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.
"The ease of reaching the support team and their promptness for support is great."
"The StarWind Virtual SAN management console is intuitive and easy to use."
"The control panel is nice. It gives you a lot of good feedback as to the status and health of the VSAN."
"The price was right."
"We are able to do maintenance by bringing down one node at a time, rather than having to schedule a complete shutdown."
"The top-notch support before, during, and after deployments are better than any other vendor I have come across."
"StarWind allows us to move virtual machines from one physical host to another, which greatly reduces the downtime required for maintenance."
"Besides being 80% cheaper than the other alternatives, the simplicity makes reconfiguration and support much easier."
"The feature that I have found most valuable is the backup recovery."
"Looking at the way that our infrastructure team works now, we don't think about infrastructure, storage, or compute anymore. The solution just works. It is same with the backup and replication side of things, as it just works on schedule. We don't have to manage it tightly, like we used to."
"The most valuable feature is that the product has an inborn backup."
"The most valuable features are replication and backup."
"The department that ran our reporting in the legacy environment, it took them about six hours to run their report. Now, it is taking the same department less than an hour."
"The ability to manage the environment without special consoles or interfaces is a plus."
"What I appreciate most about HPE SimpliVity is its seamless integration of hardware."
"There is no single feature that's the most valuable. All of SimpliVity's components work together to make daily operations easier for our customers."
"Our clients value being able to upgrade with one click or a few clicks."
"Cost-effective and easy to install."
"We were able to speed up our gaming software, which was a big plus."
"The stability continues to get better and better. It's pretty reliable."
"The feature that I have found most valuable with VxRail is its upgrade. Because if you talk about the normal ESX process you have to upgrade the firmware, the bios, and you have to manage the compatibility. You have to do a lot of things. But in the case of VxRail, it's a single upgrade, end to end. You simply upload the bundle, click next, it will do some pre-checks, if those pre-checks pass, it will update everything one by one. It will put one ESX in the maintenance and move other VM's to another mode. There is no downtime to the VM's."
"Enterprise is a complete solution that includes performance, backups and disaster recovery."
"VxRail can manage the whole cluster at the same time, so it's easy to expand. VxRail has more features vSAN ReadyNodes that make it easier to implement from scratch."
"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."
"I would like to see more user-friendly dashboards in future versions."
"We would like to see the documentation more fully developed."
"A mobile app to sync up for overview and status would really be helpful."
"The documentation could be clearer in terms of explaining the installation."
"The initial setup got a little confusing at a few points with differences between the VMware version in documentation vs the latest, etc."
"They need to invest more in the support documents for real issues happening when integrating the solution with the hypervisor."
"We have, in rare cases, received conflicting guidance between different support folks within StarWind."
"We ran into an issue with alerts."
"HPE SimpliVity should cost less."
"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."
"Deployment could be simplified and more user friendly."
"We would like to have more security with the solution."
"Upgrading can be complicated."
"The interface is good but takes some time to get used to."
"I think the licensing cost could be lower."
"The upgrades need improvement."
"The solution is okay to scale vertically but a bit difficult to expend horizontally. For example, increasing RAM."
"The technical support is good but could be better."
"The configurations of VxRail can be difficult. However, it has improved in the newer version. From version 6 to 7, there has been a lot of changes."
"In the next release, maybe they could add in integration with the hyper-cloud so it will be easier to do the movement up and back to the cloud in order to scale in and scale out."
"The solution is vendor-locked and Dell is the only supplier of VxRail."
"VxRail is a closed system with an out-of-the -box solution approach, it has basic 3 layers, Hardware, Network, Storage, Software, (Virtualizing) Applications. Release notes and improvement tips, patches from the back office, the business units, should be frequent and up to the patches which are coming from different vendors as far as the operating system application and also the technology itself is concerned."
"The licensing is a bit too costly."
"I would like better integration with VCF from VMware, which is the Cloud Foundation tool set, so we can easily provision servers very quickly."
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HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 148 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 112 reviews. HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.6, while VxRail is rated 8.6. 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 VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI, Dell PowerFlex and HPE StoreVirtual, whereas VxRail is most compared with VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex, Cisco HyperFlex HX-Series, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and HPE Hyper Converged. See our HPE SimpliVity vs. VxRail report.
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Hi, Refer to your questions if you are a COO of a small company then both solutions would be costly as a minimum of 3 nodes solution is required. Both are good at their places. Let's say, VxRail is deeply engineered with VMware and they have strong integration and performance testing results. in terms of expansion, federation, compression/deduplication, etc., is much more improved. Whereas HPE SimpliVity used its own storage virtualization software and backup software. Whereas in VxRail you can also use any backup software. Apart from the discussion, my suggestion would be to go with simple X86 Servers(any OEM) with Sangfor( they have built-in administrative software (i.e. VCenter), built-in backup (no need to buy any other software), multi-hypervisor support, cost-effective even if you plan to provide SaaS service you can easily do it from your company immediately. They also provide vNGFW, vADC, vIAM, etc. It is an end-to-end HCI Solution with Security support included. Prices are very reasonable(I don't know your region). Thanks