VxRail Reviews

We mainly use the solution for our data center equipment. 

As with SimpliVity, the solution concerns itself with storage, networking and virtualization resources.

The price of the solution is rather on the high side, not generally speaking but only as concerns VxRail. Dell Strava has exactly the same kind of price when it comes to HPE. VxRail starts at a higher price, so we tend to use SimpliVitity solutions concerning small companies. 

The full solution is not completely included as a bundle, such as we see with SimpliVity.  VxRail lacks a backup solution.

I have been using VxRail for around five years. 

VxRail's technical support is very good.

As with SimpliVity, the initial setup took two days. 

The price is rather on the high side. 

There is no licensing fee. One can buy HPE, all fully included, with either a three or five year license covering full support. 

The solution is deployed mostly on-cloud, although some of the bigger environments prefer do so on-premises. 

I would recommend this solution to others. 

I do not know the exact number of customers who are using the solution. I believe this number to be 15 or 20 in France, although there are more who use the SimpliVity solutions because of the lower price. 

I rate VxRail as an eight or nine out of ten. 

A valuable feature of the solution is that it allows everything to be integrated into a single model, comprised of hardware and software. 

When using hybrid nodes, such as VxRail, there should not be compression and deduplication, only in All-Flash nodes. So, it's about improvement. It's good to see deduplication in hybrid nodes.

I have been working with VxRail for around one year. 

I am satisfied with the stability. To my knowledge, our customers don't have any problems with the solution.

As I am not an engineer, I am not in a position to talk about the installation. I do not have familiarity with implementation. 

I do not believe that the price should be lower. I feel it to be reasonable. This is because we can compare blade with blade server, MX7000 for example, when it comes to buying VMware products, meaning it will not act like a true hyper converged infrastructure. 

I prefer VxRail to that of HyperFlex, because the VMware facilitates the configuration of two or more disk groups. Yet, HyperFlex offers one test drive and separate capacity drives, so this group only handles one load.

My knowledge of HyperFlex is limited, which is why I am in the process of comparing it with the solution.

Everything is balanced in the solution. The hardware is integrated with VMware. 

VxRail is a good solution. It offers easy administration, including updates, along with a central console enabling complete visibility of management, administration and monitoring. 

I rate VxRail as a ten out of ten. 

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.

I don't know which version we are using. 

I use VxRail as a VDI solution in my environment. 

We use the solution to solve our performance problems in the environment. In spite of the great expense, I needed to deploy a good alternate solution for our VDI clients, as there was a need to address the slow pace of the VDI and other deployment issues. 

I wish for the performance environment to be improved. 

We have been using VxRail for approximately one month.

The stability is fine. 

We may need more nodes next year. At the present time, the solution is fine as we support only 200 users. However, I will need to have these capabilities for approximately 1,500 users, although I cannot specify the exact number. 

For the moment, the support is okay. 

I am not in a position to assess the difficulty or duration of the deployment as this is done with our partner, who sends it to us only after the implementation and deployment are completed. 

The solution is very expensive. 

We support 200 users.

VxRail performs well in the VDI environment. We feel it to be a good solution.

I rate VxRail as a ten out of ten. 

We are using this solution for our business-critical application.

VxRail solution provides hassles free deployment for small IT team. It also provided High Availability and Scalability for future extensions.

I have found that the professional deployment services from Dell EMC, monitoring Services likes Secure Remote services , and the many others services such as patch updates. Additionally, the deployment team has demonstrated the best practice approach for the appliances.

I have been using the solution for one month.

The solution is quite efficient for scaling horizontal  but will a bit difficult to expand vertical where on the certified engineer can authorized. For example, increasing RAM and storage.

The installation was straightforward and took approximately five days to implement the whole stack.

We used Dell EMC team together with local vendor team to implement the solution and we have two engineers to do the maintenance. Their knowledge and skills are outstanding.

There is a license required for this solution.

I would recommend this solution to others. This solution is for people who want to simplify the whole virtual data center. Initially, if you want to use virtual data center, you need to buy hardware and the license separately. After combining everything together, if anything happened to each product, you need to do a lot of troubleshooting and communicate with different parties . With this solution, it is quite straightforward. You can have a deployment team come and install it for you within a week if you provide the correct configuration. This will save you a lot of time.

I rate VxRail an eight out of ten.

It is used for server virtualization. Most of my work is around server virtualization. There has been a lot of interest lately in virtual desktop interfaces but not much is happening there. Most of the customers come for server virtualization. They generally have three-tier architecture running VMware vSphere, and they are looking to upgrade their technology for different reasons, such as performance or hardware being the end of life. Our customers are mostly using the new versions of this solution.

There are so many features, but if I have to choose, I would go for scale-out upgrades and performance.

Scale-out upgrades are very valuable. Typically, when customers engage in virtualization, they're committing themselves to run many virtual machines on a fewer number of hosts. They'll have five or six hosts, and they will run all their virtualization on vSphere. They could be having anywhere from 50 to 100 or even more virtual machines. Once all these go into production, getting downtime or getting planned maintenance windows is extremely difficult. It is something that typically businesses will frown upon. With VxRail, you can just go ahead and add a node without disrupting the existing environment, which works very well. That's why scale-out upgrades are a key feature.

Its performance is also valuable. It 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.

It would be nice if its installation can be simplified, but it is currently not too bad.

They can provide deduplication and compression in hybrid configurations. To the best of my knowledge, these features are not there, and it would be nice if these are added. Some of its competitors already have these features, so it will help VxRail to have a better feature set and compete more effectively.

I have been off and on working with VxRail for more than three years.

It is fairly stable. There are no showstoppers as such.

It is easy to scale, but typically, it involves adding more nodes. So, there is an investment from the customer side. They have to have the budget for it, and then scalability is not an issue.

We are focused on all segments. Some of our customers start off with something as small as a three-node cluster, and we also have large enterprise customers who start off with 10 or 12 nodes.

I don't interact with their technical support.

Its installation can be a little complex, but it is not bad. If you plan it well and stay in touch with the customer about requirements, it is not difficult. For an implementation project, it is a standard practice for us to work very closely with the customer. It is definitely not as complicated as deploying a three-tier architecture with SAN storage, SAN switches, and those kinds of things.

In terms of maintenance, it usually requires version upgrades. When a VxRail cluster is already in production and in use, these things are discussed very deeply with the customer, and whether to go for an upgrade or skip it is decided based on the consultation with the customer. It depends on a whole lot of things, and the customer is the key in deciding such things. You have to consider the following:

• What is the business cycle at that point in time?
• What is the workload on the virtual machine?
• Is this the right time to carry out the upgrade?
• Is the upgrade really necessary?
• Is the upgrade going to impact any of their applications?

I would definitely recommend VxRail. If you have a heavy investment in VMware software infrastructure, it is definitely useful.

I would rate VxRail 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. 

I like the simplicity of the orchestrating network, storage, and compute under one umbrella.

The footprint is very minimal too. For management operations, the VxRail appliance is easy to use.

I like that there is a dependency on the storage controller.

I would like to see how they work with multiple vendors and not just with their own branded hardware.

One of the complications in teaming is the number of patches that are required, which is too high. 

This is also a challenge when your infrastructure might be legacy and you want the latest platform installed. Most of the ports might already be consumed and you have very few ports available for your new deployment, and due to the SEI, you are required to have a high port density.

I would love to see license migration from one host to another.

I have been working with this solution for a year.

We are using the latest version.

For now, it has been stable. 

We have posted a really critical application and so far it's been great.

I have not dealt with technical support from VxRail yet. We have not had any issues.

The initial setup was straightforward.

It took less than a week to deploy, without dedicating full days. It was approximately two to three hours a day for this particular job.

It comes with preloaded ESX sites, it's about how you configure it.

I would totally recommend this product. If you have a good proportion or, if their infrastructure requirement has a higher compute, proportionally designed storage, and memory, then go for higher VxRail, which is the ACI platform. Instead, if your computing requirement is higher and the storage of memory doesn't really matter, the benefits of hyper-converged infrastructure are not for you.

I would rate VxRail an eight out of ten.

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 have deployed it in our lab in our organization for POCs. We have its latest version.

I am responsible for presales and solution architecture for HCI VxRail. It is suitable for any business, such as financial, telecom, education, etc. 

The simplicity and manageability of VxRail are most valuable. We have a very good experience with this product. Its stability and scalability are also very good.

The most important thing that I want to be included in this solution is the VMware license. 

Its deployment time can be quicker so that instead of 40 minutes, it takes 10 minutes.

I have been using VxRail for four years. 

It is the most stable solution I have come across.

I have scaled it many times, and its scalability is very good. You can scale out and scale up as much as you need, which is a great thing.

It is suitable for small, medium, and large businesses. We have almost 500 users.

I have contacted them many times. The best thing about their support is that there is single support for software, hardware, and networking.

It is very straightforward, but it would be great if it can be done in 10 minutes rather than 40 minutes.

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

I would 100% recommend this solution to others. I am very happy with this product.

I would rate VxRail a ten out of ten.