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 vSAN has allowed us to leverage our server infrastructure more completely without the need to add more hardware."
"The top-notch support before, during, and after deployments are better than any other vendor I have come across."
"The fact that I can now count on a true failover solution is what is most appealing."
"In the three years that we have been using StarWind, the product has yet to cause us any problems."
"The most valuable features are high availability and real-time replication between two servers."
"Recovery and maintenance are now less stressful and most importantly, it allows our users to keep working."
"vSAN we found was simple to set up, easy to configure and manage and allows us to achieve storage redundancy."
"The most useful aspect is the hyper-converged SD SAN and the ease to expand it by just adding cheap SSD or NVME disks."
"Its ease of use is valuable. It is being used in a mining company. They wanted their working nodes to be seamless, and they wanted ease of use. That's why they opted for SimpliVity. They are running VMware virtual machines on it."
"The features I have found most valuable are the convergence of the infrastructure and multi-platform support, for example, VMware and Hyper-V"
"We really enjoy the virtualization that the solution offers."
"Its performance is quite good, and it is also easy to use. One of the biggest benefits is the included backup solution."
"The compression and deduplication features are most valuable because they allow us to have a small footprint for storage. It is a very stable product, and we are also able to get all that we need in terms of reporting."
"The most valuable features of SimpliVity are the built-in backup and immunity to ransomware."
"PCX card implementation improves speed."
"SimpliVity's console is useful."
"Very good VCG notification feature."
"We find it easy to deliver this solution."
"We've found the solution to be scalable."
"Allows us to implement more quickly, and to ease the maintenance."
"It has a single pane of glass for management and operational control, which is the most valuable feature. The integrated storage is also valuable."
"This product has very good performance when it comes to virtualization storage and works well with solutions such as SAP HANA, Exadata, Hadoop, and Big Data Analytics."
"Stretched Cluster is one of the big features that we use across multiple data centers."
"I have found that the multi-homing feature is very valuable in VMware vSAN. It is an easy-to-use solution."
"I would like an automated installation/configuration despite the fact that their service is very collaborative, a customer should be able to deploy the solution by themselves."
"Perhaps more reporting features on the utilization, usage, and performance of the configured high-availability images and underlying physical disks would be helpful."
"The system failovers properly on its own without too much worry."
"The console is something that I feel could be improved. There is nothing technically wrong with it, but it can be jazzed up and/or made to be a little more intuitive."
"I see no need for major improvements but there could be some improvements in the form of notifications and the simplifying of maintenance mode."
"We would like the documentation to be more complete. Most items are covered, but if you don't know something, you may need to contact their support."
"I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues."
"Updating the software can be a bit tricky."
"Its deployment should be easier."
"There may be issues around scaling."
"Its price can be improved. Customers always look for better prices. It is more expensive as compared to other products available in the market."
"I think the licensing cost could be lower."
"We had some hardware compatibility issues with the earlier versions of HPE SimpliVity. We upgraded to the latest version a few months ago, and since then, there is no hardware failure, and it is better. They don't provide a portal to create a ticket directly for the HPE SimpliVity. We have a web portal to create a ticket when we have an issue, but for HPE SimpliVity, we need to call the local vendor for support. If they are not able to resolve the issue, they contact the global support, which takes more time. Technology is moving very fast, and everybody nowadays is focusing on the cloud base. In the future, they should integrate it with the cloud base for the backup."
"The fact that it is tied to a certain hardware platform would probably be the bigger negative versus just being able to buy something off the shelf."
"There needs to be a simple process for migrating one SimpliVity cluster to a new SimpliVity cluster."
"There is a file size limitation when you want to do an individual file restore, but they might have resolved this in newer versions. As I'm taking backups at the VM server level, I can restore a file from any one of those without standing up the VM, and I can restore it to any mounted VM that I want. The problem is that there is a file size limitation. It becomes problematic when I'm trying to restore. When I want to restore a backup of a SQL database, my backups are considerably larger than 10 gigs. So, the only way to restore that backup file is to mount the entire VM somewhere and then copy it, which doesn't take long at all."
"The only negative point relates to the licensing. If you want multiple, different servers, it costs money, but you have all the capacity for vSAN. You do not reach the data, but the processor arrays and the current architecture."
"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 ability to access SAN environments with fiber channels (or even NVMe) would be a good addition."
"If the support could be provided more quickly, it would be very helpful."
"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 see more support for applications. I think currently it only supports applications between two vSAN clusters."
"The monitoring feature in VMware vSAN could be better."
"We would like to see even more storage capacity."
Try it today
HPE SimpliVity is ranked 4th in Hyper-Converged (HCI) with 60 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in Hyper-Converged (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 Acropolis AOS, HPE Nimble Storage dHCI, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and Sangfor HCI, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Nutanix Acropolis AOS, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. 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.