We performed a comparison between HPE SimpliVity and VxRail based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison of Results: Based on the parameters we compared, VxRail seems to be the superior solution. Our reviewers found HPE SimpliVity to be more difficult to deploy and more expensive to purchase than VxRail.
"VSAN works great; it's very easy to install, configure, and manage."
"The license price is one of the cheapest in the market."
"StarWind allows us to move virtual machines from one physical host to another, which greatly reduces the downtime required for maintenance."
"StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution."
"vSAN we found was simple to set up, easy to configure and manage and allows us to achieve storage redundancy."
"The biggest benefit was that it allowed us to provide SAN services on a limited hardware budget."
"It integrates (fully) with VMware and Veeam, my hypervisor, and backup vendors, so for me, all the puzzle pieces simply fit and work smoothly."
"The available GUI is excellent for monitoring and operating the system in an easy and direct way."
"The configuration capabilities are good."
"The backup feature is valuable, and replication is also valuable. It is very quick and easy to use."
"It's much more simple than Nutanix and other hyper-converged solutions, at least from our point of view."
"HPE SimpliVity is simple, it's very friendly."
"I like SimpliVity because it can be adapted for small clients or the biggest ones. It's flexible."
"SimpliVity helps us to manage and has made deduplication work really well."
"Best for companies just starting out."
"We have not had any problem with customer support at SimpliVity."
"I have found that the admin deployment, monitoring off-premises, and the many services important features. Additionally, the solution has good integration."
"VxRail performs well in the VDI environment."
"The scalability of VxRail is very good."
"VxRail has high performance and has great efficiency. There is a single place for us to manage all of our virtual machines. The ability to right-size instead of overcommit VMs is a large benefit."
"The VxRail is built on two specific platforms that have been in the industry for the last 15 to 20 years: the 1-U socket and the 2-U socket platforms from Dell. They're in their sixteenth generation of those platforms, I believe, so they're very stable."
"The stability of VxRail is good, we have not had any issues."
"The ease of deployment and management of the solution are the most valuable aspects of the product."
"The major advantage is the blueprint. You do not need to separately manage the sand or network part because it all gets virtualized."
"The platform needs to improve user management and the web console."
"Currently, the StarWind management console is a bit clunky to navigate and isn't the most user-intuitive interface."
"I'd prefer it if a remote console was provided."
"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."
"A better overall view of the different deployments could be beneficial, although this is difficult due to how flexible the solution is."
"I had issues locating the documentation that applied to my version of StarWind vSAN."
"This is a great product."
"It should be improved in the way it detects the right filesystem image after a complete shutdown of the system or in the case of disaster recovery."
"In the next release of the solution, they should make updating the solution easier. Currently, we have HPE doing it for us but I would like to be able to do it."
"There may be issues around scaling."
"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."
"Its deployment should be easier."
"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."
"I have a free project with SimpliVity deployment in the next three months. What can be improved is that in one or two of these projects, I need a cloud backup for the infrastructure and data. As for the infrastructure of the product as it relates to customer size, it is not very good at this moment in Peru. I need a solution for the cloud. In Peru, it's a three or four solution provider for cloud services."
"I'm not a technical guy, and I am pretty much okay with the way it is, but it would help if it was closest to Nutanix in Gartner's Magic Quadrants. Nutanix very often beats us. Nutanix provides Acropolis for free. It probably would be great if we have a virtualization layer. It is something that might be lacking in our solution. We depend on VMware, and it is very expensive. It is lacking the software that allows us to install it with HPE and not depend on a third party."
"Once you select the size of SimpliVity, it could be risky for you to downsize it because you may need maybe to reimplement some things."
"We used an integrator team for the implementation of the solution. The one person who takes care of the maintenance of VxRail, such as upgrading the software. The upgrading takes too long. We have many nodes which takes a long time, they need to improve the speed of the upgrades"
"We'd like to see more automation capabilities in the future."
"In the next release, I would like to see our graphical user interface allow us to manage VxRail clusters and everything on a single pane of glass where I can monitor and shut down the server, similar to a VxRail manager."
"If VxRail could also offer file services in addition to virtualization, that would be nice because sometimes people want to complement their environment with file services, and you don't have that in VxRail."
"The cost is quite high. It's a very expensive solution to run."
"The full solution is not completely included as a bundle, such as we see with SimpliVity."
"When it comes to maintenance, it takes 16 hours to upgrade a 12 node VxRail plus. This could be improved in the system."
"Lacks integration of licenses so that it's an expensive solution."
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HPE SimpliVity is ranked 6th in HCI with 44 reviews while VxRail is ranked 3rd in HCI with 53 reviews. HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.4, while VxRail is rated 8.6. 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 VxRail writes "It's built on platforms that have been in the industry for more than 15 years, so it's very stable". HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Nimble Storage dHCI, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series and HPE Hyper Converged, whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes. See our HPE SimpliVity vs. VxRail report.
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