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."StarWind SANs come with outstanding support."
"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 management interface on the software is very simple. It is insanely simple compared to most SANs. The interface is also powerful when used to complete tasks that an IT administrator needs to complete."
"The StarWind products have enabled our organization to modernize stations where larger and more expensive equipment was not an option."
"Integration with Microsoft clustering has been perfect, allowing us to leverage our investment in MS server licensing to the fullest."
"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 Virtual SAN is a very easy-to-use solution that can be quickly and easily deployed and configured without intimate and specific knowledge in the virtualization sphere."
"The StarWind tech support is extremely helpful, especially during the initial setup."
"The most valuable feature is the in-built backup system. The backup speed is also excellent."
"No concerns or issues with stability."
"We like the fact that the hyper-converged infrastructure provides a simple to grow, easy to configure platform."
"The provisioning is very fast. It’s not a problem for us to achieve the goals of the client."
"It provides unmatched performance, productivity and reliability."
"The HPE Hyper Converged solution is used in a hybrid cloud configuration. We assess the disk space and partition additional capacity."
"The HA, which means I have a copy of the VMs always available, and the moment a VM is down, the system tries to power it on again."
"It is easy to manage; the administration is simpler. It saves a lot of rack space in the data center because you can consolidate 20 servers into three to five nodes. The client will be able to benefit from power savings and cost savings as well."
"Storage virtualization software with a good storage management feature. It's a scalable and stable software."
"Overall the solution is very good."
"I have used VMware for 15 years and I never had any problems with stability."
"VMware comes with different stacks like VMware Cloud Foundation, which is integrated with different VMware modules. There's interoperability between VMware products."
"it's easy to scale, it's easy to predict IOP needs, and you can design for low latency using all-flash... Also, for setting up new clusters for VDI quickly, it's nice. You don't have to wait on an order for a storage vendor to ship you a system and help you configure it, you do it all yourself. And the sizing guides are pretty straightforward."
"Its ease of use is most valuable. It is easy to configure, and there is a unified interface, which makes things slightly easier."
"The product’s most valuable features are performance and expandability."
"It's very scalable. I like that. Adding a node is easy. Adding a disk group is easy."
"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"
"We would like to see the documentation more fully developed."
"The documentation could be clearer in terms of explaining the installation."
"Scaling the product is fairly easy except for the computing aspect. It would entail another appliance. While not a show stopper, it isn't as easy as dropping in a few extra SSDs."
"The initial setup got a little confusing at a few points with differences between the VMware version in documentation vs the latest, etc."
"For me, the product could be improved by it being made cheaper."
"I would like to see more monitoring and alert tools."
"Diagnostics information or alerts on the state of systems could also be implemented to give more visibility."
"Its technical support services could be faster."
"In the Hyper Converged environment, some of the brands only support the OS VMware and not Hyper-V from Microsoft or even Red Hat or KVM."
"The price can be improved. We would like to see support for some open source virtualization technology like for example KVM."
"The improvements could be customization and backup efficiency."
"I would like to see a more intuitive, user-friendly UI."
"The solution would be better served if it integrated with other solutions better."
"Though with HPE Hyper Converged, you get everything, the documentation part is very much required, especially if you opt for the solution's subscription-based licensing model."
"Could be more secure and more economical."
"We plan to switch products since the hardware nowadays is a little bit outdated and we need to scale up a bit."
"This solution would benefit from better collaboration with Cisco for driver updates."
"I would like compression and deduplication to be offered for offloading hardware, instead of doing it with software. That would be nice."
"The platform’s pricing needs improvement. Additionally, there should be an appliance module included in it."
"A vSAN cluster must have compression and deduplication to be an all-flash array, but it's not supported with a hybrid array. Deduplication and compression work better with an all-flash array, so I think that VMware should give customers the option to activate and support this feature for hybrid arrays. Other products like Nutanix support this."
"Its integration with a hybrid cloud can be improved. Its scalability can also be improved so that it can be integrated with more than 32 nodes. The maximum number of nodes is okay, but our use cases could probably do with more nodes, probably up to 64. In terms of new features, it should probably have the basic support for high-speed networking spaces."
"Lacks sufficient storage terabytes."
"In a future release, they could add micro-segmentation or security level features integrated into vSAN."
HPE Hyper Converged is ranked 10th 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, 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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