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HPE Hyper Converged vs VMware vSAN comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jul 24, 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 Hyper Converged
Ranking in HCI
11th
Average Rating
8.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
35
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 Hyper Converged is 3.2%, up from 3.1% 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

Ray Baruwa - PeerSpot reviewer
Advantageous from a sustainability perspective since the networking, storage, and compute are all located within one unit
Hyperconverged is used in an environment where the footprint in the data center is restricted. It is advantageous from a sustainability perspective since the networking, storage, and compute are all located within one unit The most beneficial feature is the life cycle management. I haven't had…
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

"The most valuable feature was its time to delivery."
"Ease of management, as I come from a software background, and I'm responsible for IT overall. I can get in there and turn some nuts and bolts and make things happen without any trouble."
"No concerns or issues with stability."
"What I really like about this program, is that it needs little space and it works really fast, so it saves us time."
"It is easy to manage; the administration is simpler. It saves a lot of rack space in the data center because you can consolidate 20 servers into three to five nodes. The client will be able to benefit from power savings and cost savings as well."
"One of the solution's strong points is the deduplication capabilities of SimpliVity."
"The product enables me to use any software or database."
"Reasonably priced and easy to manage for small to medium size companies that don't have an IT department."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"This solution has a dashboard that you can log into and control if you need too while the VM is getting created."
"The most valuable feature is the simplicity of its scalability: being able to grow it without having to make sure you get the right disks and the right nodes. The solution is also easy to manage. It's all right there in the vSphere Client. You're not going through multiple things. You don't have to know, once you've created the vSAN node. You add storage, it sees it, and you create your data storage from there. Everything is right there for you."
"The performance has exceeded our expectations and exceeded our traditional converged infrastructure."
"The deduplication and compression are excellent."
"VMware vSAN is an easy to use and easy to manage storage solution. Deploying and upgrading are easy. Technical support is very good."
"We don't have to order a storage system, we can just use whatever we have on hand and roll it into our virtualization system."
"It is easy to use. It is easy to implement for us, and it is also easy to maintain for the customers. It is not necessary to buy some extra devices and talk with other vendors."
 

Cons

"I would like to see a more intuitive, user-friendly UI."
"The solution needs to add a module or plugin of vCenter for clear monitoring and insights."
"In the Hyper Converged environment, some of the brands only support the OS VMware and not Hyper-V from Microsoft or even Red Hat or KVM."
"There are some general issues around component failure and raising technical support. Overall, the stability is rated seven or eight out of ten."
"The product must provide more storage capability."
"We have faced some challenges when upgrading. With Hyper Converged, you have to fully upgrade because there are no incremental upgrades available in this solution. For example, let's say we have two nodes. If we want to upgrade storage, we also need to upgrade computing. That means a full upgrade EME."
"The solution is not very stable."
"The price can be improved. We would like to see support for some open source virtualization technology like for example KVM."
"Licensing costs are a little too high for smaller sized companies."
"If one node out of your ten nodes fails, it takes a lot of time to replicate and rebalance VMware vSAN. This time can be reduced. When a node fails and the data is not accessible, vSAN has to be rebalanced to make the redundancy level of two again. However, if it is taking a lot of time and any other hardware fails during that time, then we have a problem. Two disk failures mean that all data will be lost, and we may have to recover it from the backup. So, the number of threads that run to do the rebalancing could be more so that the time taken to make it fully redundant again is not so much."
"It would be much improved if we could somehow integrate a better backup with it. Right now, we're using Veeam and it's okay, but I would like more of a VDP vSAN solution. That would be excellent. The VDP, at least the last time we looked at, it was just not quite there."
"Because of virtual storage, the system reaches reserve storage for its functions. It also consumes a certain amount of storage, which then results in the creation of a fault tolerance for the system. All of this adds to a lot of capacity being consumed in terms of storage for each drive for vSan. I find this to be one drawback of using vSan."
"The UI falls short compared to other solutions. It needs some development to make it more user-friendly."
"Lacks sufficient storage terabytes."
"The platform's cost affects the business. This particular area needs improvement."
"One area that could be improved is the management feature."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Pricing with Dell EMC is double the price which I paid for HPE. However, in the end, Dell EMC is double in performance. This is not an apple to apple comparison though, as I have a four node from Dell EMC and a three node."
"With this solution, I buy everything together, pre-packaged, pre-installed, and in just 15 minutes, it's installed."
"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."
"It is an expensive solution, however. If they could adjust the pricing, that would be helpful."
"We have a very good return on investment due to data savings through compression and deduplication methods. It simplifies IT management and enhances security, including the end-to-end security of the IT data engine. The product is complete, simple, and provides visibility."
"The price per value compared to other solutions, like Nutanix and SimpliVity. (We made the deal before approval of HPE SimpliVity deal)."
"The solutions cost us a lot."
"If I'm comparing with Dell, HPE Hyper Converged is definitely cheaper in my experience."
"The price is okay."
"This solution requires the purchase of a license."
"It is an expensive solution. There should be more flexible with licensing to allow small businesses the essentials of the solution's features."
"It could be cheaper."
"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."
"The price of vSAN could be lower."
"We are using the VMware vSAN ROBO which allows us to have a maximum of 25 virtual machines. The approximate cost is €10,000 for a perpetual license."
"With the new pricing model, it's expensive for the customer."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Government
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Educational Organization
51%
Computer Software Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
6%
Financial Services Firm
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about HPE Hyper Converged?
The solution's most valuable features are scalability, easy migration, easy recovery, and flexible backup possibilities.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE Hyper Converged?
The pricing is competitive. Initially, I misunderstood and rated it as higher, but on a scale of one to ten where one is cheap, I would rate it as a four.
What needs improvement with HPE Hyper Converged?
I haven't had issues personally. I've heard from other people that maybe there could be some improvements around technical support.
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 Hyper Converged 380, HPE Hyper Converged 250, HPE Hyper Converged 250 for Microsoft CPS
vSAN
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

North Lindsey College, FireWhat?, HudsonAlpha
Read Some Case Studies At Home Cloud CaribCINgroupDiscovery Check out the Rest of our Customer Stories Here
Find out what your peers are saying about HPE Hyper Converged vs. VMware vSAN and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
848,716 professionals have used our research since 2012.