VMware vSAN Reviews

We mainly use vSAN for two purposes. One is to improve application performance with the HCI. The second is to migrate customers from legacy storage to high-speed SSD-based infrastructure. They are moving the computer network and storage capacity together. 

The vSAN features we've found most helpful are live application migrations and storage policies. It has storage, policies, application, and DRS policies. Automation is there. 

Also, if a customer wants to go for a VMware stack, vSAN has flexible, completely integrated solutions for two clouds. Stretched Cluster, vMotion, VXLAN—there are so many features. 

We are an IT solution provider, and we've been using VMware for 15 years. 

I would say vSAN is stable. 

Once you develop all three of your stacks, you can plug in the rack servers and all. If you are increasing in parallel, vSAN automatically increases the overall computing capacity of the IT infrastructure in terms of network storage and what you can compute.

Technical support is also good. I would rate VMware support eight out of 10 because nobody is perfect.

Setting up vSAN isn't too tricky. All HCI providers—Microsoft, Cisco, and VMware—have very smooth implementation except for Microsoft storage, which is complex. 

Maintenance is required. Sometimes hard disks crash, but thanks to the mobility and abstraction of the software from the hardware, we can migrate the entire infrastructure layer to some spare PC's main server and perform maintenance. This is the standard patching practice in the industry.

The pricing model is sometimes a challenge for us because their licenses are very costly.

I rate VMware vSAN nine out of 10. I am a VMware fanatic. As a solution architect, I've designed solutions for many customers. Clients have personal preferences, and they're generally swayed by what the vendors tell them, but my perspective is purely technical. If you are going for features, scalability, and performance, VMware is the best solution. 

It's not dependent on any vendor. The VMware layer is there, and VMware is required, but it saves a lot of costs and provides flexibility. Let's say I bought around 10 or 15 servers, and I'm not satisfied with the performance. I can change my server and migrate all my workloads to the new servers in the future.

VMware has an edge in terms of computing and networking because if we are going for a VMware infrastructure solution, there's a storage layer, so it can work with any kind of server or vendor. Suppose I buy some of my servers from Dell, some from HP, and a few from various companies. VMware gives you the flexibility to work with any vendor, networking, switches, and storage. They can come together in a complete software layer. I can have five servers from five different vendors. If I don't like one, I can plug in a server from any vendor in the stack, and it'll work. 

We use it for our whole infrastructure. We use it for about 50 servers.

We are using its latest version.

We use it on three hosts, and we find it very easy to administer.

It is user-friendly, and its performance is good.

It could be cheaper.

We have been using it for two years.

Its stability is good. Its performance is good. We haven't had any breakdown in the last two years. We are very satisfied with the solution.

At the moment, we have a limit because we host 50 servers. We could have a bit more memory, and we have to buy it.

There are 60 users who are using all the servers. Its usage is moderate.

Normally, when we have a problem, we contact the consultant who had set up the system. He can usually fix the problem, but there haven't been many problems since we set up the system.

We used VMware but not vSAN.

Its setup was done by a consultant. It took about one or two days, but I don't remember exactly.

In terms of maintenance, it doesn't require much. We have to update it once in a while. It takes about two or three days a month.

We don't look at these figures. We buy a system and use it. We don't look at the figures like ROI.

It could be cheaper.

We are very satisfied with this solution. I would advise others to go ahead and just use it.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. It is a good product.

We use it for commoditization and cost-effectiveness. We use it only to be able to spin up instances for monitoring and to do some application testing for other contracts. We are using the latest version.

It uncoupled the idea of proprietary technology and component capabilities. It is basically a proprietary technology for a cost-effective infrastructure. 

They can package it in a way that is specific to the hardware infrastructure and the hardware platform. It should stay fairly up to date with the drivers and the manufacturer issues.

The problem with uncoupling the proprietary technology and component capabilities is that by uncoupling them, you run into some concerns or challenges over the poor performance model. These concerns really come when you start talking about high performance, high bandwidth, and high availability types of environments. While vSAN is a leader, in a critical view, it is not about being cost-effective. It is more about the immediate impact of money loss to the business in critical applications where we want to maintain a continuous operational 59 model. It is, however, good for QA/QC tasks. I don't necessarily know how it works in regards to VDI or virtual desktop infrastructure.

I have been using VMware vSAN for one and a half years.

It is fairly good.

I wouldn't really be able to comment on that because we don't really have enough of an environment to understand what the cost of scale would look like. Our customers are small to medium enterprises.

They are pretty good. I would rate them a seven out of ten. 

We didn't use any solution previously. We just had monolithic storage. We just wanted to test this solution out.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward. You just need to do a level of due diligence before you do the installation. You can run into issues depending upon the compatibility with drivers.

It is fairly cost-effective for entry to mid-level performance based on the underlying hardware components.

I would advise doing your homework and making sure that it scales according to your expectations, performance, and ownership cost.

DataCore is a company that competes against them. DataCore is more focused, whereas VMware is wide. DataCore is a little bit better in terms of due diligence and information. vSAN is one of the many products based on the VMware industry, whereas DataCore is very focused and very niche. They've been doing virtualization since 1986.

I would rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten.

Our primary use case for vSAN has been our branch locations and multiple different office locations. We are running vSAN as an alternative to external storage arrays, and it's working really well to provide us with data storage at these branch sites.

The most valuable features of vSAN are its simplicity to deploy and that we can use commodity disks in our servers without complexity or need for external storage arrays or storage specialists on our teams. It's part of our vSphere admin's duties as opposed to storage experts.

The features of vSAN allow us to reduce our operational complexity to a large degree. It's a single pane of glass for the administrator, and we're able to somewhat reduce costs, other than the fact that vSAN is somewhat expensive to license.

I see room for improvement for vSAN just around general hardware compatibility and expanding that sort of matrix. It's pretty wide already, but everything else within vSAN seems to work really well. It is very well-integrated. 

I don't see a lot to complain about at this point.

Stability with vSAN has been really good. We've had very few issues. When we have had maintenance issues, the vSAN has come back and healed them automatically for us. I don't think that we've had to actually engage support a single time in the six months that we've been running vSAN in our corporate office.

I can't really speak to scalability. We have a fairly limited deployment at this point with three nodes, so it's a bare minimum sort of configuration.

We have not had to engage technical support for vSAN. At this point, we've been able to solve all the problems or basically work through the GUI intuitively to be able to resolve anything that has happened.

The decision to switch away from standard array to vSAN was a fairly simple one for us. We had been decreasing the amount of operations that we do inside of our branch sites. For the sites which remain, vSAN is a good fit versus the legacy Dell EMC VNX arrays that we had been deploying. 

We are finding that vSAN is a lot more scalable and adaptable, because we can go in with hybrid arrays for our lower-end storage needs or with all-flash versions of vSAN for places where we need more performance, and it's coming in at a lower cost point than an actual traditional array.

The initial setup for vSAN was extremely simple. There are some concepts that you need to understand before you go in, install, and click the buttons, but once you have your drives configured and inside of the individual nodes, the configuration takes just a few minutes. Everything gets done and orchestrated for you directly from the vSphere or vCenter consoles.

If I had to rate vSAN, I would give it a nine out of ten.

When we're choosing a vendor, we're looking at the ability for the vendor to be in business:

• The viability of the vendor
• Its reputation in the marketplace
• The technical solution.

These have a lot to do with our decision to work with a particular vendor. We typically seek out the best-of-breed solutions and try to adhere to those. At the same time, we try to work with the same vendors over and over, because we have existing relationships to leverage and existing expertise around the solutions that are adjacent to what we may be evaluating.

The primary use case is all of our VMware workloads. In terms of performance, it does alright with the general workloads. I've had some issues with the dupe clusters, but that's just the right-sizing overwriting the cache.

It has helped break down the silos, and we have not needed a separate storage team since the introduction of vSAN.

The most valuable feature is the simplification of storage. We no longer need to deal with Fibre Channel and the external storage arrays.

There are features that we could use that are coming out: File Services, data backup, and a better way to do Maintenance Mode with vSAN, which takes a while.

So far, except for a couple glitches in past revisions, the stability has been alright. We had some issues with dedupe and compression in 6.2, where we had to delete all the storage off of it and recreate the storage groups. But besides that, it's been working well.

It scales really well. However, we're going to be in need of some, not external storage, but ways to expand storage without adding additional nodes to the cluster.

We're an MCS customer with VMware so we get great support.

For HCI, we didn't have anything else in place. For servers, this was our introduction to HCI. We have other products for VDI, but not for server workloads.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

If you're going to run vSAN, make sure that you stick to the HCL and that your firmware and your drivers match what's on the HCL before you implement it or go live with it.

When selecting a vendor, for us, support is number one, the support that we can get from them. The other factor would be the forward-looking direction of the company.

If you really want to squeeze all of the value out of this solution, it should deployed in an all-flash configuration. The all-flash vSAN solution allows customers to take advantage of newer features such as erasure coding, deduplication and compression, greater swap file efficiency and other enhanced management capabilities.

The erasure coding (aka RAID-5/6) feature increases storage capacity efficiency compared to the default RAID-1 fault tolerance method that consumes more space but provides the best performance. Some virtual workloads do not require all of the performance provided by RAID-1. An administrator simply defines a capacity-based storage policy configured for RAID-5/6, which is then quickly applied to the VMs that would require it.

vSAN is a very cost-effective solution for just about any data center. It is very easy to deploy, scale and manage. The entire solution is built on commodity hardware, so customers do not have to break the bank (or budget) to invest in this technology compared to a much more costly centralized storage array.

Snapshot management is something that continues to improve with each release of vSAN. Earlier versions experienced performance degradation, but each version gets more and more efficient with snapshots. The new snapshot format known as “vsanSparse” was introduced in vSAN 6.0, which replaced the traditional “VMFSsparse” formats which involved redo logs.

I have been working with VMware vSAN for quite some time now, dating back to the old vSphere Storage Appliance and then vSAN in vSphere 5.5. It has come a long way in a short period of time with many improvements.

Anytime I have encountered issues with stability, it usually was the result of a poor design or poor implementation. If you are looking to deploy VMware vSAN properly aligned to your business needs, you should consider a vSAN assessment before anything else. Properly sizing and spec’ing the solution will ensure stability.

Scalability is not a major issue with vSAN. The latest version can scale up to 64 nodes per vSAN-enabled cluster. The nodes can be configured to be very dense when it comes to CPU, memory and local disk configurations. A majority of the 2U servers out there contain up to 24 slots (SSD or HDD). All-flash configurations provide more disk capacity thus making the solution more dense. Scaling the solution is also very easy. Scale up or scale out; it all depends on how the solution was initially sized during the design phase.

The stability of the solution has limited the number of times that I have been on a support call for vSAN. The handful of times that I have had to call VMware for support on vSAN, the support experience was phenomenal. The support staff responded swiftly and were very knowledgeable.

I did not previously use a different solution but there are various solutions out there in the hyper-converged market that work very well.

The actual implementation of vSAN is very easy to do. Once the equipment is racked, stacked, powered on and installed with ESXi, the vSAN cluster can be up and running very quickly. To avoid any hiccups, it should be properly sized and designed.

Review all of the options available with each vSAN version (Standard, Advanced, Enterprise, ROBO) and look at the solution from a “long-term” perspective. One example would be a vSAN solution that will eventually span multiple sites. The primary site is ready now but the second and third sites are a year or so away from being production ready. In this case, I would recommend to my customer the Enterprise Edition, so they can take advantage of the stretched cluster feature. Once the other sites are ready, the stretched cluster vSAN can be quickly deployed because the proper licensing is already in place.

I would certainly consider other options, but I apply that logic to any solution. Always weigh the pros and cons of the solution that you are looking for. Does it satisfy your solution requirements? Does it fit with the long term goals? What type of workloads are being deployed? Cloud integration or some type of automation required? Many factors can and will come into play with choosing the proper hyper-converged solution. Look very closely at each one and do a comparison to determine which solution aligns with your needs the most. Once you have narrowed things down to two or three solutions you can then use the results of the assessment to assist with the final decision.

Invest the time and resources to properly design and size vSAN early on, long before hardware is purchased. It is very important to ensuring stability and its overall functionality. Contact a trusted solution provider or expert and evaluate the existing infrastructure or environment to determine the correct hardware and software configuration. Lastly, VMware is very consistent with releasing up-to-date ready node configurations that are certified and tested for vSAN functionality. Adhere to those guidelines and the solution will be successful.

We have a private cloud that we host in our data center. All of our servers are on VSAN and we have customer servers that we host in our data center on our hardware that is on top of VSAN.

Data store: you don't have to carve out ones and ones and ones and then map from the data stores and data stores and data stores. Good performance.

It makes it really modular too so we can grow as needed, that's actually the case that I submitted to do this talk was about another customer that we host in our rack at our data center wanted to do small entry, have a small entry footprint but then grow as their business acquired other business.

Benefits are being able to grow as needed. We don't have to drop half a million on a SAN for all the storage that we may or may not use and it just eases the pain of a lot of storage. You still have to deal with the, the networking of it, making sure that everything is networked together, but that radically simplifies the storage administration piece.

Some of the problems that I have with, traditional SANS whenever I'm administering them is, whenever I do edit operations I have to be extremely careful. It requires a lot of planning up front to deploy the LUNs. To make sure everything matches all the way through from end to end. So that when I know have a data store, you know, one, whenever I turn it off on the SAN after I’m done using it, I'm not turning off the wrong one and taking down the entire environment. Things like that. You know, I don't have to deal with that 'cause it's just one data store and it does what I need it to do.

So, another big use case that we do is Horizon View for VDI customers. We use it internally and the contrast between our internal use, which is off of an NFS store, contrasting that with a VSAN, deployment is like night and day. Our internal one is kind of slow and kludgy. It's not a big central part of our day to day work so it doesn't impact us as much but I can see how big the difference is between the performance of a Horizon View deployment on an NFS target is compared to how tightly it works with VSAN and how much performance and throughput VSAN does with the, the read and write caching with the flash drives. We haven't got to mess a lot with the flash, all-flash VSAN, yet, but I'm sure we will soon here.

The dedupe is awesome. The stretch clustering is crazy, in my opinion. It's really cool. We've been talking about it internally and have lot of school districts and it actually makes a lot of sense for a school district because they have the fiber runs between the buildings so they can hit the five millisecond, ten, twenty, forty, a gig, requirements of the network and it would be a good use case for them I feel like. We have to look at the reality of it, of course, cause it got announced like yesterday, but it's really exciting to see some of this stuff and especially dedupe. Dedupe for root would be really cool. It's really kind of taking that mindset that I see a lot of people have that VSAN isn't, you know enterprise ready and putting it to rest.

We are a partner with VMware and we do deployments services. Do a lot of professional services that's a lot of what we do and then we're growing our managed services to be able to incorporate VMware monitoring and alerting both, proactive and reactive, to be able to stabilize customer environments and give them the best performance that they can out of their products.

Starting out there was some stability issues but I don't see them the same way that I did. There were bugs, there’s firmware, the HCL cam, seemed a little fluid but things have stabilized significantly. There haven't been any major outages that were something that I would say wasn't our fault or wasn't due to like a configuration error somewhere in the stack so, and the best part about it actually was, whenever we did have these stability issues and outages VSN never dropped data.

It wasn't until we had gone through like five or six, dirty reboots that we started to have it drop the objects from the metadata tables so we couldn't address the objects and see them but they were technically still there, there was just no owner of them. So if we had gone in, you know, with a higher level engineer that knew how to take ownership of those back we would have been able to get them back but it was a VDI deployment so we didn't really care we just scorched earth and began again, but you know, data resiliency has been something that VSAN evangelists really talk about and it's something that they really do. You're not dropping data as long as you stick to the HCL, of course.

Scalability is good. We haven't had to scale a lot. We scale from a three node to a four node and we're trying to decide that to a five node or not, it's pretty easy. Once you have a networking piece set up, like, that's one and done. Upfront costs and then you just bolt everything on the side because you just blast out the same config, same quotes, same everything. Get the exact same hardware. Stick it on. Scales out.

Once you get to the VSAN team they know what they're doing. Like bar-none. They are incredibly receptive. They’re very good at giving you root cause and analyses and helping you work through issues.

We've been a strong VMware partner for a long time and we saw, my direct boss is John Nickelson, he's a vExpert, a huge, huge, huge storage person. He really identified the value that it was going to bring and how, impressive the technology was to have this, you know, kind of decoupling from the, you know, the big SAN box that sits in the corner and it really makes a lot of sense for certain use cases.

Some use cases where a traditional SAN is the right move, you know, if you want the capacity and stuff like that but the VSAN really helps especially with the VDI. That was where our biggest play was initially, was Horizon View mixed with VSAN.

We usually will do a four node deployment. That's in our opinion, the best configuration. Three nodes the minimum, but we like to do four so we can do rolling upgrades without losing our n+1 fault tolerance, and so, when we initially started using this, and technically it was before I started working there. When we initially started using this, we'd roll it out and just take advantage of the performance improvement that it would make. Getting the right cache with the flash drives, you know, allowed us to spin up, spin down, fast log-in times, fast application delivery. Really makes a difference.

If you're looking at a traditional SAN you're already looking at a lot of money anyway. So, VSAN is a contender in a lot of cases.

To my knowledge we didn't ever do like Citrix or, you know, anything like that. We didn't actually deploy the VDIs that are on traditional SANS so I think that we have just done pretty much all VSAN coupled with VDI 'cause it just makes so much sense.

Obviously, it saves rack space and that's something you have to consider. It's an important thing 'cause you got to pay for power, cooling, if you got give him more cabinets cause you got another SAN coming in that's more money for you that you may not be fully utilizing and it really helps with that efficiency. You know, your rack space is doing as much for you as they can because if you have to compute the storage memory, in some cases will view the GPU off load just for us all in a little for you, for your rack, and we have three of the exact same deployments just like on top of each other. Two of them are customer's and one of them is ours and they, you know, at 12 views of stuff, just one on top of the other where it would be, probably have a full rack rather than just, you know, a quarter of the rack and that's very beneficial.

I'd probably rate it a seven right now. Probably in six months it'll be an eight or a nine. Just, you know, growing pains obviously. It's a fairly new product. Having to deal with some of the baby steps, you know, and the HCL, getting the HCL right, the ready nodes things that they've been doing they've pretty much replaced the HCL with ready nodes. That was actually our initial offering for VSM was that. So, that actually simplifies the process a lot. It helps to bolster and make sure that you're not deploying something that isn't going to work.

You got to size the compute, the memory and the storage right? You got to make sure that all those are going to make sense so that you're going to be able to hit that within the con-con-confines of VSAN. Yeah, you only get the one flash disk and you want to make sure that you're hitting at least ten percent flash, magnetic disk and so you have to just you have to evaluate it. You know, make sure that it makes sense and don’t discount just because you think it's not enterprise ready or that it's too expensive.

Some of the most valuable features of VSAN include the ability to be able to provision and grow your storage as you need to without a very large upfront cost. Also the ability to be able to carry along the licenses as part of a refresh as opposed to traditional storage systems, you end up losing that investment after every single refresh which usually occurs every three to five years.

The great thing about VSAN in terms of resiliency and recoverability is the fact that with policy-based storage, you can actual decide what level of recoverability you want, what level of redundancy you want. This no longer the case of trying to figure out complex RAID-systems or anything like that. You set the policy, and you will get the level of redundancy and resiliency that you want. Something that has been in the enterprise space for quite sometime, with some of the more expensive arrays, now you can bring it down into the commercial even the mid-market space. That's pretty amazing.

For scalability of VSAN, I mean, you've seen the blog post out there. They've taken up to four million IOPS. In terms of scalability, we haven't seen any roof, any limit, any ceiling to the scalability there. We are extremely surprised that VSAN has been able to keep up with solutions that are four or five times more expensive.

The technical support for VSAN has been really surprising in a good way. In our experience, there are very few vendors that take full ownership of a problem when it occurs. What VMware has done is that whenever there is a VSAN issue or a question, as long as the hardware is on the hardware compatibility list, they took full ownership. They escalate with the hardware vendor. It's really one throat to choke. Where else can you say that?

We've been a VMware partner for quite sometime. When VSAN was announced, we were actually working with the beta. We decided that this is really the track that we want to follow because we believe in the software-defined data center. Everything is becoming software-defined. For us to not do the same thing with storage when we're doing it with networking and with compute, it just really doesn't make sense. The same kind of savings had been brought by server virtualization, the same kind of flexibility, agility, that can also be applied to storage. So, it just seems like the next natural place to go. For us as a VMware-focused partner, it made sense to get on board with VSAN right from the get-go.

Previously before VSAN, we're using a whole host of different technologies because there were a lot of corner cases where we would have to use an enterprise array. Other times we would end up using something that's a little bit smaller. What VSAN has done is, not only bridge some of the gaps that we had in storage before, but it's allowed us to replace a lot of solutions that didn't really meet the needs perfectly. Here we've got a more custom-fit that we can provide our customers and be able to address about 80% of customer's needs.

From a cost-benefit perspective, especially in regards to TCO, total cost of ownership, CFOs, CEOs that are looking to really cut down the cost of their storage systems because that's becoming a larger part of their overall IT budget. This uncontrolled cost is running along the same lines with the uncontrolled growth and data. So, you know, when more and more of that IT budget is going to storage, you have CFOs, CEOs looking to try to control those costs. What VSAN allows us to do is give them an enterprise-class array, enterprise-class solution at usually half the cost of the traditional arrays.

I would easily give it a 9, because 10 would be perfect and nothing is perfect. After the next few releases, who knows? Maybe that 10 will happen.

For people who are evaluating bringing VSAN into their environment, one of the most important things to do is really get an idea of what the performance the requirements are and what workloads are going to go into that environment. That's best done with an assessment. Right now, VMware partners are providing a assessment service for VSAN. That's a great jumping off point to make sure that the VSAN implementation is going to go as expected and have an immediate win.