VMware vSAN Reviews

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.

There was a significant increase in the IOPS and the cost. VMware, on paper, guarantees you up to 3 million IOPS on vSAN. The more efficient hard disk drives (HDDs) you have, the better the IOPS speed. Since this works on the local storage cluster, there is very little loss of IOPS compared to the traditional SAN boxes, where you need FC connectivity.

There was a significant reduction in the total cost of ownership. Due to the local storage architecture involved in vSAN, the prices 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.

Since I am working in the banking and finance industry, speed is of paramount importance to us since we deal 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 vSAN Hardware Compatibility List Checker needs to improve, since currently it is a sore point for vSAN. You need to thoroughly check and re-check the HCL with multiple vendors like VMware, in the first instance, and manufacturers like Dell, IBM, HPE, etc., as the compatibility list is very narrow. I would definitely be happy if there is significant additional support for more models of servers from Dell, IBM, HPE, etc.

I have used this solution for a year and a half.

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

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

I would give the technical support a 8/10 rating.

We were using traditional SAN technology before moving over to vSAN.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

Make sure that you verify and again verify the HCL, before you place an order for the hardware.

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.

The main thing is the comprehensive data center management type of features. The overall management dashboard, capability to have multiple clusters, link clones, distributed computing, where you have vCenters in different geographies. Site Recovery Manager for failover, VSAN for storage, and again the EVO:RAIL mechanism combining with the type of VSAN architecture that is out there, and previously, the automation capabilities of vCloud Automation Center. Previously, I had experience with vCloud Director, but obviously everything's being transported onto vCloud Automation Center now.

The biggest benefit is cost, so for someone looking to deploy low cost storage, but something that integrates with their virtualization architecture. It's a very good fit for smaller companies who have multiple nodes, and can leverage commodity hardware to go with that. VSAN, by its architecture itself, has inbuilt features for reliability, for load balancing. You could enable VCRE cache, along with VSAN, so it works and integrates with a lot of other VMware technologies.

I would love to see VSAN transform into an EVO:RAIL-type of technology, but EVO:RAIL has a separate use-case. I think it's not meant for all companies either. VSAN does serve that purpose, and kind of addresses the primary need there. At the same time, EVO:RAIL is limited to certain hardware manufacturers and some providers who are kind of combining everything into one package and selling it off. Whereas, customers like to use commodity hardware, like to use regular software, and do things their own way. So, if VSAN continues to offer that flexibility, which it does today, I think there's great significance for it. If it integrates with replication and SRM, that takes it in a really good fashion, right to the area where it can be heavily adopted.

I have experience, personally, as a VMUG leader and as a vExpert in the areas of vSphere 6, SRM, I've tested VSAN in my home lab. I have worked with replication technologies. Done a little bit of vCloud Automation Center as well, and vCloud director.

I personally consider VSAN to be a very stable product. Obviously you have to have a minimum of four nodes, to say that, the minimum spec is for three nodes, but if you have 4 nodes or higher for VSAN, it is a very stable product.

It's all about adding nodes, and the number of drives to it. VSAN is very scalable. I was able to, just for a lab purpose, scale it up to 10 terabytes, and I started off at four, so it tells you that it was easier to scale from 4 to 10 terabytes, and the same mechanisms I've read online reviews and some white papers around it, it goes up to quite a few hundred terabytes.

Very straightforward, you need to obviously follow the configuration guide, read advance, just so that you understand the components around VSAN. Then it was just a matter of enabling VSAN, provisioning all the data storage that it needs. You obviously need to have a Solid State Drive to go with it, so many people don't realize that, but you should have one. That is to allow the performance that is required from commodity hardware to be scaled up.

For our VMUG group, I was trying to set up a lab, and I tried to go with the VSAN for storage purposes. It's a very rock solid product, very robust. Compared to the previous iterations it is very flexible and very strong now. It was a breeze to set up, it didn't take time. The reliability of VSAN is really good, I was able to set it up at four nodes and I purposely took out one node just to see what happens, and it just kept working fine.

Looking at VSAN or a different solution, it depends on the use-case really. Someone looking for Oracle database set up on ASN, is not going to first think of VSAN, but, if you design VSAN the right way, it can host Oracle databases. It's just a matter of how much compute you throw at it, how much storage power you throw at it, and how you design the pool. If you have done things the right way and you have sufficient cache, and you have sufficient Solid State, I think it can be a really good use-case for many different organizations.

It offers a lot of scalability to customers. People looking to scale up in terms of nodes when they need it, it's a perfect fit for it.