We performed a comparison between HPE SimpliVity and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series 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 features are high availability and real-time replication between two servers."
"The primary purpose of this software is to create a virtual SAN between local storage on Hyper-V hosts. I find this feature most valuable since it accomplishes this quite well."
"The features that I found most valuable are ease of use of the software that StarWind offers - with the first setup being a bit painful."
"Updates to server hardware are now painless and done during working hours with zero stress. We had a RAID failure a few months back, and nobody in the building even noticed and there was no after hours time used for repair."
"The StarWind VSAN is always up and allows us to move VMS to other nodes for maintenance, without interruption to service."
"We can lose a site or even two of our three, and we would lose no data and have no outage."
"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."
"The failover redundancy is why we bought this product and it has never let us down."
"The pricing of the solution is very good."
"Disaster Recovery (DR) with very minimal effort."
"Has good performance and ease of use"
"The most valuable feature is high availability."
"The scalability is its most valuable feature. It's also able to do stretch clustering."
"Up scaling is very possible, and at any time it is scalable."
"Its simplicity is most valuable. The management is easy, and you don't have to have a lot of knowledge about storage, network, etc. It is simple to manage and simple to implement, and that's its key feature."
"Software upgrades and scalability can be done during normal business hours with no downtime."
"Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series' deployment is easy. We are a tier-one platinum partner who is into multiple implementations."
"The VX machines are scalable."
"Installation is straightforward because it's a vSAN. It only took one or two days."
"We find the setup quite straightforward and very easy."
"StarWind currently has a Windows native application that it uses for management. There is not a web-based GUI at this time."
"I think the setup could be streamlined a bit."
"I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues."
"If there was one feature I would like to see it would be a built-in subsystem for managing UPS backups shutdown procedures providing a way to initiate VM shutdown on all host servers, shut down the host servers, then put the fault-tolerant mirroring in standby, and finally shut down the StarWind SANs."
"There is one issue as far as licensing goes and that is a lack of documentation online for users when transitioning from the free version to the paid version, or vice versa."
"Sometimes documentation on their site can be out of date."
"While it is possible to implement disk encryption in StarWind using Windows Bitlocker, such a solution can be a little tricky to manage."
"The only point they should improve is the amount of documentation available for the user, especially in the first preliminary phase in which we were testing the product on our own."
"The technical support is weak. It is a layered product. It has a software solution on top of the SimpliVity solution, which is built on top of the hardware of the HPE DL380s. When we call for a problem that we know is related to the DL380, we get a SimpliVity guy trying to solve a SimpliVity problem. If it is not a SimpliVity problem, it's a hardware problem. So, it takes awhile for them to figure out which part of the organization should really be helping us."
"We had one call with technical support which was not completely answered to our satisfaction. We did not receive the right answer."
"It is not so cheap, and this is the most common complaint that my customers have. It is a very good product, but the price is an issue in Latin America. VMware is a de facto tool. It would be useful for customers if HP can also use Red Hat or any other open-source virtualization product. Currently, you can only use VMware to manage the machines inside SimpliVity."
"The product should be competitive with other brands."
"Not being able to apply ESXi patches as needed has always been a concern, but it has not become a big issue."
"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."
"Upgrading can be complicated."
"The upgrades need improvement."
"Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series needs to improve its stability. Its resolution should be faster."
"Support could be better."
"With the VX machines, the clients often confuse the hardware itself with the services and resources. VMs are configured according to resources - memory, hard disk capacity, and network. These resources, including memory and processor, are actually shared on the VX Series. So, if the server's processor is underpowered or unreliable for the VMs, many of the VMs will encounter issues. Ideally, the physical server configuration should align more closely with the needs of the virtual servers."
"The user management could be a bit better. It's something they could improve upon in future releases."
HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 151 reviews while Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series is ranked 19th in HCI with 4 reviews. HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.6, while Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series is rated 8.6. 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 Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series writes "simplifies management for clients familiar with VMware, and offers a user-friendly management and configuration experience". HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VxRail, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI and Rubrik, whereas Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series is most compared with VxRail, Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series, HPE Alletra dHCI and VMware vSAN. See our HPE SimpliVity vs. Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series report.
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