtual SAN Software and is jointly engineered and built with VMware, for VMware, to enhance Vmware. VxRail software-defined architecture simplifies compute, storage, virtualization, and management. It will safeguard performance, reliability, and flexibility across your organization with a broad range of workloads and applications from business-critical to next-gen. With VxRail, you are covered.

VxRail is a single turn-key appliance that is a validated, fully integrated, pre-configured, pre-tested solution and offers non-disruptive scaling. Every node includes compute storage and IO. All-flash configurations can contain between 12-28 cores per node. The storage capacity options run from 7.6 TB to 19TB with either 256 GB or 512GB of memory. Hybrid appliances may have 6-20 cores per node, 3.6 TB to 10 TB of storage capacity, and 24GB to 256 GB of memory.

VxRail offers high availability fail-over, an active/active stretch cluster, and VSan Kernal integration. VxRail is a power-edged server with APIs built on automation. There are over 15 million different combinations of hardware available with VxRail. VxRail provides a simple, cost-effective solution that solves a large range of use cases. Additionally, you also get a mixed workloads automated system that is backed with fully automated system updates, and complete end-to-end lifecycle management all in a single two-rack appliance.

VxRail is a value-added suitable solution for distributed small to mid-sized enterprises, remote offices, private clouds, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). You choose the deployment option that best suits your organizational needs, from appliance to integrated rack offerings, with or without networking, and it will be delivered to you, ready to deploy out-of-box.

If you know VMware, you know VxRail.

VxRail Features and Benefits

Seamlessly accelerate deployment to a hybrid cloud
Fast data center modernization
Create developer-ready Kubernetes platforms

Powerful performance and reliability
Improve and simplify operational efficiency
Excellent integration
Save time
Reduce costs

Reviews from Real Users

VxRail is an all-in-one solution: "You don't have to worry too much about the hardware and you don't have to work on integrating a storage device. We instead have this as an all-in-one solution and everything is available as a box."

VxRail is remarkable: “The cover points feature in VxRail is remarkable. It's unique. It has an intervention failover system as well as an automatic failover system, reaching clusters existing in VxRail…”

VxRail is a powerful performer: “...VxRail delivers a very high number of IOPS for a hybrid configuration or an all-flash configuration. The processors that are available in the Xeon family are very powerful. They are multi-core with typically 2 gigahertz, 2.4 gigahertz, or higher frequency, so the performance is very much appreciated.”

Dell Technologies

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

World Wide Technology Inc, Renault Sport Formula One Team, 8x8 Inc, Brownes, Canadian Pacific, Canopy, Denton, EDF, Unilin, Xerox

Buyer's Guide

Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure vs. VxRail

April 2025

Free Report: Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure vs. VxRail

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