VMware vSAN Reviews

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.

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.

Virtual environment.

It helped to reduce storage costs.

Straightforward and easy to use.

Data services like remote replication.

It's going to be employed for our VDI infrastructure and, potentially, we will move it into our VSI infrastructure.

Considering that we have many storage arrays, this seems to keep us a little bit more contained and it's easier to manage versus some of the legacy storage where we don't have manageability, or we're losing manageability for it.

We have greater uptimes, we're not down nearly as much, and we can identify and deal with solutions to problems that we're encountering in those environments.

• Scalability
• Cost

I would like to see more ease of use, more compatibility with different areas.

The stability is good. 

We have a couple of problems but we're working through them. In the deployments we have in our Dev environment, it's more about how the hardware is interacting. We have them on Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes and we're just working through some of the driver issues and some random rebooting that we're having to deal with. But we have support contracts. Everything seems to be doing fine.

Our experience working with technical support has been good.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor for us are the stability of the product, as much uptime as we can get, and service contracts so that we can get people to react more quickly to cases that we open and get things escalated properly.

I rate vSAN at nine out of ten. What would help make it a ten would be if we didn't have so much inconsistency in the information around how to deploy it. That that would be a little bit better.

The primary use case is that we're getting ready to deploy a VDI solution across the campus and our healthcare network.

The opportunity gained with the relationship we have now is limitless, as new features and products roll out, especially with today's announcements: the news about microsegmentation, the RDS in the cloud with AWS, as well as some security features. It's a constant evolution for us. That's really why we're with vSAN.

The most valuable feature for us, long-term, is the integration with VMware that we're going to be using. We're currently using AirWatch, we're working in Workspace ONE. We want to make sure that our VDIs, with the integration of the Windows 10 solution - as well as any-device, anywhere, anytime mobility - work, yet still offer them the ability to gain access to that VDI. That is huge for us.

If you want to get down to the nuts and bolts of room for improvement, we would really like them to look at what Nutanix did for day-one/day-two operations deployment: Bringing in the equipment, getting it deployed, getting it setup, and ease of use of one-click for deploying our 30-node solution. With vSAN we had to go into each one individually and set it up.

The stability is there.

It absolutely scales, that's the beauty of it.

We actually involved VMware from the beginning. We brought in Nutanix, Simplivity, and vSAN technicians, as well as integration with our hardware platforms. But the true key was bringing those guys in, helping us set up the best environment, and seeing exactly what our endpoint was going to look like with our business integration. That was better than, "Yay, we can deploy 40 VDIs in 10 seconds." What does that do for the environment we're currently existing in? So for them to help us set up as a true test in our actual environment, that was a huge help, from all three that we tested. It was really impressive.

I am the manager of the guys who will be implementing the product. We recently received our client from Dell and we have installed it. My two main CI guys are here with me at VMWorld 2018 this week, so we're on a temporary hiatus, but we did get one full rack installed so far, and we're getting ready to deploy the vSAN to it.

The solution is only as good as the technicians you have and the investment put into proof of concept testing. My two technicians are some of the smartest people. You always hire someone smarter than you and I definitely did with these two guys. They've already got it worked out. We had the tasks laid out, what we were going to do day-one, day-two, rolling it into a test environment, and then production. We already had that done before we had the equipment on site.

We're just wrapping up year-two of our five-year ROI plan and this VDI solution, with vSAN, is part of it.

We purchased a VMware Enterprise agreement so vSAN was already included with what we had. It was just a smart choice, given where we were heading eventually, to go with vSAN. That was one of the deciding factors.

We just wrapped up proofs of concept for both hardware and software. We did vSAN, we did Nutanix, and we did Simplivity. We looked at HPE hardware and we looked at Dell EMC hardware, among others.

We actually decided to go with Dell with a vSAN solution, even though Nutanix had better day-one/day-two operations, straight out of the box for us. Long-term, we felt that the vSAN solution itself was going to serve us in terms of to utilizing and leveraging the power of VMware, either going to a private and hybrid-cloud solution or public and hybrid cloud solution.

As far as the hardware goes, we didn't really have that much of a preference among the three, but we did see that Dell EMC's OpenManage solution for managing the hardware, the bare metal itself, was much more productive than the other two.

You'd want to give it a 10 out of 10 based on what they're doing in the future, but if you always give a company a 10 they'll feel like they're already there. I would actually rate vSAN one below Nutanix, as far as maturity of the model goes.

I would give vSAN a very solid eight. There is room for improvement to catch up to Nutanix. Nutanix is definitely a nine. Again I don't like giving anybody a 10 because we always want to see what the next evolution or innovation is that they're bringing to the table. The way vSAN would get to a 10 depends on how they get me to "tomorrow".

• Allows for very easy administration
• You don't have LUNs to set up and assign
• The ability to set up storage policies and assign them at the disk level
• Allows for different setups for different workload requirements

• Allows for the expansion of our public library patron computer environment into a three-node VMware cluster using commodity servers
• Eliminates the need for expensive disk arrays and controllers
• Provides greater reliability and performance

We have been using vSAN in one environment for about eight months and in another environment for about four months.

The only issue I encountered during deployment was with the hardware and not with vSAN itself.

The disks in the new servers were installed at the factory as RAID disks. I had to mark them as non-RAID disks so that vSAN would be able to see them correctly in order to add them to disk groups.

There have been no issues with stability.

We have had no issues with scalability.

Fortunately, I have not had to contact support for any issues with my implementations.

We chose VMware vSAN for these reasons:

• It is part of the ESXi kernel. This allows for the product to be very fast with little overhead.
• It is included in the Enterprise Plus version of ESXi. Compared with competing products, it provides great cost savings.

We have a Nutanix environment running in production as well.

The initial setup was straightforward as was learning the vSAN environment.

The complexity comes in setting up and managing the storage policies. These can be simple or complex depending on the environment.

When using VMware Horizon View, there are several storage policies that are auto-created and managed. Creating and managing your own policies and rule sets depend on your needs and workloads.

VMware vSAN is included in the enterprise plus level of software that we purchased. Our cost savings were due to buying commodity server hardware with local hard drives instead of investing in large SAN hardware.

The most valuable features are scalability and speed.

The ability to throw in extra disks on the fly and extend storage with no limits is very useful. I already had to do this twice.

I think performance of my vSAN is better than that of a SAN, even though I am only working with 10 VMs per site. I don’t know how many performance hits we would get if I had more VMs.

Typically when you get a SAN, there’s a size limit or cap, adding more storage means buying an extra shelf.

In our environment we use Dell 530’s (8 bays), the original setup was only 4TB of usable storage from a pair, but later just added 2 extra disks per esx to make a 12TB volume, I still have 4 open bays and could easily add 8TB drives there if I needed to and on-the-fly.

In terms of performance, it beats going through the wire, since the disks are on the bus and with caching, iops are a plenty.

Furthermore, we have a power limitation at our communities, and adding one more box (SAN) would require an extra 8amps of juice.

No single point of failure, although SANs are very reliable these days, there’s connections and switches to content, with vSAN you can now connect 2 ESX servers directly not needing a 10GB switch

Refresh cycles: my storage follows my ESX servers, so no more extra new hardware to purchase.

vSAN Robo’s are inexpensive to own and maintain, the enterprise version is a tad more.

I am able to utilize ESX HW at my robo sites without needing to add a SAN or NAS.

I would like to see the following:

• Fixing the resync function. This needs to be addressed ASAP.
• A better UI showing actual space used and disk space available. The current output is very deceiving. It shows a total that should actually be divided in half, minus the headroom.

When disks are getting full or near 70%, there’s a potential for receiving out-of-sync nodes. One node may have more content than the other, and the re-sync button starts a process that never ends. This is a known issue.

When looking at space details, the available free space depicts the sum of the two nodes. In reality, that should only show half and even more. I would like to see a gauge that marks a safe zone, or under 70%.

The reality is that once you go over 70%, the sync issue comes into play, performance hits are unavoidable, and the rebuild could take a long time.

We have used this solution for over a year.

When dealing with seasoned vSAN experts, the experience was outstanding. Getting them to respond quickly is always an issue. I sometimes had to go ahead and perform a rebuild, as it was quicker than waiting for a callback.

The installation was easy.

I deployed it myself with trial and error support from VMware.

The ROI is negative, the capex is OK, but the opex is outrageous. They need to drop the opex to 20%.

See if you can really afford it and make sure you have the expertise on hand to deal with initial deployment issues.

I found that buying a new SAN by Tegile is less expensive, less complex, and very inexpensive to maintain. In addition, support is the best in the business.

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.