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 main benefit is that StarWind is almost maintenance-free."
"You can build cheap, reliable, replicated virtual machines clusters using simple servers with an all flash disk or SAS\SATA hybrid tiered by performance storage."
"The ease of reaching the support team and their promptness for support is great."
"A typical system administrator with minimal experience in Hyper-V, VMware, or Windows can do VSAN configuration and maintain VSAN operations."
"Using our own choice of HW allowed us to price our service to answer our customers' needs."
"Integration with Microsoft clustering has been perfect, allowing us to leverage our investment in MS server licensing to the fullest."
"In the three years that we have been using StarWind, the product has yet to cause us any problems."
"The StarWind tech support is extremely helpful, especially during the initial setup."
"The accelerator card is a lifesaver for speeding up backups."
"It comes all in one box."
"In terms of HPE SimpliVity's most valuable features, its backup integration is a good thing. Its performance is very good as is the whole integration."
"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."
"Dedupe, compression, and replication of primary and secondary data, locally and remotely."
"It has instantaneous backup and lag-free restore. When everything is running, I can bring back a huge VM in less than 30 seconds. That's even better than Veeam."
"There is no single feature that's the most valuable. All of SimpliVity's components work together to make daily operations easier for our customers."
"My impression is that it is a very nice solution. Very simple to use."
"The scalability has been quite good."
"By eliminating dependency on that back-end storage, we now depend on everything that's in the VMkernel with vSAN. We eliminate the middleman."
"The migration of servers feature makes server rack maintenance easy."
"Everyone uses virtualization to more efficiently utilize hardware resources. That's the main point of vSAN and VMware."
"I like the scalability and the fact that it reduces your total cost for storage over several years."
"The product's initial setup phase was very straightforward."
"I like that we could choose whatever hardware we wanted, rather than having to use one particular vendor."
"The most valuable features are the encryption, deduplication, compression, and the ability to manage all of your storage within your server rack."
"With data verification, I would like to know how does the solution perform validation of data being synced between two VSANs."
"Pricing is a bit high."
"StarWind really needs to market its product more."
"Some configuration options still demand service restarting."
"I wish they would improve the documentation for the beginner level as it's not very clear on the web page."
"Being able to run StarWind vSAN on top of any free UNIX operating system to build a resilient iSCSI/FTP/SMB storage system would be useful."
"This product could be improved with the inclusion of new health check procedures."
"StarWind offers the Enterprise-level high availability (HA), deployed and easily configured .maintain and update and with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings a the cost of a Highly Available HCI solution down to a very cost effective point" Having used Starwind Virtual SAN for many years both for clients and for internal systems it has always done exactly what it set out to do, provide a cost effect way to run a HCI storage platform for almost any hypervisor, but it is most effective with Hyper-V, simple, easy to use, -.software monitoring should be web based to be reachable from any workstation in VLAN."
"The price is quite high. The system could also be more scalable."
"We definitely want to see more of the CLI commands come up to the GUI, and it is a legitimate question, if we are going to be happy with the integration in the vsphere web client, which is awfully slow."
"Deployment could be simplified and more user friendly."
"It could integrate better with other platforms. It's a proprietary solution of HPE, so you are stuck. Before I was running SimpliVity as an independent solution. it wasn't a card and software, so you could put in whatever server, IBM, Dell, etc."
"The compatibility with other products needs an improvement."
"Its price can be improved. Customers always look for better prices. It is more expensive as compared to other products available in the market."
"The installation is quite easy but it could still be improved."
"The local support in Argentina is not good. This is a new technology and HP doesn't have a lot of technology specialists here in Argentina. It's very hard to find the specialist here."
"While I like the replication and compression features, there is a problem with them running too slowly."
"It would be ideal if the solution offered some intelligent monitoring."
"The pricing model is sometimes a challenge for us because their licenses are very costly."
"I would like for the next release to be a bit cheaper."
"The platform’s pricing needs improvement. Additionally, there should be an appliance module included in it."
"They should provide Deduplication and Compression over the hybrid drives."
"The technical support, it's not satisfactory. Whenever we raise a ticket it takes a lot of time to have an engineer get involved sometimes, or we receive a less experienced engineer. We then have to repeat the situation to the next engineer which all takes time."
"There is always a challenge with their firmware."
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.