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Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued) vs. Dell VxRail vs. Proxmox VE

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)

    Score7.8 out of 10
    N/ACisco HyperFlex Systems is a hyper-converged infrastructure product, based on technology acquired with SpringPath (acquired September 2017). Cisco's modern HCI solution is Cisco Compute Hyperconverged with Nutanix.N/A

    Dell VxRail

    Score9.4 out of 10
    N/AThe Dell VxRail is a VMWare-based hyper-converged infrastructure appliance.N/A

    Proxmox VE

    Score9.2 out of 10
    N/AProxmox Virtual Environment is an open source server virtualization management solution based on QEMU/KVM and LXC. Users can manage virtual machines, containers, highly available clusters, storage and networks via a web interface or CLI. Proxmox VE code is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3. The project is developed and maintained by Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH.

    $7.50

    per month

    Pricing
    Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)Dell VxRailProxmox VE
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Community
    € 90
    year & CPU socket
    Basic
    € 280
    year & CPU socket
    Standard
    € 420
    year & CPU socket
    Premium
    € 840
    year & CPU socket
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)Dell VxRailProxmox VE
    Free Trial
    NoNoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNoYes
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional DetailsProxmox Virtual Environment's source code is published under the free software license GNU AGPL, v3 and thus is freely available for download, use and share. A Proxmox VE Subscription is an additional service program that helps IT professionals and businesses keep Proxmox VE deployments up-to-date. A subscription provides access to the stable Proxmox VE Enterprise Repository delivering software updates and security enhancements, technical help and support.
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)Dell VxRailProxmox VE
    Considered Multiple Products
    Cisco
    Chose Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)
    Cisco tech support is one of the best in the market
    Incentivized
    Chose Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)
    HyperFlex is built on top of Cisco UCS infrastructure, which allows us to manage other non-HX servers attached to the same UCS environment. This allows us to tie everything together via Intersight and see all of the servers in our data centers. Other platforms don't really …
    Incentivized
    Dell Technologies
    Chose Dell VxRail
    At the time we had a deployment of SimpliVity which did not measure up. We demo'd other products such as HyperFlex. We appreciated the ease of use of the VxRail and the overall value.
    Incentivized
    Proxmox Server Solutions
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    27 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Would buy again
    9 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    96%
    Delivers good value for the price
    24 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    9 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    96%
    Happy with the feature set
    26 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    9 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    96%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    22 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    7 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    96%
    Implementation went as expected
    26 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    9 Answers
    Features
    Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)Dell VxRailProxmox VE
    Server Virtualization
    Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued) and Dell VxRail and Proxmox VE
    Feature
    Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)
    -
    Ratings
    Dell VxRail
    -
    Ratings
    Proxmox VE
    7.3
    12 Ratings
    10% below category average
    Virtual machine automated provisioning00 Ratings00 Ratings7.112 Ratings
    Management console00 Ratings00 Ratings7.112 Ratings
    Live virtual machine backup00 Ratings00 Ratings8.012 Ratings
    Live virtual machine migration00 Ratings00 Ratings6.112 Ratings
    Hypervisor-level security00 Ratings00 Ratings8.011 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)Dell VxRailProxmox VE
    Small Businesses
    StarWind HCA
    Score8.6 out of 10
    StarWind HCA
    Score8.6 out of 10
    Oracle VirtualBox
    Score8.2 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    StarWind HCA
    Score8.6 out of 10
    StarWind HCA
    Score8.6 out of 10
    VMware vSOM (discontinued)
    Score10 out of 10
    Enterprises
    Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
    Score9 out of 10
    Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure
    Score9 out of 10
    IBM PowerVM
    Score9.6 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)Dell VxRailProxmox VE
    Likelihood to Recommend
    7.2
    (28 ratings)
    10.0
    (3 ratings)
    8.4
    (12 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.8
    (3 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Support Rating
    7.2
    (27 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco HyperFlex (discontinued)Dell VxRailProxmox VE
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Cisco
    Smaller sites that would benefit from a cluster of 2-5 nodes. Not saying that it can't scale above that, but I find HyperFlex a great solution for those sites. A simple 3-node edge cluster can provide a huge amount of resources and redundancy. It's also really easy to scale the environment to meet growth requirements.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Dell Technologies
    As Dell EMC VxRail comes as pre-built, the deployment process is simple and easy. It is possible to scale out easily and will get support from the vendor instantly. As it is a Hyperconverged Infrastructure and it is also the integration of Dell EMC hardware and Vmware, the flexibility that VxRail provides is effective. An organization that is looking for all in one place like data management, network management, Integration, and backup software ecosystem can go for this product.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Proxmox Server Solutions
    We used Proxmox to implement private cloud services, for clusters
    of a small number of servers, from 3 to 11 with and without high
    availability. Allways with ZFS file systems, and we used to install the
    root pool in SSDs mirrored and use other pools with RAID 10 in groups of
    four, for the virtual machines and containers, for the backups and snapshots, we used magnetic disks with RAID 10, in groups of four. Do
    not use an even number of servers because does not facilitates the
    implementation of High Availability, because the corosync service must
    have an odd number of servers to detect a failed server for the quorum
    system. We used a variety of servers, from clone PCs with AMD Ryzen with 6 cores and 12 threads with 64 GB of RAM no ECC, to high end servers with 64 cores and 128 threads per cpu and 2 cpus per server, with AMD EPYC Rome or Milan, 2 terabytes of RAM ECC.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Cisco
    • UCS manager in HX is truly helping us in doing one touch firmware upgrades. Scaling of HX cluster (in few minutes) is too seamlessly due to service profiles.
    • HX does not hold you back by creating a single data store unlike other HCI products. With HX, you can create multiple data stores and allocate those to desired services. This help logically separate the install base on HX and removes confusion for the admins too.
    • We run high IOPs workload on HX, and we never felt latency issues due to the Cisco backbone (as you get FI as a TOR switch and options to choose 10G or 40G speeds).
    • With HX you truly enjoy a single window support from Cisco including for the top of the rack switch (FI in HX case). In other HCI infra, you certainly have to bank on to network switch vendor for support and bring HCI and switch vendor at one pane for troubleshooting latency related issues.
    • While we increased our footprint on HX, we didn't added additional administrators to support the landscape. This was possible because of the simplicity in managing HX clusters.
    • With HX we had setup stretched cluster between two near site data centres. This is a unique proposition in HX (we have 2 nodes in each data centre) and data centre failover works absolutely seamless.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Dell Technologies
    • VxRail gives us a standard, predictable, unit of scale and purchase.
    • Infrastructure maintenance and upgrades are much easier than on a traditional infrastructure stack.
    • Performance tuning is much easier and more straightforward than on a traditional infrastructure stack
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Proxmox Server Solutions
    • BackUp System, provides extensive propiertes and verifications. An exclusive server for BackUp Administration (PBS)
    • Hardware Customization. You can select several properties to adapt the hardware to your needs
    • Easy administration. You will be able to manage the server with easily accessible tools such as the web console and usage statistics.
    • Certificates Administration.
    Read full review
    Cons
    Cisco
    • there is the problem with starting cluster where there are not outside DNS and NTP services so we need to workaround this with additional storage or hosting it on the local storage.. many clusters has internal DNS/NTP services not available from outside and they need to be hosted on the HX
    • there is not RBAC or user mgmt on the CVMs so it is difficult to not add full permission for the people responsible for just shutdown and power on the cluster
    • native snapshots support with ibm backup products
    • running from not the only last snapshot in all use cases
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Dell Technologies
    • The software release cycle is slow compared to general release of software. Particularly with VMware based releases.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Proxmox Server Solutions
    • The web UI does not work as well on mobile devices. It is useable, but a mobile optimised / responsive UI would be nice to have. There is a mobile app, so that may alleviate this issue, but I have not yet tried it.
    • Support in the community forums could be better. There are paid support plans, but new users trying out the software will not have access to this. Answers to questions can sometimes be terse, and I can imagine this may put some people off.
    • The wiki is a bit hit and miss with certain topics. I've often seen outdated or missing information, and the whole thing looks like it could do with some polish. I'd love to see it opened up for the community to add to.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Cisco
    We are doing it in the current moment. The platform expansion will be twofold.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Dell Technologies
    No answers on this topic
    Proxmox Server Solutions
    Proxmox VE provides the most capable, yet stable virtualization platform in the market today. Licensing options are also competitive and cost-effective for support, and support is extremely fast and knowledgable of getting issues resolved as quickly and soundly as possible.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    Cisco
    Everything is fine if you work as a user of the system. Difficulties in fine tuning the system.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Dell Technologies
    No answers on this topic
    Proxmox Server Solutions
    The interface is easy to use for most of it, but still lacks screens for some configurations. Also, a few of the screens are not as intuitive as they could be. This is specially true with disk and network configuration, where some graphic/visual representations of the configurations would be very useful
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Reliability and Availability
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Dell Technologies
    No answers on this topic
    Proxmox Server Solutions
    Proxmox VE's ha-cluster functionality is very much improved, though does have a not-very-often occurrence of failure. In a 2-node cluster of Proxmox VE, HA can fail causing an instance that is supposed to migrate between the two nodes stop and fail until manually recovered through the command-line tools provided. Other than this, the HA clustering capability of Proxmox VE has proven to be reliable in 3 or more clustered environments with much less chance of these failures to occur.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Performance
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Dell Technologies
    No answers on this topic
    Proxmox Server Solutions
    Proxmox VE's interfacing is always fast to load, both the Web interface and the command-line tool interfaces. Reporting is practically real time almost all the time, and you can see everything in mere seconds, easily able to identify if something is wrong or it everything is in tip-top shape as always desired
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Support Rating
    Cisco
    More documentation is available now than when the product initially came out (which was an issue early on). Because it only supports UCS hardware, I think it does help with support issues. Nutanix has to support much more hardware. At the same time, you're dealing with the Cisco TAC, which can be mixed at times.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Dell Technologies
    No answers on this topic
    Proxmox Server Solutions
    They are fast, understanding, very intelligent, know their product very well, fast, responsive, and concise. Need I say more?
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Implementation Rating
    Cisco
    Fast, powerful, flexible.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Dell Technologies
    No answers on this topic
    Proxmox Server Solutions
    It worked, was easy and super fast to deploy, and provided everything we needed in a matter of minutes
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Alternatives Considered
    Cisco
    HyperFlex is built on top of Cisco UCS infrastructure, which allows us to manage other non-HX servers attached to the same UCS environment. This allows us to tie everything together via Intersight and see all of the servers in our data centers. Other platforms don't really have a comparable offering.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Dell Technologies
    All of these solutions scored very close together in our testing. Nutanix actually was the highest scoring in ease-of-use, but the integration with Vmware and the pricepoint led us to choose VxRail.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Proxmox Server Solutions
    Proxmox VE is cheaper than VMware, especially upscaling an HA architecture. Compared with other free or less expensive solutions, Proxmox VE is high compatible with more types of hardware solutions and more VM types. From my point of view, Proxmox VE has no competitor at the same price level, it offers the most complete and production-ready HA solution.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Scalability
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Dell Technologies
    No answers on this topic
    Proxmox Server Solutions
    Proxmox VE provides everything you need to quickly add new storage mediums, network and local, as well as networking interfaces, such as using Linux standard bridges and now Open-vSwitch bridges which can be even more scalable than before. Proxmox VE 4.0 dropped support for OpenVZ in favor of the more well supported and native LXC and made an upgrade path to it very simple.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Cisco
    • The simplified management makes it easier to operate and prevents mistakes.
    • Guided installation using the installer VM means you don't have to configure every component by hand. Improves deployment speed and lowers the risk of configuration issues.
    • Performance increase of 40-90% compared to our previous compute/storage cluster.
    Read full review
    Dell Technologies
    • We were able to exponentially reduce the cost spending to buy different components.
    • As it has VMWare integration, possible to work on different operating systems.
    • Automation of IT operations helped the colleagues to work on different manual tasks.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Proxmox Server Solutions
    • Due to the open source nature of Proxmox, we have no licensing costs while training our employees
    • We've migrated 100% of our clients to Proxmox and have found improved uptime, and flexibility.
    • In the 10 years of using Proxmox, we've yet to lose any data or not be notified of backup issues.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    ScreenShots