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HPE Hyper Converged vs StarWind Virtual SAN comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

HPE Hyper Converged
Ranking in HCI
12th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
6.5
Number of Reviews
37
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
StarWind Virtual SAN
Ranking in HCI
5th
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
198
Ranking in other categories
Software Defined Storage (SDS) (1st)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the HCI category, the mindshare of HPE Hyper Converged is 3.2%, up from 3.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of StarWind Virtual SAN is 1.9%, down from 2.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

GosayeErko - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure management simplifies for clients with integrated interface and enhanced resource utilization
Currently, the HPE HCI is based on the VMware solution, and most clients are skipping VMware because VMware has changed its licensing method. If HPE starts to use its own hypervisor for its HCI solutions, it will be the best solution. We push a different vendor for the backup and replication, so we only use the HCI, then we use Veeam for the backup and replication section.
Vladimir Simion - PeerSpot reviewer
Achieving seamless cost-saving implementation with exceptional support
The best features that StarWind Virtual SAN offers include the price because comparing to other virtual SAN solutions, this one is the best, and it also has a great support team behind it. My experience with their support has been positive, as their guides regarding the integration are very useful. They have some awesome guides online that show you exactly how to configure the product, how to do the initial setup, and you can speak with them directly. They will be able to connect and verify your setup, run its parameters and see exactly what's working and what is not, and they really help you with that. StarWind Virtual SAN has positively impacted my organization and my customer through initial cost saving. They use this product in a dark site, so I'm not able to provide any additional details about this, but they were really glad about it, they're still using it, and they asked for extending the capacity for it and the support. They really want to use it and are enjoying using it.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"There are multiple advantages. Typically, being an all-flash storage, which is available through either SimpliVity or dHCI, the performance is much better because the IOPS goes high, so it's more powerful in terms of performance. Secondly, if I'm talking of SimpliVity Hyper Convergence solution from HPE, unlike the competition, even if three hard drives fail, you are still running the solution."
"It is a scalable solution."
"It provides unmatched performance, productivity and reliability."
"No concerns or issues with stability."
"The product enables me to use any software or database."
"The scalability of this tool is very good. You can basically add more storage and seamlessly expand the current storage that you have."
"The features of HPE Hyper Converged that are most effective and beneficial are its simplicity as well as its scalability."
"The most valuable features are resiliency and data protection."
"It has given the company an almost zero possibility of downtime."
"When using new (warranty) servers, you can forget about the storage service for several years. The users will not even notice the failure of two servers out of three."
"Their support goes above and beyond with the integration of their software."
"I've had to open a few support cases over the years due to administrator errors, and the support received was top-notch."
"As the client had acquired another company some distance away, they were concerned about having a single SAN in one location or the other. StarWind vSAN allowed us to keep a copy of the data local to each site without asking the client to pay for two SANs in addition to the two new servers they needed."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to leverage our server infrastructure more completely without the need to add more hardware."
"The vSAN provides full redundancy for storage while reclaiming some rack space."
"You can build cheap, reliable, replicated virtual machines clusters using simple servers with an all flash disk or SAS\SATA hybrid tiered by performance storage."
 

Cons

"I would like to see more deduplication."
"A software-only version of the solution, without the hardware, would be nice."
"In the Hyper Converged environment, some of the brands only support the OS VMware and not Hyper-V from Microsoft or even Red Hat or KVM."
"The solution's pricing for the hardware and support could be reduced."
"Data protection and optimization: It is really weak. They do not offer deduplication or compression."
"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."
"The product must provide more storage capability."
"The solution is not very stable."
"I would like to see different levels of support offered."
"There should be publicly available tutorials on YouTube or other platforms that help the users to integrate this solution with other platforms, for example."
"This product would benefit from having automated alerting functionality."
"There is one issue as far as licensing goes and that is a lack of documentation online for users when transitioning from the free version to the paid version, or vice versa."
"Some configuration options still demand service restarting."
"I would like to see improvements in the documentation area."
"Some of the documentation seems to be a bit older and refers to deprecated items."
"Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price per value compared to other solutions, like Nutanix and SimpliVity. (We made the deal before approval of HPE SimpliVity deal)."
"The solutions cost us a lot."
"If I'm comparing with Dell, HPE Hyper Converged is definitely cheaper in my experience."
"There are costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."
"Pricing with Dell EMC is double the price which I paid for HPE. However, in the end, Dell EMC is double in performance. This is not an apple to apple comparison though, as I have a four node from Dell EMC and a three node."
"The entire solution is packaged with all licenses and support."
"The solution is expensive - not only the hardware costs but server costs too. And the more you scale, the more expensive it gets."
"It is an expensive solution, however. If they could adjust the pricing, that would be helpful."
"Licensing is easy and the whole package is cost-effective."
"The license is reusable. We can always rebuild it and apply the license. Then, boom, we get new servers, apply the license, and we're back up and running."
"I think the cost of this solution is quite fair."
"This solution has competitive prices and the implementation is very easy."
"The premium support from StarWinds is a must have. The ability to have access to a storage engineer 24/7 is a must for a production environment."
"Once you buy the license, you are free to build your own hardware solution based on your needs."
"This solution has a great price for the functionality."
"The cost seems a bit steep, and I wish it was less expensive."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
11%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about HPE Hyper Converged?
The solution's most valuable features are scalability, easy migration, easy recovery, and flexible backup possibilities.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE Hyper Converged?
The product is intermediate in price, neither expensive nor cheap. We are talking about an on-premises solution without licensing for years. Currently, licensing is required for VMs and CPU cores. ...
What needs improvement with HPE Hyper Converged?
It is very complicated to migrate to another domain. When we have one domain and want to move to another domain, we need to destroy the cluster on the HPE Hyper Converged system, and we need to cha...
What do you like most about StarWind Virtual SAN?
It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combines flash and disks of the cluster and forms a virtual shared storage “pool” acce...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?
I had experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing through using the free version of StarWind Virtual SAN for testing purposes, so there was no cost involved during my evaluation. That made i...
What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?
One area for improvement regarding StarWind Virtual SAN is the lack of a full-feature trial. At the time I tested it, I had access only to the free version, which required using PowerShell scripts ...
 

Also Known As

HPE Hyper Converged 380, HPE Hyper Converged 250, HPE Hyper Converged 250 for Microsoft CPS
StarWind SAN & NAS
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

North Lindsey College, FireWhat?, HudsonAlpha
Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
Find out what your peers are saying about HPE Hyper Converged vs. StarWind Virtual SAN and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,384 professionals have used our research since 2012.