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."Virtual SAN runs on iSCSI, which is free and easy to configure. It's easy to manage from StarWind's GUI console, and it only required a few extra switch ports."
"Integration with Microsoft clustering has been perfect, allowing us to leverage our investment in MS server licensing to the fullest."
"The ability for us to manage all of our nodes from the same console makes systems administration very easy."
"Recovery and maintenance are now less stressful and most importantly, it allows our users to keep working."
"The ability to choose our own hardware and our own vendors for this was hugely beneficial, as we had pre-existing relationships with vendors we wanted to maintain."
"A great feature is that I basically set it and forget it, as everything is automatic."
"Besides being 80% cheaper than the other alternatives, the simplicity makes reconfiguration and support much easier."
"The most valuable feature is the fact that the nodes are Active/Active, and allow us to do upgrades on any node without any downtime."
"The solution's most valuable features are scalability, easy migration, easy recovery, and flexible backup possibilities."
"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."
"Hyper Converge is easier to manage and performs better than traditional infrastructure."
"HPE Hyper Converged is stable."
"No concerns or issues with stability."
"Reasonably priced and easy to manage for small to medium size companies that don't have an IT department."
"Our storage and IT are now at an enterprise level with all the necessary controls and restrictions being enacted."
"The HPE Hyper Converged solution is used in a hybrid cloud configuration. We assess the disk space and partition additional capacity."
"I have used VMware for 15 years and I never had any problems with stability."
"It's completely hyper-converged, so it's very convenient."
"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."
"It's stable and scalable. Also, you can virtualize SAN so that you don't have to have a separate storage area network and can have your computer and storage on the same box or computer."
"The most valuable features are the encryption, deduplication, compression, and the ability to manage all of your storage within your server rack."
"Its ease of use is most valuable. It is easy to configure, and there is a unified interface, which makes things slightly easier."
"We find it easy to deliver this solution."
"By eliminating dependency on that back-end storage, we now depend on everything that's in the VMkernel with vSAN. We eliminate the middleman."
"With data verification, I would like to know how does the solution perform validation of data being synced between two VSANs."
"The only way I can see this product needing improvement is the consultation level of the StarWind sales and engineers."
"I would like to see more user-friendly dashboards in future versions."
"The platform needs to improve user management and the web console."
"I would say that the documentation is mostly great, however, some features could be expanded upon a bit."
"I want to suggest that the complexity of the startup and shutdown procedure needs to be reduced."
"It would be nice to add the ability to use raw partitions instead of file containers."
"The system failovers properly on its own without too much worry."
"This solution is very costly."
"Scalability is an issue because it becomes very expensive. When you need to upgrade memory, you have to upgrade memory across the nodes. Suppose a customer has gone with a three-node HCI solution, then to increase the memory, you have to do it across the three nodes."
"Some improvement is required in the availability of the data and performance. The solution is too expensive for our customers. The pricing should be lower."
"I would like to see more deduplication."
"In my country, the biggest issue is probably pricing."
"Providing local technical support and improving the price are areas this service needs to consider improving."
"We've had to do a power cycle to bring it all the way down, bring it back up for power outages, A/C shut-downs of our DC office, but it hasn't presented a problem."
"The software version on the HC380s we are using is version 1. It does not support spanned vCenter which we use since we have multiple sites."
"They can package it in a way that is specific to the hardware infrastructure and the hardware platform. It should stay fairly up to date with the drivers and the manufacturer issues. The problem with uncoupling the proprietary technology and component capabilities is that by uncoupling them, you run into some concerns or challenges over the poor performance model. These concerns really come when you start talking about high performance, high bandwidth, and high availability types of environments. While vSAN is a leader, in a critical view, it is not about being cost-effective. It is more about the immediate impact of money loss to the business in critical applications where we want to maintain a continuous operational 59 model. It is, however, good for QA/QC tasks. I don't necessarily know how it works in regards to VDI or virtual desktop infrastructure."
"We do see weird things crop up every now and again. It will say that a drive gets kicked off even though it's fine, and we have to re-add it."
"The product's high price is an area of concern where improvements are required."
"The solution must provide better customization."
"I would like to see some of the more traditional SAN functions that are out the now. I can list them: being able to Snapshot on the back-end, better de-dupe, and better compression. Those are the major ones."
"vSAN does not have online dedup. When opening the inline dedupe, the performance will be lower than off inline."
"It needs to be vanilla. There shouldn't be any custom drivers, any custom anything. It should just be, "Hey, you know what? These drivers are going to work for this version, the next version, and the following version after that." That's the difficulty in this. It takes too much upkeep... The main issue is drivers. Every time we move to a new vSAN version, we're having problems finding the correct drivers for the vendor."
"We often run out of space but we have enough capacity for memory and CPU. It's difficult to find the balance between storage and memory CPU."
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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