Scale HC3 vs. VMware
March 09, 2019
Scale HC3 vs. VMware
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Scale Computing HC3
Scale has been used in our environment to replace VMware. We decided to go with Scale because of the cost and the ease of use. All of our Server Infrastructure sits in Scale, and we also use a Secondary cluster at an offsite location for DR. This allows us to no longer have to support a Data Center full of physical servers or to pay obscene licensing fees for VMware, NetApp, and our Cisco UCS cluster.
- Snapshots between clusters is fast, and functions without notice.
- Management of all VMs through a single pane of glass in a web browser is very convenient.
- Cloning machines from a "Golden" template is extremely quick and easy.
- Scale could improve when it comes to increasing Virtual Disk size. Instead of having to create a second disk and then convert them into dynamic disks in Windows applications.
- Allowing more than 4 HDDs to be assigned to a machine is also a pain point, as we have some DB servers that require at least 4 HDDs to function properly.
- Making migration from a standard vmdk file easier than the current method would also be a good way to improve. Paying for Carbonite licensing is not something feasible for all organizations, and the other method is not guaranteed to work and can be quite tricky also.
We run many web applications, file servers, and database servers using Scale HC3. All of them perform just as well if not better than in VMware. Scale HC3 allows us to determine how much of the machine is run off of Flash storage vs. Spinning Disk storage, which increases performance on mission-critical machines. We have several massive DB servers that run almost exclusively off of Flash storage now, and the performance increase on the Web Apps associated with these DBs has been remarkable compared to what it used to be when we were using VMware.
We did not evaluate any other Hyper-Converged solutions, but we previously used VMware vCenter, vSphere, ESXi and we piloted Microsoft Azure. All of them had higher costs and recurring costs that were not necessarily associated with Scale. We explored staying with VMware and also a couple of cloud solutions for migrating our data center, and none were as good of a fit as Scale was.