HPE Hyper Converged vs VMware vSAN comparison

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 2024

VMware vSAN and HPE Hyper Converged compete in the hyper-converged infrastructure market. HPE Hyper Converged seems to have the upper hand with its comprehensive feature set and superior customer support.

Features: VMware vSAN offers robust integration with VMware environments, high performance, and simple management. HPE Hyper Converged provides greater scalability, advanced data protection, and a more extensive array of functionalities.

Room for Improvement: VMware vSAN needs more competitive pricing, simplified complex features, and better support for non-VMware environments. HPE Hyper Converged could enhance support services, improve cost efficiency, and simplify licensing.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware vSAN features straightforward deployment within VMware environments and reliable customer service. HPE Hyper Converged offers even simpler deployment processes and proactive customer support.

Pricing and ROI: VMware vSAN has competitive initial setup costs and satisfactory ROI. HPE Hyper Converged has higher setup costs but delivers greater long-term value and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed HPE Hyper Converged vs. VMware vSAN Report (Updated: July 2024).

Buyer's Guide

HPE Hyper Converged vs. VMware vSAN

July 2024

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Categories and Ranking

StarWind Virtual SAN

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2024, in the HCI category, the mindshare of StarWind Virtual SAN is 2.1%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of HPE Hyper Converged is 3.6%, up from 3.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware vSAN is 16.2%, down from 18.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

HCI

Unique Categories:

Software Defined Storage (SDS)

9.2%

No other categories found

Featured Reviews

reviewer2114511

New Business and New Products Manager at dualBASE

Feb 24, 2023

Flexible with good GUI and nice documentation

First of all, the flexibility and reliability are great. The ability to be managed by PowerShell scripts made the management of the system really easy and efficient. We're able to do remote operations or even some operations different from the standard ones (allowed by the GUI). It also runs under a Windows OS, so it is able to be installed in any virtualized system, independent from the Hypervisor itself. The available GUI is excellent for monitoring and operating the system in an easy and direct way. It also makes it very easy to deploy and configure. It has good documentation, and I did not need technical support once during the entire deployment.

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it_user683277

Consultant at Hexagon Safety and Infrastructure

Jun 13, 2017

The infrastructure provides a simple to grow and easy to configure platform.

From the release that we have, we'd like to see better integration with vCenter and OneView. I believe the vCenter integration is available in an update that was released earlier this year. We have not applied it yet. It is complex to set up and it is not something you would really want to have to do yourself. The software version on the HC380s we are using is version 1. It does not support spanned vCenter which we use since we have multiple sites. I heard that the version 2 of the software handles that better. We are working with HPE to get the software updated to the new version. Our implementation involved two separate clusters at two different locations. We wanted to be able to manage the two clusters from a peered vcenter instance so we could have 2 independent clusters but one management point. The version of software and OneView that were available at the time of installation did not support peered vCenters. So better integration will all of the features supported by vCenter. There might be another option it was not discussed at the time of the install if there was or is.

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Genesis Dapoza

Email Administrator at Technopaq, Inc.

Mar 1, 2024

Offers good availability and save on external storage and use the internal storage for the VMware environment

The purpose of vSAN is to cluster nodes and distribute storage usage. Like, if a server has ten hard disks, for example, and the main server also has ten hard disks, and the two other nodes or servers each have ten hard disks as well, then it will combine them all. Once combined, it becomes…

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It has improved our organization in terms of its uptime as our main cluster has never been offline due to a SAN failure."

"StarWind Virtual SAN offers high availability and data resilience features to prevent data loss if hardware fails."

"Given the high availability of the server cluster, we were able to reduce separate physical servers onto one hyper-converged cluster - this saved in OPEX and CAPEX costs immediately, along with licensing costs of the Windows Server licenses."

"The Windows-based StarWind GUI is easy to use and understand and integrates seamlessly with VMware's vSphere portal as well."

"Updates to server hardware are now painless and done during working hours with zero stress. We had a RAID failure a few months back, and nobody in the building even noticed and there was no after hours time used for repair."

"This solution enables us to make better cost-effective use of our existing hardware and leverage the current infrastructure at a higher level than we could before."

"One of the most valuable features is the way it sets up the virtual SAN, because we don't have to buy a separate appliance for storage. It uses the existing storage on the servers, which is definitely a cost savings for us."

"The virtual tapes can be uploaded to the object storage of your choice with object locking/governance which gives you an extra layer of protection."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pros

"Hyper-convergence is the most valuable aspect of the solution. We can avoid downtime when there's maintenance or updates needed. Also, we have homogenous hardware, so we have a lot of trust in the solution's reliability."

"The product enables me to use any software or database."

"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."

"The provisioning is very fast. It’s not a problem for us to achieve the goals of the client."

"The most valuable features are resiliency and data protection."

"One of the good features would be the fast backup solution Hyper Converged offers, which is more efficient compared to other vendors."

"I've found the data protection features the most valuable."

"HPE Hyper Converged is stable."

More HPE Hyper Converged pros

"The technical support is good."

"The solution fits well with my requirements."

"Stretched Cluster is one of the big features that we use across multiple data centers."

"The most important functionality is the ability to extend cluster storage and cluster computing power securely without loss of data."

"We can scale it very easily for a test environment. We were able to segment our DMZ so it wasn't connected to anything, which we really liked."

"The deduplication and compression are excellent."

"The newer versions of this solution are much more stable and easier to manage."

"When we do to do more scaled load testing, we can run more dense workloads and still have the same results across all specific nodes"

More VMware vSAN pros

Cons

"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."

"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."

"There should be publicly available tutorials on YouTube or other platforms that help the users to integrate this solution with other platforms, for example."

"The cluster configuration is time-consuming and tedious."

"Though I have learned some of the nuances with the upgrading of firmware/windows/etc., it would be nice to have a more efficient method of doing so."

"The management console of StarWind Virtual SAN is pretty complex."

"It would be nice if we could designate pools, or tiers, for storage of different speeds, and then assign rules to new VMs that would automatically place them into the proper pool."

"It took a bit of knowledge and support to put in place but once installed it works fine. Migration (HyperV) from one server to another sometimes takes longer than expected but there is no data loss even if the host crashes."

More StarWind Virtual SAN cons

"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."

"This solution is very costly."

"Its technical support services could be faster."

"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."

"I would like to see more deduplication."

"I would like to see improvement in the hardware underneath it. Currently, it's a Gen9 DL380. One day, there will be a Gen10 DL380 and maybe they will have bigger or smaller sizes."

"We have faced some challenges when upgrading. With Hyper Converged, you have to fully upgrade because there are no incremental upgrades available in this solution. For example, let's say we have two nodes. If we want to upgrade storage, we also need to upgrade computing. That means a full upgrade EME."

"If the solution could further compress the data, it would use less storage."

More HPE Hyper Converged cons

"If one node out of your ten nodes fails, it takes a lot of time to replicate and rebalance VMware vSAN. This time can be reduced. When a node fails and the data is not accessible, vSAN has to be rebalanced to make the redundancy level of two again. However, if it is taking a lot of time and any other hardware fails during that time, then we have a problem. Two disk failures mean that all data will be lost, and we may have to recover it from the backup. So, the number of threads that run to do the rebalancing could be more so that the time taken to make it fully redundant again is not so much."

"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."

"I have used the VMware Replication but I can't get it to work properly. The process should be simplified."

"Dedupe in non flash drives can be improved."

"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."

"Its price could be improved. It is too expensive for our clients."

"The only thing that can be improved is the cost."

"Some intelligence can be added to the newest version to provide more flexibility between storage tiers."

More VMware vSAN cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I think that purchasing StarWind Virtual SAN Professional Edition would be optimal for most."

"Licensing is easy and the whole package is cost-effective."

"The pricing is excellent. It will run on anything. You don't have to buy a $100,000 server, with hardware you don't need. You just pay for the license and you're good to go."

"Their pricing seems pretty good, and their licensing structure is pretty straightforward."

"This solution has competitive prices and the implementation is very easy."

"The StarWind VSAN business model is very cost-effective."

"The licensing is a bit weird. If you license the standard version of StarWind, it allows you four terabytes. Then, they have a pro version, but with the pro version, the only difference is it doubles the terabytes to eight."

"The setup cost, pricing, and licensing are very straightforward. They are exactly what you expect."

More StarWind Virtual SAN pricing and cost advice

"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 a cost-effective solution."

"It is an expensive solution, however. If they could adjust the pricing, that would be helpful."

"The solutions cost us a lot."

"The price per value compared to other solutions, like Nutanix and SimpliVity. (We made the deal before approval of HPE SimpliVity deal)."

"It could be cheaper, everything could be cheaper."

"The solution is too expensive for our customers. The pricing should be lower."

"I would rate the price at seven out of ten. There are no additional licensing fees, but it would be cheaper to go with a dHCI solution."

More HPE Hyper Converged pricing and cost advice

"Its reasonable, compare with other storage vendors"

"It is an expensive solution. There should be more flexible with licensing to allow small businesses the essentials of the solution's features."

"I would rate the licensing model a three out of ten, where one is expensive, and ten is cheap."

"The vSAN licensing is not an inexpensive product. It does cost more than hypervisor."

"The cost of the solution is high and if it could be reduced the customers would be very happy."

"It is expensive. It should be cheaper. It has a perpetual license as well as a subscription-based license, but they are moving towards subscription-based licenses."

"We did consider other hyperconverged solutions. It usually came down to price. vSan was the most cost effective thing."

"I have been told that if I used VxRail it would be cheaper than the system we are using now with buying the products separately. The solution is expensive overall."

More VMware vSAN pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

19%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

11%

Financial Services Firm

Educational Organization

48%

Computer Software Company

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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) combin...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for StarWind Virtual SAN?

Make the most of your 30-day trial license, and if needed, you should contact the sales department of StarWind to ext...

See all answers

What needs improvement with StarWind Virtual SAN?

The dashboard is functional, but it could benefit from a more modern and visually appealing design. A facelift would ...

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE Hyper Converged?

On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten.

See all answers

What needs improvement with HPE Hyper Converged?

The solution's pricing for the hardware and support could be reduced.

See all answers

What Is The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail?

While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an e...

See all answers

Which would you choose - Nutanix Acropolis AOS or VMware vSAN?

We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interfa...

See all answers

How does HPE Simplivity compare with VMware vSAN?

HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We resea...

See all answers

Comparisons

StorMagic SvSAN vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 17% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 16% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 14% of the time

DataCore SANsymphony vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 5% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs StarWind Virtual SAN

Compared 4% of the time

More StarWind Virtual SAN Competitors

VxRail vs HPE Hyper Converged

Compared 41% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs HPE Hyper Converged

Compared 13% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs HPE Hyper Converged

Compared 8% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs HPE Hyper Converged

Compared 6% of the time

HPE Alletra dHCI vs HPE Hyper Converged

Compared 5% of the time

More HPE Hyper Converged Competitors

VxRail vs VMware vSAN

Compared 18% of the time

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs VMware vSAN

Compared 12% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VMware vSAN

Compared 9% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs VMware vSAN

Compared 7% of the time

NetApp AFF vs VMware vSAN

Compared 3% of the time

More VMware vSAN Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

StarWind Virtual SAN

June 2024

Download StarWind Virtual SAN product report

Buyer's Guide

HPE Hyper Converged

July 2024

Download HPE Hyper Converged product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware vSAN

June 2024

Download VMware vSAN product report

Also Known As

StarWind SAN & NAS

HPE Hyper Converged 380, HPE Hyper Converged 250, HPE Hyper Converged 250 for Microsoft CPS

vSAN

Learn More

StarWind

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

VMware

Overview

StarWind Virtual SAN provides high availability and fault tolerance for virtualized environments without the need for dedicated SAN hardware. It allows for real-time replication between servers, shared storage for Hyper-V clusters, and enables vMotion and High Availability features for VMware vSphere. The solution reduces costs and leverages existing hardware while providing a scalable and reliable infrastructure. Valuable features include ease of use, scalability, top-tier support, hardware agnosticism, and the ability to use off-the-shelf standard servers to increase storage space. StarWind VSAN has helped organizations improve performance, data availability, and data security while reducing downtime and providing cost-saving storage options.

HPE Hyper Converged solutions combine intuitive software with the reliability of a world class platform to deliver cloud-like simplicity to your business.

Now, IT can become an internal service provider to end-users by quickly delivering the resources they need for application development and consumption. With HPE Hyper Converged systems companies can operate with cloud efficiency to simplify IT operations with one comprehensive control panel to deploy, monitor, analyze and update – with a single generalist; consume with cloud flexibility to deliver a cloud-like experience, with multi-tenant workspaces that eliminate stranded resources and flexes on demand; and deploy at cloud speed to empower developers and lines-of-business with a self-service portal that can instantly compose and recompose VMs in minutes. Built-in enterprise grade features, such as performance and resiliency enable HPE Hyper Converged systems to easily handle a wide variety of virtualized workloads, including general purpose virtualization, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and cloud.

VMware vSAN is a software-defined storage product that is used in collaboration with VMware ESXi hypervisor and that provisions and manages storage based on policies, regardless of the underlying hardware. The solution enables you to prime your business for growth through its seamless evolution (it is integrated with vSphere and requires no new tools), its flexibility, and its multi-cloud capabilities. As an industry-leading software, VMware vSAN provides high levels of performance with minimal impact on CPU and memory.

VMware vSAN Features

VMware vSAN has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Storage policy-based management (SPBM): VMware vSAN supports storage policy-based management for automated management of storage profiles.

Software-defined data-at-rest encryption: With this VMware vSAN feature, you can prevent unauthorized access of data at rest.

Multiple nodes: VMware vSAN provides clusters that can include as few as 2 nodes or as many as 64 nodes.

High security and availability: VMware vSAN offers stretched clusters, allowing more than one virtualization host server to be used in the same setup, promoting higher security as well as availability.

Deduplication: VMware vSAN’s deduplication compresses data to ensure efficient storage management and security.

HCI mesh updates: VMware vSAN clusters can share storage capacity with non-HCI Sphere clusters and can adopt HCI without having to scale computing resources and storage or replace existing servers.

Simplified file services: With VMware vSAN’s file services, backup of file shares is simplified. You can use APIs that allow backup and recovery software vendors to integrate with your VMware vSAN file services, which enables backup software to track new data and add scalability enhancements to files.

VMware vSAN Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing VMware vSAN. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO): VMware vSAN helps you reduce upfront costs for businesses because it can be easily deployed on inexpensive x86 servers. In addition, its highly scalable infrastructure and quick deployment also save organizations time and money, making it an efficient storage solution.

Good manageability: VMWare vSAN is easy to set up, manage, and provision, without sacrificing performance.

Scalability: VMware vSAN is agile and allows administrators to scale storage on demand, quickly, and efficiently via policies and rules.

Simplicity: VMWare vSAN is simple to configure since it is embedded in the vSphere hypervisor. Installing it using the vSphere Web Client can be done quickly.

Reduced risk: VMWare vSAN reduces the risk associated with digital transformations by utilizing existing tools, skill sets, and solutions.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the VMware vSAN solution.

PeerSpot user Yves S., CEO, Cloud Evangelist at Comdivision Consulting GmbH, says, “vSAN gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources. We have an overall larger host infrastructure, and we split that up for specific customer test and use cases. In that specific scenario, we can easily add more hosts or reduce the number of hosts in the environment.”

A reviewer who works in Infrastructure Security explains, “The ease of use is great. The initial setup and upgrade process was pretty straightforward. And, technical support is great.”

Laurent N., Director at Softlogic, comments, "The feature that I have found most valuable is that it is easy to deploy. It is easy to create and delete virtual servers. It is easy to create the load balancing and the clustering."

Sample Customers

Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School

North Lindsey College, FireWhat?, HudsonAlpha

Read Some Case Studies At Home Cloud CaribCINgroupDiscovery Check out the Rest of our Customer Stories Here

Buyer's Guide

HPE Hyper Converged vs. VMware vSAN

July 2024

Free Report: HPE Hyper Converged vs. VMware vSAN

Find out what your peers are saying about HPE Hyper Converged vs. VMware vSAN and other solutions. Updated: July 2024.

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