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.
"I like the asynchronous replication and failover features. They are what I'm primarily using it for. The asynchronous replication is helpful because our servers are backed up continuously throughout the day. If anything goes wrong we just fail over immediately. That is a very nice feature to have."
"It has reduced our overall maintenance and overhead by having to only maintain physical boxes for one cluster instead of having to manage physical boxes for two clusters."
"Their support goes above and beyond with the integration of their software."
"The StarWind Virtual SAN management console is intuitive and easy to use."
"Using our own choice of HW allowed us to price our service to answer our customers' needs."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a very mature software that supersedes its capabilities with my use cases."
"Speed and high availability have been the most valuable for us."
"The failover redundancy is why we bought this product and it has never let us down."
"The product enables me to use any software or database."
"Reasonably priced and easy to manage for small to medium size companies that don't have an IT department."
"One of the solution's strong points is the deduplication capabilities of SimpliVity."
"The most valuable features of this solution are fast deployment, security, and it is easy to upgrade."
"It is easy to manage; the administration is simpler. It saves a lot of rack space in the data center because you can consolidate 20 servers into three to five nodes. The client will be able to benefit from power savings and cost savings as well."
"It is a stable solution...Those who want flexibility, ease of use, and a simple support system can opt for HPE."
"The most valuable features are resiliency and data protection."
"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 scalability is very good and the solution is stable and reliable."
"VMware vSAN has greatly reduced refresh spending."
"The most valuable features for us are the ability to scale out the nodes independently, and the flexibility of the nodes. We can put almost any type of server in there with our connectivity and everything works great."
"The main advantage is that it's all in the box, with VMware vCenter Server product."
"VMware vSAN is a global solution, so we can manage all the storage solutions in one place. It's embedded in VCI solutions."
"I have found that the multi-homing feature is very valuable in VMware vSAN. It is an easy-to-use solution."
"VMware vSAN is compatible with the legacy hypervisor solutions and most of the features are good."
"The scalability of the solution is most valuable."
"We would like the documentation to be more complete. Most items are covered, but if you don't know something, you may need to contact their support."
"I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues."
"The only way I can see this product needing improvement is the consultation level of the StarWind sales and engineers."
"Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer."
"I wish the sync after a failure, such as hardware failure or power-related issues, for example, was faster."
"vSAN's free version does not have a graphical user interface."
"Feature-wise we are only waiting for the release of a "planned disaster" feature that would allow us to patch a hypervisor node without having to take the full storage offline."
"I wish there was online support because email return takes a long time and a faster solution should be found."
"The solution's pricing for the hardware and support could be reduced."
"One of the things that can be improved is that today, is supporting VMware, maybe as a hypervisor. But it would be good to have an open kind of platform for other hypervisors, maybe. Like Nutanix is doing, it's very open."
"I would like to see a more intuitive, user-friendly UI."
"The product must provide more storage capability."
"The solution is not very stable."
"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."
"Could be more secure and more economical."
"The price can be improved. We would like to see support for some open source virtualization technology like for example KVM."
"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."
"What I would like to see, for the really small customers, is the ability to have two nodes."
"When you upgrade the vSAN, there are some issues like lost data and problems with the log. The log disappears. When you upgrade the solution, you must have several logs, so if you have some problems, you can check the log server to find them."
"There are certain shortcomings in the stability of the product where improvements are required."
"I would like a better Hardware Certification List (HCL). The HCL should a little easier to deal with."
"The only thing I can think of at this time is to improve the performance monitoring and performance visibility within the GUI."
"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."
"The platform’s pricing needs improvement. Additionally, there should be an appliance module included in it."
HPE Hyper Converged is ranked 11th in HCI with 34 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd 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 Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity and Red Hat Ceph Storage. See our HPE Hyper Converged vs. VMware vSAN report.
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