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.
"The Windows-based StarWind GUI is easy to use and understand and integrates seamlessly with VMware's vSphere portal as well."
"Speed and high availability have been the most valuable for us."
"The license price is one of the cheapest in the market."
"Being hardware agnostic is a must and definitely scored points for us."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a very easy-to-use solution that can be quickly and easily deployed and configured without intimate and specific knowledge in the virtualization sphere."
"We are running Hyper-V on twin servers in failover, and being able to manage servers from anywhere I need to, virtually, has been a game changer."
"Integration with Microsoft clustering has been perfect, allowing us to leverage our investment in MS server licensing to the fullest."
"StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere is a software-defined storage solution that has reduced administration time for storage. It's pretty straightforward to install and setup it and so far it has been robust and worked as advertised from StarWind."
"The solution is user-friendly."
"The backup and restore features are the most valuable."
"The ability to backup our data without requiring additional storage media or software application was a huge gain."
"Up scaling is very possible, and at any time it is scalable."
"SimpliVity's console is useful."
"It is a stable solution."
"The backup and recovery is very fast, effective, and easy to use."
"The biggest benefit of this solution is that If you use it, you can use it for the company headquarters and also for all the branches. You use the same system, only a smaller size. With SimipliVity you can also use the included backup solution. You don't need any other solution to back up the data or to transfer it."
"Its ease of use is most valuable. It is easy to configure, and there is a unified interface, which makes things slightly easier."
"The product’s most valuable features are performance and expandability."
"The ability to have a disaster recovery option for our end-users by being able to use VDI and the vSANs, and the ability to do replication across multiple data centers, are valuable to us."
"vSAN Health is a feature designed to monitor the health and performance of the vSAN environment. It's crucial for us and our customers to frequently check on this to ensure everything is operating smoothly."
"VMware comes with different stacks like VMware Cloud Foundation, which is integrated with different VMware modules. There's interoperability between VMware products."
"All orchestration and monitoring are routed to the cloud."
"The feature we have found most valuable is the compatibility of VMware products with VCF and VMware Cloud Foundation."
"I like vSAN because they release features incrementally, every year, and you don't have to upgrade your hardware to get those features. If you bought a traditional SAN, you would have to upgrade your hardware constantly, every three years: You would get it, and it is how it is for three years. But on vSAN, you upgrade when you have to, when your hardware gets old or when you need more capacity. It's great, you get new features constantly."
"While we had no problems setting the system up, and service technicians from StarWind could assist us very well, they could provide some form of in-depth documentation."
"I would like to see more monitoring and alert tools."
"In all areas the product could be made faster."
"I'm sure it needs bug fixes..."
"For someone entering the IT sector with little knowledge of storage, iSCSI, and virtual disks, they might not find the GUI immediately obvious."
"It would be good to have a little more access to control certain aspects within the UI."
"With data verification, I would like to know how does the solution perform validation of data being synced between two VSANs."
"The system performs as expected, but we're always looking for performance improvements regarding the best utilization of NVMe disks."
"They can bring more awareness about this product. In this part of the world or this region, people normally don't know about SimpliVity and its capabilities. The company we have it sold to hasn't been able to fully utilize all the features or understand the features. So, product awareness should be improved."
"The solution could improve by adding better support of the VMware add-ons and a more intuitive user interface for administrators."
"I would love it if the solution would auto data balance within the cluster. It is possible, and eventually, it will be likely that certain nodes within the same cluster will hold more data than the other nodes."
"There are a lot of different components to choose from in the chassis. This could be easier by providing a standard or a base model to create and configure from."
"It is not so cheap, and this is the most common complaint that my customers have. It is a very good product, but the price is an issue in Latin America. VMware is a de facto tool. It would be useful for customers if HP can also use Red Hat or any other open-source virtualization product. Currently, you can only use VMware to manage the machines inside SimpliVity."
"Simplify the backup and restore: With integrated backup and remote replication, it could reduce risk and eliminates the use of legacy data tools."
"It could integrate better with other platforms. It's a proprietary solution of HPE, so you are stuck. Before I was running SimpliVity as an independent solution. it wasn't a card and software, so you could put in whatever server, IBM, Dell, etc."
"An area for improvement would be the flexibility of server configuration."
"Hardware load balancing is available on the enterprise version of the solution, however, it's extremely expensive and therefore out of our budget."
"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 ability to access SAN environments with fiber channels (or even NVMe) would be a good addition."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"There is a lot that VMware could improve from a marketing perspective. The cloud is still new for many people, so extending storage should be effortless. It shouldn't be so complicated to extend the storage so workloads can access it no matter where they go."
"The integration could be improved. I would like to see integration with other platforms."
Try it today
HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 148 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 219 reviews. HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of HPE SimpliVity writes "Provides a unified management interface that allows administrators to manage all aspects of the infrastructure". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI, Dell PowerFlex and HPE StoreVirtual, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) 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.