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HPE SimpliVity vs Sunlight comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 31, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

HPE SimpliVity
Ranking in HCI
6th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.9
Number of Reviews
155
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Sunlight
Ranking in HCI
28th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the HCI category, the mindshare of HPE SimpliVity is 5.7%, down from 8.7% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Sunlight is 1.4%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
HCI Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
HPE SimpliVity5.7%
Sunlight1.4%
Other92.9%
HCI
 

Featured Reviews

Mohammed Lokman Hossen - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager, Enterprise Technology Services at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Has integrated solutions and rapid recovery made management smoother and more reliable
There is the latest update from HPE regarding HPE SimpliVity. For virtualization, HPE has to depend on other manufacturers, OEMs such as VMware or Hyper-V. Recently, HPE declared the VM essential virtualization solution. In the future, if HPE integrates HPE SimpliVity with VM essential, that will be a great combination. Functionality-wise, I am totally satisfied with HPE SimpliVity, but for improvement, if HPE integrates its own virtualization solution, this combination and integration will be beneficial because this integration can be configured with the cloud-based system. A VM can be uploaded to the cloud from this, which will be advantageous for backup to other sites.
RajeshKANUMURY - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Executive Officer at GniYes Inc.
Performs well, effective, and has responsive remote technical support
Sunlight is a scalable solution. It supports on-premises and distributed deployments, as well as public deployments. It has a single pane of management so I can manage all of my VM installations in a distributed manner. It also has a footprint, that allows me to operate on Edge. If for example, you have a retail shop with 2,000 locations and they use a networked point of sale system, or if you are Chipotle and they have so many locations and they have to use a backend system at each location. At the moment, these are all standalone systems that operate with very little connection to the central. We could, however, connect and create a network using Sunlight. We can virtualize and run with Edge thanks to Sunlight. This allows us to operate and obtain high-end computing on Edge for retail. Sunlight is a startup. I am not sure how many users they have, but we have been using it constantly and using the technology to bring in customers.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"The solution is user-friendly."
"It comes all in one box."
"HPE SimpliVity is stable enough for our business; we never have a problem."
"With Simplivity we are able to backup file servers every 4 hours and restore them in less than 20 seconds."
"The department that ran our reporting in the legacy environment, it took them about six hours to run their report. Now, it is taking the same department less than an hour."
"As an early adopter of SimpliVity’s hyper-converged infrastructure, we’ve seen significant benefits of the solution."
"It is a good solution; it is a good hyper-converged solution as compared to other solutions like Cisco or Dell because they don't embed software inside the solution."
"We saw their solution, saw the backup and restore, the ability to do disaster recovery and business continuity, and we were sold."
"It supports the latest technology of NVMe SSD, which is PCIe-based SSD. It has a very good IOPS performance as compared to vSAN. For the same system, I get 1,000 IOPS with vSAN, and with Sunlight, I am able to get almost 10,000 IOPS. In terms of features, it has almost all the features, such as HA and centralized dashboards. It can be managed centrally, and the visibility of the system is very good. They also have very good technical support and customer or partner training."
"If I had to use VMware or Nutanix, the same application would take three nodes and provide 400,000 IOPS, or input-output operations, but with Sunlight, I can get four million IOPS for the same price, allowing me to run an application on much less hardware."
"The performance and small footprint of this solution are its most valuable features. I am able to obtain and use more than 90 percent of the physical hardware capacity."
 

Cons

"They should optimize the administration stack because it is consuming too much memory. It ends up consuming 20% of memory. They have another product for this feature, but I would like to have this feature within HPE SimpliVity."
"Technical support is not so good. We have some issues with the memory and we still don't have answers for that problem."
"The stability and scalability of the product are areas of concern where improvements are required."
"There are some maintenance features (replica copy load-balancing) that could stand to be automated and/or streamlined for customer execution."
"Now that the technology has been changed, the product stability will always be in doubt."
"We had failures out-of-the-box of our new technology along with a few bugs during the initial setup."
"Bottleneck is the main issue."
"For virtualization, HPE has to depend on other manufacturers, OEMs such as VMware or Hyper-V."
"My recommendation would be to add this technology to Azure, Microsoft Azure so that we can bring it to the market, or deploy it on public clouds such as Microsoft Azure and Google. It is currently only available on Amazon's public cloud."
"Its reporting and dashboards need to be improved. It currently has very basic reporting options. It should also be made easier to deploy on Unix operating systems. It is easy to deploy on Windows and Linux, but it is currently not easy to deploy on Unix."
"It lacks the bells and whistles that are typically associated with Amazon Services or Nutanix."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The licensing is on a yearly basis. The licensing cost also includes vCenter at a cost in the cloud solution."
"The hardware is expensive. For the same price, Cisco can provide more hardware specifications for us."
"The pricing of HPE SimpliVity is comparable with other solutions so the price is good."
"HPE SimpliVity is much more affordable than Nutanix or VMware vSAN...The first pair of servers was about 90,000 EUR, including three years of warranty. It is 30,000 EUR per year."
"The time savings on the administration side of things is huge. We had somebody who was dedicated pretty much full-time to hardware, and now, they spend about a quarter of their time a year on hardware-related issues."
"For the VMware licensing, it is approximately $10,000 a year."
"The solution can be expensive if you are using a lot of nodes."
"ESXi licensing is a big part of initial investment if you do not already have that covered."
"There is an operating cost for the VDIs, which is an additional cost. However, the licensing fee is half that of VMware or Nutanix."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
8%
Outsourcing Company
8%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business67
Midsize Enterprise49
Large Enterprise80
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

How does HPE Simplivity compare with VMware vSAN?
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 ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for HPE SimpliVity?
Standalone HPE SimpliVity is more expensive than other OEMs and solutions. Regarding the software side, VMware is costing significantly more nowadays compared to other solutions in the market. The ...
What needs improvement with HPE SimpliVity?
I haven't noticed anything that should be better in HPE SimpliVity, as I haven't done extensive work on this platform; I have only completed a couple of projects recently. Pricing could be an area ...
Ask a question
Earn 20 points
 

Also Known As

SimpliVity, HPE HCI
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Red Bull Racing, Mandarin Oriental, Brigham Young University, UCLA, Merlin Entertainments, Sasa Cosmetics, Travelport, St. John’s Riverside Hospital, Princess House
Lavazza, Infraspace
Find out what your peers are saying about HPE SimpliVity vs. Sunlight and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
908,800 professionals have used our research since 2012.