HPE SimpliVity vs VMware vSAN comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Apr 4, 2022

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.

  • Ease of Deployment: Most HPE SimpliVity users say the initial setup is complex. In contrast, VMware vSAN users say that the initial setup is straightforward.
  • Features: Users of both products are happy with their stability and scalability. HPE SimpliVity users say it performs well, is user-friendly, and has excellent backup and restoration abilities. Several reviewers write that HPE SimpliVity consumes a lot of memory. VMware vSAN users say the solution has good deduplication and compression abilities. A few VMware vSAN users mention that they would like to see better storage capacity.

  • Pricing: Reviewers for both products say their prices are high.

  • ROI: Reviewers of both products report seeing an ROI.
  • Service and Support: Reviewers for both solutions are satisfied with the level of support they receive. A few VMware vSAN users mention a slow response time.

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.

To learn more, read our detailed HPE SimpliVity vs. VMware vSAN Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"When using new (warranty) servers, you can forget about the storage service for several years. The users will not even notice the failure of two servers out of three.""The ROI is great on this product.""You can turn your local disk storage into high-availability iSCSI storage.""We have experienced multiple hardware failures at one site and the fault-tolerant volume worked exactly as expected with zero downtime.""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.""It allows you to use ANY consumer or enterprise HDDs and SSDs, and that's a really great thing!""The StarWind products have enabled our organization to modernize stations where larger and more expensive equipment was not an option.""Quick setup, great support, stability is great"

More StarWind Virtual SAN Pros →

"SimpliVity has provided our organization with a cost effective DR/data protection solution.""The ease of managing this system.""I have saved time and money by moving to the platform.""The configuration capabilities are good.""​My impression is that it is a very nice solution. Very simple to use.""The feature that I have found most valuable is the backup recovery.""The compression and deduplication ratio.""We like the backup feature, which is inbuilt."

More HPE SimpliVity Pros →

"Everyone uses virtualization to more efficiently utilize hardware resources. That's the main point of vSAN and VMware.""By eliminating dependency on that back-end storage, we now depend on everything that's in the VMkernel with vSAN. We eliminate the middleman.""If we decide to expand, vSAN could offer us some flexibility. We are researching ways to set this up from a new data center, which is located somewhere different from the current location right now.""The solution fits well with my requirements.""The most valuable feature is the simplification of storage. We no longer need to deal with Fibre Channel and the external storage arrays.""VMware vSAN is compatible with the legacy hypervisor solutions and most of the features are good.""This product has very good performance when it comes to virtualization storage and works well with solutions such as SAP HANA, Exadata, Hadoop, and Big Data Analytics.""The most valuable feature is the ability to continue our business needs and have higher visibility. It has definitely increased our business productivity levels."

More VMware vSAN Pros →

Cons
"We just need more integration with Veeam.""Ability to to test the virtual storage are network area and storage speed from StarWind Management Console.""I would love to see more vendor selection to be available for the HCA/vSAN appliances.""It would be nice to see a new UI for the windows client, as it is not the easiest to find settings.""It would be good to have a little more access to control certain aspects within the UI.""There needs to be more visibility on how long the cloud replication will take as there is no current ETA.""We don't really have any issues with this product.""Android app for monitoring and receiving push notifications as alarms or monitoring I/O from any mobile device could be a good feature and nice to have as we are not always on our desk."

More StarWind Virtual SAN Cons →

"The ease of new deployments could be improved.""Product doesn't scale.""The compatibility with other products needs an improvement.""I would like to see it be a truly hybrid-cloud solution where I could take my on-prem SimpliVity environment and have replication to a cloud install.""​I have some worries about the support after the acquisition. ​The support was better before HPE acquired SimpliVity.""The solution could improve by adding better support of the VMware add-ons and a more intuitive user interface for administrators.""Not a lean architecture in terms of anything.""SimpliVity has very limited options for the virtualization layer."

More HPE SimpliVity Cons →

"I think it needs to be more cost-effective. I would also say that even though the capacity is good, there is also room for improvement there. Also, they could improve the security of the system.""Lacks sufficient storage terabytes.""One thing in vSAN that I would like to improve is using vSAN as a repository for files or other things. For example, with Horizon, maybe we can save profiles with UEM on there. That would be a good feature that I would like.""There is a lot that VMware could improve from a marketing perspective. The cloud is still new for many people, so extending storage should be effortless. It shouldn't be so complicated to extend the storage so workloads can access it no matter where they go.""The ability to access SAN environments with fiber channels (or even NVMe) would be a good addition.""The solution functions as the marketing says, as long as you follow certain rules.""I see room for improvement with vSAN in particularly in the reporting realm. Now, with vSAN 6.7, they're starting to include vRealize Operations components in the vSphere Client, even if you're not a vRealize Operations customer. So, that's really good. It exposes some really low-level reporting. I would like to see more of that. However, you have to be a vRealize Operations customer to obtain that. I would like to see more include of this included in the vSAN licensing.""The UI falls short compared to other solutions. It needs some development to make it more user-friendly."

More VMware vSAN Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The setup cost is very low. The pricing is great."
  • "We are happy with the price."
  • "The license is reusable. We can always rebuild it and apply the license. Then, boom, we get new servers, apply the license, and we're back up and running."
  • "The pricing is fine for the work that it does."
  • "When we did all the analysis for StarWind, it was approximately 20 percent less than any of the other solutions that we looked at."
  • "The scalability limitation for us is its licensing. At some point in the fairly near future, we will probably have to upgrade our license so we can store eight terabytes instead of four. We are currently at four terabytes, but we're starting to knock on the door of that capacity."
  • "The pricing is excellent. It will run on anything. You don't have to buy a $100,000 server, with hardware you don't need. You just pay for the license and you're good to go."
  • "The licensing is a bit weird. If you license the standard version of StarWind, it allows you four terabytes. Then, they have a pro version, but with the pro version, the only difference is it doubles the terabytes to eight."
  • More StarWind Virtual SAN Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "This solution, while costly as all these solutions are, was in fact less expensive than upgrading my old SAN."
  • "The price should be cheaper."
  • "ESXi licensing is a big part of initial investment if you do not already have that covered."
  • "All-in license, simple and fair."
  • "Other vendors fall short on price compared to HPE on this product."
  • "​Cost is a factor. It is quite expensive."
  • "It seemed like it was expensive at first. Now that I have had it installed for a period of time, I think I got a great deal."
  • "For most use cases, look to see if you can use all-flash as the price point, as it has come down significantly."
  • More HPE SimpliVity Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The first 1-2 years of purchasing vSAN will be expensive. Thereafter, the longer you are running it, the more cost savings you will have."
  • "Its reasonable, compare with other storage vendors"
  • "Basically, vSAN is a license in addition to that of the classic VMware Vsphere, which is also mandatory."
  • "​I would like to see this technology be made available to smaller businesses, who might benefit from high availability but struggle with the entry fee.​"
  • "Perhaps a bundle, like Essentials, would allow more businesses to make the leap to the product."
  • "We have increased our user productivity."
  • "What made us go with this solution was price point. When you can utilize existing storage infrastructure, and not have to continually purchase new SAN products out there that are going up in price as time goes by, then it's a wonderful thing."
  • "We did consider other hyperconverged solutions. It usually came down to price. vSan was the most cost effective thing."
  • More VMware vSAN Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Answers from the Community
    Netanya Carmi
    reviewer1797342 - PeerSpot reviewerreviewer1797342 (Works)
    Real User

    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.

    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:It is easy to use and can monitor system synchronization and check Storage status. StarWind Virtual SAN (VSAN) combines… more »
    Top Answer:The cost of this is less than you expect. Since they're selling a software stack, you do need to consider your own… more »
    Top Answer:You can maintain and update it with little to no fuss, even the free version is incredibly capable whilst it brings the… more »
    Top Answer:HPE SimpliVity is a hyper-converged infrastructure solution that is primarily geared to mid-sized companies. We… more »
    Top Answer:What I appreciate most about HPE SimpliVity is its seamless integration of hardware.
    Top Answer:HPE SimpliVity offers competitive pricing, generally lower than some alternatives. However, I believe there is room for… more »
    Top Answer:While both run on the vSAN technology from VMware, vSAN needs to be deployed on vSAN ready nodes while VxRail is an… more »
    Top Answer:We found the reduced power consumption with Nutanix Acropolis AOS a very attractive feature. We also like the interface… more »
    Top Answer:We found VMware’s vSAN was easy to set up, configure, and manage compared to other solutions we considered. It is best… more »
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    StarWind SAN & NAS
    SimpliVity, HPE HCI
    vSAN
    Learn More
    Overview

    StarWind Virtual SAN provides high availability and fault tolerance for virtualized environments without the need for dedicated SAN hardware. It allows for real-time replication between servers, shared storage for Hyper-V clusters, and enables vMotion and High Availability features for VMware vSphere. The solution reduces costs and leverages existing hardware while providing a scalable and reliable infrastructure. Valuable features include ease of use, scalability, top-tier support, hardware agnosticism, and the ability to use off-the-shelf standard servers to increase storage space. StarWind VSAN has helped organizations improve performance, data availability, and data security while reducing downtime and providing cost-saving storage options.

    HPE SimpliVity is an HCI software solution that provides powerful data protection, reducing data loss along with lowering the risk of ransomware attacks on your enterprise.

    HPE SimpliVity Features

    HPE SimpliVity has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Flexible, compact architecture
    • Centralized management
    • AI-driven intelligence
    • Built-in data protection and disaster recovery
    • VM-centric management and mobility
    • Simple to deploy, manage, and scale

    HPE SimpliVity Benefits

    There are several benefits to implementing HPE SimpliVity. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Efficient: HPE SimpliVity helps reduce the number of devices in your data center while also decreasing the total cost of ownership.
    • Cloud benefits with enterprise capabilities: When your enterprise deploys HPE SimpliVity, you gain the agility, elasticity, and affordability offered by cloud computing.
    • Affordable and flexible: The solution provides IT teams with the performance, reliability, and resiliency of on-premises infrastructure. HPE SimpliVity allows them to start virtualizing their enterprise while also keeping sensitive data safe.
    • Reduced risk of data loss: Because HPE SimpliVity is a powerful solution with built-in resiliency, backup, and disaster recovery, it is able to provide advanced data protection that reduces your organization’s risk of data loss and also lowers the risk of ransomware attacks.
    • Speed: HPE SimpliVity gives you the ability to deploy blocks and manage VM environments quickly and easily by using the VMware interface. In addition, the solution allows you to quickly view all data centers and remote offices within a single interface.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by HPE SimpliVity users.

    Jeff S., Information Technology Manager at Troyer Foods, Inc. says the solution has “Phenomenal deduplication and compression, good support, and works on its own. SimpliVity is integrated with the hypervisor, and you have a single pane of glass. It is really hands-off. Once you set your backup schedules, you're done.

    A Senior Datacenter Consultant at a computer software company mentions, “The most valuable feature is the ease of use and the storage virtualization layer, together with the built-in backups. That's what makes SimpliVity really useful, and how you can replicate data between different sites without paying an extra license for that feature. All the features are built into the product.”

    PeerSpot user Doug C., IT Engineer at a government, comments, “Backups and restores occur very quickly. All SimpliVity management is done through vCenter, providing a single-pane of glass for all management and configuration functions. The advanced deduplication and compression greatly reduce the storage requirements, reducing the amount of expensive flash storage required.The 10G interfaces between the SimpliVity nodes greatly speeds up VM migrations between nodes. SimpliVity enables "stretched-cluster" operation with mirrored storage between the nodes, enabling automated failover. If a node or site goes down for any reason, the VMs on that node are automatically restarted on the other node.”

    German I., Solutions Architect Data Center Servers and Storage at Tecnologia informatica, explains, “The integration possibilities regarding the administration console are one of the best configurations and one of the best features that differentiates this product from others in the market. Also, you can add extra coverage protection that includes everything inside of the hard drives — similar products don't do this. You can use it directly from the hypervisor, which is great.”

    VMware vSAN is a software-defined storage product that is used in collaboration with VMware ESXi hypervisor and that provisions and manages storage based on policies, regardless of the underlying hardware. The solution enables you to prime your business for growth through its seamless evolution (it is integrated with vSphere and requires no new tools), its flexibility, and its multi-cloud capabilities. As an industry-leading software, VMware vSAN provides high levels of performance with minimal impact on CPU and memory.

    VMware vSAN Features

    VMware vSAN has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

    • Storage policy-based management (SPBM): VMware vSAN supports storage policy-based management for automated management of storage profiles.
    • Software-defined data-at-rest encryption: With this VMware vSAN feature, you can prevent unauthorized access of data at rest.
    • Multiple nodes: VMware vSAN provides clusters that can include as few as 2 nodes or as many as 64 nodes.
    • High security and availability: VMware vSAN offers stretched clusters, allowing more than one virtualization host server to be used in the same setup, promoting higher security as well as availability.
    • Deduplication: VMware vSAN’s deduplication compresses data to ensure efficient storage management and security.
    • HCI mesh updates: VMware vSAN clusters can share storage capacity with non-HCI Sphere clusters and can adopt HCI without having to scale computing resources and storage or replace existing servers.
    • Simplified file services: With VMware vSAN’s file services, backup of file shares is simplified. You can use APIs that allow backup and recovery software vendors to integrate with your VMware vSAN file services, which enables backup software to track new data and add scalability enhancements to files.

    VMware vSAN Benefits

    There are many benefits to implementing VMware vSAN. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

    • Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO): VMware vSAN helps you reduce upfront costs for businesses because it can be easily deployed on inexpensive x86 servers. In addition, its highly scalable infrastructure and quick deployment also save organizations time and money, making it an efficient storage solution. 
    • Good manageability: VMWare vSAN is easy to set up, manage, and provision, without sacrificing performance. 
    • Scalability: VMware vSAN is agile and allows administrators to scale storage on demand, quickly, and efficiently via policies and rules.
    • Simplicity: VMWare vSAN is simple to configure since it is embedded in the vSphere hypervisor. Installing it using the vSphere Web Client can be done quickly. 
    • Reduced risk: VMWare vSAN reduces the risk associated with digital transformations by utilizing existing tools, skill sets, and solutions.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the VMware vSAN solution.

    PeerSpot user Yves S., CEO, Cloud Evangelist at Comdivision Consulting GmbH, says, “vSAN gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources. We have an overall larger host infrastructure, and we split that up for specific customer test and use cases. In that specific scenario, we can easily add more hosts or reduce the number of hosts in the environment.”

    A reviewer who works in Infrastructure Security explains, “The ease of use is great. The initial setup and upgrade process was pretty straightforward. And, technical support is great.”

    Laurent N., Director at Softlogic, comments, "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."

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    Learn more about VMware vSAN
    Sample Customers
    Baker Tilly BVI, CMS Internet, Board Harpeth Hall School
    Red Bull Racing, Mandarin Oriental, Brigham Young University, UCLA, Merlin Entertainments, Sasa Cosmetics, Travelport, St. John’s Riverside Hospital, Princess House
    Read Some Case Studies At Home Cloud CaribCINgroupDiscovery Check out the Rest of our Customer Stories Here
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Manufacturing Company10%
    Construction Company8%
    Computer Software Company8%
    Educational Organization8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company18%
    Manufacturing Company9%
    Government9%
    Financial Services Firm8%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Computer Software Company8%
    Retailer7%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization50%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Government5%
    Comms Service Provider5%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company16%
    Comms Service Provider12%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Healthcare Company9%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization45%
    Computer Software Company9%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    Financial Services Firm5%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business64%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise13%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business25%
    Midsize Enterprise17%
    Large Enterprise58%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business34%
    Midsize Enterprise26%
    Large Enterprise40%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business14%
    Midsize Enterprise59%
    Large Enterprise27%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business34%
    Midsize Enterprise22%
    Large Enterprise44%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business13%
    Midsize Enterprise53%
    Large Enterprise34%
    Buyer's Guide
    HPE SimpliVity vs. VMware vSAN
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about HPE SimpliVity vs. VMware vSAN and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    HPE SimpliVity is ranked 5th in HCI with 148 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 3rd in HCI with 219 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 HPE StoreVirtual, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) and Pure Storage FlashArray. See our HPE SimpliVity vs. VMware vSAN report.

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    We monitor all HCI reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.