VxRail Reviews

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.

The general use case for VxRail was to deal with the obsolescence because the current infra was not adequate to deal with the licensing and the support as we were running on the older hardware and the ESX version, and being a manufacturing site we didn't have a good level of redundancy.

We have two server rooms there. But if we lose one server room, we will not be able to run all our workload from the existing server room. So we deployed the V Service cluster during this deployment, wherein we have four modes in total in each room, and in the corporate data center.

We also deployed a backup solution with the Data Domain application. Then even if we lose one server room we have all the backup data in the other server room. So now at least we have local redundancy.

So the main use case is redundancy, obsolescence, better architecture, better throughput, and better back up time. Pfizer was not very responsive after we did the VxRail with the vCenter architecture with the upgraded styles. So we got feedback that Pfizer was responding well. Their help was good.

Also the backup time is good. Pfizer has the 1.5 PV. It used to take five to six hours on the back up but now it takes almost half of the time. So we are saving back up time and throughput is good. After deploying we have been getting some good benefits. Even the local businesses are happy with this solution.

So we are now deploying VxRail to more manufacturing sites.

The feature that I have found most valuable with VxRail is its upgrade. Because if you talk about the normal ESX process you have to upgrade the firmware, the bios, and you have to manage the compatibility. You have to do a lot of things. But in the case of VxRail, it's a single upgrade, end to end. You simply upload the bundle, click next, it will do some pre-checks, if those pre-checks pass, it will update everything one by one. It will put one ESX in the maintenance and move other VM's to another mode. There is no downtime to the VM's.

It will upgrade end to end infra, including bios from there, your ESX host, everything. So this is a really good feature. Then in new mode feature, they only have to configure it from the network standpoint and it can listen on a second mode. If they see a new mode in the network, the cluster will automatically have that mode as a new member.

VxRail has helped us with the automation. So we are happy with that.

As I said, one place for improvement would be the automated update for VMware Tools. Additionally, better integration with ServiceNow because if there are some issues, we could directly get the notification through IPS and Tools, so that integration is missing.

Somehow they did it, but it was not a very smooth integration because we have to use email features since they are sending emails. We contacted someone at ServiceNow at our end and we sent emails to ServiceNow and they converted it to some incidents or something. If we could have some out of the box ideas in integration, I think that would be a great feature.

VxRail provides more automation. For example, the process going from VMware to Tools is still a manual process where we have to manually update the VMware Tools. There should might be an option to upgrade VMware Tools automatically. We know that we need some downtime, but still, there should be a possibility to do this as an automated process.

I have been using VxRail for about six months. We deployed it back in September and did the migration, so it's been three or four months in the company.

I think we're using version 4.7 because we had some limitations with respect to vCenter and Vserver costing because ESX was the older version. So we went with VxRail 4.7 rather than going with VxRail 7, which is the latest.

We are maintaining this solution ourselves. We have some level of support from Dell, as well, but they are not directly responsible for the support. We are the ones who are supporting it.

Initially, it had some issues. As I said, the version we deployed had some known issues. But the stability is pretty good. There were some issues here and there, but that was not due to ESX, but due to some network fluctuation we had.

VxRail is especially useful for a manufacturing site. I can't really know many end users are there, but I know that they are participating in the manufacturing process. This is a pharma company and for us, VxRail is critical in our process.

So far, looking at its specifications, it looks good. It's scalable.

In general cases, technical support is good. They're pretty responsive. But besides that, there have been some issues with the cluster. For example, the version that we deployed had some bug which was a known bug. Later on we were advised to get this upgraded. But that advice came to us after two or three reassignments within their own IT section because one person evaluated it and they collected multiple logs. Then he transferred the case to somebody else, then she then collected some further logs and did some analysis. I'm not saying they were not good. They were pretty good. They had some good technical skills. They did all the analysis. Then they assigned it back to the IT guy. But as soon as the IT guy came in, he saw the version. He immediately said we have to update it because this version is having some known issues.

I would say they are pretty good. I'm not complaining about them, but this is the feedback that I personally have - that technician should have come in the very first place by just looking into the VxRail version and told us there is a known bug in this version and we should upgrade it. But that took almost two or three weeks to identify.

But still, I'm happy with the Dell services. No complaints. But just constructive feedback. The rest are good.

They are always helpful. If we join the call, they are very polite and knowledgeable. They bring more people as required, so overall, it's good.

We did not have a complete HCI product, but we had storage-defined software, like Datacode and EqualLogic. Now we are replacing Datacode and EqualLogic with this VxRail because we are using it in vCenter.

In terms of the initial setup, only the network part was a little complex for us. Maybe because we were doing it for the very first time because there is a very strict firewall applied there, being a manufacturing site. We had multiple firewalls there, so we had to open each and everything one by one. That was the only thing.

Once the network part was done, everything was smooth and we had a product life support from Dell. It was Dell who basically deployed it from a remote session with our presence. We only give them some input around the infra set up and they actually did the end to end deployment.

It took one day for rack and stacks and then two days for its set up, installation, and configuration as per our department. Later on we did the migration on our own based on the downtime that we received because we had to update the VMware Tools. We had to configure the backup, et cetera. We did it slowly, one by one, three, four servers a day.

In terms of pricing, I would say it's reasonable, not cheap and not too costly. If you compare it with some other HCI solutions, for example, there were a lot of discussions around Cisco UCS for one of the manufacturing sites. The local ITP had a preference for Cisco UCS because they had some prior experience working on it. We had already successfully deployed VxRail in some of the manufacturing sites and we found that Cisco UCS is much too costly. 

In the deployment, all the softwares were included, only the vCenterv was excluded because we were using an external vCenter, so we had to manage an external vCenter license. All the rest was included.

Some licensing, like vRealize was not included, so we have not taken it.

I would definitely recommend VxRail. But again, it depends upon the use cases. If they have a big data center, then you have to look for some other version of VxRail, maybe VxBlock, but for normal sites, for a small manufacturing R&D site, or for remote sites, they may go with VxRail.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give VxRail a nine out of 10.

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 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 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.

Normally customers are looking to move to data centers that are modern. We have a request for upgrades from old storage and media to something new. We consolidate old solutions and simplify the way the client manages their data center. 

We have a customer, for example, that has a factory. Before they used the VxRail solution, tasks would take hours. With VxRail, a comport starts working in 30 minutes. It saves so much time. It's a competitive gain for the organization.

The solution allows a user to plan how they will be able to organize their data over the course of many months.

It's very easy to upgrade.

Simplifying network configurations is very easy.

The policies are very good.

The licensing needs to be improved upon.

For example, when we need to move your Oracle databases to VxRail solutions, we need to license the processor core and the solutions. This comes at a high cost to customers.

There needs to be better integrations with other products.

I've been working with a variety of Dell products for a while.

The stability is excellent. We don't have any issues with reliability. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's not buggy and we don't have to deal with glitches. We're happy with it.

We haven't had any issues with scalability so far. It should be pretty easy for a company to expand it out if they need to. We haven't received any feedback to make us assume otherwise. You can scale up on many things, including processors, discs, and nodes.

We don't sell to many large companies. typically we deal with small and medium-sized organizations.

Their technical support on offer is better than other products on the market.

As resellers, we don't just deal with Dell. We also resell products from HP, Nutanix, and Lenovo, for example.

The initial setup is not too complex. It's pretty straightforward, in fact. 

In terms of deployment, it typically takes less than a week, in some cases. Of course, it depends of the customers, however, in many cases it takes about a week.

The solution is pretty reasonably priced. It's not too expensive, and often less than the competition.

We're a reseller of the product.

We work with different versions including CEs, PCEs, FCEs.  What we use depends on the customer's needs. In most cases, we have sold VxRail to clients as it is cheaper than other options on the market and it's also a good way to consolidate support to one vendor.

I'd advise that those considering the solution make sure they size everything appropriately. 

We've been quite pleased with the product. On a scale from one to ten, I'd give it a perfect ten.

We have four nodes. We're using it for our VMware infrastructure.

The updating of the features was one aspect of the solution that made us decide to use it. I have yet to actually do an update, however.

All updates are supposed to be done through VxRail, however, the vCenter actually showed that there was an update it needed. I've just started using the product. I didn't know what I was doing. I actually updated my vCenter and that actually threw the VxRail system offline. We had to spend some time trying to get that working again. If possible, they should make the process a bit more clear so we don't make mistakes like this in the future. There should maybe be some sort of pop-up that can direct you.

I haven't used the solution for too long. So far, it's only been about two to two and a half months.

Aside from our mistake updating the vCenter, which threw things off, we haven't had any issues. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't freeze. So far, it's been rather reliable.

As far as the documentation goes, it seems to be scalable. I haven't had to do any scaling, however, the documentation certainly makes it seem like it's just a matter of adding another node and everything will just work fine. 

So far, the technical support has been pretty good. We actually worked with a third-party who worked with Dell on the vCenter problem we had. So far, they seem knowledgable and responsive. We're satisfied with the level of service our organization receives.

We did not previously use a hyper-converged solution. We had a Cisco UCS and we needed to update it. We looked at HyperFlex and at VxRail. We're actually a big Cisco and a big Dell shop, however, on the server-side, we're more of a Dell shop and I liked the step updating. That's pretty much why we went with that.

The initial setup was not complex. It was pretty straightforward for us.

We had a technician from Dell actually do the initial setup. It helped make the entire process very seamless.

We don't have to pay for anything after the initial purchase. There aren't ongoing licensing costs. I don't know the exact price of the solution.

We're just customers. We don't have a professional relationship with the company.

If an organization is considering implementing the solution, I would advise they get some help doing so, unless they have the correct staff in house that can handle it, or they are very concerned about getting outside help for some reason. The technician that helped us got right through it. I would have been hard-pressed to get the implementation done on my own.

Overall, I would rate the solution eight out of ten. Aside from the one issue we had at the beginning with the update confusion, it's been very good.

We primarily use the solution for general computing. We have everything on it and anything that's licensed is on it. We have our file servers, database servers, applications servers, web servers, etc., on it. Anything that fits on it basically.

We were able to commission an old center and provide more computing to the environment.

I like the managed updates. They are really nice in VxRail. Everything comes packaged and the updates are much easier than with other solutions that I've had to work with. 

The fact that it's presenting you validated the design. Anything through the update manager will be guaranteed to work as VMware is integrated into the hardware side of it as well to validate that the patches that they're providing will work. There's less risk there. 

The storage, the hyper-converged storage, is a nice boon. We have a sort of isolated storage from our main sandbox so that we can put things on there if the sandbox is having problems or it's basically another fault domain. It's another place where things can be protected. 

The requirements need improvement. Some of the managers of VMs are a little sensitive to where they need to be placed in the environment and what names they need to have. I would like a little more control over that so that it fits into our naming scheme and it fits our organizational structure within vSphere. That's cosmetic, however. It's not a functional problem. It's just slightly disorganized. We have to put exceptions into our rules in order to check our rules.

I've been using the solution for less than six months. I don't remember the exact day, things have been blending together. I recall that it was right at the start of the pandemic. That was when our order was supposed to come in and things got delayed. We got it sometime over the summer.

The stability is good. We haven't had any issues. We don't suffer from bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's good.

We have not needed to scale up. It is less than six months old, so we have not needed to scale it, however, I have scaled other VSN clusters and it was easy.

My department is kind of interesting. We are the central IT provider for the university, we provide IT services for other IT departments. I can't actually answer how many people are on the solution at any given time. We're essentially an MSP for on campus, but that's sort of our role. Therefore, I am so far removed from what the end-user is doing with it. 

I haven't had a need to call tech support. One of my coworkers has, and it seemed to go well. I was not the one who took lead on that call. I can't advise on if they are knowledgeable or responsive. I don't have direct experience.

We also have a pair of Nutanix clusters and we didn't switch from it. They're running concurrently. They run different workloads. We wanted to make sure that a false in one hyper-converged did not bring down all of our environment. We wanted to make sure that we were not putting all of our eggs in one basket.

Our Nutanix runs some of our core services. Things that can never go down. That is why we have a pair of Nutanix clusters. They're essentially isolated from everything else. They don't rely on stories. I didn't realize they have their own hosts. They are as isolated as they can be from the rest of the environment so that a fault in one environment won't bring down everything.

As part of a VxRail deployment, you have to get professional services. It's an assisted install. I have experience with all of the components of VxRail. In terms of the VSN, the hyper-converged, some of my coworkers did not. That actually was a learning experience for them. They were able to learn from the documentation and that made it easier, however, it was still a learning curve. That was the only difficult part in terms of implementation -  the learning curve.

We're just a customer.

We're running an ESX 6.7. We're running the latest version of VxRail manager, but we're not running the latest version of ESX or V share. It can do for us. We want other people to find the bugs first.

My advice to other companies is to learn and ask lots of questions. Make sure that you understand the solution at the outset. Make sure the networking team is solid. Any hyper-converged solution like VxRail should rely on the network more than a traditional environment. You need to make sure your networking team is involved from the beginning.

I would rate the solution eight out of ten. VSN has come a long way, which is what the shell is based on for storage and the rest of the components are standard vSphere. You manage everything through the same vSphere interface. You're not using a different interface and it's fairly easy to maintain when you have problems. If you have problems, you will need to call tech support. They will have to walk you through it because it is a new thing for most people. That's why I recommend learning about the solution straight away.