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HPE SimpliVity vs VMware vSAN comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
8.5
HPE SimpliVity significantly reduces costs, offers quick ROI, and enhances performance for financial benefits and operational efficiency.
Sentiment score
4.8
Organizations found VMware vSAN impacts varied, with cost savings and productivity gains, but faced challenges in precise financial measurement.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
2.5
HPE SimpliVity's customer service is praised for knowledgeable support, despite transition challenges, with room for improved documentation.
Sentiment score
5.6
VMware vSAN support is generally praised for responsiveness and competence, though users note variability in response times and delays.
I am not satisfied with VMware support, particularly with the reaction times, SLAs, and those kinds of issues.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.5
HPE SimpliVity is scalable and suitable for small to medium businesses, but may not fit larger enterprises' needs.
Sentiment score
6.5
VMware vSAN offers flexible scaling, enabling efficient infrastructure expansion, appreciated for seamless storage and performance boost across workloads.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.5
HPE SimpliVity offers stable, efficient performance with minimal disruptions, effective support, and reliable zero downtime even in large deployments.
Sentiment score
5.7
VMware vSAN is generally stable with high performance, though hardware compatibility and minor glitches are occasionally reported.
 

Room For Improvement

HPE SimpliVity struggles with limited integration, complex upgrades, slow restoration, costly pricing, and lacks flexibility in scaling and management.
VMware vSAN requires improvements in management, compatibility, cost, monitoring, and stability, with challenges in user interface and integration.
Maybe incorporation of automation to build clusters in a more automated way would be beneficial.
 

Setup Cost

HPE SimpliVity offers competitive pricing and value with straightforward licensing, appealing to organizations focused on efficiency and consolidation.
VMware vSAN offers enterprise storage features with potential cost savings but can be costly for smaller businesses.
 

Valuable Features

HPE SimpliVity offers efficient storage optimization, integrated backup, user-friendly management, and scalable performance with vSphere integration.
VMware vSAN offers high performance, scalability, cost-efficiency, easy deployment, and integration, providing flexible storage for evolving business needs.
A one-stack solution from one vendor is the main benefit here.
 

Categories and Ranking

HPE SimpliVity
Ranking in HCI
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.8
Number of Reviews
153
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 February 2025, in the HCI category, the mindshare of HPE SimpliVity is 9.1%, down from 10.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware vSAN is 16.2%, down from 18.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

Xavier Perez - PeerSpot reviewer
Has a deployment phase that is straightforward but needs improvement in the area of scalability
The main issue with HPE SimpliVity is that you are very attached to VMware or VMware dependencies because the tool works with VMware technology. HPE SimpliVity is an add-on from VMware. Nowadays, my company has a lot of concerns about VMware's licensing policy. Another big concern of the tool is related to security because one has to continuously update patch vulnerabilities that are appearing continuously in VMware's different versions. Actually, the foundation of all the architecture is VMware and that is one of the main issues with the tool. My company is analyzing our virtual infrastructure strategy to see if we can move to Nutanix because maybe it may work better and might have another approach. Nutanix is absolutely independent of VMware. I could add that since HPE SimpliVity is very precisely dependent on VMware, it is not open to containers unlike Nutanix, for example. The aforementioned area is a concern that needs to be resolved by HPE.
Lipaz Hessel - PeerSpot reviewer
Expensive solution that requires professional services for installation and implementation
I'm still using a different solution. I only took two servers with vSAN to support one application that needs one feature that only VMware has. If not for that feature, I wouldn't touch VMware. Now, I'm looking at products like Nutanix, Silver Peak, Flexione, and FortiGate. For products that I choose, I don't need a specialist of that vendor. In VMware, I need a specialist in VMware. That's the issue I have with VMware. It's not like I can take any IT person, and they will know what to do. I need to make sure he will do the call, get the certificate and time to practice.
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Answers from the Community

NC
Mar 2, 2022
Mar 2, 2022
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...
See 2 answers
Nov 1, 2021
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.
Mar 2, 2022
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.
 

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
61%
Computer Software Company
7%
Government
4%
Manufacturing Company
4%
Educational Organization
53%
Computer Software Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
5%
Financial Services Firm
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

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 ...
What do you like most about HPE SimpliVity?
The solution's technical support is good.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE SimpliVity?
The price is almost equal to VMware vSAN, making it not much cost saving. However, the time-saving during upgrades is notable.
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 VMware vSAN compare with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct?
We found VMware’s vSAN was easy to set up, configure, and manage compared to other solutions we considered. It is best suited for small- to medium-sized organizations. It is easy to create load bal...
 

Also Known As

SimpliVity, HPE HCI
vSAN
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Red Bull Racing, Mandarin Oriental, Brigham Young University, UCLA, Merlin Entertainments, Sasa Cosmetics, Travelport, St. John’s Riverside Hospital, Princess House
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 SimpliVity vs. VMware vSAN and other solutions. Updated: January 2025.
838,533 professionals have used our research since 2012.