HPE Hyper Converged vs VMware vSAN vs VxRail comparison

Hewlett Packard Enterprise and VMware are both solutions in the HCI category. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.4, while VMware is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.8. Hewlett Packard Enterprise holds a 3.2% mindshare in HCI, compared to VMware’s 14.6% 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 37 HPE Hyper Converged reviews

2,178 Views
2,091 Comparison Views

97% willing to recommend

VMware vSAN

Read 231 VMware vSAN reviews

19,027 Views
12,177 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

VxRail

Read 132 VxRail reviews

17,453 Views
16,580 Comparison Views

94% willing to recommend

HPE Hyper Converged

VMware vSAN

VxRail

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between HPE Hyper Converged, VMware vSAN, and VxRail based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Dell Technologies, VMware, Nutanix and others in HCI.

To learn more, read our detailed HCI Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

HCI

July 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:

Mindshare comparison

As of July 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 VMware vSAN is 14.6%, down from 18.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VxRail is 17.4%, down from 21.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

HCI

Featured Reviews

GosayeErko

System Engineer at BIOS Engineering

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.

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Pramod-Talekar

Sr Service Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Enables efficient multi-environment cluster deployment and resource management with versatile features

While VMware vSAN is quite comprehensive, if we are running multiple infrastructures, applications, databases, and other elements, having a diagnostic tool to identify the actual problem area, whether application-side or infrastructure-side, would be beneficial. A proper monitoring tool that encompasses both applications and infrastructure would help in quickly resolving issues.

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Rami Jadallah

Data Center Solution Manager at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Streamline management and integration with seamless upgrades

The primary reasons customers choose VxRail include ease of management, ease of upgrades, and integration with VMware. The hyper-converged infrastructure simplifies software and hardware upgrades. Customers prefer the single pane of glass management and integration with VMware, which makes it easier for them to proceed with decisions involving VMware products.

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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's a very complete product with residencies to protect data and secure it end-to-end. It includes storage, computing, and networking, offering a fully ten-key solution."

"The HPE Hyper Converged solution is used in a hybrid cloud configuration. We assess the disk space and partition additional capacity."

"We like the fact that the hyper-converged infrastructure provides a simple to grow, easy to configure platform."

"HPE Hyper Converged is stable."

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

"The solution has many good features."

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

"What I really like about this program, is that it needs little space and it works really fast, so it saves us time."

More HPE Hyper Converged pros

"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."

"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."

"We find it easy to deliver this solution."

"It is simple to manage, very easy to implement and troubleshoot in case of any failures."

"The most valuable features are the encryption, deduplication, compression, and the ability to manage all of your storage within your server rack."

"The solution is stable."

"VMware vSAN is easy to implement in a VMware environment and it is not expensive."

"it's easy to scale, it's easy to predict IOP needs, and you can design for low latency using all-flash... Also, for setting up new clusters for VDI quickly, it's nice. You don't have to wait on an order for a storage vendor to ship you a system and help you configure it, you do it all yourself. And the sizing guides are pretty straightforward."

More VMware vSAN pros

"VxRail can manage the whole cluster at the same time, so it's easy to expand. VxRail has more features vSAN ReadyNodes that make it easier to implement from scratch."

"The recent technologies and management features that have been implemented."

"VxRail has improved our organization by providing our admin team with an easy-to-use interface."

"You don't have to worry too much about the hardware and you don't have to work on integrating a storage device. We instead have this as an all-in-one solution and everything is available as a box."

"It is the most valuable Software Defined Storage ever to manage all storage workloads, and also offers high availability."

"The tool's price is competitive and it is easy to use."

"It supports VDI deployment, enabling easy use for running different platforms in similar environments."

"The update capability of VxRail is crucial for us."

More VxRail pros

Cons

"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 change the IP sub-network and IP service."

"'ve heard from other people that maybe there could be some improvements around technical support."

"The storage efficiency is weak and needs to be improved."

"Currently, the HPE HCI is based on the VMware solution, and many clients are skipping VMware due to its changed licensing method."

"In my country, the biggest issue is probably pricing."

"The product must provide more storage capability."

"We've had to do a power cycle to bring it all the way down, bring it back up for power outages, A/C shut-downs of our DC office, but it hasn't presented a problem."

"The solution needs to add a module or plugin of vCenter for clear monitoring and insights."

More HPE Hyper Converged cons

"I would like a better Hardware Certification List (HCL). The HCL should a little easier to deal with."

"Troubleshooting tools could be improved."

"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."

"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."

"Reporting currently depends on third party applications and that could be improved."

"The architecture of vSAN is not good. vSAN works with objects, such as disks, and it causes problems with availability."

"They can improve the manageability of the solution to make it more simple. It is not that complicated, but it will be good if they can make it more simple."

"Only the stretched cluster requires a minor improvement."

More VMware vSAN cons

"Lacks integration of licenses so that it's an expensive solution."

"We'd like to see more automation capabilities in the future."

"I would like to see more solutions for satellite capabilities where we can put it into smaller locations and still have the redundancy that we have with a larger cluster."

"I would like it to tier to the cloud effectively, making sure that cold data can be pushed out to some sort of Bitbucket."

"I would like them to include an easier solution to host its own DNS. When they changed to version 6.5, they took out the easy features of letting the rail be its own DNS. You can still trick the system and make the VxRail Manager another one of the rail-required VMs become the DNS, but it's a lot of extra work. I'd like to see it put back into the UI."

"I can't speak to any missing features or weak aspects of the system just yet. We haven't had a chance to really dig in."

"The price could be better. The backup mechanism could also be better. Some of our clients prefer to work with backup software from a different vendor. They don't do a built-in backup solution. It would be better if they had guidelines on proper sizing and the whole life cycle from the requirement collection. If there aren't any proper guidelines, how do I go to the customer and evaluate their existing infrastructure? How can you do appropriate sizing to migrate to a hyper-converged environment? I think this is a requirement because most of our clients are migrating to a hyper-converged environment. In the next release, they can improve absolutely anything you can think of to improve the product in general—for example, the clusters and backup software."

"From a hardware and software perspective, there could be an improvement in the sales cycle, as there is a lot of hoops to go through to get pricing on a solution."

More VxRail cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"There are costs in addition to the standard licensing fees."

"HPE Hyper Converged is an affordable solution."

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

"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 entire solution is packaged with all licenses and support."

"We have a very good return on investment due to data savings through compression and deduplication methods. It simplifies IT management and enhances security, including the end-to-end security of the IT data engine. The product is complete, simple, and provides visibility."

"With this solution, I buy everything together, pre-packaged, pre-installed, and in just 15 minutes, it's installed."

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

More HPE Hyper Converged pricing and cost advice

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

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

"Clients have to pay for VMware vSAN licensing based on the number of CPUs. The purchases would be lifetime or perpetual, but you need to have support, e.g. the support is negotiated from one, two, three, or four years."

"The licenses are very expensive. The renewal of licenses has extra costs attached to it."

"The only problem I have with VMware is the price. It is a good product, but it is expensive."

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

"With the new pricing model, it's expensive for the customer."

"VMware vSAN is an expensive platform. We purchase its yearly license."

More VMware vSAN pricing and cost advice

"The tool is expensive."

"I do not believe that the price should be lower, as I feel it to be reasonable."

"A typical node that I would sell to a customer has a list price be between $80,000 and $100,000 per node. Organizations typically start with four nodes. That's the hardware, software, VMware licensing, everything. Customers typically pay about half of that - approximately $45,000 to $50,000 a node. On average, it costs about $200,000 to get your foot in the door."

"It varies. It could be $100,000 at the smaller end and millions and millions of dollars at the higher end."

"I live in Brazil, and my customers are from Brazil. It is quite an expensive solution. It is more expensive than the traditional environment."

"The price point needs improvement, certainly for smaller SMBs. The cost of it is still quite painful. I think all vendors should do a product which is capped either by terabytes, IOPs, or VM instances. It should be an SMB solution that's going to make hyper-converged solutions easier for SMBs to get hold of. It's fine for those big guys that have billions of dollars of budget, but not for customers who have barely a 100,000 dollars or pounds in budget."

"When compared with others, the price is very reasonable."

"The pricing is very accurate, and we haven't had any problems with the licensing costs."

More VxRail pricing and cost advice

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Comparison Review

it_user759894

Development and IT Manager at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Dec 19, 2018

Performance is robust, but Dell EMC VxRail is easier to implement

HPE Hyper Converged handles all the network setup for my servers and data. My experience is in SMBs Before we bought the HPE Hyper Converged servers, we had scattered systems and servers. Our data was scattered. When the solution came into place, we were able to connect all our data and organize…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Government

12%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Computer Software Company

14%

Educational Organization

10%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

14%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Government

10%

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.

See all answers

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 witho...

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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 n...

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...

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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...

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How does HPE Nimble Storage compare to VxRail?

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI Vs. VxRail One of the best things about the HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is the three, two, one, z...

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What are the major differences between VxRail and Dell EMC PowerFlex?

VxRail vs. Dell EMC PowerFlex VxRail provides stable solutions for technical problems while at the same time not bein...

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How does VxRail compare with Cisco HyperFlex HX Series?

VxRail provides stable solutions for technical problems while at the same time not being too expensive for a company ...

See all answers

Comparisons

Dell PowerFlex vs HPE Hyper Converged

Compared 18% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs HPE Hyper Converged

Compared 7% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs HPE Hyper Converged

Compared 6% of the time

Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure vs HPE Hyper Converged

Compared 5% of the time

Azure Stack HCI vs HPE Hyper Converged

Compared 5% of the time

More HPE Hyper Converged Competitors

Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct vs VMware vSAN

Compared 15% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VMware vSAN

Compared 8% of the time

Dell PowerFlex vs VMware vSAN

Compared 7% of the time

Red Hat Ceph Storage vs VMware vSAN

Compared 6% of the time

Azure Stack HCI vs VMware vSAN

Compared 5% of the time

More VMware vSAN Competitors

Dell PowerFlex vs VxRail

Compared 27% of the time

HPE SimpliVity vs VxRail

Compared 13% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs VxRail

Compared 7% of the time

Dell vSAN Ready Nodes vs VxRail

Compared 5% of the time

HPE Alletra dHCI vs VxRail

Compared 2% of the time

More VxRail Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

HPE Hyper Converged

July 2025

Download HPE Hyper Converged product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware vSAN

June 2025

Download VMware vSAN product report

Buyer's Guide

VxRail

June 2025

Download VxRail product report

Also Known As

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

vSAN

VCE VxRail

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

VxRail is a hyper-converged appliance based on VMware virtual SAN Software and is jointly engineered and built with VMware, for VMware, to enhance Vmware. VxRail software-defined architecture simplifies compute, storage, virtualization, and management. It will safeguard performance, reliability, and flexibility across your organization with a broad range of workloads and applications from business-critical to next-gen. With VxRail, you are covered.

VxRail is a single turn-key appliance that is a validated, fully integrated, pre-configured, pre-tested solution and offers non-disruptive scaling. Every node includes compute storage and IO. All-flash configurations can contain between 12-28 cores per node. The storage capacity options run from 7.6 TB to 19TB with either 256 GB or 512GB of memory. Hybrid appliances may have 6-20 cores per node, 3.6 TB to 10 TB of storage capacity, and 24GB to 256 GB of memory.

VxRail offers high availability fail-over, an active/active stretch cluster, and VSan Kernal integration. VxRail is a power-edged server with APIs built on automation. There are over 15 million different combinations of hardware available with VxRail. VxRail provides a simple, cost-effective solution that solves a large range of use cases. Additionally, you also get a mixed workloads automated system that is backed with fully automated system updates, and complete end-to-end lifecycle management all in a single two-rack appliance.

VxRail is a value-added suitable solution for distributed small to mid-sized enterprises, remote offices, private clouds, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). You choose the deployment option that best suits your organizational needs, from appliance to integrated rack offerings, with or without networking, and it will be delivered to you, ready to deploy out-of-box.

If you know VMware, you know VxRail.

VxRail Features and Benefits