VxRail Reviews

We use VxRail as a hyper-converged infrastructure service within our virtualization environment. We utilize it to run various applications, including virtual infrastructure, Microsoft SharePoint, Citrix solutions, and internally developed applications. These applications serve diverse purposes and are essential components of our environment.

The product has significantly improved our organization. It is highly stable and supported by an excellent support team, ensuring reliability and assistance whenever needed, regardless of time or location. The self-deployment feature is easy to use.

One of the most valuable features we have found is the ease of managing our virtualization environment. The management interface makes overseeing various resources and tasks within our infrastructure simple. Additionally, managing different kinds of hardware and platforms through the same interface is highly valuable.

The product has high pricing. This particular area needs improvement.

The platform is stable. Once you deploy any workflow or virtual machine within the environment, it operates without encountering issues. There are no significant downtimes or interruptions in monitoring. Stability remains consistent unless constraints are due to specific errors.

The product has good scalability. We can connect the required nodes automatically. Deploying VxRail is relatively cost-effective in increasing the number of users. We currently have a low demand for increased user capacity. However, if such demand arises, the process would be straightforward. Adding additional nodes is intuitive and seamless. Connect the new nodes, and the system will automatically update within the centralized management model.

We have only needed to utilize support services once or twice. We have not encountered any major issues. Additionally, when we did require support, the response was immediate, and our requests were promptly addressed.

The initial setup was straightforward as it was deployed with the help of product management partners. As for requirements for deployment and maintenance, no additional software is needed. Basic skills and general knowledge are sufficient for deploying and managing this solution.

The licensing costs can vary depending on the number of processors and specific requirements, which may result in considerable expenses.

The platform has enabled us to reduce the physical machines required to run large-scale services. It supports VDI deployment, enabling easy use for running different platforms in similar environments.

Integrating VxRail with our IT infrastructure has been relatively straightforward, particularly from the network perspective. However, we encountered some challenges regarding firewall integration. Overall, the process has been facilitated by the platform's compatibility with various vendors.

I rate the platform a nine out of ten.

I use VxRail with VMware VCF. The requirement is to have a private cloud to provide services for users.

VxRail has improved the way we function because everything is centralized. There is no need to be going to many different places. it's all in one pane of glass, making it easier to manage.

The most valuable features are ease of management and ease of applying updates. It provides centralized management.

In the version that I was working with, the integrations are in need of improvement.

The technical support is in slight need of improvement.

I have been using VxRail for several years, and am just starting a brand new project with it. This will be a fresh deployment.

VxRail is pretty robust and steady.

VxRail is very easy to scale. It is simple to add nodes, scale-out, or scale-up. We have more than 2,000 users. There are many different people in people in many different departments, going from regular day to day administration, helpdesk, cybersecurity operations, forensics, virtualization administrators, VDI administrators, and so forth.

I have been in contact with technical support and they are excellent. I would rate them a nine out of ten on support because there is always room for improvement, but they do a good job.

Sometimes, when passing on tickets to other techs because people leave on vacation or for other reasons, they don't follow up quickly enough in my opinion. I have found that sometimes, I've had tickets open and two days later, I don't hear anything and it's because the person was out and nobody else took over the ticket. Other than that, they are on point.

In my previous organization, we were using a regular blade chassis. We were not using HCI solutions. Rather, it was just the normal virtualization environment deployment using fabric switches. We were also using Dell servers, only it was M540s and 840s on a Dell M1000M chassis.

It was different, and HCI is something that I like.

The initial setup is pretty easy and straightforward.

At about $200,000, this solution is a little bit pricey but it is more economical than others such as Nutanix or Cisco Hyperflex. Dell is more economical.

In my previous deployment, there were a couple of things that I identified as needing improvement. I believe they were addressed on the new version of their software because, in the previous deployment, I wasn't using the latest version. Apparently, VMware came out with VCF 4.1, and Dell came out with a newer iteration. At this point, I'm hoping that the stuff is fixed. Once I start working with the newest version, I'll see what new features I would like to see in the next one.

My advice for anybody looking into implementing VxRail is to read the documentation and do the virtual labs that they have. Repeat them over and over before deploy it on the actual system that they are going to deploy to avoid having to take everything down and redo it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case is company growth, where storage an compute is growing fast. VDI is due to be deployed imminently

We are opening new properties. This product has given us clear visibility into what we need technology-wise to grow.

ESRS: This gives us the confidence that when we are not monitoring our environment, then Dell Tech is, and can make us aware of any failures/pending issues before those issues impact us globally. We do not have the manpower to monitor 24/7, so this saves us significant costs on support contracts.

RecoverPoint: It give us peace of mind knowing any corruption or server issue can be rectified very quickly, making sure the business impact is minimal. It has also allowed us during our setup to failover an entire cluster. This is a significant improvement for our system availability.

Expansion: Our business is growing rapidly with new hotels being built and acquired. We need to scale our data centre quickly and easily. There is no in-depth config involved nor third-party needed, saving us time and money.

Support - fantastic! as we try to automate the business and the mundane processes , the support element with VXrail has helped us along this journey. We are having to make fewer calls chasing different Storage /Server / VMware / Network vendors , we now make 1 call!

The initial setup between the different Dell departments is fragmented (ESRS Team, onsite deployment team, RecoverPoint team, etc.). The engineers who come to rack/stack and do the initial config should be trained on all the areas and work with the different Dell departments whilst they are onsite to give a smoother install and better experience for customer.

At present, VxRail is a hyperconverged state of the art product being installed in a legacy way. We need hyperconverged install teams.

Before we had VxRail, we had stability issues. After installing VxRail, we did not experience issues.

Before we had VxRail, we had scalability issues. After installing VxRail, we did not experience issues.

I would rate technical support as a 10 out of 10.

We switched from converged to HCI for the ease of management and business growth.

The initial setup could have been easier. There were too many cooks with all the Dell departments.

Compare it to what you spent on your last solution. Look at other costs: Power, IT staff, time to manage the system, cost of expansion for the future versus current (all costs: human/power/kit).

We evaluated Nutanix, Nimble, Cisco... We went with Dell VxRail, as Dell were already a trusted partner, and it has great support and products.

• Look at your pain points.
• Look at where your business is and where it is going.
• Look at the time currently invested by IT personnel to carry out mundane firmware and software upgrades.
• Look at how you currently log support calls for different entities.

We use VxRail for ERC for SAP.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the performance.

The solution's setup is a bit complex, and the complexity needs to be reduced.

I have been using VxRail for three to four years.

I rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.

The solution’s scalability is very good. Our clients for VxRail are usually small and medium businesses.

I rate the solution ten out of ten for scalability.

Dell's technical support is not that good. The support team takes a long time to respond, and there are challenges regarding the people's expertise. We have been facing a lot of problems with the technical support for any of the Dell products, including storage, backup recovery, RecoverPoint, or VxRail.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is bad and ten is good, I rate the solution’s technical support a four to five out of ten.

Neutral

On a scale from one to ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy, I rate the solution's initial setup a six out of ten.

The solution’s deployment takes a few days.

If we normally quote for storage, we have to quote for something like PowerStore. In that area, the solution has brought down some costs. VxRail is still more expensive than its competitor solutions.

On a scale of one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing an eight out of ten.

We had some initial challenges because of the networking component. To overcome them, we had to go through a lot of documentation and information from the website. I would recommend VxRail to customers who have a VMware environment and want to consolidate everything into servers without using the storage.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

For remote work, we use VMware Horizon, running on VxRail, and have centralized all applications and storage.

We can do updates at a much higher cycle with much less resources. We can monitor all the VDI desktops, and I don't have to physically maintain desktops.

What I like the most in terms of features is the fact that the VxRail update can be done in one week. It takes much less time to do a whole server upgrade and an infrastructure update as well.

The update for the graphics integration and the media drivers isn't included in the VxRail update.

We've been using it for the past three years.

It's very stable. We haven't had any downtime so far.

The technical support is good, and I would give it a nine out of ten.

Positive

We used a terminal server from Microsoft and switched because we had to renew the whole data center and wanted to use the latest technology.

We liked the integrated update, and the people behind Dell technologies made the difference.

The initial setup was straightforward. The process took around one day.

Our environment is in one location, and it's not a stretch cluster; it's a single cluster. We run about 190 virtual desktops and 200 virtual servers on it.

The solution does not require a lot of maintenance, and the system engineer takes care of that.

We wanted to roll out the VDI department by department. We used an integrator for the initial deployment, who was very competent. We also used one system engineer.

The pricing is very accurate, and we haven't had any problems with the licensing costs.

We evaluated HPE and Lenovo. 

I recommend testing the data applications first, which could really speed up the process of installing the golden images or setting up the initial golden image.

I rate this solution ten on a scale from one to ten.

We use VxRail for the promotion of all our infrastructure VM services.

VxRail has helped us by increasing the performance and capacity of our workload. 

I have found the vSAN is highly flexible. The documentation is good and the interface of the solution is responsive and fast. The interface has everything you need to manage the solution, such as the VxRail and VMware integration. You can manage the hardware from within the VMware plasma pan.

I have been using VxRail for approximately four years.

VxRail is stable because it has redundancies. VxRail is our standard system for the deployment of HR environments.

We have one person for the maintenance of the solution and one person for the backups.

We use the solution on a daily basis.

I have found VxRail highly scalable. You are able to add more nodes and increase the hardware to scale. It is flexible.

We have thousands of people using the solution. However, it is difficult to know for sure since many different business units use it.

VxRail comes from Dell and they have a one-stop service. You can work with Dell to get everything solved. Any issues in hardware or in software, whether it be VMware related or Dell related, everything is done by one team from Dell. The support aspects of the solution are good but it carries a price. We're happy to pay the price if we get that level of service.

One of the most valuable aspects of the support is the knowledge of the people and the speed at which they respond. If you have a problem and you phone them up, they immediately have the experts at the end of the phone to assist. If there is a problem they come in and fix the problem quite fast. If it is more difficult they will spend the time that is needed to solve it. They have helped us out of some heavy situations we caused ourselves. The support is very good.

The support that they offer us is why we purchased the solution.

We have previously used Hyper-V-based systems, StarWind, and Nutanix. We have mostly done testing of the other solutions and have not fully introduced them. Out of all the solutions we tested, we settled on the VMware-based VxRail. 

We switched from the others solutions because the support from Dell VxRail was excellent.

The configurations of VxRail can be difficult. However, it has improved in the newer version. From version 6 to 7, there has been a lot of changes.

The initial setup of VxRail was straightforward because they get handled by Dell themselves. There is a one-stop-shop for all your needs. They gather the information on what you require in your environment and how you want to set it up, such as what local IT information networks are required. They do a good job and the whole process took them a couple of hours to half a day.

Dell did the implementation of the solution for us.

VxRail is expensive because it's based on VMware and V-SAN. The price is not the cheapest. The technical support is expensive, but it is a good service.

My advice to others would be not to attempt to fix issues yourself and let Dell look after them.

I rate VxRail a nine out of ten.

We primarily use the solution to run the loudmouth to host our virtual server's core courses.

There's user integration with VMware so you don't have to load VMware on top of it and it works right out of the box. 

There's good integration between VMware as my hypervisor and the hardware and it is specifically to size. 

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. 

They could make something like an actual catalog where you could just put your weblogs and then you cold can get the recommended specs along with the utilities like which processor to get. That would be an economical way to figure out the specs of the solution in relation to your requirements. 

Right now, it's difficult for a non-technical person to participate in using the product. It could be made more consumer-friendly. 

It should give output or recommend orders and dissolve effects. 

They could be more clear in terms of which options to choose. For example, they could say, "We recommend, if you want high performance, to go with this pack." Or "if you want an economical option, try this".

The solution could improve on some existing features, especially experience-based access or something like that. 

The product could benefit from more tightly integrated management.

I've only been using the solution for the past six months or so.

This generation, the third generation, seems to be the most stable compared to the initial bracket in the market. Of course, after learning from our myriad mistakes through the initial implementation allowed us to make changes and choose more stable options compared to a few years ago. 

Especially in the Philippines, we are the number one matching reseller for business-critical items. We utilize multiple units to ensure we have a failover in place. If repairs are delayed for hours, we're covered. 

Generally, Dell has a very good presence here. Therefore, we are very stable. The quality of the algorithm is better. You can see the quality of components inside the hardware. They manufacture everything in their own plants in Malaysia. Therefore, they already have hardware components inside the region that are easily accesible.

Failure rates are low compared to Cisco hardware.  

The solution is pretty scalable. There are a lot of items that keep adding onto the computing power and storage. It's not like other platforms where you have to plan far ahead if you plan to scale. 

We've dealt with technical support in the past. We dealt with HP, IBM, and Cisco a long time ago, and we find Dell works hard for us. Their service levels are very good in comparison to other organizations. We're quite satisfied with their level of service.

I've used Cisco in the past. I find this solution is easier to implement and offers good hardware and software integrations. We've also worked with IBM and HP a very long time ago. Dell has better customer services than all of them.

In terms of the initial setup, compared to any other platform, it pretty simple. I've used Cisco UCS in the past, and have experience with that solution, and compared to that, this implementation is easy.

It's got a very good integration between hardware and software specific configurations. You just need to watch out for technical inputs.

The maintenance we negotiated as a bundle over years of use. Our partner handles the maintenance of the solution.

We actually had that alteration done through our Dell partner. We chose a partner based on input from Dell about our limitations, what sort of skill set they had, how many engineers were verified, etc., and then we chose our partners. 90% of the population was done by the partner and 10% wherever delegation was needed, they would assist as necessary.

The pricing varies. We were able to negotiate a pretty good position

In India, they gave us something like three years without interest. However, there are various categories in terms of getting the correct payment options on the pricing, they have a lot of options.

They gave us 40% off of this year in the Philippines whereas in India they gave a monthly payment option without interest. 

A company can negotiate a price. At my organization, we've always managed very good pricing. Therefore, we have no regrets when it comes to the pricing we have to pay. If you have a good relationship with them, they'll try to take care of you.

We're just a customer. We don't have a relationship with Dell.

We just procured the latest version of the solution.

When we decided on our requirements, we had multiple calls with Dell and the attorneys to ensure that we received what we needed. Apart from choosing various generations or various models on VxRail boxes, we also took to deep dive into the actual configuration on each processor to understand how much memory to use.

It's easier if you have a technical professional on your side when you're dealing with Dell. I'm a technical person, so I could get into the weeds with them. If you are a company without the technical expertise, you're going to run into a bit of trouble as you won't necessarily understand the product or the technical aspects that are being discussed.

I would advise organizations considering implementing the solution to choose your partner really carefully. Ask questions like how many engineers do they have and find out how transparent they are about how they handle the process. I'd look at at least two potential partners and compare their capability and expertise.

Overall, I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

The computing achieved by the solution for more than 100 VMs with less storage is very good. The software integration is easy, like plug-and-play. Compared with other products, the IT administrator or IT integrator doesn't take much time to get the tool up and running.

The solution should facilitate the separate expansion of computing and storage.

I have been using VxRail for ten years.

The solution's stability is very good. The failure ratio and errors are very low. The solution gives us fast pre-alerts for main upgrades.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten for stability.

As per the current scenario, we can scale up to 64 nodes, which is enough for normal workloads.

The solution's technical support is very good. We get very good support from Dell in the Middle East, but L3 access is a bit tough.

Positive

The solution’s initial setup is very easy.

Since VMware is detached from Dell, the solution's pricing is a bit higher than before. After the detaching of Dell and VMware, VMware's licensing pattern has changed and has become a bit expensive compared to other hypervisors in the market.

We do not pay for each Dell product but for the whole Dell bundle. We purchase a license for three to five years, which includes maintenance and support.

VxRail is utilized in our data center operations depending on multiple types of workloads. VxRail can be used by any company, including small and medium-sized or enterprise businesses. Once implemented properly, the solution works smoothly, and we don't need to maintain it. VxRail is easy to scale, use, and manage.

I would not recommend the solution to small companies. Small companies with less than 15 VMs won't be able to afford the price, and traditional tools will be better for them. I recommend VxRail to small and medium-sized businesses with more than 15 to 20 VMs.

Overall, I rate the solution seven and a half out of ten.