We performed a comparison between HPE SimpliVity and VxRail based on our users’ reviews in four categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison of Results: Based on the parameters we compared, VxRail seems to be the superior solution. Our reviewers found HPE SimpliVity to be more difficult to deploy and more expensive to purchase than VxRail.
"Virtualizing data infrastructure with StarWind Virtual SAN improves efficiency and reduces operational costs."
"The product's core feature of virtualizing our storage is by far the most valuable."
"It also provides a high degree of mobility, as the virtual SAN can be moved relatively painlessly between on-site devices and the cloud."
"StarWind saved us about 80% of our storage costs over our old solution."
"As the client had acquired another company some distance away, they were concerned about having a single SAN in one location or the other. StarWind vSAN allowed us to keep a copy of the data local to each site without asking the client to pay for two SANs in addition to the two new servers they needed."
"The ease of reaching the support team and their promptness for support is great."
"It has reduced the amount of switching, network connections, etc., because the converged StarWind Virtual SAN allows us to connect high-speed network interfaces between different boxes instead of having to connect SANs via the network, then connect those two clusters together."
"The vSAN provides full redundancy for storage while reclaiming some rack space."
"The simple management comes in handy since a standard VMware admin can manage it."
"I find the replication feature valuable."
"Among the valuable features are that it's a complete solution, it's easy to use, and there is not a lot of management time involved in operating the solution."
"The most valuable feature is that the product has an inborn backup."
"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."
"SimpliVity helps us to manage and has made deduplication work really well."
"The backup and recovery is very fast, effective, and easy to use."
"The solution has integrated backup features that are useful."
"It improved from an operations standpoint as we have reduced failures compared to a previous vendor. The hardware that we previously used had a lot of issues with components failing regularly."
"Low-maintenance solution with hyperscale feature so it has the ability to utilize the resources for the VMware cluster setup on which Citrix VDA runs."
"My customers use it for VDI. It has been very usable and very fast to use with VDI. On the VxRail side also, it has been very fast."
"One-click upgrade is valuable because upgrading an environment that is considered a traditional one is something that we never do or are never going to complete. It is very time-consuming for my team. With the one-click upgrade, it is much quicker. There are preparation stages, but it takes less time, so we are also saving time in the daily administration."
"The initial setup was very easy."
"The most compelling aspect of VxRail lies in its unwavering guarantee of sustained performance for my systems, regardless of their geographical distribution."
"VxRail has given us a lot of tools in a one-stop-shop environment."
"With VxRail, we can manage the life cycle of a virtual machine."
"I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit."
"I would like to see improvements in the documentation area."
"It is not very clear within the StarWind Management Console or the StarWind support documentation how to perform maintenance on a single node in a two-node HA cluster."
"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."
"It runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear."
"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."
"A great feature would be a wizard and to include a new disk in the SAN. At the moment, including a new disk requires several steps - some that must be done at the OS level and others in each node."
"vSAN's free version does not have a graphical user interface."
"The setup was complex, as it has multiple integrations with multiple orients."
"Scalability is something that needs to be improved because if you need more storage then you have to add more nodes."
"Needs decoupling of distributed data fabric to run in a hyperscale deployment outside the hypervisor on dedicated nodes."
"The initial setup was complex. It took a few months to integrate and adapt to the new platform."
"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."
"Not a lean architecture in terms of anything."
"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."
"SimpliVity needs to add support for Hyper-V and KVM."
"The only issue which is every now and again is that when you log in it will tell you that there's an issue with VxRail when there actually isn't. All that's required is a refresh or reload. The solution itself works but you may get some bad reports every now and again. Probably once every couple of months; there is no effect to the solution's capabilities."
"When using hybrid nodes, such as VxRail, there should not be compression and deduplication, only in All-Flash nodes."
"We spend around six months waiting for a confirmation and firmware upgrade to confirm this step."
"You cannot install another operating system such as Microsoft or Hyperflex or Nutanix. We have also had a hardware problem."
"Obtaining support was hindered by the frequent changes to the hotline numbers."
"If they can provide deduplication compression through the traditional hard drives, as Cisco does in the HyperFlex system, it will be very cost-effective, especially when it comes to archiving workload. VxRail doesn't allow the mixing of old flash clusters and hyper clusters. When I'm starting with an old flash cluster and it comes to archiving workload, I will also need to attend the new cluster. So, I either manage two different clusters, or I pay and upload my work with the archiving mobile hard drive, which is not cost-effective at all. The main key is to allow mixing between two types of clustering, like Nutanix, or allow deduplication of completion over the period of shared hard drive on SAV. It will be much better."
"The search feature isn't good."
"The solution is vendor-locked and Dell is the only supplier of VxRail."
HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 151 reviews while VxRail is ranked 1st in HCI with 121 reviews. HPE SimpliVity is rated 8.6, while VxRail 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 VxRail writes "Offers a hassle-free, complete package, and is energy-efficient". HPE SimpliVity is most compared with VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Alletra dHCI, Dell PowerFlex and Scale Computing HC3, whereas VxRail is most compared with Dell PowerFlex, VMware vSAN, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), HPE Hyper Converged and Dell vSAN Ready Nodes. See our HPE SimpliVity vs. VxRail report.
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Hi, Refer to your questions if you are a COO of a small company then both solutions would be costly as a minimum of 3 nodes solution is required. Both are good at their places. Let's say, VxRail is deeply engineered with VMware and they have strong integration and performance testing results. in terms of expansion, federation, compression/deduplication, etc., is much more improved. Whereas HPE SimpliVity used its own storage virtualization software and backup software. Whereas in VxRail you can also use any backup software. Apart from the discussion, my suggestion would be to go with simple X86 Servers(any OEM) with Sangfor( they have built-in administrative software (i.e. VCenter), built-in backup (no need to buy any other software), multi-hypervisor support, cost-effective even if you plan to provide SaaS service you can easily do it from your company immediately. They also provide vNGFW, vADC, vIAM, etc. It is an end-to-end HCI Solution with Security support included. Prices are very reasonable(I don't know your region). Thanks