Scale Computing offers edge computing, virtualization, and hyperconverged solutions for customers around the globe. Scale Computing HyperCore software promises to eliminate traditional virtualization software, disaster recovery software, servers, and shared storage, replacing these with a fully integrated, highly available system for running applications. The vendor says that, using patented HyperCore™ technology, the SC//HyperCore self-healing platform automatically identifies, mitigates, and…
$249
per year per core
VMware ESXi
Score 7.8 out of 10
N/A
A bare-metal hypervisor that installs directly onto a physical server. With direct access to and control of underlying resources, VMware ESXi partitions hardware to consolidate applications and cut costs.
N/A
Pricing
Scale Computing Platform
VMware ESXi
Editions & Modules
Standard
$249
per year per core
Professional
$312
per year per core
Professional Essentials
$5,600
one-time fee
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Scale Computing Platform
VMware ESXi
Free Trial
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
Pricing shown in U.S. Dollar.
Pricing for other regions available on request.
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Scale Computing Platform
VMware ESXi
Features
Scale Computing Platform
VMware ESXi
Server Virtualization
Comparison of Server Virtualization features of Product A and Product B
Scale is best suited to environments that do not have excessive external or proprietary peripherals. Integrating with tape drive backups or robot tape libraries can be problematic. The most effective use of Scale systems is for companies running multiple instances of the same operating system. The hypervisor's code/file-sharing nature does an excellent job managing new instances while keeping the increase in storage to a minimum.
If you're looking for the industry standard in server virtualization, I would recommend ESXi. After decades of expertise in the field, VMware continues to provide a strong product, production-ready, with an easy-to-learn interface that allows for quick management along with less costly upfront onboarding and training. Grab the free personal-use license and install in your homelab to start!
Display the IP address of the node on which the VM is running on the Devices (gear icon) tab. This would allow me to manage my Microsoft license easier.
During the on-boarding I missed the step to install the Scale Computing Platform tools, and we didn't notice this until I had issues with backups. It would be helpful if some kind of alert notification would display on a VM card if the tools were not installed.
Add a new health or diagnostics tab that would display alerts, diagnostic tools, performance concerns or pattern anomalies.
Some kind of email/alert when a disk reaches near capacity
There are some odd issues with VMware's virtualized network drive (VMXNET3). On occasion, after a reboot of a Windows-based VM the NIC will fail to bind properly and network access is unavailable until an admin intervenes by disabling/re-enabling the adapter. While it's possible that our environment is a contributing factor, this never happens on VMs using Intel E1000 emulation, only the paravirtual NICs.
Logging is extensive but difficult to work with. VMware's solution is a product called Log Insight, which comes at additional cost. Fortunately this is somewhat mitigated by the extensive support documentation and robust user community, but in the heat of the moment obtaining the required detail can be a trying experience.
I'm on the fence about renewing the support contract. The reliability of the HC3 makes it difficult to spend the cost of the renewal which is higher than the costs prior to Scale. I'm convinced if we were a larger district that the savings would be tremendous and I wouldn't hesitate to renew. In our specific situation, it may be more feasible to pay per incident.
It is critical to our business, what started out as a way to do certain functions, it has now become core to ensuring our product is available to our customers and reducing our costs to operate and reduce our recovery time and provisioning servers. Their support is great and the costs to renew is reasonable.
Everything you need to do is point-and-click easy. If you are the kind of admin who wants to edit every config file and endlessly customize your environment, then Scale may not be for you. On the other hand, if you just want it to work really well, and do what they told you it will do, then Scale is the ideal system.
The interface is fairly intuitive for most things, and the areas that are a little less obvious usually have fantastic documentation in the online knowledgebase. In 3-4 years of managing our ESXi hosts, I think that I have only opened 4-5 support cases for things that I could not figure out myself or find answers to on the website.
Without the need to patch the servers with bug fixes and enhancements we whave not experienced any downtime with VMware issues. Even the bug fixes and updates do not cause of downtime as we just migrate the servers to the opposite node and update the one and then move servers back. Very simple and painless.
We do not notice any difference between a physical and virtual server running the same workload. In fact we can scale quicker with the virtual server than we can with the physical.
We had one need for support post-setup, and the person who answered the phone was the support person I needed. No transfer, no level one, and our accents were similar enough that we understood each other easily. The problem was actually in my switch, not with Scale, but the support person still assisted me and got the entire cluster up and running again in under 30 minutes. They are truly a partner not just a vendor.
I rarely ever need support for anything VMWare makes, but when I do, the documentation available just in the free community is generally enough. It's extensive and the community is truly robust and active. And if you have a myvmware account, you can get support for your owned products from VMWare support by the conventional case/ticket method
The implementation was very easy. We had Scale support on standby and they were ready and eager to help if needed. The process went so fast the employees in the organization did not even know it was done.
Jsut read and follow anything your storage provider may require to allow the integration of VMware with storage operations, outside of that VMware jsut works.
As mentioned previously, not having to worry about the compatibility between your hardware, hypervisor, and VM OS is a great help. On the downside, there is less ability to get deep in the weeds with your own system. Much of the Scale HyperCore OS is locked down intentionally, which prevents technical users from having much insight on broad error messages without support intervention.
While Hyper-V also can work very well and can have licensing benefits, it does rely on Windows in order to run. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it can add another layer of potential failure and might not be running on as low of a level as ESXi does. The footprint for Hyper-V can be smaller if the Desktop Experience isn't used for the hosts, but this is the default fashion that ESXi has been running for many years. VMware's support has always been stellar, and its documentation is phenomenal. Hyper-V can work as a virtual environment option, but ESXi has never let me down in any environment I have managed. I will continue standing by this product and prefer it over other options. It has proven itself time and time again over time as the defacto virtual environment hosting platform.
HC3 is one of the best products I have purchased for our district. It is unbelievably reliable to the point that they shoot themselves in the foot on support contracts.
We started out with a two-server cluster and adding a third or fourth is very straightforward and simple with no issues. You just need to be aware of the size of your Vcenter Server to handle the workload, but still the resources needed is very minimal
Positively, it has saved us time in spinning up new servers for the different departments in our company. It is easy for us to spin up virtual machines with VMware ESXi and deploy applications at the drop of a hat.
Positively we are able to save space in our data closets as we no longer need to keep room for physical servers and workstations, allowing us to expand in other areas like networking equipment and physical backup solutions.
It has moved our business forward as we are able to migrate old servers and static workstations in the virtual environment allowing us to easily keep an eye on older applications and update/backup easily through VMware ESXi management console.
