We performed a comparison between HPE Hyper Converged and VMware vSAN 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 ability for us to manage all of our nodes from the same console makes systems administration very easy."
"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 support team is available to solve any problem efficiently."
"The most useful aspect is the hyper-converged SD SAN and the ease to expand it by just adding cheap SSD or NVME disks."
"The top-notch support before, during, and after deployments are better than any other vendor I have come across."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements."
"I like StarWind's high availability. The failover is almost immediate, so the end users have no idea the guest VM moved at all. We can failover all guest VMs onto a single hypervisor, place it into maintenance mode, install updates, and reboot a hypervisor all during the daytime and remotely, with confidence the process will be successful."
"The configuration is so much simpler than that of a traditional SAN with fewer points of failure to worry about."
"No concerns or issues with stability."
"I've found the data protection features the most valuable."
"Our storage and IT are now at an enterprise level with all the necessary controls and restrictions being enacted."
"Reasonably priced and easy to manage for small to medium size companies that don't have an IT department."
"It is a scalable solution."
"Ease of management, as I come from a software background, and I'm responsible for IT overall. I can get in there and turn some nuts and bolts and make things happen without any trouble."
"We like the fact that the hyper-converged infrastructure provides a simple to grow, easy to configure platform."
"What I really like about this program, is that it needs little space and it works really fast, so it saves us time."
"Flexibility, growth, and expansion are probably the more important features for us. As our environment grows, the more users come on, the more VDI workstations that we need, we can easily expand either horizontally or vertically with the environment"
"vSAN Health is a feature designed to monitor the health and performance of the vSAN environment. It's crucial for us and our customers to frequently check on this to ensure everything is operating smoothly."
"We find it easy to deliver this solution."
"VMware vSAN has greatly reduced refresh spending."
"The product's initial setup phase was very straightforward."
"We don't have to order a storage system, we can just use whatever we have on hand and roll it into our virtualization system."
"The most valuable feature of VMware vSAN is you do not have to use additional hardware for storage. The operation of VMware vSAN does not take a lot of effort. If you have VMware technology on your site, then it's easy for the operational support of the system."
"The solution is stable."
"vSAN's free version does not have a graphical user interface."
"StarWind Virtual SAN could benefit from better integration with other tools and technologies, such as backup and disaster recovery solutions."
"When StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere nodes go offline unexpectedly, the nodes have to re-sync disks fully which takes a long time. We had a power failure and when both nodes came online, VMware vSphere didn't see StarWind disks before I manually re-scanned them form ESXi administration console even though it should happen automatically"
"It would help if the manufacturer provided clearer and more detailed documentation, with explanations of how the application can be installed in various HA configurations."
"Our company was hoping for deduplication and encryption across HCI. That is currently not supported."
"The system performs as expected, but we're always looking for performance improvements regarding the best utilization of NVMe disks."
"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."
"It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers."
"One problem I've had is that I was trying to do a move and it was not working. I was given an error and a message asking me to shut down the machine first and then move it to another host."
"In my country, the biggest issue is probably pricing."
"The product must provide more storage capability."
"Some improvement is required in the availability of the data and performance. The solution is too expensive for our customers. The pricing should be lower."
"Installation and setup could be easier."
"I would like to see more deduplication."
"Its technical support services could be faster."
"We've had to do a power cycle to bring it all the way down, bring it back up for power outages, A/C shut-downs of our DC office, but it hasn't presented a problem."
"It doesn't seem like it gives the performance that an actual SAN would give for heavy IOPS, read/writes."
"If one node out of your ten nodes fails, it takes a lot of time to replicate and rebalance VMware vSAN. This time can be reduced. When a node fails and the data is not accessible, vSAN has to be rebalanced to make the redundancy level of two again. However, if it is taking a lot of time and any other hardware fails during that time, then we have a problem. Two disk failures mean that all data will be lost, and we may have to recover it from the backup. So, the number of threads that run to do the rebalancing could be more so that the time taken to make it fully redundant again is not so much."
"Perhaps they could provide encryption without having to use an encryption manager."
"We would like to see even more storage capacity."
"When you upgrade the vSAN, there are some issues like lost data and problems with the log. The log disappears. When you upgrade the solution, you must have several logs, so if you have some problems, you can check the log server to find them."
"I would rate the stability a seven out of ten."
"It would be ideal if clients didn't need to monitor the solution on a daily basis."
"The price for the hard drive, for vSAN, is very expensive."
HPE Hyper Converged is ranked 10th in HCI with 34 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. HPE Hyper Converged is rated 8.2, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of HPE Hyper Converged writes " Ensures end-to-end data security with redundancy measures and provides visibility into the system but node expansion challenges". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". HPE Hyper Converged is most compared with VxRail, Dell PowerFlex, HPE SimpliVity, HPE Alletra dHCI and Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our HPE Hyper Converged vs. VMware vSAN report.
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