We performed a comparison between HPE SimpliVity and VMware vSAN based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: HPE SimpliVity has a slight edge over VMware vSAN in this comparison. It is reliable, has high availability, and is simple to use. HPE SimpliVity also received higher marks in the Service and Support category. One area where VMware vSAN does come out on top is in the Ease of Deployment category.
"VSAN works great; it's very easy to install, configure, and manage."
"Using our own choice of HW allowed us to price our service to answer our customers' needs."
"The available GUI is excellent for monitoring and operating the system in an easy and direct way."
"In the three years that we have been using StarWind, the product has yet to cause us any problems."
"The management was very easy and I was able to find all that I need in the software dashboard."
"The fact that I can now count on a true failover solution is what is most appealing."
"The most important feature is the ability to experience the loss of one node or one storage device, and not lose the entire cluster."
"The product has improved the ability to mimic physical SAN environments to demo scenarios and troubleshoot problems."
"The replication from the different centers (the main to the secondary) has been very great. It is good value for us."
"The most valuable feature is that the product has an inborn backup."
"PCX card implementation improves speed."
"Valuable features include ease of use, disaster recovery, and reliability."
"The biggest benefit of this solution is that If you use it, you can use it for the company headquarters and also for all the branches. You use the same system, only a smaller size. With SimipliVity you can also use the included backup solution. You don't need any other solution to back up the data or to transfer it."
"It has instantaneous backup and lag-free restore. When everything is running, I can bring back a huge VM in less than 30 seconds. That's even better than Veeam."
"My impression is that it is a very nice solution. Very simple to use."
"Up scaling is very possible, and at any time it is scalable."
"It is user-friendly, and its performance is good."
"The most valuable feature is fhe flexibility, the ability to move the machines around without hesitation."
"The ability to have a disaster recovery option for our end-users by being able to use VDI and the vSANs, and the ability to do replication across multiple data centers, are valuable to us."
"The most valuable feature is the simplification of storage. We no longer need to deal with Fibre Channel and the external storage arrays."
"The migration of servers feature makes server rack maintenance easy."
"The vSAN features we've found most helpful are live application migrations and storage policies. It has storage, policies, application, and DRS policies. Automation is there."
"VMware vSAN's most valuable features are the capability to consolidate standalone physical infrastructure into virtualization and the ease of management."
"It allows us to put our infrastructure in remote locations and still get the same performance we get from our onsite SAN solutions."
"I would like to see more advanced free versions."
"Besides not being able to use any filesystem, I do not have any additional cons."
"This is a great product."
"The system failovers properly on its own without too much worry."
"This product could be improved with the inclusion of new health check procedures."
"Regular updates to the software are required, and subtle design changes would be welcome."
"The number of different ways you can set it up can make it a little daunting."
"Management tools could be improved, sometimes the usage seems to be slowed down and confusing. A native web interface could also be an option. I love to see in the future port of the software on a general Linux distribution like RedHat or Ubuntu in order to avoid windows license costs. I would also like to see features like erasure coding implemented. On the VSAN software, I would like to see some improvements in the storage pools (eliminate the usage of the file as a data container and use the raw partition)."
"There are a lot of different components to choose from in the chassis. This could be easier by providing a standard or a base model to create and configure from."
"Integration with external solutions outside the HPE posed challenges."
"There needs to be a simple process for migrating one SimpliVity cluster to a new SimpliVity cluster."
"Bottleneck is the main issue."
"The solution could have an optimization site."
"While it has been a while since HPE acquired SimpliVity, there is a lack of understanding/awareness about the product. In short, it took me time to actually make them understand they had a product named SimpliVity, which as you can imagine does not instill a great deal of confidence."
"Bandwidth throttling during offsite backups would be better than the off-peak time setting for a 24/7 shop."
"Let us populate the entire node; right now, there are 24 slots in a server and you're only allowed to populate 14."
"One thing in vSAN that I would like to improve is using vSAN as a repository for files or other things. For example, with Horizon, maybe we can save profiles with UEM on there. That would be a good feature that I would like."
"vSAN itself is a great storage platform, but one of the issues with it is that you have to be fully locked into the VMware package to use it. We're going to be deploying 72 Kubernetes nodes, and we're not going to buy VMware licenses for 72 of them, just so they can access vSAN. That's what we're using the Pure for. Opening it up so you could have vSAN as a data store, use it as a data lake, hit it with an NFS, S3 from outside the VMware ecosystem, would be great."
"There are certain shortcomings in the stability of the product where improvements are required."
"The ability to access SAN environments with fiber channels (or even NVMe) would be a good addition."
"The integration could be improved. I would like to see integration with other platforms."
"I would like to see replication as part of it. I would also like to see direct file access, being able to run SIF shares and NFS and the like. I think that would be critical to continuing the use of it going forward."
"We want see a better monitoring tool in vSAN. Monitoring is not that great as of now because it shows us false alarms in the Health status. We would like that to be improved."
"I would rate the stability a seven out of ten."
HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 150 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 226 reviews. HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of HPE SimpliVity writes "Provides a unified management interface that allows administrators to manage all aspects of the infrastructure". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI, Dell PowerFlex and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Dell PowerFlex and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our HPE SimpliVity vs. VMware vSAN report.
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The answer depends on what is it that you are looking for in your solution...
Both Simplivity & vSAB are software-defined storage technology-wise. Now the second important thing is both create a blob/object storage out of a set of disks.
Ideally, both these solutions can't compare to real-world storage requirements where the need is block storage at the lowest latency. Most of the time both technologies are used for generalized VM workloads and not for specialized workloads.
vSAN from VMware leverages Erasure code for maintaining the availability of data on the soft SAN. This architecture is referred to as RAIN - a minimum of 3 nodes are recommended in such architecture to run the storage show effectively.
Simplivity, on the other hand, leverages a combination of RAID + RAIN wherein the storage availability is unimpacted even if you start with 2 Nodes.
IOPS and latency are the issues with both solutions. Application performance is dependent on disk latency & throughput too. So, depending on the scenario, you need to tailor your solution.
What my point is: it generally depends on workload type, data volume and performance of the VM platform that you are planning for. Both the technologies are great, People use vCloud Suite more as compared to Simplivity globally, that too is a proven fact.
Then it depends on the size of a company and the workloads you wanna run... tools and processes around which your operation is defined and built.
HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We researched VMware vSAN but found HPE was a better option for us.
HPE SimpliVity has valuable features, but the most important thing for us is that it provides a complete solution. We could set it up very quickly, and the interface is intuitive. It has a central dashboard, and you can find everything from there.
HPE SimpliVity made our virtualization stack so simple. You can combine it with an accelerator card, so the number of writes is reduced significantly. Cloning or backup VMs is a breeze because the system only changes the data you need to restore or clone. Additionally, it works well with Veeam, which we already have.
Cost-wise, it is very reasonably priced. However, if you want to add more memory, you’ll need to pay additional licensing costs. We found the upgrades to be a bit complex.
We tried VMware vSAN too. One of its advantages is the easy setup. VMware vSAN supports all-flash memory and integrates with all VMware products, which helps run operations smoothly. The best feature might be its scalability. VMware vSAN scales up and scales out very easily. It is easy to manage, too.
There are downsides to VMware vSAN, though. For instance, support is very slow. It doesn’t work well with high IOP either. Finally, you cannot isolate virtual machines for deduplication and compression. So, if you are looking for high performance, we found VMware vSAN to be too expensive for the value it provides.
Conclusions
VMware provides good storage as a service for companies that already work with other VMware products or are looking for a reliable SAN. But their poor support and lack of virtual machine-level features made us decide on HPE SimpliVity for our hyper-convergence needs.