What is our primary use case?
Our clients primarily use vSAN for general-purpose workloads, such as web servers and application servers, though not as much for databases.
We have a customer who is successfully running VDI on vSAN.
How has it helped my organization?
Our customers also use vSAN for storage consolidation.
We have customers who previously relied on separate servers and storage solutions but wanted to transition to Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI).
We proposed vSAN for this purpose and utilized its standard features to migrate their existing infrastructure to vSAN.
What is most valuable?
vSAN Health is a good feature. It is a vCentre portal.
vSAN Health is a feature designed to monitor the health and performance of the vSAN environment. It's crucial for us and our customers to frequently check on this to ensure everything is operating smoothly.
What needs improvement?
A more user-friendly GUI for troubleshooting and resolving issues would be beneficial.
Now, addressing problems often requires opening support tickets and command-line interventions, which can be cumbersome for customers and partners alike.
For example, a server might disconnect from vSAN because we didn't realize we needed the command line to check certain things. Ideally, they should develop a web portal that allows users to diagnose and fix errors on their own.
So, I would like to see a tool in the web portal to address vSAN issues. A tool to fix recent issues.
There are some additional features I would like to see but it's not directly related to vSAN, but I'd like to touch on the vCLS feature. In the past, there was no such feature, but they're planning to develop this feature and integrate it.
This creates challenges for our sales team and sometimes even difficulties in maintaining service on other servers. Ideally, they could develop something that allows authorized users to check out a server, essentially take it offline for maintenance, before doing so and notifying others.
The VCLS feature is confusing for your customers. It would be better to develop a feature that helps authorized users check out and disable this feature before taking a server offline for maintenance.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using it for five years now.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
I would rate the stability a six out of ten because sometimes everything looks all green, and healthy.
But the next day, vSAN shows something red, and the host just disconnects from the cluster with a recent issue. We have to open a ticket to resolve it.
So the stability can be inconsistent.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scaling vSAN is manageable; however, upgrading the entire cluster to a new version can take a lot of time and challenging for our customers.
It is easy, but it takes time to upgrade the cluster.
I would rate the scalability capabilities a seven out of ten. It should be improved.
We have small and medium-sized businesses as our customers.
How are customer service and support?
The quality of the customer service and support depends on the vSAN case. For example, if I open ten cases, maybe two or three get resolved quickly. But the other cases have a slow response.
Maybe they end their shift and don't transfer it to the next, and no one picks it up. I have to wait until the original owner comes back to work.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
For successful business continuity, we have to use Site Recovery Manager. However, customers are pushing for more options. They'd like to see other solutions that might be a better fit for their specific needs. So, they use different third-party tools for disaster recovery.
How was the initial setup?
I would rate my experience with the initial setup an eight out of ten, with ten being very easy.
Deployment can be done within three hours if we prepare all the information beforehand. We can set it up in two to three hours.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
With the new pricing model, it's expensive for the customer. The old cost model was X, and the new model might be 50% more.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Comparing vSAN to traditional infrastructure solutions like those from VMware or SolarWinds, I don't see a distinct advantage.
What other advice do I have?
For now, I wouldn't recommend it because of the price. There are other products on the market that work well like Nutanix.
In your opinion, these are better options.
Overall, I would rate the solution a six out of ten.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Private Cloud
*Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: