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.
"It eliminates the use of expensive physical shared storage."
"The support has been amazing and quick to reply."
"We test live failovers every week, and so far, everything has been running smoothly without anything unexpected."
"The most important feature is the ability to experience the loss of one node or one storage device, and not lose the entire cluster."
"Starwind support is excellent. They are very fast and have very good knowledge of Starwind and Hyper-V Cluster software."
"StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution."
"The iSCSI protocol is quite simple to configure."
"The most valuable feature for us is having the ability to configure our local storage using a limited number of disks and using the StarWind VSAN software to keep the cluster nodes in perfect sync."
"The ease of managing this system."
"The initial setup was very easy as I had the SimpliVity engineers work with our managed services."
"The solution is scalable and one of the best in the market."
"As a point for optimization on our infrastructure, it works great for us."
"Backups happen very quickly."
"The built-in backup and quick restore are good features."
"HPE SimpliVity is a very valuable and effective solution. It's also a scalable solution. As the customer requirements and application requirements increase, it can scale to accommodate them."
"Its performance and availability are most valuable."
"Its ease of use is most valuable. It is easy to configure, and there is a unified interface, which makes things slightly easier."
"vSAN provides default HA configurations, where if any host goes down, the VM moves around within the host. Even though the disks are local, the VMs moves around with the vSAN disk and vSAN provides a high availability on its own."
"Technical support is very helpful and very good at resolving issues."
"Instead of going for SAN storage, customers can use the scale-up and scale-out features of VMware vSAN."
"Since the storage space is local to the hosts, it reduces the overall response time and improves the performance."
"The flexibility is most valuable. Being able to manage things quickly if something goes wrong is also valuable. Very recently, we had one node that went down due to a power problem, but there was really no major impact on the systems running on top of it."
"It's very scalable. I like that. Adding a node is easy. Adding a disk group is easy."
"VMware vSAN's most valuable features are the capability to consolidate standalone physical infrastructure into virtualization and the ease of management."
"It would be great if the Linux version of the management console offered the same features as Windows."
"It would be helpful to have a little more insight into what kind of performance the VSAN cluster is utilizing; something that would be more proactive on our side, versus their ProActive Support."
"The system performs as expected, but we're always looking for performance improvements regarding the best utilization of NVMe disks."
"This is a great product."
"If there was one thing we could request, it would be the ability to shrink volumes. For example, we want to be able to decrease in the size of the volume."
"I wish they would improve the documentation for the beginner level as it's not very clear on the web page."
"Besides not being able to use any filesystem, I do not have any additional cons."
"The interface of the management console of the StarWind Virtual SAN is complex, and it's difficult for the novice user to interact with the management having less knowledge or training in the product."
"SimpliVity has no file server services. That's one of the solution's biggest shortcomings."
"The solution wasn't able to connect to the cloud, and there's no micro-segmentation. The configuration of this solution is also complex."
"The setup was complex, as it has multiple integrations with multiple orients."
"The installation is quite easy but it could still be improved."
"Needs decoupling of distributed data fabric to run in a hyperscale deployment outside the hypervisor on dedicated nodes."
"One thing that I would like to see improved is the flexibility of the node expansion."
"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."
"The Omni Card consumes a lot of memory and CPU."
"I would like to be able to limit IOPS."
"Perhaps they could provide encryption without having to use an encryption manager."
"I would like to see the availability of more template based VMware systems. Combined with the ability to check and measure multiple and converging data segments. Another issue I've seen is that the tool seems to be slow when first starting up."
"Pricing is something of a concern."
"Hardware load balancing is available on the enterprise version of the solution, however, it's extremely expensive and therefore out of our budget."
"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."
"We often run out of space but we have enough capacity for memory and CPU. It's difficult to find the balance between storage and memory CPU."
"VMware vSAN could improve by adding NAS and object storage."
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 Scale Computing HC3, 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.