VMware vSAN Reviews

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.

With Virtual SAN we did like the performance, the simplicity, the fact that it’s very easy to manage and upgrade and the integration with all of the VMware technologies that we are very familiar with. Also the fact that it's completely different from the old paradigm of provisioning storage and different storage systems and it's also saving rack space. We use less physical space for the deployment of storage systems.

When we first were shown Virtual SAN, we compared our traditional storage system what we had with the Virtual SAN performance in one of our labs and we showed that the performance was impressive with Virtual SAN. So, we started adding more applications to it and expanded this Virtual SAN Proof of Concept that we had. So, we realized that our performance is comparable to old flash, disk carriage at a much better core structure that we get as cloud providers. So, the fact that it is very fast, very simple and the fact that it's also easy to consume as a cloud provider, this made it a no brainer for us.

The simplicity to provisioned VMs and applied policy to specific VMs for our customers is one of the most important features for us without having to separate the area of storage like we had before with our traditional storage system. As a cloud provider the biggest challenge with storage is that you get completely mixed workloads. You don't know what the customers will be landing on. So, there is no way to predict the storage performance needs of a customer before they actually start using the systems.

There's some features in the future releases that we would really like to see: encryption as part of the offering. The application and compression would be nice to have those features available in the next Virtual SAN releases and also the capability to serve storage through other protocols. Like NSF or iSCSI for other vendors, for other applications that are not VMware. We have some solutions now that we use like Nexenta, in order to do that but it would be nice if Virtual SAN support of this natively. So we have one vendor to deal with.

Cloud Carib is a cloud provider in the Bahamas, and it’s targeting enterprise customers in the Caribbean. The company started about three years ago and because we're using VMware products since the beginning, working with Virtual SAN on the new storage offering in addition to our vCloud stock which is the Cloud Director, vSphere, and VCNS.

There’s never been an issue with Virtual SAN over the last year that we've been testing it. Support is really efficient because it's same global support with VMware that we've been with and we are familiar with. As far as I know, some of the highest rated support from any vendors that we use. We did all sorts of tests initially before we deployed in the production environment. We simulated disk failures, host failures, network failures, and Virtual SAN didn't have any issues dealing with all of these failures, so we're confident in that deploy more applications, more VMs in this system.

Since the original deployment, we have doubled the capacity of our recent cluster with zero down time. So the more nodes we have the more capacity we get the more performance and there's no downtime. So, it's very easy to scale up, scale-scale out with VSAN and all it takes is a few clicks. It's a very efficient way to upgrade your storage without adding more rack space than you actually need because by having converged storage network in the computer capacity, we don't have to waste rack space which is at a premium where we are in the Caribbean. So we did like the fact that we can scale our compute and our storage at the same time without wasting rack space.

The technical support that we get from VMware is part of our cloud provider contract is very efficient, very quick responses. The support is always knowledgeable and they can resolve the issues. As far as I know it's one of the highest rated support from any vendors that we use and this is very important for our storage system because that's the most critical aspect of customers' data. They need to be able to have confidence that the data is on a solid stable system.

So the way that we found out about Virtual SAN, we kept running into performance problems and capacity problems with our current storage that we had before. With all storage that we had and Virtual SAN is a radically different approach. So we were intrigued by that and, after testing it, we realized that all of our requirements were met by this approach. So some of the criteria that we look at when we evaluate vendors is the credibility of the vendor in the industry. The support history that we have with them, customer references.

So with VMware, we know that VMware is already used by everybody in the Fortune 500. Huge companies globally rely on VMware for day to day operations. So, we’re fully con=fident in basically running all of our infrastructure through the VMware technologies.

We spent quite a bit of time studying the design guides from VMware about the proper implementation and the hardware compatibility list. Ran all of the self-checks that were listed on the website and we used hardware that was certified ATL. And with these requirements- having passed the requirements it was very simple to enable Virtual SAN. So, after the initial, deployment design we're able to implement it in a matter of hours. It was, very, very simple. Much easier than deploying a hardware based storage system.

The vendors that were directly competing with Virtual SAN for our project were hardware vendors that were providing all-flash systems. This would be the comparison for us. The cost of the all-flash systems was prohibitive for us. We are a relatively small cloud provider in the Caribbean and, with Virtual SAN, we like the fact that we can pay through the VCOM program where we pay for only what we use and this was another huge benefit with Virtual SAN in our use case.

There's no issues that we have with it so far. We're very happy with it. I would highly recommend Virtual SAN for any demanding application that this running on VMware. We have no have reservations at all with Virtual SAN. We recommend Virtual SAN to anybody was has demanding applications.

So a lot of people think that Virtual SAN is a new unproven solution that people might use for testing or development but, what we actually see when we talk with our peers and with what we see with our customers is that people are using it in production and we are using it in production. If it can be used in production for a demanding app environment like cloud provider, then it means that it can definitely be used in production for any company that has storage requirements, demanding storage requirements.

Peer reviews and peer comments are very important factors when evaluating storage solutions or any other priced IT solutions is the raw data that you see from the people that are using it the way that we are going to be using something. It's not media or something that's not tested. So, this has the most weight for us. The most important factor when considering a solution whether PRC.

We use VMware vSAN as a VDI solution.

The performance of VMware vSAN is very good.

I have been using VMware vSAN for approximately two years.

VMware vSAN is a stable solution.

The support from VMware vSAN was good. When I had to contact the support for my clients everything was as expected.

The initial setup is straightforward. It took us approximately one month to implement for one of our customers but there were some delays on our customer's side. We could have done it in a shorter timeframe.

My customers have found VMware vSAN to be a little expensive.

VMware vSAN is the most trending hypervisor that most of the customers are working with.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate VMware vSAN a ten out of ten.

While we have some applications running on VMware, mostly we are providing and proposing these solutions to our clients.

I have one client, for example, that is running the CRM and accounts and manufacturing applications on VMware and they're using HP infrastructure for them. They have some SQL databases they're running on that and some back-office applications, and also an Extend Server as well.

The migration capabilities are a very useful aspect of the solution. 

The way it handles failovers is very good. 

The imaging is helpful.

Right now, VMware is number one in the virtual space.

The initial setup is very easy.

The management is very straightforward. It's an extremely user-friendly product.

It integrates very well with other products. 

The scalability is very good and the solution is stable and reliable.

So far, everything is okay.

Currently, there aren't any shortcomings to discuss or missing features that we worry about. 

This product is very expensive. 

I've used the solution for a long time. I'd used VMware since it come out in the '90s. It's been decades. 

I have found the stability to be great. There aren't bugs. It doesn't glitch. There aren't issues around it crashing or freezing. It's reliable. 

The scalability has been great. If you need to expand it, you can do so. 

Technical support has been great. They are helpful and responsive. I've been happy with their level of service when we've needed them. We are satisfied. 

The initial setup is very straightforward and simple. There shouldn't be an issue if a company wants to set it up. 

If you have, for example, 100 VMs, you only need one person to manage it. It requires very little maintenance or overhead in terms of staff. 

The solution can be expensive. However, if you are a big company, such as a telco, likely you can get a good deal on pricing. That said, being so big, likely the cost won't be a deterrent. 

We are partners and also a solution provider.

The solution is great. I'd rate it at a nine out of ten. I'd advise other people to give it a try. 

We use it as a primary storage for our Horizon View environment. 

The product is great. It runs well. 

It helped us survive power outages in one of our data centers, then continued to function without a hitch.

• Its redundancy
• Its uptime capabilities
• The performance is great.

I would like a better Hardware Certification List (HCL). The HCL should a little easier to deal with.

Making the hardware compatibility not as much of an issue would be a good thing. 

It scales well. We have plenty of room to grow. It should be a good long term solution for us.

Technical support has been fantastic. We always get answers quickly whenever we call.

We wanted to give more redundant access to the users' desktops than they previously had. Before, we were on a single SAN which was causing us issues if we had either an issue with the SAN or an issue with our environment when the SAN would go down. By using vSAN, it would allow us to spread our data across multiple data centers on our campus and be more fault tolerant.

It was really straightforward. 

We had some help from Venture Technologies, who helped us get it going. They didn't really have to do too much. We figured it out.

We have increased our user productivity. However, being in Higher Education, we don't really measure it.

Give it a look. It will save you time and money.