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 most valuable feature of this solution is the support. They are excellent and you can learn a lot from the support team."
"Virtualizing data infrastructure with StarWind Virtual SAN improves efficiency and reduces operational costs."
"StarWind vSAN has allowed us to leverage our server infrastructure more completely without the need to add more hardware."
"The price was right."
"StarWind SANs come with outstanding support."
"The failover redundancy is why we bought this product and it has never let us down."
"StarWind is very easy to use, even if you have had no experience using a SAN before."
"The most important feature is the ability to experience the loss of one node or one storage device, and not lose the entire cluster."
"Our storage and IT are now at an enterprise level with all the necessary controls and restrictions being enacted."
"It is a scalable solution."
"Hyper Converge is easier to manage and performs better than traditional infrastructure."
"We like the fact that the hyper-converged infrastructure provides a simple to grow, easy to configure platform."
"The provisioning is very fast. It’s not a problem for us to achieve the goals of the client."
"It is easy to manage; the administration is simpler. It saves a lot of rack space in the data center because you can consolidate 20 servers into three to five nodes. The client will be able to benefit from power savings and cost savings as well."
"The most valuable feature is the in-built backup system. The backup speed is also excellent."
"If you were comparing this solution to VMware, it has more features, and it's very fast on the recovery."
"Easy to deploy and manage."
"The feature that I have found most valuable is that it is easy to deploy. It is easy to create and delete virtual servers. It is easy to create the load balancing and the clustering."
"If we decide to expand, vSAN could offer us some flexibility. We are researching ways to set this up from a new data center, which is located somewhere different from the current location right now."
"The most valuable features of VMware vSAN are that it receives updates frequently, has good compression, optimized storage, and they provide webinars on what is new. Additionally, the integration with third-party products is good and it is easy to manage."
"The solution has high performance."
"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"It is very easy to set up and very easy to use. It is very useful."
"I have found that the multi-homing feature is very valuable in VMware vSAN. It is an easy-to-use solution."
"I would like to see more monitoring and alert tools."
"A web management interface would be good, especially for those coming from other solutions that have one."
"I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit."
"The only way I can see this product needing improvement is the consultation level of the StarWind sales and engineers."
"Updates seem to be non-existent."
"If there was a way to automatically put disks in maintenance mode when shutting the host down and exit maintenance mode automatically, that would simplify things."
"We have, in rare cases, received conflicting guidance between different support folks within StarWind."
"It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers."
"One of the things that can be improved is that today, is supporting VMware, maybe as a hypervisor. But it would be good to have an open kind of platform for other hypervisors, maybe. Like Nutanix is doing, it's very open."
"The solution needs to add a module or plugin of vCenter for clear monitoring and insights."
"Could be more secure and more economical."
"In my country, the biggest issue is probably pricing."
"Data protection and optimization: It is really weak. They do not offer deduplication or compression."
"The solution can be improved on the management side. More management features should be added to future releases."
"I would like to see improvement in the hardware underneath it. Currently, it's a Gen9 DL380. One day, there will be a Gen10 DL380 and maybe they will have bigger or smaller sizes."
"A software-only version of the solution, without the hardware, would be nice."
"We would like to see even more storage capacity."
"We are facing some problems with updates with the VMware vSAN. When we upgraded from version 6.5 to 7, we have been faced with many problems. They have been deploying many hotfixes for this version, and they need to continue to improve this version."
"We do see weird things crop up every now and again. It will say that a drive gets kicked off even though it's fine, and we have to re-add it."
"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."
"The server files are larger than before."
"Currently, one of the available features is shareable VMBKs. You can create the VMBK disc and you can make them shareable between the ends. But as soon as you start using this feature, you lose the ability to create snapshots."
"The biggest room for improvement I see in vSAN is the lack of SAN connectivity. I've kind of joked around that there is no "SAN" in vSAN. And it's something that we've worked to try and introduce some options for, and we're going to continue to work towards that."
"I'd like to see better integration with the Update Manager, with respect to firmware updates for hardware."
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, Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure and HPE Alletra dHCI, 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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