HPE SimpliVity vs. SUSE Harvester

SimpliVity Omnicube is well suited in any environment. Especially if you are not currently using any VMware or Hyper-V products. It is a great gateway into the virtualization of your data center. For environments where VMware is currently being used, SimpliVity will be a great addition. Less cabling is required. Better performance is guaranteed. Two boxes are required as they work as a high availability pair. As the years go by you can simply just add a box or two to grow your environment. You can also get them configured with NVidia Grid cards to bring graphical performance to the VDI environment.

Incentivized

It's great for provisioning any kind of virtual servers, but for now, we use it to provision only servers for Rancher managed Kubernetes clusters. But we are considering to provision also virtual servers for all kinds of needs on SUSE Harvester in the near future, as it's getting more and more mature with every release.

• HPE SimpliVity has built in incremental backups, and the restores are incredibly fast. I have seen 2TB VMs restored in 20 seconds.
• HPE SimpliVity has also made DR/BC a possibility. We have purchased and off-site DR box at a fraction of what tradition DR would cost.

Incentivized

• Fast to deploy new virtual machines
• It's easy to use
• Stable and ready for production
• Free and open source
• Has a strong community

• Upgrades are better than they used to be, but still complex.
• Make existing RapidDR product integral, versus a separate licensed component.

Incentivized

• It takes expertise to set up SUSE Harvester for production
• You need to get used to SUSE Harvester to be as "fluent" as in VMWare ESXi
• You need to well prepare for system upgrades

It sits nicely ontop of VMWare and is easy enough to use. Some improvements to the UI could be done, such as placing buttons where it is expected to have them not in unusual places, so you have to hunt for them. The backup and restore is intuitive and makes things super easy if you need to do a quick rollback. Space savings on multiple VMs and backups means we are backing up more than we need which gives us confidence in what we do. Updating the system is also fairly easy and their support has always been fantastic. They will contact us if they detect any issues, usually before we notice them!

Incentivized

Support is very good. With proactive support, you are supported by an engineer in North America who answers the phone and immediately begins assisting with your issue. The folks I have dealt with in the last several years have been very skilled and it is rare to have a ticket open for more than a day or two. Issues affecting production are dealt with appropriately and are escalated within the support organization.

Incentivized

There were not many others > 4 years ago that stacked up. Nutanix at the time just was too pricey compared to what HPE SimpliVity offered.

Incentivized

We used ESXi for years and were happy with it. Then we implemented Rancher managed Kubernetes clusters with nodes provisioned on VMware ESXi. Later, when SUSE Harvester came out, we started to provision SUSE Rancher nodes on Harvester. Both VMware ESXi and SUSE Harvester are great products, and I think - we are keeping both, at least for now, when SUSE Harvester is a young project.

• We have been able to go from spending 53L per annum on backups to 23K with the HPE SimpliVity Solution
• When not needing Servers, Storage, and networking and combining it all into the one we have saved a considerable amount of space and money.
• The DR and backup confidence we have has meant we have been able to reduce risk and meet our cyber objectives and RPO / RTO times.

Incentivized

• We can provision more virtual servers
• It's cheaper than competitor products (tbh - it's free, if you don't need support)
• It's easy to manage when you get used to it