VMware vSAN Reviews

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.

In our model, the price of vSAN storage space is a bit lower than SATA-based storage space from other storages, and vSAN usually has better characteristics (IOPS + latency).

We can easily scale up our vSAN cluster horizontally. All we need is to buy the same hardware nodes and put them in racks.

vSAN has better integration with virtualization than any other datastore.

Stretched All Flash vSAN is the leading product to build a disaster recovery solution. We have a plan to build it in near future.

It’s simple: We are service provider and if a solution can give us new opportunities, it is a good solution. We can build economically effective IaaS clusters on top of vSAN.

vSAN is very complex inside. For example, you need to have a plan for any emergency situation, beginning from the PoC stage; how you monitor SSD and HDD; how you change them. It looks simple, but you cannot just remove a broken component and an install new one. Under the vSAN layer, you need many accurate steps to make these simple actions.

And when you operate a big environment, you need to have more tools to control the health of the solution, to troubleshoot issues and so on. VMware has improved this side from 5.5 to 6.5, and there’s still room for it.

vSAN is not a hardware-agnostic product. We would like to have more compatible SAS controllers and other components in the market. There is room for improvement for both hardware vendors and for VMware.

On the other hand, vSAN is a production-ready solution and all these possible improvements are cosmetic issues.

We have used it from the vSAN 5.5 release date, more than two years.

We use VMware vSAN 5.5 with the latest updates in our products.
The first product is a B2B sector solution, CloudLine, and we sell space on vSAN as one of the storage tiers.
The second one is our B2C solution, CloudLite.ru. It looks like Digital Ocean – we sell IaaS to retail customers in the mass market.
We have plans to build new clusters using vSAN 6.5.

We have encountered stability issues. We had run many tests with vSAN before production. To avoid any issues with vSAN stability, one needs HCL hardware and compatible BIOS drivers for each of the components. The crucial part is that you need HBA without RAID and with disk pass-through, which is important. Finally, you need strong network expertise and a solid network.

We have not encountered any scalability issues; you can scale vSAN horizontally without any issues. But you need to start from 5 (!) nodes; not 3 or 4. It’s a long story – why? :)

Rating technical support is not a simple question. VMware has great technical experts at level 2 and 3, and they are always available if you have severity 1 issue. Technical support is not so good for minor issues.

Previously we use traditional datastores - NetApp, EMC, IBM. And we continue to use it.

Initially, you need to have enough expertise. You need to read some popular bloggers and select hardware from “recommended nodes”. And then you can start a PoC.

We are part of the VMware vCAN program, so our licensing is different from the retail model and it’s comfortable for us.

We keep an eye on all solutions that come to the market. We have tested SimpliVity and Nutanix. We use MS Storage Spaces in our production. All these products have their pros and cons.

You need to use it for the reason of economical efficiency. It’s one of VMware’s great products.

vSAN is a great product, and we see improvement from 5.5 to 6 and 6.5.

Our company works in a multi-cloud model, hybrid environment using both the hyperscalers AWS and Azure with a combination of public and private clouds. Our organization is an integrator so VMware vSAN is used for our end customer.

VMware vSAN is used for VM workloads. We show our customers that they do not need to keep everything on-premises and that they can move not critical data to minimize data compliance security. We move them to a public cloud with the two hyperscalers. For workloads that they are not comfortable keeping in a public cloud, we recommend using a hybrid model. My use cases deal with virtual workloads, retailing and manufacturing solutions.

VMware vSAN is easy to configure, with basic functionality and the customer can maintain the solution.

The only thing that can be improved is the cost.

I have been using VMware vSAN for more than two years.

VMware vSAN is stable. We would not recommend it to so many of our partners if it were not. It is foolproof; it's on multiple workloads.

The solution is scalable. Our customers have varying workloads, so we use the combination of on-premises and hybrid cloud, moving from private to public, and public to private so the scalability is always there. 

We have in-house support for normal operational transactions. We also have a contract with VMware vSAN. Even our end customers have direct support contracts for the solution. Normally escalations to VMware support have to do with product bugs, a defect, or an engineering issue. 

Our team deploys the solution in the customer's environment. We use VMware administrators to manage the storage. They have a combination of storage and VMware background. Our virtualization administrator is VMware certified and cross-trained with the storage administrator to increase productivity. 

VMware vSAN is less expensive than having a traditional three-tier solution or a full virtual VFX using a hyper-converged soluton. The cost is still too high and should be lower.

VMware vSAN is not right for all types of use cases. It is specific to an opportunity if the customer is looking at an interim solution and wants to keep the costs low. This environment is more to do with development testing.

VMware vSAN is a good fit if you are looking at security and scale. In an environment that is more productive and needs better performance, this solution may not be the right fit.

I would rate this solution a 9 out of 10.

We are using VMware vSAN for data center virtualization.

The solution has benefited our organization from all the consolidation features, such as disaster recovery and backups.

The most valuable features of VMware vSAN are that it receives updates frequently, has good compression, optimized storage, and they provide webinars on what is new. Additionally, the integration with third-party products is good and it is easy to manage.

Customers who are using Essentials Plus or even Essentials have to pay for technical support. However, they should not have to pay for support.

I have been using VMware vSAN for approximately seven years.

The solution is highly stable.

VMware vSAN is scalable.

We have approximately 20 to 30 customers using this solution.

The support is very good. However, there are times it could be quicker.

I have worked with other solutions, such as Hyper-V and Citrix. Our preference is always VMware.

The initial implementation is straightforward. The time of installation can vary, it depends. If you're looking at virtualizing a host only, it can be done in five minutes.

We use one engineer for the installation and maintenance of the solution.

There is a license required for this solution, it is a one-time payment. However, if they want support for the solution, it can be paid annually or for three years.

I rate VMware vSAN a nine out of ten.