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.
"I have found the graphical user interface to be the most useful thing about Virtual SAN."
"Active-active HA provides top performance and redundancy."
"In our case, the cost and high availability are the two most important factors which we were looking for in a solution."
"This was a great implementation for a small to mid-size business."
"The control panel is nice. It gives you a lot of good feedback as to the status and health of the VSAN."
"It has reduced our overall maintenance and overhead by having to only maintain physical boxes for one cluster instead of having to manage physical boxes for two clusters."
"We like their high availability. It reduces the downtime for our entire organization's environment."
"Given the high availability of the server cluster, we were able to reduce separate physical servers onto one hyper-converged cluster - this saved in OPEX and CAPEX costs immediately, along with licensing costs of the Windows Server licenses."
"The HCI concept by itself is the most valuable feature of the solution. It is a full-fledged HCI. It is the main component. I think this is what makes the project valuable."
"The ease of use on the backup and DR and replication side of things is good. It can be done by a VMware admin with no additional training."
"It has reduced my data center activities."
"The interface is very good and is very easy to navigate. You can find everything you need from one central place."
"The solution's simplicity is its most valuable feature. The usability is also good."
"It is a stable solution."
"The replication from the different centers (the main to the secondary) has been very great. It is good value for us."
"We have not had any problem with customer support at SimpliVity."
"I have used VMware for 15 years and I never had any problems with stability."
"The valuable features of vSAN are that you can get it up and running quickly, you get redundancy built-in, and it's pretty much the perfect solution for a cluster."
"The most valuable features are its performance, simplicity, and synchronicity with vSphere."
"We had very good access to technical support."
"It is simple to manage, very easy to implement and troubleshoot in case of any failures."
"To me, VMware is a leader of the visualizations. I think everyone just follow VMware."
"This solution has a dashboard that you can log into and control if you need too while the VM is getting created."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to continue our business needs and have higher visibility. It has definitely increased our business productivity levels."
"The documentation is good yet is still lacking in a few areas."
"The initial setup got a little confusing at a few points with differences between the VMware version in documentation vs the latest, etc."
"I had to buy upgraded support, which was not a problem, but it wasn't a prorated amount, so I paid for the support, the full upgrade, but I only got a couple of months out of it because it was only good until renewal time."
"The setup and documentation for the installation with the free version could definitely be improved."
"The software could benefit from more tooling to help with initial deployment."
"I would like them to invest time in reducing the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure."
"Some configuration options still demand service restarting."
"You have to do a "full" sync on write-back cache disks instead of a quick sync if there is an issue."
"I can say that the support was better when it was a separate company, when it was SimpliVity. But, now with HPE it has not been quite as good. B"
"The stability and scalability of the product are areas of concern where improvements are required."
"We had some hardware compatibility issues with the earlier versions of HPE SimpliVity. We upgraded to the latest version a few months ago, and since then, there is no hardware failure, and it is better. They don't provide a portal to create a ticket directly for the HPE SimpliVity. We have a web portal to create a ticket when we have an issue, but for HPE SimpliVity, we need to call the local vendor for support. If they are not able to resolve the issue, they contact the global support, which takes more time. Technology is moving very fast, and everybody nowadays is focusing on the cloud base. In the future, they should integrate it with the cloud base for the backup."
"Let us populate the entire node; right now, there are 24 slots in a server and you're only allowed to populate 14."
"I would love it if the solution would auto data balance within the cluster. It is possible, and eventually, it will be likely that certain nodes within the same cluster will hold more data than the other nodes."
"A lot of our customers are using VMware and also are using Hyper-V. Hyper-V is not very stable on the HP SimpliVity."
"Its price can be improved. Customers always look for better prices. It is more expensive as compared to other products available in the market."
"I think that they should have their own hyper-converged system."
"When designing the implementation for vSAN, I have noticed that it requires a minimum of six nodes, and this creates a problem when it comes to maintenance. If, out of the six nodes, I put one node in maintenance mode, then vSAN does not create other VM components."
"There is a room for improvement on the latest version of compatibility with the VMware product, especially for vSAN and with other vendors on their motherboards and driver configurations."
"One of the things that we've had challenges with are when we place hosts into maintenance mode. Sometimes doing so triggers large re-sync processes which can be time-consuming and which have, at times, pushed the capacity to the threshold. I definitely think making some changes in that area would provide some big improvements."
"VMware vSAN needs to improve its features because other solutions have more advanced features."
"Licensing costs are a little too high for smaller sized companies."
"Its price could be improved. It is too expensive for our clients."
"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 would really like them to look at what Nutanix did for day-one/day-two operations deployment: Bringing in the equipment, getting it deployed, getting it setup, and ease of use of one-click for deploying our 30-node solution. With vSAN we had to go into each one individually and set it up."
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 Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series, 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.