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."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 solution provides great performance for the price it is listed with."
"The license price is one of the cheapest in the market."
"One of the standout features of StarWind.com is its remarkable ability to seamlessly integrate with Dell systems. This integration provides users with an unmatched level of convenience and compatibility, allowing for streamlined operations within a Dell environment. This compatibility factor alone can save significant time and effort for IT professionals, ensuring a smooth integration process and optimized performance."
"Highly available storage is the most valuable feature. The entire rollout is hyper-converged and requires no extra storage further than the hosts in which Hyper-V is running. Another feature that has been great is the support from StarWind in general. We have their proactive support package on the main cluster that employs Starwind Virtual SAN."
"Immediately we noticed huge performance gains, even on older hardware and once we implemented a 10GB link between both servers, the sync was near-instant after the initial sync was complete."
"PowerShell library is pretty good feature as I created with APC PowerChute a script to put volumes on maintenance mode then turning off the StarWind nodes together with the VM and Hosts when UPS reaches 15 percent, this way after a blackout or electrical problems when turning servers on again, there is no issues for syncing or data loss due to energy interrupts."
"Using our own choice of HW allowed us to price our service to answer our customers' needs."
"It is a scalable solution."
"The solution's most valuable features are scalability, easy migration, easy recovery, and flexible backup possibilities."
"Hyper Converge is easier to manage and performs better than traditional infrastructure."
"The HPE Hyper Converged solution is used in a hybrid cloud configuration. We assess the disk space and partition additional capacity."
"HPE Hyper Converged is stable."
"If you were comparing this solution to VMware, it has more features, and it's very fast on the recovery."
"The most valuable feature was its time to delivery."
"It provides unmatched performance, productivity and reliability."
"One of the valuable features of vSAN is it has a universal type of technology that allows you to deploy it on any server or hardware. Competitors, such as Nutanix, provides the AOS and can be deployed only on certified hardware. For vSAN, it does not require any kind of certified hardware."
"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."
"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"
"The implementation is simple, it was very straightforward. It took us approximately three weeks because it was installed in four locations."
"I like that we could choose whatever hardware we wanted, rather than having to use one particular vendor."
"We find it easy to deliver this solution."
"vSAN is easy for deploying and maintenance, so some customers can do service themselves."
"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."
"I'd love to see more clarification for us folks who are smart enough to do some damage yet not smart enough to use CLI."
"Ongoing improvements in read and write performance would help meet increasingly demanding workloads."
"The number of different ways you can set it up can make it a little daunting."
"StarWind Command Center's single-pane management solution only works with Hyper-V."
"The system performs as expected, but we're always looking for performance improvements regarding the best utilization of NVMe disks."
"I would love to see more vendor selection to be available for the HCA/vSAN appliances."
"StarWind offers the Enterprise-level high availability (HA), deployed and easily configured .maintain and update and with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings a the cost of a Highly Available HCI solution down to a very cost effective point" Having used Starwind Virtual SAN for many years both for clients and for internal systems it has always done exactly what it set out to do, provide a cost effect way to run a HCI storage platform for almost any hypervisor, but it is most effective with Hyper-V, simple, easy to use, -.software monitoring should be web based to be reachable from any workstation in VLAN."
"They need to improve the speed of the interfaces, thus allowing for better traffic on the network."
"The solution's pricing for the hardware and support could be reduced."
"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."
"We have faced some challenges when upgrading. With Hyper Converged, you have to fully upgrade because there are no incremental upgrades available in this solution. For example, let's say we have two nodes. If we want to upgrade storage, we also need to upgrade computing. That means a full upgrade EME."
"Scalability is an issue because it becomes very expensive. When you need to upgrade memory, you have to upgrade memory across the nodes. Suppose a customer has gone with a three-node HCI solution, then to increase the memory, you have to do it across the three nodes."
"If the solution could further compress the data, it would use less storage."
"The solution can be improved on the management side. More management features should be added to future releases."
"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."
"The solution is not very stable."
"It is an expensive solution."
"VMware vSAN could improve by adding NAS and object storage."
"I'd like to see better integration with the Update Manager, with respect to firmware updates for hardware."
"Based on my testing, I would like to expand deduplication to include hybrid deployments and not just for all-flash deployments."
"The solution functions as the marketing says, as long as you follow certain rules."
"I would like to see a little bit more documentation on the initial setup, and a little bit more explanation on the expandability: How to extend out your vSAN much more simply through the console because, a lot of the time, you have to do it through the command line."
"I would love to see vSAN integrate Persistent Memory and NVDIMMs. I know they're supposed to be working on an elastic tier so that we don't have the issues with destaging from the cache to the capacity. Those are the things that I'm interested in."
"Its price could be improved. It is too expensive for our clients."
HPE Hyper Converged is ranked 11th in HCI with 34 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 226 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, HPE SimpliVity, Dell PowerFlex, 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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