VMware vSAN Reviews

We are using it for the consolidation of compute, network, and storage.

For VMware, we're mostly using on-premises deployment.

It is very well known in the industry, and there are a lot of technical resources around it. This is a big thing for me because, at the end of the day, when you implement it, you need to support it.

It is easy to use and easy to implement.

The big thing is pricing, and the rest of it is mostly good. From a scalability point of view, scaling the storage from network or compute should be easier. It is again all around the cost, and it would be good if it was easier to scale your storage separately from your compute. One of the things that I have observed is that when you start off, you've got too much storage, and over time, you've got less storage, and you have to build new clusters to scale. So, if you can scale compute and storage, it would be good. I know it is scalable separately, but it is a complex process.

I have been using this solution for more than 10 years.

It is pretty scalable. 

Currently, we've deployed VxRail, and it comes with everything. So, support is good.

We used Nutanix with VMware for about a year, and then we switched over to the packaged solution with VMware. 

Dell has got a product called VxRail, which incorporates vSAN. So, it's a packaged solution. We've now implemented VxRail, and it is a new experience with them. VxRail is an all-in solution, but there might be an additional cost that you have to pay to get the support at the vSAN level.

It is easy to implement, but for big organizations with multiple products, it becomes complicated. If you're going to have different clusters for your databases and workload, then setting up and deploying it could become complex. 

Its price could be improved. 

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

We usually use it for any workload virtualization, data center virtualization, and storage. We use it for our software-defined storage and when a customer needs scalable storage. Data center modernization is also a use case for it.

I am using its latest version.

The scalability of the solution is most valuable.

They can improve the manageability of the solution to make it more simple. It is not that complicated, but it will be good if they can make it more simple.

I have been using this solution for almost three years.

It is stable, and its performance is very good.

It is really scalable. We have five to six administrators and implementers who work with this solution.

They are supportive. They are good in their support.

In my previous company, I worked with Nutanix. In my current company, I'm working with vSAN. Nutanix is much simpler from an interface point of view. vSAN, as a part of VMware, has more maturity in terms of features and software-defined data center journey. VMware is more mature than Nutanix in this area.

It is straightforward. It took two to three days.

In terms of maintenance, it requires the usual day-to-day maintenance. It sometimes requires some kind of support.

We installed it ourselves.

It is not that expensive, and it is not even cheap. If it is designed in a proper way, it has good pricing, but if you do oversizing, the price will be high. There are different licensing models.

I would advise others to do proper sizing and look at the features that they want to include or not include. They need to first understand their business needs and then do the sizing. This way they will get a good solution.

I would rate VMware vSAN a nine out of 10.

Basically, we wanted to do more automation. That was the primary reason for us to move to it. Specifically, with respect to the finance part, we wanted to ensure that more automation can happen there in order to give more control to the end-user. It's also used for managing some of the application stack as well as storage management.

The solution makes management very easy.

We've found the solution to be scalable.

The stability of the solution is very good.

The installation process is very simple and straightforward.

The solution could use more integration with respect to the DR solution. If there was more integration with respect to the backup solutions, that will definitely help us.

On the DevOps side, if there could be more automation it would be more helpful. Specifically, we would like to know how to integrate and extend it towards the cloud. Either it is JCP or GCP or AWS.

I've been using the solution for one and a half years.

We have found the solution to be stable and reliable. We haven't really had to deal with bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze either.

The solution is very scalable. If a company wants to expand the solution it can. It's not a problem.

We have about 500 users on the solution currently. We do plan to continue to use it.

We've only really had two incidents that required support, and therefore my experience with technical support is rather limited. Dell EMC tends to handle the support, and we've never had issues getting any help. Overall, it's been fine, and in general, we are satisfied with the level of technical support we can get when we need it.

I didn't really use a different version of the solution. Most of the time I had been using ESX environment, and that was one of the reasons for going ahead with vSAN.

The initial setup is not difficult or complex. It's very simple, very straightforward. A company should find it very easy to set up.

We handled the implementation ourselves, in-house. We did not need the help of a consultant or implementor.

We are a customer and an end-user.

We are not on the latest version. We are using the latest version minus one. 

I'd recommend this solution to others.

I'd rate the product at an eight out of ten.

We are mainly using the solution for our Windows environment. 

We're largely happy with the solution overall. 

The performance has been good in general.

The initial setup is simple.

Technical support is very helpful and very good at resolving issues.

The pricing is decent.

We are looking for more load balancing at an application level.

For the hardware level, we're looking at some other solutions. For example, we're checking out Nutanix and Sangfor. 

We've had issues with load balancing. Suppose, for example, if the physical ESXi host is down, the virtual machine you have handle manually. We need to have load balancing and RAM and processor balancing also.

Hardware load balancing is available on the enterprise version of the solution, however, it's extremely expensive and therefore out of our budget.

In general, we're looking for more features. This solution doesn't really offer us that much.

We've been using the solution for three to four years at this point.

We had some issues about a year ago with stability. We took the problem to support and they were able to resolve whatever the issue was. It's been stable since then, and we haven't had issues with bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze.

My colleague and I are the IT people, and we are managing vSAN for the most part. We haven't necessarily attempted to scale the solution at all. Therefore, it would be hard to say how easy or difficult the process is or how scalable in general the product is.

We've used technical support in the past to resolve issues, and they have been very helpful and responsive They were able to fix any problems we've had. We're quite satisfied with them. They've been very good, very helpful.

The initial setup is not complex. It's very simple and very straightforward. 

While we handle the maintenance ourselves in-house, we have the option of calling our integration partner if we run into any issues.

We had an integration partner that came in and assisted us with the initial implementation. We did not handle it completely in-house. They were very helpful.

The pricing is mid-range. It's pretty good compared to other options. Everything is included. There are no additional or hidden costs.

The enterprise version, however, is very, very high. Currently, we are using the standard version. To move to the enterprise level, there is a big price jump.

We're currently evaluating Nutanix and Sangfor as options to replace VMware in our organization. We want more load balancing and therefore are looking for a solution that could potentially offer us that.

We are just a customer and an end-user.

I'd recommend the solution to other organizations.

I would rate it at a seven out of ten. We've been happy with it for the most part, however, we are looking at other options that offer more features. The standard version just isn't giving us enough of what we need. That said, it;'s a good product.

We are using it for management of all the data that we collect from our customer bases and from our 500-plus locations. There is also the data that we use to manage employee systems, so it's both ends of the business. It's the actual retail side of the business, as well as the internal operations.

vSAN has improved the organization just based on the overall speed. It's a lot faster than what we what we've used in the past. The old-school storage systems were kind of slow and cumbersome. This is much faster. It's much more reliable.

The most valuable feature that VSAN offers is reliability. In my mind, as long as their storage is up and running, we can always access what we need when we need it, that's what's important. It's super important to have reliability, particularly for internal operations: for employee data, payroll management; and then as well for the customer side of the equation with customer information and customer databases.

Areas of improvement could be the UIs. I've seen them. I've worked with them a little bit. The UIs are kind of cumbersome.

There could be an easier way than having the UUIDs associated to the LUNs. That could be simplified to make life a little easier to search and naming conventions and being able to search them down and for overall utilization; ease of utilization.

The stability of vSAN has been pretty much flawless for us.

Scalability: pretty simple. You just add more and away you go.

The data sets are constantly growing, so we have internal needs, new VMs are getting spun up all the time. They're gobbling up all kinds of storage space. We try not to over-commit too much, but everybody does, right? But it's constantly growing and we're constantly adding to it.

I have personally not contacted tech support at VMware for vSAN.

The company has been around for quite a while, so we go back to some of the earliest days of spinning disks and a local, small data center at the corporate office, to the point now where we've grown to have our own data center and racks upon racks upon racks of storage.

I was not involved in the setup on that side, either. That's a different team that does that.

The primary ROI for this is its stability. That's the key. I can't really speak to the cost side of the equation, but I can speak to the stability side, and I know that it's critically important to us to have our data available to us when we need it. Since we've gone over to the vSAN solution, it's been very stable.

When we're choosing a vendor, there are two factors involved, and the lowest price isn't always the most important. We need a vendor who provides really good support and products that really meet our needs well. 

I'm going to rate it as a ten out of ten, because it just works. It's always solid.

Our vSAN setup is used in our development system, not our production system, for ease of use and ease of access.

The benefit is easier deployment of storage. We don't have to order a storage system, we can just use whatever we have on hand and roll it into our virtualization system.

I would like to see a little bit more documentation on the initial setup, and a little bit more explanation on the expandability: How to extend out your vSAN much more simply through the console because, a lot of the time, you have to do it through the command line.

So far, the stability has been very good.

We haven't tested the scalability as much, but the small amount we have done has been very good.

We have not had to use technical support. 

We use in-place storage systems, but I wanted to be able to spin something up quickly, for the development side, for our clusters. Since it's not a permanent thing, it's much easier to go in and re-do it without having to re-blow-out a whole storage system. It works well.

When selecting a vendor, what's important for me are support and value. The support is especially important. When I have a problem I need solutions. And return on investment is very big for me. I want to make sure that when we buy something, it's going to return the investment very quickly.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. I had a couple of Knowledge Bases I followed, but it was straightforward, once I read all of them.

It has provided good value on the development side. Once I'm comfortable with it, we'll start looking at moving towards a production setup. But for now, just development.

I would definitely tell colleagues to move towards this solution. I've had a lot of people wanting to go to Hyper-V, not VMware. I have told them VMware is much more mature, it's got the feature list, it has a lot of good qualities.

We use it for storage and redundancy.

It has changed the way we design our infrastructure. We're looking at a new infrastructure.

Also, it allows us to put our infrastructure in remote locations and still get the same performance we get from our onsite SAN solutions.

I like the availability aspects of it.

The stability has been very good. I don't think we've had any real issues from what we have been setting up so far.

It's very scalable. That is a really good feature of the product.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

I rate it at 10 out of 10 because it is just a really good product. I've used other products like it and it seems to be the most stable and easiest to configure.

Significant increase in IOPS: VMware, on paper, guarantees you up to 3 million IOPS on vSAN. The more efficient HDDs you have, the better is the IOP speed. And since this works on the local storage cluster, there is very little loss of IOPS compared to the traditional SAN boxes, where you need fiber channel connectivity.

Significant reduction in total cost of ownership: Because of local storage architecture involved in vSAN, the price of these are significantly cheaper if compared to the SAN disks that you have in the SAN boxes. The price difference is anywhere between 20% to 40%, which is a significant amount.

Working in the banking and finance industry, speed is of paramount importance to us since we deal in with millions of records fetching data everyday. vSAN helped us to leverage this and speed up the response time from our applications to the end-users.

The hardware compatibility list (HCL) is a sore point for vSAN. You need to thoroughly check and re-check the list with multiple vendors, like VMware in the first instance, and the manufacturer (like Dell, IBM, HPE, etc.), as the compatibility list is very narrow. I would definitely be happy if there were significant additional support for more models of servers from Dell, IBM, HPE, etc.

I have been using vSAN for 1.5 years.

We did have some stability issues. Initially, we faced issues due to lack of visibility of the HCL from VMware and the hardware vendor (Dell). But once the issue was sorted out, the product gave us rock-solid stability.

We did have some scalability issues. Similarly, when we added a new host in the existing cluster, we faced a similar issue with the HCL, but that was resolved soon.

I rate technical support 4/5.

We used traditional SAN technology before using vSAN.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward.

Verify, and again verify, the hardware compatibility list before you place an order for the hardware.

We didn’t look at alternatives.

This will definitely reduce your TCO by at least 50%. Hence, if you are planning to go with this product, just go ahead. But again, as I have said previously, please MAKE SURE that you take a look at the HCL up to the micro level.