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HPE Alletra dHCI vs VMware vSAN comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

HPE Alletra dHCI
Ranking in HCI
10th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.2
Number of Reviews
28
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware vSAN
Ranking in HCI
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.6
Number of Reviews
230
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the HCI category, the mindshare of HPE Alletra dHCI is 4.6%, up from 3.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware vSAN is 15.6%, down from 18.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

Antonin Pavlik - PeerSpot reviewer
Effortless upgrades with one-click feature while new server deployment needs a smoother process
I have a data center, and all the servers are connected to HPE Alletra dHCI. I use it for data management with VMware running on the servers The most valuable feature of HPE Alletra dHCI is the one-click upgrade function, which allows all drivers and services to be downloaded to all servers…
Yves Sandfort - PeerSpot reviewer
Gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources
Stability can be improved. Adding all these new features is nice, but we are now at the level where most of the features you need in production are there. The stability is not from a day-to-day operations perspective, but more from a supportability perspective, because currently some of the support scenarios require you to completely evacuate hosts or the complete cluster. That sometimes can be a stretch. This would clearly be an improvement if the support teams were given additional tools to make that easier. Upgradability could be a bit easier sometimes. We are now where vSAN can be updated without ESXi, but there is still enough dependency. So that would be good if that actually would be uncoupled even more. Dashboards are there, and we use vROps as well. So, we have all the beauty of capacity planning and everything over there. That's not really something where we need a lot of other things.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"HPE Alletra dHCI was good because we could have the vVols, which we are using for our production server, with the snapshots."
"It's helpful as you stand on high-end storage. Alletra offers up to 99% availability, providing excellent stability. You also get the benefits of an HCI solution with a template and upgradability at any time."
"We have this feature in Nimble dHCI, wherein we can upgrade individual components in the infrastructure."
"It is easier to manage compared to the other vendors."
"The technical support services are good."
"The latency is very low."
"So far, the solution's performance is very good."
"Nimble Storage is a capable platform with high availability."
"We've found the solution to be scalable."
"It is scalable, overall. If you need to add storage, it makes it easy to scale by adding additional hard drives into the existing servers or you can add storage by just adding more servers."
"The scalability is very good and the solution is stable and reliable."
"In my opinion, vSAN is the most natural way to migrate to a fully hyperconverged solution. If a customer needs a more scalable solution with consolidated management, vSAN is excellent."
"IOPS is comparatively best to run VDI solution."
"The product’s ecosystem is better than Nutanix’s."
"The most valuable feature is that it is software-defined storage. Also, being able to do maintenance on the fly is a real benefit: migrating off, updating, and then moving the guest back on to the nodes."
"The solution is quite stable."
 

Cons

"I rate Nimble one out of 10 for ease of setup. Setting up Nimble Storage was a nightmare. It took us three months to deal with all the kinks and bugs. We had two people from HPE assisting us and two from our team."
"The product’s performance needs improvement. It could also help with more environment monitoring and AI technologies to improve the performance and thresholds."
"I'm not sure if there are features lacking."
"The initial setup is a little bit complicated."
"HPE Nimble Storage dHCI's website does not open properly or work consistently."
"HPE Nimble Storage dHCI currently is promoting only VMware as a hypervisor, whereas if they can look into other OSs, such as KVM or Red Hat, it would be an improvement."
"The implementation process was problematic due to firmware incompatibilities and lengthy support intervention."
"Lacking integration to the cloud."
"I would love to see vSAN integrate Persistent Memory and NVDIMMs. I know they're supposed to be working on an elastic tier so that we don't have the issues with destaging from the cache to the capacity. Those are the things that I'm interested in."
"he list of hardware supported should be increased in the future."
"I would like to see replication as part of it. I would also like to see direct file access, being able to run SIF shares and NFS and the like. I think that would be critical to continuing the use of it going forward."
"Integration could be better."
"We want see a better monitoring tool in vSAN. Monitoring is not that great as of now because it shows us false alarms in the Health status. We would like that to be improved."
"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."
"vSAN has a significantly higher license cost post-merger."
"There is always a challenge with their firmware."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The product is costly."
"The prices are very high."
"The product licensing costs vary depending on whether VMware or other solutions are used."
"The solution’s pricing was very good."
"The price of HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is expensive."
"The customers have found the solution to be expensive. However, when compared to the competition the price is reasonable."
"I would rate the licensing model a three out of ten, where one is extremely expensive, and ten is cheap."
"HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is much cheaper than the competition and has value proposition. Customers can see an ROI in three months. There are no additional costs, and VMware licenses can be reutilized."
"This solution requires the purchase of a license."
"From a cost perspective, it is expensive. From a usability perspective, it reduces the overhead costs attached to its users' servers."
"There is a license to use this solution and we pay approximately $30,000 annually. There were not any additional fees required other than the license. The solution is expensive."
"Every product is licensed with full support for a certain number of years. The licensing could be cheaper."
"There is a license required for this solution, it is a one-time payment. However, if they want support for the solution, it can be paid annually or for three years."
"The licenses are very expensive. The renewal of licenses has extra costs attached to it."
"This solution is expensive. Nutanix provides us with Acropolis Operating System (AOS) along with its hardware, while VMware provides vSAN, vCenter, and vSphere which all have separate licenses and costs."
"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Educational Organization
8%
Educational Organization
53%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE Nimble Storage dHCI?
The price of HPE Alletra dHCI is considered expensive for small businesses, however, it is suitable for medium to large companies.
What needs improvement with HPE Nimble Storage dHCI?
The deployment of a new server could be improved. I would like to add servers to the existing stack more easily, and there should be a function to reinstall servers with a one-click installation pr...
What Is The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail?
While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an engineered system. The choice to choose which technology depends on two major fac...
Which would you choose - Nutanix Acropolis AOS or VMware vSAN?
We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface that allows you to talk directly to your VM from the present software. We fou...
How does HPE Simplivity compare with VMware vSAN?
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 ...
 

Also Known As

HPE Nimble Storage dHCI
vSAN
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

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Find out what your peers are saying about HPE Alletra dHCI vs. VMware vSAN and other solutions. Updated: March 2025.
842,767 professionals have used our research since 2012.