We performed a comparison between HPE Alletra dHCI 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 has provided us with a top-notch, well-supported, robust vSAN offering when other vendors have moved to hyper-converged solutions that are outside of our average clients' reach from a financial and resource perspective."
"This solution made it possible to deploy a new infrastructure in the shortest amount of time, at a low cost without purchasing expensive hardware storage, and use unused servers."
"You can build cheap, reliable, replicated virtual machines clusters using simple servers with an all flash disk or SAS\SATA hybrid tiered by performance storage."
"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."
"StarWind allows us to move virtual machines from one physical host to another, which greatly reduces the downtime required for maintenance."
"StarWind Virtual SAN is essentially hardware agnostic, allowing us to build out a specific hardware layer based upon the customer's unique requirements."
"It has improved our organization in terms of its uptime as our main cluster has never been offline due to a SAN failure."
"The vSAN provides full redundancy for storage while reclaiming some rack space."
"We have the ability to increase the storage without any additional costs."
"The product provides zero downtime."
"It is easier to manage compared to the other vendors."
"I love InfoSite. That gets you a lot of good detailed information."
"HPE Nimble Storage dHCI's user interface is very easy to work with."
"HPE Nimble Storage dHCI is stable."
"The solution works well."
"The technical support services are good."
"The solution fits well with my requirements."
"The most valuable feature is that it is software-defined storage. Also, being able to do maintenance on the fly is a real benefit: migrating off, updating, and then moving the guest back on to the nodes."
"The scalability of the solution is most valuable."
"The vSAN features we've found most helpful are live application migrations and storage policies. It has storage, policies, application, and DRS policies. Automation is there."
"vSAN is one of the easiest implementations of any VMware product. It's almost like click it to enable it, then you're almost done."
"You get the benefit of local storage, but you have the protection of shared storage."
"Scalability in vSAN has been really good. It's very easy to add nodes in, to automatically generate the drives and the disk groups. It has been a piece of cake, surprisingly so."
"The most valuable features are productivity and data storage."
"The number of different ways you can set it up can make it a little daunting."
"The cluster configuration is time-consuming and tedious."
"Other vendors such as VMware vSAN have a bigger community of users, so it is easier to find more pre-sale or post-sale information from users."
"It would be nice to see a new UI for the windows client, as it is not the easiest to find settings."
"They need to improve the speed of the interfaces, thus allowing for better traffic on the network."
"Management tools could be improved, sometimes the usage seems to be slowed down and confusing. A native web interface could also be an option. I love to see in the future port of the software on a general Linux distribution like RedHat or Ubuntu in order to avoid windows license costs. I would also like to see features like erasure coding implemented. On the VSAN software, I would like to see some improvements in the storage pools (eliminate the usage of the file as a data container and use the raw partition)."
"StarWind really needs to market its product more."
"I would like additional documentation regarding possible networking configurations with 10GbE switching."
"HPE Nimble Storage dHCI currently is promoting only VMware as a hypervisor, whereas if they can look into other OSs, such as KVM or Red Hat, it would be an improvement."
"The only issue I'm really running into is we have a SQL server that we're having a lot of high IO latency on one of my drives and it's my data drive from my SQL server. It's not really giving me any good information as to where that latency is coming from, so that's what I'm trying to track down and troubleshoot."
"I'm not sure if there are features lacking."
"The solution could improve by providing better file-level restoration and DVX system options."
"Companies in small countries face problems with spare parts."
"Nimble Storage's integration with the management software could be better."
"Sometimes the technical support would get back to us in two hours, but other times it would take them two or even three days to respond."
"This year 2022, we have the possibility to include new kinds of storage with a high disk availability, such as Alletra 6000 and Alletra 9000. Those are the new storage available. If we would like to improve the quality and the capability and the high availability of these products, we can choose between different costs. This is another benefit from this HPE Nimble Storage dHCI solution of hyper-converged."
"I would like to see it be more hardware-agnostic. Other than that, the only other complication is - and it has gotten better with the newer versions - that lately, once you're running an all-flash, if you need to grow or scale down your infrastructure, it's a long process. You need to evacuate all data and make sure you have enough space on the host, then add more hosts or take out hosts. That process is a little bit complex. You cannot scale as needed or shrink as needed."
"Pricing is something of a concern."
"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."
"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."
"This solution would benefit from better collaboration with Cisco for driver updates."
"I would like to see the availability of more template based VMware systems. Combined with the ability to check and measure multiple and converging data segments. Another issue I've seen is that the tool seems to be slow when first starting up."
"VMware vSAN could improve by adding NAS and object storage."
"The upgrading process could be simplified."
HPE Alletra dHCI is ranked 12th in HCI with 24 reviews while VMware vSAN is ranked 2nd in HCI with 227 reviews. HPE Alletra dHCI is rated 8.2, while VMware vSAN is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of HPE Alletra dHCI writes "Independently scalable solution with the highest resiliency, low latency and intelligence ". On the other hand, the top reviewer of VMware vSAN writes "Very stable, easy to set up, and easy to use". HPE Alletra dHCI is most compared with HPE SimpliVity, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI), Dell PowerFlex, VxRail and HPE Hyper Converged, whereas VMware vSAN is most compared with VxRail, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage and DataCore SANsymphony. See our HPE Alletra dHCI vs. VMware vSAN report.
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