We performed a comparison between HPE Alletra dHCI 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."I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"Being hardware agnostic is a must and definitely scored points for us."
"With an uptime of 384 days, StarWind has improved overall server reliability."
"Having the ability to scale horizontally if needed is a huge plus for future growth."
"The main benefit is that StarWind is almost maintenance-free."
"The product's core feature of virtualizing our storage is by far the most valuable."
"We are able to do maintenance by bringing down one node at a time, rather than having to schedule a complete shutdown."
"The ability for us to manage all of our nodes from the same console makes systems administration very easy."
"Artificial intelligence is built into the product. If there's a failure, HP support will proactively call the client about the issue."
"Nimble is easy to use, but hard to install. Once it's installed, it's user-friendly. Reporting is another advantage because we get a lot of statistical forecasting. It helps us see into the future with that."
"HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is stable."
"The nice thing about it is that it truly integrates with the cloud, so I can move my volumes bi-directionally in and out of the cloud."
"Nimble DHCI is really user friendly and not complex"
"So far, the solution's performance is very good."
"With regards to performance, configuration, and longevity it is upgradeable, which means it has a good TCO rate. These are valuable aspects to me."
"Very good in-line compression."
"Flexibility, growth, and expansion are probably the more important features for us. As our environment grows, the more users come on, the more VDI workstations that we need, we can easily expand either horizontally or vertically with the environment"
"VMware vSAN has greatly reduced refresh spending."
"The ease of use is great."
"VMware has been around for a long time are are doing a decent job at catching up with the latest technologies i.e. bringing in kubernetes and containerization. Overall, this is a great tool for virtualization."
"You get the benefit of local storage, but you have the protection of shared storage."
"Being able to deploy multiple applications with virtual servers is the most valuable for us. The capacity of the system is quite constant so it's got some of the good features."
"The scalability of the solution is most valuable."
"The performance of VMware vSAN is very good."
"StarWind offers the Enterprise-level high availability (HA), deployed and easily configured .maintain and update and with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings a the cost of a Highly Available HCI solution down to a very cost effective point" Having used Starwind Virtual SAN for many years both for clients and for internal systems it has always done exactly what it set out to do, provide a cost effect way to run a HCI storage platform for almost any hypervisor, but it is most effective with Hyper-V, simple, easy to use, -.software monitoring should be web based to be reachable from any workstation in VLAN."
"The console is something that I feel could be improved. There is nothing technically wrong with it, but it can be jazzed up and/or made to be a little more intuitive."
"The system performs as expected, but we're always looking for performance improvements regarding the best utilization of NVMe disks."
"I wish they would improve the documentation for the beginner level as it's not very clear on the web page."
"StarWind doesn't really have any performance reporting, especially compared with other vSAN products we've used."
"It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers."
"Perhaps more reporting features on the utilization, usage, and performance of the configured high-availability images and underlying physical disks would be helpful."
"I would like an automated installation/configuration despite the fact that their service is very collaborative, a customer should be able to deploy the solution by themselves."
"The only issue I'm really running into is we have a SQL server that we're having a lot of high IO latency on one of my drives and it's my data drive from my SQL server. It's not really giving me any good information as to where that latency is coming from, so that's what I'm trying to track down and troubleshoot."
"Sometimes the technical support would get back to us in two hours, but other times it would take them two or even three days to respond."
"Nimble Storage's integration with the management software could be better."
"They should improve just the support."
"HPE Nimble Storage dHCI only works with a hypervisor like VMware. There are plenty of other hypervisors that HP doesn't support. This is an area for improvement."
"Lacking integration to the cloud."
"The initial setup is a little bit complicated."
"I rate Nimble one out of 10 for ease of setup. Setting up Nimble Storage was a nightmare. It took us three months to deal with all the kinks and bugs. We had two people from HPE assisting us and two from our team."
"Based on my testing, I would like to expand deduplication to include hybrid deployments and not just for all-flash deployments."
"Better options would be clustered nodes, or even cloud configuration. There is room for improvement in cloud configuration, we typically do web browsing for management."
"The updating process could be easier."
"A vSAN cluster must have compression and deduplication to be an all-flash array, but it's not supported with a hybrid array. Deduplication and compression work better with an all-flash array, so I think that VMware should give customers the option to activate and support this feature for hybrid arrays. Other products like Nutanix support this."
"There is always a challenge with their firmware."
"In a future release, they can bring in the object storage capabilities to this solution. Currently, there is not any compatibility."
"The UI falls short compared to other solutions. It needs some development to make it more user-friendly."
"The biggest room for improvement I see in vSAN is the lack of SAN connectivity. I've kind of joked around that there is no "SAN" in vSAN. And it's something that we've worked to try and introduce some options for, and we're going to continue to work towards that."
HPE Alletra dHCI is ranked 13th in HCI with 23 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 226 reviews. HPE Alletra dHCI is rated 8.2, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of HPE Alletra dHCI writes "Independently scalable solution with the highest resiliency, low latency and intelligence ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". HPE Alletra dHCI is most compared with HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex and VxRail, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and DataCore SANsymphony. See our HPE Alletra dHCI vs. VMware vSAN report.
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