We performed a comparison between HPE SimpliVity and VMware vSAN based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: HPE SimpliVity has a slight edge over VMware vSAN in this comparison. It is reliable, has high availability, and is simple to use. HPE SimpliVity also received higher marks in the Service and Support category. One area where VMware vSAN does come out on top is in the Ease of Deployment category.
"The StarWind tech support is extremely helpful, especially during the initial setup."
"The management and monitoring have been very easy since the solution's dashboard is very simple and user-friendly."
"Support keeps track of alerts of the system and verifies with us if we need help to fix any issues. They have great and quick technical support."
"High Availability is the best feature of product."
"The most valuable feature is the fact that the nodes are Active/Active, and allow us to do upgrades on any node without any downtime."
"Virtual SAN runs on iSCSI, which is free and easy to configure. It's easy to manage from StarWind's GUI console, and it only required a few extra switch ports."
"The solution offers easy one-click PowerShell scripts that are ready to run."
"The main benefit is that StarWind is almost maintenance-free."
"PCX card implementation improves speed."
"The most valuable feature is the quick restore."
"What I appreciate most about HPE SimpliVity is its seamless integration of hardware."
"The pricing of the solution is very good."
"The backup feature is valuable, and replication is also valuable. It is very quick and easy to use."
"It has lessened our burden on multiple different products, so they are under one umbrella. This has been economically good."
"Its deduplication and backup functions are reliable."
"What I like about the solution, is that SimpliVity is easy to deploy and maintain. It's really performing very well. The ratio of price to performance is really good."
"vSAN has just one datastore. so customers do not need to think where to put their VMs, how to design the physical disk RAID, the LUN size, the LUN mapping, etc. when they use NetApp/EMC/HDS or other storage systems."
"This solution has a dashboard that you can log into and control if you need too while the VM is getting created."
"Very easy to implement in any existing environment."
"Good performance, reliable and agile."
"We've found the solution to be scalable."
"The features of vSAN allow us to reduce our operational complexity to a large degree."
"The solution is easy to use."
"It is very easy to set up and very easy to use. It is very useful."
"I would like to see improvements in the documentation area."
"Although minor, some of the documentation could be rewritten to be clearer."
"StarWind currently has a Windows native application that it uses for management. There is not a web-based GUI at this time."
"Initially, when we first started, the sync was horrible."
"New versions of this solution should be tested more thoroughly before the release as we had a few problems with one version due to a bug."
"The documentation is good. However, if compared with competitors, it could be enhanced and made more professional."
"The gathering of monthly consumption and performance reports for future dissemination to concerned parties is very important. Unfortunately, StarWinds vSAN doesn't offer this functionality."
"We would like the documentation to be more complete. Most items are covered, but if you don't know something, you may need to contact their support."
"Deployment could be simplified and more user friendly."
"The stability and scalability of the product are areas of concern where improvements are required."
"SimpliVity has very limited options for the virtualization layer."
"There are some small changes that can be made to the interface to improve it but it typically works well."
"The backup and recovery process needs to be faster. Right now, it's a bit slow."
"The compatibility with other products needs an improvement."
"Since it is a newer solution, there needs to be more knowledge transfer out there."
"Upgrading can be complicated."
"Its price could be improved. It is too expensive for our clients."
"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."
"As a software-based product, it requires a lot of system resources."
"Lacks sufficient storage terabytes."
"There is room for improvement in vSAN's ability to debug. When it's not working well, debugging becomes quite challenging. Identifying issues when it's lagging or not functioning properly can be difficult."
"The solution functions as the marketing says, as long as you follow certain rules."
"The product's complex setup phase is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The ability to access SAN environments with fiber channels (or even NVMe) would be a good addition."
HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 151 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.6, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. 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 VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI, Dell PowerFlex and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Dell PowerFlex and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our HPE SimpliVity vs. VMware vSAN report.
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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.
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.