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HPE SimpliVity vs VMware vSAN comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 2, 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
4.8
HPE SimpliVity offers varying ROI timelines, significant cost savings, reduced complexity, and easy VM expansion, reported by users.
Sentiment score
3.2
VMware vSAN reduces hardware costs, increases efficiency, and boosts ROI despite high operational expenses and upfront costs.
I have seen a return on investment; it's satisfactory in the long run.
Deputy Manager at Mannai
Starting with a smaller infrastructure and scaling as required allows us to save costs initially.
Sr Service Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
6.7
HPE SimpliVity is praised for responsive, knowledgeable support, despite minor issues with response times and documentation accessibility.
Sentiment score
4.9
VMware vSAN support is knowledgeable but response times vary, with resources helping reduce direct contact needs for clients.
The technical support from the HPE side is excellent, and I give them 10 out of 10.
Senior Manager, Enterprise Technology Services at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
I would rate technical support from HPE SimpliVity eight out of ten.
Presales engineer and consultant at Hybrid Tech
I would rate their support nine points.
Sr Service Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I am not satisfied with VMware support, particularly with the reaction times, SLAs, and those kinds of issues.
private cloud team at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
If we consider technical support from Broadcom, I would rate them an eight or nine now.
Senior Infrastructure Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
6.9
HPE SimpliVity offers easy scalability but may face limitations and flexibility issues in large enterprise environments.
Sentiment score
4.8
VMware vSAN offers seamless scalability, enabling efficient node addition and storage expansion to meet evolving business capacity demands.
With HPE, customers can scale up the HPE SimpliVity solution anytime.
Senior Manager, Enterprise Technology Services at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
HPE SimpliVity is scalable, as it can be scaled in terms of addition of nodes.
Presales engineer and consultant at Hybrid Tech
It supports up to 64 nodes in a cluster, allowing us to add nodes and expand the cluster as needed.
Sr Service Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
If you have already bought it, you need specific servers, and it is easier with a SAN.
Senior Infrastructure Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.5
HPE SimpliVity is highly stable and reliable, with most issues linked to external factors, earning high user ratings.
Sentiment score
5.9
VMware vSAN reliability improves with updates, strong support, and adherence to hardware compatibility lists, ensuring stable performance.
From HPE's side, it is stable, and customers find it easy to manage and easy to grow.
Senior Manager, Enterprise Technology Services at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
When setting up a new installation, it is relatively stable.
Senior Infrastructure Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
In terms of stability, I give VMware vSAN nine points.
Sr Service Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Room For Improvement

HPE SimpliVity requires improved integration, faster updates, enhanced features, simplified interface, better support, and expanded cloud compatibility.
VMware vSAN requires better management tools, integration, and hardware support, with improved stability, scalability, and enhanced disaster recovery features.
In the future, if HPE integrates HPE SimpliVity with VM essential, that will be a great combination.
Senior Manager, Enterprise Technology Services at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Pricing could be an area for improvement, as there are many other options that are very cost-effective compared to HPE SimpliVity or converged solutions.
Presales engineer and consultant at Hybrid Tech
A proper monitoring tool that encompasses both applications and infrastructure would help in quickly resolving issues.
Sr Service Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Discussing the pricing model is significant as Broadcom creates many discussions worldwide regarding pricing.
Senior Infrastructure Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
I have recently used Nutanix, and I observed that Nutanix provides better performance than VMware vSAN due to its data locality features.
Associate Tech Specialists at Seatrium
 

Setup Cost

HPE SimpliVity offers cost-effective hyper-converged solutions with competitive pricing and lower total ownership costs compared to alternatives.
VMware vSAN offers long-term savings, but initial costs and licensing complexity concern small businesses, especially post-Broadcom acquisition.
Standalone HPE SimpliVity is more expensive than other OEMs and solutions.
Presales engineer and consultant at Hybrid Tech
This has resulted in a slight cost increase.
Sr Service Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
 

Valuable Features

HPE SimpliVity provides efficient data management with deduplication, backup, and recovery, enhancing performance and reducing complexity and costs.
VMware vSAN provides high-performance, scalable storage with cost-effective integration, using existing hardware and offering advanced features.
HPE SimpliVity is the best solution for customers because its compression capacity meets customer requirements, and it is a very robust solution.
Senior Manager, Enterprise Technology Services at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
HPE SimpliVity is a complete solution for converged infrastructure, having its own local data store for the virtual machines and workloads.
Presales engineer and consultant at Hybrid Tech
The performance is excellent, handling workloads better than direct-attached or legacy storage solutions.
Associate Tech Specialists at Seatrium
Hot add features are available by default in vSphere, allowing us to immediately increase memory, CPU, and hard drive without any downtime.
Sr Service Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Integration is very important because it makes VMware vSAN more valuable.
Senior Infrastructure Consultant at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
 

Categories and Ranking

HPE SimpliVity
Ranking in HCI
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
155
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
VMware vSAN
Ranking in HCI
2nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
6.1
Number of Reviews
234
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2025, in the HCI category, the mindshare of HPE SimpliVity is 8.0%, down from 9.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of VMware vSAN is 12.0%, down from 16.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
HCI Market Share Distribution
ProductMarket Share (%)
VMware vSAN12.0%
HPE SimpliVity8.0%
Other80.0%
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

Mohammed Lokman Hossen - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager, Enterprise Technology Services at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Has integrated solutions and rapid recovery made management smoother and more reliable
There is the latest update from HPE regarding HPE SimpliVity. For virtualization, HPE has to depend on other manufacturers, OEMs such as VMware or Hyper-V. Recently, HPE declared the VM essential virtualization solution. In the future, if HPE integrates HPE SimpliVity with VM essential, that will be a great combination. Functionality-wise, I am totally satisfied with HPE SimpliVity, but for improvement, if HPE integrates its own virtualization solution, this combination and integration will be beneficial because this integration can be configured with the cloud-based system. A VM can be uploaded to the cloud from this, which will be advantageous for backup to other sites.
ShyamikaThamel - PeerSpot reviewer
Associate Tech Specialists at Seatrium
Managing mixed RAID workloads has improved data protection and delivers strong performance
VMware vSAN can be improved in certain areas. In cases involving our large data stores with large VMs, we experience some latency, not during normal operation, but during database backup operations. We observed latency due to buffer issues from the top-of-the-rack switches. These issues are mostly network-related because all storage data traffic travels through the network. I have recently used Nutanix, and I observed that Nutanix provides better performance than VMware vSAN due to its data locality features. VMware vSAN is now providing data locality, but we did not use that option. If VMware vSAN provides additional features in the next release, such as the VM balancing feature called DRS on the cluster that VMware previously had, it would be beneficial. With DRS, VMs can move easily from one node to another within the same cluster. Nutanix does not provide that flexibility. When placing a VM on a cluster in Nutanix, the placement uses a balancing component. After that, the VM remains on the same host. If any contention occurs on the CPU or memory side, the VM stays in place until contention happens. If issues occur, the VM migrates to another host while transferring all objects to the same host. This is how their data locality is maintained. When a VM moves to any host, it moves with all VM objects. VMware vSAN does not currently offer this option. If a VM moves to another host, it accesses the disk object through the network, which increases latency. VMware vSAN now offers an option to select data locality, but it does not function like Nutanix. This is why some latency remains. If VMware vSAN can improve this feature, it would be very helpful and VMware would regain its top position.
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Answers from the Community

NC
Content Manager at PeerSpot
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
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
8%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
13%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
8%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business67
Midsize Enterprise49
Large Enterprise80
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business100
Midsize Enterprise58
Large Enterprise129
 

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?
Standalone HPE SimpliVity is more expensive than other OEMs and solutions. Regarding the software side, VMware is costing significantly more nowadays compared to other solutions in the market. The ...
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...
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...
What do you like most about VMware vSAN?
Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.
 

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: December 2025.
879,371 professionals have used our research since 2012.