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.
"Highly available storage is the most valuable feature. The entire rollout is hyper-converged and requires no extra storage further than the hosts in which Hyper-V is running. Another feature that has been great is the support from StarWind in general. We have their proactive support package on the main cluster that employs Starwind Virtual SAN."
"The license price is one of the cheapest in the market."
"With an uptime of 384 days, StarWind has improved overall server reliability."
"High Availability is the best feature of product."
"The support has been amazing and quick to reply."
"I've been really impressed with it so far. I think it's pretty great, actually. It does exactly what we need it to do, and it does it well, so I would recommend it. Plus, the support has been very good."
"It includes every feature that a traditional SAN offers and so much more."
"Having the ability to scale horizontally if needed is a huge plus for future growth."
"HPE SimpliVity is a very valuable and effective solution. It's also a scalable solution. As the customer requirements and application requirements increase, it can scale to accommodate them."
"I like SimpliVity because it can be adapted for small clients or the biggest ones. It's flexible."
"It's much more simple than Nutanix and other hyper-converged solutions, at least from our point of view."
"The main thing is its performance. In terms of performance, it is a lot better than VMware. Obviously, technology is changing a lot all the time. We were on just VMware with a separate attached array. The performance was kind of a step backward from just running separate servers. Now, the performance is much better, and we can take snapshots and backups of really big servers in just a matter of seconds. We can even restore them in a matter of seconds."
"HPE SimpliVity is scalable. Some 200 people at my organization are using this solution at present."
"I like HPE SimpliVity's hard disk compression capabilities. The data is compressed into very little space or volume. I think that the principal value of HP SimpliVity is its capacity to compress the data, and I'm saving a lot of disk space using SimpliVity."
"What I like about the solution, is that SimpliVity is easy to deploy and maintain. It's really performing very well. The ratio of price to performance is really good."
"It doesn't take long to mount the entire VM somewhere and then copy it. That's one of the things that I like about SimpliVity's deduplication and compression. I can literally stand up a backup in minutes. It is like no time at all. They've got pretty phenomenal deduplication and compression. Within SimpliVity, one of the things that they do is deduplication and compression on ingestion. So, on the front side, everything is deduplicated and compressed, which, of course, adds some overhead to their solution. For instance, in my environment today, I've got roughly 30 terabytes of raw storage, and with their deduplication and compression, I'm over the 300 terabyte threshold with my active servers and all my backups."
"Storage is expandable with no extra cost."
"One of the most valuable features of this solution is that it is stable."
"The scalability has been quite good."
"It easily integrates with all types of storage."
"I like the orchestration feature."
"The implementation is simple, it was very straightforward. It took us approximately three weeks because it was installed in four locations."
"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."
"I like the tolerance of VMware vSAN."
"If it's possible to make a driver/solution that does not make use of the iSCSI targets of Windows, that would be great. I don't know if that's possible, however, it could make the configuration a little easier."
"The console is something that I believe could be enhanced."
"The only way I can see this product needing improvement is the consultation level of the StarWind sales and engineers."
"The system failovers properly on its own without too much worry."
"There is one issue as far as licensing goes and that is a lack of documentation online for users when transitioning from the free version to the paid version, or vice versa."
"The configuration can a bit cumbersome."
"The documentation can be better for the free tier."
"Android app for monitoring and receiving push notifications as alarms or monitoring I/O from any mobile device could be a good feature and nice to have as we are not always on our desk."
"The setup was complex, as it has multiple integrations with multiple orients."
"SimpliVity has very limited options for the virtualization layer."
"HPE SimpliVity should cost less."
"The life-cycle management can be improved."
"SimpliVity has no file server services. That's one of the solution's biggest shortcomings."
"The installation is quite easy but it could still be improved."
"Deployment could be simplified and more user friendly."
"HPE SimpliVity could be more flexible and scalable. I don't feel SimpliVity is flexible or easily scalable because I still need to buy another server to add to my clusters. I can't just run or harvest and add to my solution. I need to buy another server. There are a lot of components that are not giving a lot of value to me right now. I also had a few problems with the built-in hard disk drives. I've had many issues with the harvest stripes that the servers use. Maybe it's a coincidence, but it's unusual to have a physical failure on the HPE platform. I don't see any value at the software level, especially in the software that manages that solution. I was waiting for something, especially in the application layer that I would use, but that is all over VMware, and it doesn't have an integrated module that I can use to manage the server and all the instances."
"We would like to see even more storage capacity."
"The solution could be improved by having more filtered and multiple view volumes instead of a single view."
"Customers who are using Essentials Plus or even Essentials have to pay for technical support. However, they should not have to pay for support."
"Hardware load balancing is available on the enterprise version of the solution, however, it's extremely expensive and therefore out of our budget."
"The big thing is pricing, and the rest of it is mostly good. From a scalability point of view, scaling the storage from network or compute should be easier. It is again all around the cost, and it would be good if it was easier to scale your storage separately from your compute."
"We would like to see additional backup and recovery options added. In particular, integration with popular applications like databases."
"It could have some automation. We haven't involved ourselves in a lot of automation around the vSAN environment capabilities. We're still running it using a very traditional setup. So, there could be some plugins to automate it using third-party environments, such as Jenkins."
"There could be more features with the automatic backup."
Try it today
HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 48 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 76 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 and Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Red Hat Ceph Storage and HPE Hyper Converged. See our HPE SimpliVity vs. VMware vSAN report.
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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.