HPE Hyper Converged vs VMware vSAN comparison

Hewlett Packard Enterprise and VMware are both solutions in the HCI category. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is ranked #11 with an average rating of 8.3, while VMware is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.7. Hewlett Packard Enterprise holds a 3.2% mindshare in HCI, compared to VMware’s 15.0% mindshare. Additionally, 97% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of VMware users who would recommend it.

HPE Hyper Converged

Read 35 HPE Hyper Converged reviews

2,449 Views
2,098 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

VMware vSAN

Read 231 VMware vSAN reviews

16,228 Views
11,516 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

HPE Hyper Converged

VMware vSAN

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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: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

HPE Hyper Converged vs. VMware vSAN

April 2025

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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

11th

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

VMware vSAN

Ranking in HCI

2nd

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

Number of Reviews

231

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the HCI category, the mindshare of HPE Hyper Converged is 3.2%, up from 3.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware vSAN is 15.0%, down from 18.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

HCI

Featured Reviews

Ray Baruwa

Enterprise Architect at Dell Technologies

Advantageous from a sustainability perspective since the networking, storage, and compute are all located within one unit

Hyperconverged is used in an environment where the footprint in the data center is restricted. It is advantageous from a sustainability perspective since the networking, storage, and compute are all located within one unit The most beneficial feature is the life cycle management. I haven't had…

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Yves Sandfort

CEO & Majority Shareholder at Comdivision Consulting GmbH

Gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources

Stability can be improved. Adding all these new features is nice, but we are now at the level where most of the features you need in production are there. The stability is not from a day-to-day operations perspective, but more from a supportability perspective, because currently some of the support scenarios require you to completely evacuate hosts or the complete cluster. That sometimes can be a stretch. This would clearly be an improvement if the support teams were given additional tools to make that easier. Upgradability could be a bit easier sometimes. We are now where vSAN can be updated without ESXi, but there is still enough dependency. So that would be good if that actually would be uncoupled even more. Dashboards are there, and we use vROps as well. So, we have all the beauty of capacity planning and everything over there. That's not really something where we need a lot of other things.

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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

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

"It scales very well."

"The solution has many good features."

"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 scalability of this tool is very good. You can basically add more storage and seamlessly expand the current storage that you have."

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

"The solution has good backup resolution updates."

More HPE Hyper Converged pros

"It easily integrates with all types of storage."

"IOPS is comparatively best to run VDI solution."

"We've found the solution to be scalable."

"vSAN provides default HA configurations, where if any host goes down, the VM moves around within the host. Even though the disks are local, the VMs moves around with the vSAN disk and vSAN provides a high availability on its own."

"I think vSAN's stability is good. It's an underlying solution for both on-prem and in the cloud, especially the VMC on AWS stuff too. VMware has been around for a long time, so it's pretty stable."

"vSAN is easy for deploying and maintenance, so some customers can do service themselves."

"It is scalable, overall. If you need to add storage, it makes it easy to scale by adding additional hard drives into the existing servers or you can add storage by just adding more servers."

"By eliminating dependency on that back-end storage, we now depend on everything that's in the VMkernel with vSAN. We eliminate the middleman."

More VMware vSAN pros

Cons

"The solution would be better served if it integrated with other solutions better."

"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."

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

"Some improvement is required in the availability of the data and performance. The solution is too expensive for our customers. The pricing should be lower."

"Installation and setup could be easier."

"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."

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

More HPE Hyper Converged cons

"Because of virtual storage, the system reaches reserve storage for its functions. It also consumes a certain amount of storage, which then results in the creation of a fault tolerance for the system. All of this adds to a lot of capacity being consumed in terms of storage for each drive for vSan. I find this to be one drawback of using vSan."

"There's already a concern with VMware with ransomware and security issues. VMware could focus on improving security."

"Its installation should be easier, and its price should be cheaper. It would be good for the product if they can include the data locality feature."

"I would like to see better integration between the cloud and our VMware virtual environment. We only have one virtual environment, which is VMware vSAN. Right now, there is little interoperability with the cloud solution at the moment."

"I would like to be able to limit IOPS."

"This product is very expensive."

"We would like to see even more storage capacity."

"As a software-based product, it requires a lot of system resources."

More VMware vSAN cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is a cost-effective solution."

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

"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 product's pricing is very competitive because HPE provides a buyback policy to users...Users can make either monthly or yearly payments towards the licensing cause of the solution."

"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."

"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."

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

More HPE Hyper Converged pricing and cost advice

"Its price could be improved."

"It is expensive, but you get what you pay for."

"If they could reduce the cost, it would be better. Licensing costs are something that they could take care of. If you are a smaller and strong IT team, then VMware vSAN is a very good product. If you want to expand in the service provider space, then you will have to go for an open-source solution like OpenStack. We are now looking at OpenStack because we sell licensing costs. We are a service provider, so the IT component data is a substantial component in our overall costing. We feel that OpenStack might help us to cut down the licensing cost. Therefore, we are looking at SAS storage instead of vSAN. SAS is open source, but it is not wise to have open source without having the backend support. We are using RedHat SAS, and it is an open-source solution. You can also have a free version, but we are using it with support from RedHat so that we have somebody to back us up in case we have a problem. If you do normal business, then IT expense is 1% or 2% of the total turnover. The higher licensing costs sometimes don't make difference to the big companies who are not service providers and are using it only for their internal use. For them, the IT cost is 1% or 2%, but for an IT service provider, the IT costs will go up to 15% to 16% of the total cost of the operations. This is where the licensing costs become irrelevant. For example, the licensing cost of using VMware, VC, and vSAN is 8% of my monthly revenue. Every month, I pay about $35,000, and, with the revised plan, it will be something like $50,000 or revenue of 600k per month, which means almost 8% of the revenue is going into VMware licensing. In a very competitive world, 8% as a cost element is huge. So, if I can bring it down to 2%, I save 6% in revenue expenditure. In terms of profit, 6% of 30% is something like another 25% increase in my profit. My profit can be almost 25%. It would be 20% to 25% in case I am able to handle the licensing costs and bring them to a very low level. Because these IT costs are substantial for us, that is why we are going with OpenStack. OpenStack has a limitation that it requires more hardware. There will be some increase in the hardware cost, but overall we will save 5% to 6% of our licensing cost by using OpenStack."

"The price of VMware vSAN is expensive and there is an annual license required."

"Enterprise customers can customize their licenses according to their own needs and budget."

"This is a cost-effective product. It's a bit cheaper than the other solutions."

"The product’s pricing is a bit higher than other solutions."

"The price is expensive."

More VMware vSAN pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Government

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Educational Organization

50%

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 HPE Hyper Converged?

The solution's most valuable features are scalability, easy migration, easy recovery, and flexible backup possibilities.

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

The pricing is competitive. Initially, I misunderstood and rated it as higher, but on a scale of one to ten where one is cheap, I would rate it as a four.

See all answers

What needs improvement with HPE Hyper Converged?

I haven't had issues personally. I've heard from other people that maybe there could be some improvements around technical support.

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 engineered system. The choice to choose which technology depends on two major fac...

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 interface that allows you to talk directly to your VM from the present software. We fou...

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 researched VMware vSAN but found HPE was a better option for us. HPE SimpliVity has ...

See all answers

Comparisons

VxRail vs HPE Hyper Converged

Compared 36% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs HPE Hyper Converged

Compared 18% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs HPE Hyper Converged

Compared 6% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs HPE Hyper Converged

Compared 6% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) 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 16% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VMware vSAN

Compared 8% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs VMware vSAN

Compared 8% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs VMware vSAN

Compared 6% of the time

More VMware vSAN Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

HPE Hyper Converged

April 2025

Download HPE Hyper Converged product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware vSAN

April 2025

Download VMware vSAN product report

Also Known As

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

vSAN

Overview

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.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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."

VMware

Sample Customers

North Lindsey College, FireWhat?, HudsonAlpha

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Buyer's Guide

HPE Hyper Converged vs. VMware vSAN

April 2025

Free Report: HPE Hyper Converged vs. VMware vSAN

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