HPE Alletra dHCI vs VMware vSAN comparison

Hewlett Packard Enterprise and VMware are both solutions in the HCI category. Hewlett Packard Enterprise is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.1, while VMware is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.8. Hewlett Packard Enterprise holds a 4.8% mindshare in HCI, compared to VMware’s 14.9% mindshare. Additionally, 95% of Hewlett Packard Enterprise users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 87% of VMware users who would recommend it.

HPE Alletra dHCI

Read 29 HPE Alletra dHCI reviews

3,145 Views
2,238 Comparison Views

95% willing to recommend

VMware vSAN

Read 231 VMware vSAN reviews

13,937 Views
8,456 Comparison Views

87% willing to recommend

HPE Alletra dHCI

VMware vSAN

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 2024

VMware vSAN and HPE Alletra dHCI compete in the hyperconverged infrastructure category. Based on feature integration and intelligent management, VMware vSAN appears to have the edge with comprehensive integration capabilities within VMware environments.

Features: VMware vSAN is renowned for its scalability and seamless integration within the hypervisor core, which simplifies management and provides flexibility in hardware compatibility. Its noteworthy features include stretched cluster solutions, high availability, and integrated tools for efficient setup and management. Conversely, HPE Alletra dHCI stands out with its AI-driven Infosight, offering intelligent storage solutions, high availability, and adaptable integration with on-premises and cloud platforms.

Room for Improvement: VMware vSAN can enhance by improving integration, reducing licensing costs, and offering better scalability options. Users have noted slower regeneration post-failures and the need for more effective cloud integration. HPE Alletra dHCI could expand hypervisor support beyond VMware, enable improved file-level restoration, and provide more granular upgrade options. Both aim to improve cost efficiencies and broaden compatibility.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: VMware vSAN is noted for its ease of deployment within VMware environments, leveraging existing infrastructure. Its customer support is usually dependable, though occasionally slow. On the other hand, HPE Alletra dHCI is praised for straightforward deployment with excellent initial configuration tools and notable customer support. Both solutions provide a responsive support framework, with opportunities to enhance speed and depth of technical assistance.

Pricing and ROI: VMware vSAN commands a higher upfront cost, justified by its comprehensive capabilities and enterprise-grade features. Although expensive, users report satisfactory ROI through stability and scalability. HPE Alletra dHCI is regarded as competitively priced, delivering significant ROI through cost-effectiveness and quick recovery of investments. Both solutions align economically with their market expectations, yet potential customers should consider exploring customized pricing offers.

To learn more, read our detailed HPE Alletra dHCI vs. VMware vSAN Report (Updated: June 2025).

Buyer's Guide

HPE Alletra dHCI vs. VMware vSAN

June 2025

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Helped 859,579 peers since 2012

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 Alletra dHCI

Ranking in HCI

9th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.2

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 June 2025, in the HCI category, the mindshare of HPE Alletra dHCI is 4.8%, up from 3.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware vSAN is 14.9%, down from 18.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

HCI

Featured Reviews

Antonin Pavlik

IT Specialist at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Effortless upgrades with one-click feature while new server deployment needs a smoother process

I have a data center, and all the servers are connected to HPE Alletra dHCI. I use it for data management with VMware running on the servers The most valuable feature of HPE Alletra dHCI is the one-click upgrade function, which allows all drivers and services to be downloaded to all servers…

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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.

Read full review

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I love InfoSite. That gets you a lot of good detailed information."

"HPE's InfoSight software, which does the comparative analysis and artificial intelligence built-in in the box, and with Nimble they do well against the competition. Additionally, the dashboards are good."

"It is easier to manage compared to the other vendors."

"The latency is very low."

"It's helpful as you stand on high-end storage. Alletra offers up to 99% availability, providing excellent stability. You also get the benefits of an HCI solution with a template and upgradability at any time."

"We have this feature in Nimble dHCI, wherein we can upgrade individual components in the infrastructure."

"The most valuable feature of HPE Alletra dHCI is the one-click upgrade function, which allows all drivers and services to be downloaded to all servers easily."

"Very good in-line compression."

More HPE Alletra dHCI pros

"The most valuable feature is the simplification of storage. We no longer need to deal with Fibre Channel and the external storage arrays."

"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."

"The most valuable feature for our customers is vMotion. It allows them to shut down virtual machines and migrate them to others servers."

"The solution has high performance."

"I like the orchestration feature."

"We find it easy to deliver this solution."

"It scales well. We have plenty of room to grow."

"It helped us survive power outages in one of our data centers, then continued to function without a hitch."

More VMware vSAN pros

Cons

"HPE Nimble Storage dHCI currently is promoting only VMware as a hypervisor, whereas if they can look into other OSs, such as KVM or Red Hat, it would be an improvement."

"The product does not support file services."

"The product's active controller feature needs improvement."

"Their documentation needs to be simpler to read yet more detailed so it's easy to compare models and easier for clients to pick."

"The product is expensive."

"HPE Nimble Storage dHCI only works with a hypervisor like VMware. There are plenty of other hypervisors that HP doesn't support. This is an area for improvement."

"Sometimes the technical support would get back to us in two hours, but other times it would take them two or even three days to respond."

"The solution could improve by providing better file-level restoration and DVX system options."

More HPE Alletra dHCI cons

"I would like to see a little bit more documentation on the initial setup, and a little bit more explanation on the expandability: How to extend out your vSAN much more simply through the console because, a lot of the time, you have to do it through the command line."

"Customers who are using Essentials Plus or even Essentials have to pay for technical support. However, they should not have to pay for support."

"The technical support, it's not satisfactory. Whenever we raise a ticket it takes a lot of time to have an engineer get involved sometimes, or we receive a less experienced engineer. We then have to repeat the situation to the next engineer which all takes time."

"The stability needs to be improved."

"I would like to see it be more hardware-agnostic. Other than that, the only other complication is - and it has gotten better with the newer versions - that lately, once you're running an all-flash, if you need to grow or scale down your infrastructure, it's a long process. You need to evacuate all data and make sure you have enough space on the host, then add more hosts or take out hosts. That process is a little bit complex. You cannot scale as needed or shrink as needed."

"The quality of the customer service and support depends on the vSAN case. For example, if I open ten cases, maybe two or three get resolved quickly. But the other cases have a slow response."

"Based on my testing, I would like to expand deduplication to include hybrid deployments and not just for all-flash deployments."

"The usability is pretty good but it could use a little tweaking on the UI, with a clearer definition of exactly what some of the things do."

More VMware vSAN cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The customers have found the solution to be expensive. However, when compared to the competition the price is reasonable."

"With the features that HPE Nimble Storage dHCI provides, I cannot say its pricing is more."

"The product is costly."

"The cost of the licensing is reasonable."

"The prices are very high."

"The price of HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is expensive."

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

"I think it's priced right and it's extremely intelligent."

More HPE Alletra dHCI pricing and cost advice

"For a classical node plus storage solution, the price is higher."

"vSAN has many versions with standard and advanced including Enterprise and Enterprise Plus. Regarding the Enterprise and the Advanced, it could be lower."

"The price is expensive."

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

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

"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."

"There is a license to use this solution and we pay approximately $30,000 annually. There were not any additional fees required other than the license. The solution is expensive."

"The price is okay."

More VMware vSAN pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Educational Organization

27%

Computer Software Company

11%

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 Nimble Storage dHCI?

The solution is easy to use.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE Nimble Storage dHCI?

Pricing is rated at six, which is normal. The price is appropriate for the capabilities and features that the customers receive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with HPE Nimble Storage dHCI?

I would like the HPE Alletra dHCI to provide options to install products separately. When extending or when servers are already present, normal Alletra systems are more suitable. dHCI projects ofte...

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...

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

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Comparisons

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Compared 18% of the time

Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) vs HPE Alletra dHCI

Compared 14% of the time

VxRail vs HPE Alletra dHCI

Compared 7% of the time

Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series vs HPE Alletra dHCI

Compared 4% of the time

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VxRail vs VMware vSAN

Compared 18% of the time

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

Pure Storage FlashArray vs VMware vSAN

Compared 4% of the time

More VMware vSAN Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

HPE Alletra dHCI

June 2025

Download HPE Alletra dHCI product report

Buyer's Guide

VMware vSAN

June 2025

Download VMware vSAN product report

Also Known As

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI

vSAN

Overview

HPE Alletra dHCI, a data storage solution from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), offers Disaggregated Hyperconverged Infrastructure (dHCI), separating storage from compute resources for independent scaling and management. Utilizing HPE Nimble Storage technology, known for AI-driven optimization, it ensures high performance and management efficiency. With scalability and agility, users can effortlessly expand storage or processing power as data requirements evolve. Additionally, boasting rapid deployment in under 15 minutes and a claimed 99.9999% data availability, HPE Alletra dHCI promises robust and reliable storage solutions.

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

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Buyer's Guide

HPE Alletra dHCI vs. VMware vSAN

June 2025

Free Report: HPE Alletra dHCI vs. VMware vSAN

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