We performed a comparison between HPE SimpliVity and VMware vSAN based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: HPE SimpliVity has a slight edge over VMware vSAN in this comparison. It is reliable, has high availability, and is simple to use. HPE SimpliVity also received higher marks in the Service and Support category. One area where VMware vSAN does come out on top is in the Ease of Deployment category.
"StarWind Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements."
"StarWind support has been great in helping resolve other issues not caused by their software."
"In the three years that we have been using StarWind, the product has yet to cause us any problems."
"The primary purpose of this software is to create a virtual SAN between local storage on Hyper-V hosts. I find this feature most valuable since it accomplishes this quite well."
"The most valuable features are high availability and real-time replication between two servers."
"High Availability is the best feature of product."
"StarWind SANs come with outstanding support."
"A great feature is that I basically set it and forget it, as everything is automatic."
"The most valuable feature is that the product has an inborn backup."
"It's much more simple than Nutanix and other hyper-converged solutions, at least from our point of view."
"It is easy to set up."
"The technical support is exceptionally good."
"The access, high availability, and interface are the most valuable and important for us. There is one interface for the whole product, which is very important because you have a single pane to view all the infrastructure of a customer. You can improve your data recovery plan or DRP, or you can make a special emergency plan if a disk has any problem."
"We have not had any problem with customer support at SimpliVity."
"SimpliVity works well in a UAT environment.."
"The features I have found most valuable are the convergence of the infrastructure and multi-platform support, for example, VMware and Hyper-V"
"The valuable feature of the solution is the total hyperconverged facility."
"Overall the solution is very good."
"The deduplication and compression are excellent."
"The flexibility is most valuable. Being able to manage things quickly if something goes wrong is also valuable. Very recently, we had one node that went down due to a power problem, but there was really no major impact on the systems running on top of it."
"The solutions best feature is that it is easy to use."
"It easily integrates with all types of storage."
"The technical support is good. We are always thankful for the technical support from VMware. They are very supportive when we have a technical problem."
"I have found the solution to be scalable."
"Management of VSAN itself could be improved. A Web UI for management would be great rather than an application installation. StarWind is testing a command center virtual appliance that I have installed in my environment."
"A central management console may be nice to see all nodes."
"The documentation could be clearer in terms of explaining the installation."
"Currently, the StarWind management console is a bit clunky to navigate and isn't the most user-intuitive interface."
"Updating the software can be a bit tricky."
"It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers."
"I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues."
"I had issues locating the documentation that applied to my version of StarWind vSAN."
"It's a very complex installation. It's gotten easier, however, it's far from a double click on a link and a self-upgrade scenario. There's still an awful lot of magic that goes down to doing upgrades."
"An area for improvement would be the flexibility of server configuration."
"The centric management could be simplified or more user-friendly."
"It would be better if it could integrate more easily with other vendors."
"Its performance can be faster."
"The product should be competitive with other brands."
"The backup and recovery process needs to be faster. Right now, it's a bit slow."
"They could have better-specialized support for more countries."
"They should make the software updates easier. We should be able to upgrade it more easily."
"I have used the VMware Replication but I can't get it to work properly. The process should be simplified."
"Reporting currently depends on third party applications and that could be improved."
"VMware vSAN could improve by having faster reload time and a single point of failure. Resynchronization of many hardware could be better. If you have an outage of a disc or a full system, the replication time is too slow. This has room for improvement."
"The monitoring feature in VMware vSAN could be better."
"We plan to switch products since the hardware nowadays is a little bit outdated and we need to scale up a bit."
"It can be very expensive."
"Its integration with a hybrid cloud can be improved. Its scalability can also be improved so that it can be integrated with more than 32 nodes. The maximum number of nodes is okay, but our use cases could probably do with more nodes, probably up to 64. In terms of new features, it should probably have the basic support for high-speed networking spaces."
Try it today
HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 60 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 87 reviews. HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.2, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of HPE SimpliVity writes "Phenomenal deduplication and compression, good support, and works on its own". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources". HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Nimble Storage dHCI, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and Sangfor HCI, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our HPE SimpliVity vs. VMware vSAN report.
See our list of best HCI vendors.
We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
The answer depends on what is it that you are looking for in your solution...
Both Simplivity & vSAB are software-defined storage technology-wise. Now the second important thing is both create a blob/object storage out of a set of disks.
Ideally, both these solutions can't compare to real-world storage requirements where the need is block storage at the lowest latency. Most of the time both technologies are used for generalized VM workloads and not for specialized workloads.
vSAN from VMware leverages Erasure code for maintaining the availability of data on the soft SAN. This architecture is referred to as RAIN - a minimum of 3 nodes are recommended in such architecture to run the storage show effectively.
Simplivity, on the other hand, leverages a combination of RAID + RAIN wherein the storage availability is unimpacted even if you start with 2 Nodes.
IOPS and latency are the issues with both solutions. Application performance is dependent on disk latency & throughput too. So, depending on the scenario, you need to tailor your solution.
What my point is: it generally depends on workload type, data volume and performance of the VM platform that you are planning for. Both the technologies are great, People use vCloud Suite more as compared to Simplivity globally, that too is a proven fact.
Then it depends on the size of a company and the workloads you wanna run... tools and processes around which your operation is defined and built.
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 valuable features, but the most important thing for us is that it provides a complete solution. We could set it up very quickly, and the interface is intuitive. It has a central dashboard, and you can find everything from there.
HPE SimpliVity made our virtualization stack so simple. You can combine it with an accelerator card, so the number of writes is reduced significantly. Cloning or backup VMs is a breeze because the system only changes the data you need to restore or clone. Additionally, it works well with Veeam, which we already have.
Cost-wise, it is very reasonably priced. However, if you want to add more memory, you’ll need to pay additional licensing costs. We found the upgrades to be a bit complex.
We tried VMware vSAN too. One of its advantages is the easy setup. VMware vSAN supports all-flash memory and integrates with all VMware products, which helps run operations smoothly. The best feature might be its scalability. VMware vSAN scales up and scales out very easily. It is easy to manage, too.
There are downsides to VMware vSAN, though. For instance, support is very slow. It doesn’t work well with high IOP either. Finally, you cannot isolate virtual machines for deduplication and compression. So, if you are looking for high performance, we found VMware vSAN to be too expensive for the value it provides.
Conclusions
VMware provides good storage as a service for companies that already work with other VMware products or are looking for a reliable SAN. But their poor support and lack of virtual machine-level features made us decide on HPE SimpliVity for our hyper-convergence needs.