VxRail Reviews

We primarily use the solution as a platform for all of the virtual platforms using VMware. We change the traditional infrastructure and don't sell any servers anymore. We're now selling appliances and VxRail and change the traditional platform to the hyper-converged platform.

Our customers have found that there is better performance across all of the virtual platforms and the routings. Routing and running are now faster.

The software-defined storage and software-defined network are great. We can easily change to VMware on Amazon, or on Azure or on private Cloud running Vx. It's very flexible.

The performance of data centers needs to be improved. They need to process more and deliver more in the space of the storage and offer better performance.

The solution should offer more integration with other virtual software. VxRail runs just with VMware.

We've been dealing with the solution for three or four years now.

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

You are able to scale up to 64 nodes at a maximum. It does scale to that size. I don't know of any client that would need 64. We have a few clients that have an installation of 16 to 24 nodes and that's rather sizable. Chances are you wouldn't have to scale quite as large as 64. Therefore, it would be a rare instance in which it wouldn't scale enough for a company.

All of our clients are quite large and government-related.

We've never had to reach out to technical support, not have our clients. We have an SLA, however, we really don't have many requests as the solution works very well.

The solution does not have a complex setup. It's very simple and very straightforward.

I've personally helped my clients with the initial setup. While I don't have all of the technical skills, I have a team that's very well versed in the product.

We're a reseller. We sell the solution to our clients. 

I'm not sure which version of the solution we're using. It might be the latest, which is the most likely.

We launch the solution on-premises in order to launch a private cloud.

Overall, I would rate the solution ten out of ten.

We use this solution mainly as a middleware application. We work in banking and use VxRail to run all of our mid-layer applications.

We would like to have on-premise technical support.

A more containerized approach in regards to the interface would be better.

I have been using this solution for one year.

VxRail is very stable.

We haven't had problems with bugs, We recently updated VxRail and we haven't had any problems.

If there are any issues, we just open a ticket and are connected with an engineer who helps us solve the problem.

We use two solutions: Vxrail with a hypervisor on VMware; and HyperGrid, with a hypervisor on Microsoft Windows, 2016. Both solutions are different and have separate pros and cons.

The initial setup was not complex. 

We had an integrator from Dell to help us set up everything. I can't remember exactly, but I believe deployment took only one or two days.

Pricing its depend on your requirement well licensing is very simple all VMware and other license cost including in VxRail. But If an organization wants to buy a VMware enterprise license, then they need to pay separately.

VxRail is a good solution, but it all depends on your strategy. We could build our own VMware cluster by buying a separate product. Technically, I could purchase a server and then built my own solution, but with VxRail, everything comes in one box, including licensing, Dell EMC and VMware — It's nice and simple. Although, if an organization wants to buy a hypervisor layer on Microsoft, then that's another story. There are many solutions available for this, including Cisco, which uses Unity to provide a hypervisor layer. HyperGrid uses Windows 2016 on its host operating system. It all comes down to your strategy and roadmap. You need to select your hypervisor first. If you go with VMware, then VxRail is a great choice; however, if you're not using a VMware hypervisor, then there are many other options to choose from.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give VxRail a rating of nine, simply because there is always room for improvement.

Most of our customers are Microsoft customers, so they are all seeking their own application servers on top of VMware. I'm a senior engineer infrastructure solutions and we are partners with VxRail. 

The support is very good from the dataset. The recent technologies and management features that have been implemented, especially the application part, are good features.  

The pricing of the solution could be improved. We are reliant on the distributor. I'm a technical person but I know from speaking to customers that they feel it's a bit costly compared to the generic product.There are also some major components of the product not available for download. Even though we are partners, we don't get them. They provide backup features but it comes at an additional cost. It would be helpful if they would include something like the standard backup procedure, backup features like the application manager.

I've been using this solution for two years. 

This solution is quite stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

I did some online training before setup, implementation probably took a few months. 

Given the overall product, I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

We primarily deploy the solution to medium-sized businesses from different markets, from automotive to sales to medical, etc.

The installation was really easy to perform. 

The most valuable aspect on VxRail is the one-click update where they are doing the updates all at once for the drivers, buyers, ID reg, and for the VMS. In one click it's running. It's great.

The performance is very good.

The update process is very convenient.

The price should come down a little bit. It has become better than it was at the beginning. There was a really big price difference between a hyper-converged infrastructure and the classic servers and storage. The gap is lessening, however, it's still there.

I first saw VxRail in 2016 when I was at EMC World in Las Vegas. I found it was a very, very interesting solution then, however, we didn't make our first installation until 2018.

The scalability is great. You can scale within the system easily. You just put in more disks and more memory. Even if you stop with one CPU, you can add a second one or you can go and just add another when customers come and say, "Okay we need more." We just buy another node and put it in. Within, let's say, 20 minutes, the node is within the cluster. It's quick and easy.

For us, we used to earn our money with installing and updating, etc., however, the customer's doing it all by himself now, even if he gets a new server or cluster, it's one each click.

Since we do not use the VxRail internally and we are just sending it to our customers, we have a technical team of about 10 people that are working in the service. Within this, there are three people who are working with VxRail.

How useful technical support really is in terms of solving the issue at hand depends on who you get. It's not only at Dell EMC. It's at Fujitsu, it's at HP, at Lenovo. It depends on which person you get on the other line of the phone. Sometimes it's great and there's no problem. Within a few minutes, the problem is solved. Sometimes you have to wait for the second or the third person that you get to be able to know what the problem is and be able to help you solve it.

I'd recommend the solution.

The big advantage of the VxRail is the one-click update. If you are using, let's say HP or Fujitsu, and use the standard VSAM cluster, then you have to update the virtual center, you have to update the host, you have to update the VSAM, you have to update drivers, etc. 

You also have to consider the HCL, whether the driver fits to that new VM version. For example, let's say from the customer side when they are working with the solution, there's no big difference whether the user is working with VxRail or the VSAM cluster. However, when you look at it from a maintenance and updating perspective, the VxRail really offers a superior system.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten. The product is almost perfect. It really does fit the needs of our customers.

The finger click upgrade is the solution's most valuable aspect.

The single point of contact for support is excellent.

Management and monitoring tools are great. The solution has a very nice user interface and an easy to navigate dashboard. Everything that a company needs can be found on VxRail. 

The downside of the solution is this: if one drive load is down, it will take some time to sequence the data. There is a need to improve on this a little bit. This inclusion of data just takes too much time. It should be improved. It should not take so much time in the case of a hard drive failure.

It should not be deployed on one hypervisor. There should be multiple hypervisors supported like Hyper-V or KVM. 

I've been dealing with the solution for the last two years.

The stability is very good. We haven't had any issues at all. There aren't bugs or glitches. There aren't system crashes or anything of that nature.

The scalability of the solution is great. If an organization needs to expand out the service they can do so quite easily.

We're quite satisfied with the level of technical support provided. They're great. They're knowledgeable and responsive. There's absolutely no issue. It's a single point of contact for support for any issue whether it is VMware or any kind of hardware issue.

I have worked a lot on VxRail. I have also worked on Nutanix, however, not as much as I've worked on VxRail.

Nutanix performance is pretty good and they have something called a CVM, or controller VM. VxRail, however, is based on hardware connections. That's the major difference between the two. That is why the high ops of VxRail is better as compared to Nutanix. Nutanix is simply a different point of VL. 

The solution's implementation is very straightforward. It will take, at a maximum, one hour to deploy all the nodes. It's not complex at all. It's easy.

The pricing is pretty typical. There is no difference in competitors for the most part. I cannot say VxRail is cheaper than Nutanix. There really is no significant difference to discuss.

We are a gold platinum partner for Dell EMC.

I'd rate the solution ten out of ten.

I'd recommend the solution, however, it really depends on the company's requirements. If someone mentions having already used VxRail and not wanting to go with another hypervisor, the best recommendation from my side is to still go with VxRail. With VxRail, they have ample VMware so there's no issue with an upgrade or anything of that nature.

However, on the other hand, if you're going with something like and Acropolis hypervisor, which is both free and a Nutanix solution, and if you are a new organization that doesn't want to invest much, then I would suggest going with something like Nutanix instead. This is due to the fact that the Acropolis hypervisor has all kinds of features. It's very important for any smaller firm if they don't want to invest too much on the hardware, to go with Nutanix as it could be more affordable as a free solution.

We used it for hosting on the infrastructure.

We previously had a traditional infrastructure where we always had issues with the performance. The vendor then introduced us to VxRail and the performance improved drastically. That was one of the best things I can say about it. The time spent on reports and support went down a lot.

VxRail's feature that we found most valuable is its really good performance. That was one of VxRail's advantages. However, we switched out from VxRail because some of our use cases and workloads required a different solution.

I would say its support could be improved. One issue that we faced was that often a single file upgrade would cause an issue, whether it was an update for the hardware or for every component. They should have an option to only upgrade individual modules of the architecture. For example, there should be an option to upgrade only the individual VMware module and not rely on a single update file for everything.

The stability was excellent. It takes around three people to manage.

The scalability was good but we didn't make use of it. It's scalable from an architecture point of view but we never took advantage of that functionality.

The initial setup was a bit complex and they didn't manage to bring it up in the first attempt. Really, only the support people can do it and if something happened the support people need to have control of it. The second attempt also took longer than expected. It took almost two days to complete the full installation, which is longer than the claim that it should take around two to three hours for the full setup. 

We had three people involved in the deployment process.

It is implemented from the supplier side, not with our people. There were 35 VxRail guests involved in the implementation.

We did evaluate a couple of other options like Nutanix and HP before choosing VxRail.

In the end, we chose VxRail because we had been using Dell for a year. That was one of the main reasons. The second reason was cost. The third was the performance of the appliance. And the last reason was its architecture.

My advice to anyone looking to get VxRail is to really understand your use case because from our experience this solution doesn't fit certain use cases. So clearly defining your use case is very important when you're choosing VxRail.

The product was good, but as I said, it's not really flexible with different use cases. That was a lesson we learned from buying VxRail. It's not meant for all use cases, it is only meant for specific ones, which is why we had to switch. It's difficult for it to adapt. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate VxRail a seven.

The primary use for this solution is storage refresh, where you want to take advantage of the HCI functionality and/or bringing in another tier of storage. 

This solution has improved our organization in the following ways:

• Easier to manage: reduced management points, consolidated alerts, automation.
• Capacity planning: manage growth with one purchase as well as plan my depreciation of assets easier.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the automation and integration points with other automation tools.  

Having a native replication would be an improvement.

It is part of the VMware stack for our data center and cloud.

I'm one of the architects for hybrid cloud. I like the new releases that Dell EMC is doing with VMware. They are allowing for flexibility across the hybrid cloud. This allows organizations to use containers and to be able to move into the public cloud, but also not have lock-in. They can come back to the private cloud when they want to, so it's creating a lot of flexibility across the stack.

Looking at the modernization and flexibility with VCM and VCF into the cloud.

We would like to see tighter integration with Pivotal, because we're looking for end-to-end transformation and tight integration. So, we would like to see the Dell EMC family have stronger integration with their products, as this would be the best thing.

It still has some maturity to grow. It needs to be more tightly integrated with its own family of products. It has shown that it is open with the other products within the market, through its stack, but it needs to have the proof in the market (with use-cases), and it has to have the scalability with the integration.

It is a lot more stable than it used to be.

It's a lot more scalable than it was. With the combination of the stack, I just recently went to training two weeks ago. For somebody who had been certified in VMware, then sort of stopped using it, I'm back as a proponent of using the solutions across the hybrid cloud and within the data center consolidation and hybrid cloud solutions.

I have not used technical support. I've just been going to technical training as a partner.

It should be straightforward. That's what we're trying to do. We are trying to make it straightforward.

I lead the largest integrator group that we're partnering with.

The real ROI is the benefit of being able to do a true hybrid cloud, not having to move from CAPEX to OPEX in a pure break. 

It is also being able to have the flexibility without having lock-in. By being able to use skills that you already have within your data center, you can optimize those as you are adding-on public cloud skills. Then, you can continue to build upon those skills with flexibility and immediate use them within the market.

Although, everybody tries to say that public cloud can be more cost-effective. By having that flexibility that fits your business need, there is a greater business case and value case for the business to create that flexibility. By going with the VxRail and full speed of VCM and VCF, it's a much greater investment and creates a greater flexibility and scalability for the customer.

Dell has a really strong set of solutions, probably the best in the market.

The first thing they should do is look at their overall enterprise architecture. Don't immediately follow the advice and take the jump to move. What they want to do is look at the investments that they've already made, and look at what the future state is that they want to go to, not just for that one simple solution. They need to look at what's their entire enterprise architecture future state, then consider everything: skills, interoperatability, integration, and future scalability. Then, look at the solution that they want to go with because they want that flexibility. They should be able to not only move to the public cloud, but be able to move back to the private cloud, and understand what's the cost of their legacy.

They should be looking at replace, refactor, and retire. How long is it going to take them to retire? You don't want to just rush into retiring your applications or replacing them if they're applications that are not coasting a lot to maintain, or you don't do a lot with them. Then, retiring those applications should be a thoughtful, longer process. It's okay to consolidate them and continue to run them on your VMware environment.