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."It allows me to configure High Availability and failover clustering with some fault tolerance, at a cost point that doesn’t break the bank for a small business budget."
"The StarWind VSAN is always up and allows us to move VMS to other nodes for maintenance, without interruption to service."
"The solution is also quite flexible. As an example, other vSAN solutions that we looked at had more stringent requirements regarding mixed HDD/SSD storage which wouldn't have worked in our environment."
"We like their high availability. It reduces the downtime for our entire organization's environment."
"StarWind vSAN is a great solution to create a redundant two-node-only Hyper-V cluster, both for domain or workgroup scenarios."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is a highly flexible solution, as it can be deployed on physical servers or on top of virtual machines running on hypervisors such as VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V."
"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."
"They offer top-tier support."
"Ease of management, as I come from a software background, and I'm responsible for IT overall. I can get in there and turn some nuts and bolts and make things happen without any trouble."
"It is a scalable solution."
"The solution has many good features."
"Our storage and IT are now at an enterprise level with all the necessary controls and restrictions being enacted."
"The solution's most valuable features are scalability, easy migration, easy recovery, and flexible backup possibilities."
"It provides unmatched performance, productivity and reliability."
"It is a stable solution...Those who want flexibility, ease of use, and a simple support system can opt for HPE."
"The most valuable feature was its time to delivery."
"You get the benefit of local storage, but you have the protection of shared storage."
"The most important feature to me, in my role, is cost. In the renewal cycle for storage, it was about a 40 percent saving compared to going to an all-flash array, which is what we first looked at doing. Secondly, performance: we need clinical data access in five seconds and need to do everything we can to retain that metric. Thirdly, I was really pleasantly surprised during the data migration across to vSAN, that it happened almost instantly whereas, in the past, migrating from array to array was an arduous and fraught process."
"Very good VCG notification feature."
"The ability to have an HA cluster in the absence of a shared storage device or SAN."
"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."
"All orchestration and monitoring are routed to the cloud."
"The solution has high performance."
"Everyone uses virtualization to more efficiently utilize hardware resources. That's the main point of vSAN and VMware."
"I wish they would improve the documentation for the beginner level as it's not very clear on the web page."
"When StarWind Virtual SAN for vSphere nodes go offline unexpectedly, the nodes have to re-sync disks fully which takes a long time. We had a power failure and when both nodes came online, VMware vSphere didn't see StarWind disks before I manually re-scanned them form ESXi administration console even though it should happen automatically"
"It runs until it does not - and disaster recovery documentation is sparse and mostly unclear."
"The gathering of monthly consumption and performance reports for future dissemination to concerned parties is very important. Unfortunately, StarWinds vSAN doesn't offer this functionality."
"I would like to see options for automated notifications of any changes, including, for example, synchronization issues."
"In the next release, they could make some graphs of the real-time loading, speed of storage, and interfaces. Of course, these can be viewed in other places. But, in the event of a malfunction or troubleshooting, this would be convenient."
"Proper training sessions should be included with the licensing."
"The documentation is good yet is still lacking in a few areas."
"I think that OneView should be replaced by something else for the management."
"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."
"Providing local technical support and improving the price are areas this service needs to consider improving."
"A software-only version of the solution, without the hardware, would be nice."
"In my country, the biggest issue is probably pricing."
"The storage efficiency is weak and needs to be improved."
"The product must provide more storage capability."
"If the solution could further compress the data, it would use less storage."
"The quality of the customer service and support depends on the vSAN case. For example, if I open ten cases, maybe two or three get resolved quickly. But the other cases have a slow response."
"It could have some automation. We haven't involved ourselves in a lot of automation around the vSAN environment capabilities. We're still running it using a very traditional setup. So, there could be some plugins to automate it using third-party environments, such as Jenkins."
"The product's high price is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"he list of hardware supported should be increased in the future."
"The architecture of vSAN is not good. vSAN works with objects, such as disks, and it causes problems with availability."
"The solution could maybe improve failure protection."
"If we have some complicated issues, you have to use the command lines interface. Not everything is possible to be fixed in the GUI. This is a drawback, that some things have to be fixed via command-line interface and should be able to be done in the GUI."
"One area that could be improved is the management feature."
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, 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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