We performed a comparison between HPE SimpliVity and StarWind HyperConverged Appliance based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two HCI solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
"The product creates opportunities with hybrid on-premise solutions."
"The fact that we can expand our storage and add on to our compute nodes easily and how amazing the StarWind technical support team is really adding value to our purchase."
"Their support goes above and beyond with the integration of their software."
"It has allowed me to effectively and confidently manage the maintenance of hosts where I can power off a host and have its VMs migrate to another one."
"We are able to do maintenance by bringing down one node at a time, rather than having to schedule a complete shutdown."
"Without the need for any downtime, enterprises can simply grow their storage infrastructure using StarWind Virtual SAN by adding new servers or disks to the current infrastructure."
"It allows you to use ANY consumer or enterprise HDDs and SSDs, and that's a really great thing!"
"Recovery and maintenance are now less stressful and most importantly, it allows our users to keep working."
"Up scaling is very possible, and at any time it is scalable."
"I find the replication feature valuable."
"It's very simple to manage. It has reduced the footprint in the datacenters quite a lot."
"Looking at the way that our infrastructure team works now, we don't think about infrastructure, storage, or compute anymore. The solution just works. It is same with the backup and replication side of things, as it just works on schedule. We don't have to manage it tightly, like we used to."
"The most valuable aspect of the HPE SimpliVity is the DL380 G10. We have mostly been using VMware and Hyper-V. On one side we have Hyper-V and the other side we have the VMware."
"It has lessened our burden on multiple different products, so they are under one umbrella. This has been economically good."
"The most valuable feature is that the product has an inborn backup."
"The way it does backups is its most valuable feature. It replicates snapshots with very low bandwidth. We only have a 50 megabit link to that site, and it doesn't really use much of it at all. Therefore, it is a really good fit for getting our backups done."
"The biggest thing we were looking for was redundancy, with both the compute and the storage, so that way we could lose a full node and still keep everything up and running, and not have to worry about it... StarWind was able to provide a solution for what we wanted, - to provide for redundancy."
"It is the perfect solution for hyper-convergence at a fair price. Our customers have Hyper-V and VMware environments, with Windows servers and Linux."
"We no longer need multiple staff members performing small, mundane tasks."
"The hardware footprint is great. We've got two 2U servers which replaced four 2U servers. Granted, they were about three years old at that point, but we actually increased our processing capacity by about 50 percent while keeping our storage capacity about the same. We've actually been able to downgrade to a half rack from a full rack because we've gotten rid of some of our network equipment and some of our additional storage arrays."
"The hosts came preconfigured, and it was plug-and-play."
"Customer service has been excellent. Any questions we have had have been answered quickly."
"UI Options are simple and easy to find."
"Their support team is extremely helpful, and they are pretty friendly and knowledgeable."
"Initially, when we first started, the sync was horrible."
"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."
"I did not see any indication that StarWinds vSAN is a usable solution with non-GUI instances of Hyper-V."
"The documentation is good yet is still lacking in a few areas."
"The documentation could be a little more concise, but, for the most part, it just works."
"Management of VSAN itself could be improved. A Web UI for management would be great rather than an application installation. StarWind is testing a command center virtual appliance that I have installed in my environment."
"I would like to see different levels of support offered."
"We don't really have any issues with this product."
"It crashes often. When one particular VM has random, large IOPS requests, it will bog down the node, and there isn't enough time for the replica to be brought up. So all the VMs on that one particular node will essentially become offline."
"The greatest disadvantage is the update process. Every patch or release update must be checked and deployed with the HPE solution, which sometimes is a little bit difficult. It is not difficult in terms of installation, but it is difficult to get the patches in time."
"SimpliVity has this thing where if a virtual machine is on the wrong node with two nodes, it will be optimized. However, if one of the nodes won't be optimized, then it will complain about that. It will give you a little warning to say the source is not optimized. Please move this to one of the other hosts. They should just add a little thing in SimpliVity to move all the VMs to the right host, because it is a pain to load balance across the three nodes when all these VMs are complaining and you have to move them to one."
"Its performance can be faster."
"Integration with external solutions outside the HPE posed challenges."
"The solution's price could be lower, but it holds good value for the money. The VMware licensing costs have skyrocketed since Broadcom's takeover."
"There is room for improvement in that there is a need for so many Federation nodes. It would help if they increased that capacity so that we didn't have to have so much hardware in our secondary site."
"I would love it if the solution would auto data balance within the cluster. It is possible, and eventually, it will be likely that certain nodes within the same cluster will hold more data than the other nodes."
"Although the setup documentation was very complete and succinct, I found StarWind documentation to be a bit sparse."
"CSVs require the storage to be configured through iSCSI, even though the storage is local."
"What would have to be done urgently is the adaptation of the hardware to the configuration."
"We ran into some issues with going from Hyper-V 2012 R2 to Hyper-V 2019."
"I would request that the terms and conditions be reviewed and made more acceptable to corporate security so that we could finally turn on the proactive support feature, as it is included with our support agreement."
"Over the past three years, there were two instances where our cluster had an issue, yet StarWind proactively notified me of those issues and effortlessly guided me through the process of correcting the issue with minimal effort on my part."
"The monitoring and reporting console can be improved in the sense that it can have more information on it."
"In the future, it would be nice to be able to migrate from the Windows vSAN to the Linux vSAN without having to do a full restore from backups."
More StarWind HyperConverged Appliance Pricing and Cost Advice →
HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 151 reviews while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is ranked 6th in HCI with 65 reviews. HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.6, while StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is rated 9.6. 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 StarWind HyperConverged Appliance writes "Straightforward to use with good remote management and a simple GUI". HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series, whereas StarWind HyperConverged Appliance is most compared with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), VMware vSAN, Dell PowerFlex and VxRail. See our HPE SimpliVity vs. StarWind HyperConverged Appliance report.
See our list of best HCI vendors.
We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.
