We performed a comparison between HPE Hyper Converged and VMware vSAN based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
"StarWind has provided us with a top-notch, well-supported, robust vSAN offering when other vendors have moved to hyper-converged solutions that are outside of our average clients' reach from a financial and resource perspective."
"This software lets us maintain storage redundancy across both of our Hyper-V hosts, so if one goes down the environment fails over to the other and we have minimal to no downtime."
"Training is also easy as it is just one system to learn."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a very easy-to-use solution that can be quickly and easily deployed and configured without intimate and specific knowledge in the virtualization sphere."
"We can lose a site or even two of our three, and we would lose no data and have no outage."
"We are able to execute maintenance on one server while the other is still running."
"StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution."
"The control panel is nice. It gives you a lot of good feedback as to the status and health of the VSAN."
"What I really like about this program, is that it needs little space and it works really fast, so it saves us time."
"Hyper Converge is easier to manage and performs better than traditional infrastructure."
"It is a scalable solution."
"Our storage and IT are now at an enterprise level with all the necessary controls and restrictions being enacted."
"One of the good features would be the fast backup solution Hyper Converged offers, which is more efficient compared to other vendors."
"The solution has many good features."
"It is a stable solution...Those who want flexibility, ease of use, and a simple support system can opt for HPE."
"It provides unmatched performance, productivity and reliability."
"The feature we have found most valuable is the compatibility of VMware products with VCF and VMware Cloud Foundation."
"While we haven't made major changes to our disaster recovery and business continuity processes yet, moving towards stretch vSAN across sites will simplify and expedite our DR processes in the future."
"The most valuable features are Erasure Coding, Deduplication and Compression, and the advancement in stretching regarding replication."
"Adding new nodes and expanding vSAN forward is simple and non-disruptive for a lot of our customers."
"I have used VMware for 15 years and I never had any problems with stability."
"It is easy to work with, easy to handle, and easy to manage."
"The solution has high performance."
"I think vSAN's stability is good. It's an underlying solution for both on-prem and in the cloud, especially the VMC on AWS stuff too. VMware has been around for a long time, so it's pretty stable."
"New versions of this solution should be tested more thoroughly before the release as we had a few problems with one version due to a bug."
"In the next release, they could make some graphs of the real-time loading, speed of storage, and interfaces. Of course, these can be viewed in other places. But, in the event of a malfunction or troubleshooting, this would be convenient."
"While we had little to no issues in setting up StarWind and received excellent support from the StarWind technicians, we would have appreciated a clearer guideline for a setup with the free version of StarWind Management Console or, in other words - for the setup with the PowerShell."
"Diagnostics information or alerts on the state of systems could also be implemented to give more visibility."
"We don't really have any issues with this product."
"For someone entering the IT sector with little knowledge of storage, iSCSI, and virtual disks, they might not find the GUI immediately obvious."
"It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers."
"I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues."
"Scalability is an issue because it becomes very expensive. When you need to upgrade memory, you have to upgrade memory across the nodes. Suppose a customer has gone with a three-node HCI solution, then to increase the memory, you have to do it across the three nodes."
"The solution's pricing for the hardware and support could be reduced."
"The solution needs to add a module or plugin of vCenter for clear monitoring and insights."
"One problem I've had is that I was trying to do a move and it was not working. I was given an error and a message asking me to shut down the machine first and then move it to another host."
"Providing local technical support and improving the price are areas this service needs to consider improving."
"Data protection and optimization: It is really weak. They do not offer deduplication or compression."
"The solution can be improved on the management side. More management features should be added to future releases."
"I would like to see a more intuitive, user-friendly UI."
"I would like to see the availability of more template based VMware systems. Combined with the ability to check and measure multiple and converging data segments. Another issue I've seen is that the tool seems to be slow when first starting up."
"This solution could be improved by having more than one controller for the environment. VMware depends on one controller for the whole environment, whereas Nutanix has one controller for each node. Because there is only one controller with VMware, if there was any drop, then the whole environment would stop working. In Nutanix, I have five nodes—there is one controller for each node and it depends on a virtual controller—so if the controller of any node is down, the whole environment will still work."
"VMware vSAN could improve by having faster reload time and a single point of failure. Resynchronization of many hardware could be better. If you have an outage of a disc or a full system, the replication time is too slow. This has room for improvement."
"The monitoring feature in VMware vSAN could be better."
"I would like to see a little bit more documentation on the initial setup, and a little bit more explanation on the expandability: How to extend out your vSAN much more simply through the console because, a lot of the time, you have to do it through the command line."
"The customer service is good but there is a cost for it. It does not come free."
"We do see weird things crop up every now and again. It will say that a drive gets kicked off even though it's fine, and we have to re-add it."
"I see room for improvement with vSAN in particularly in the reporting realm. Now, with vSAN 6.7, they're starting to include vRealize Operations components in the vSphere Client, even if you're not a vRealize Operations customer. So, that's really good. It exposes some really low-level reporting. I would like to see more of that. However, you have to be a vRealize Operations customer to obtain that. I would like to see more include of this included in the vSAN licensing."
HPE Hyper Converged is ranked 10th in HCI with 34 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 226 reviews. HPE Hyper Converged is rated 8.2, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of HPE Hyper Converged writes " Ensures end-to-end data security with redundancy measures and provides visibility into the system but node expansion challenges". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". HPE Hyper Converged is most compared with VxRail, HPE SimpliVity, Dell PowerFlex, HPE Alletra dHCI and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our HPE Hyper Converged vs. VMware vSAN report.
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