VMware vSAN Reviews

The ability to scale out incrementally instead of doing a big five year capital expense purchase that hurts the budget.

In the storage world, when it's time to buy an array, you buy half that are to be populated, and you buy more disk shelves, but it's not cost effective. Or, you buy it all and don’t use some. But with VSAN, you buy x86 servers as needed and you're done, and you can scale up.

The cost. We had a directive from the CIO to check out and play with VSAN and then to do storage cheaper and better than before, which we have achieved.

The management platforms have some gaps. It's difficult to see what’s going on with the hardware at times. The only platform available doesn’t run full time, and there is a management pack but it requires a product that not many people have (vRealize Operations). So it could use more work in management areas.

Also, it lacks deduplication, so we're using a lot more storage than you necessarily need to.

Prior to deployment, make sure you check your hardware compatibility prior, along with the drivers and firmware, because any one of those three things can cause an outage.

It's very stable, but we ran into some early issues with drivers and firmware, but this is resolved now. You must be careful to be coverd in that respect, otherwise you will have issues.

We’re scaling in a very phased process, running dev test environment with just a small three node cluster, but gradually shifting.

I've never had to use it.

It was pretty straightforward, but we had some issues with drivers, although nothing in the setup. After some time, we were losing some disks that was because of driver issues.

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.

The feature we have found most valuable is the compatibility of VMware products with VCF and VMware Cloud Foundation.

We often run out of space but we have enough capacity for memory and CPU. It's difficult to find the balance between storage and memory CPU.

Overall, this is a simple solution but could be improved due to the issue with vSAN ReadyNodes. There are many compatibility requirements for storage using this solution that are difficult to meet.

We have used this solution for two years. 

The enterprise customer service and support are very good and feedback is fast. 

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward but we have experienced some setbacks with deployments. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We are using VMware vSAN for the transformation from the physical server to the virtual environment.

By using VMware vSAN we have limited the need to maintain multiple physical servers. Additionally, we have been able to reduce the entire cost of the IT operation and management because of the reduction of physical servers. There are fewer electricity and cooling systems needed.

The most valuable feature for our customers is vMotion. It allows them to shut down virtual machines and migrate them to others servers.

I have been using VMware vSAN for approximately six years.

The stability of the solution is very good. From customer feedback, VMware is much more stable compared to Hyper-V.

The scalability of VMware vSAN is good.

We currently have approximately 80 customers using this solution.

We plan to increase usage. Our sales team prefers this solution over other solutions.

We use online documentation and videos for support, such as YouTube. If there is a problem we cannot solve then we email the support of VMware.

We deploy many other solutions for our customers, such as Hyper-V, which some of them prefer.

The initial setup is quite simple according to our customer feedback. The time it takes for the deployment depends on many factors, such as use case and environment size.

We have a six-person technical team for maintenance.

We have received a return on investment. Our customers are happy, we do not need to employ a technician after deployment which is good. There is a decent return on investment but it also depends on the customers' use case.

The cost of the solution is high and if it could be reduced the customers would be very happy.

We have used VMware for different kinds of customers. Our target customers are SMB or SME, they normally choose VMware and their first package. We do have customers who use our own data center services, in this case, we use the VMware manage service license.

We typically propose VMware to our customers. We advise the customer to switch to virtualization. The main point is the customer would like to recover their data. If they'll use the physical server they cannot meet the requirement of fast recovery of the data. That's why we ask customers to do the server control check into the virtualization. You can save a lot of time managing the physical server and have a lower cost for the backup option. You can have a better recovery solution is the main point our customer use VMware.

I rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten.

We primarily use VMware vSAN for ERP, for the assisting environment. The main environment in my company does not depend on VMware—for the production environment and operations, we work with Nutanix. 

This solution is deployed on-premises. 

One of the most valuable features of this solution is that it is stable. 

This solution could be improved by having more than one controller for the environment. VMware depends on one controller for the whole environment, whereas Nutanix has one controller for each node. Because there is only one controller with VMware, if there was any drop, then the whole environment would stop working. In Nutanix, I have five nodes—there is one controller for each node and it depends on a virtual controller—so if the controller of any node is down, the whole environment will still work. 

I have been using VMware vSAN for three years. 

This solution is very, very stable. 

This solution is scalable. 

In our organization, there are around 1,000 users of VMware, including some servers and the self-service website. We have plans to increase our usage. 

VMware's support could be faster. We don't currently have a contract with technical support because we didn't make a new one for the support license. 

I previously used Hyper-V from Microsoft, but there were many issues and lots of troubleshooting. 

The installation is easy. My team worked on the installation and, for our company, we only need one engineer for deployment and maintenance. 

We implemented this solution through an in-house team. 

I have two environments: Nutanix AHV and VMware. We use the Nutanix environment more than the VMware environment. 

I rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten. For virtualization, I would recommend Nutanix over VMware. 

We are a university and we initially designed our data center such that it would be centralized, between branch offices and headquarters. There is a small data center in each branch but we're not interested in having local storage in every one of the branches.

Our plan is to purchase three physical hosts and deploy them with VMware, using vSAN to create virtual storage using each physical host's internal storage. 

The backup features and monitoring features are good.

We would like to see additional backup and recovery options added. In particular, integration with popular applications like databases.

We evaluated and deployed VMware vSAN but have not yet deployed it for production. We will be doing so within the next six months.

This is a stable product. We have been testing it extensively.

Scalability is based on your hardware. We can scale the hardware and then it only requires extending the license.

At this point, we have not had a very heavy workload. We plan to increase our usage once it goes into production.

There is approximately 50 IT staff that have access to it. Our users will include between 30,000 and 35,000 students, and approximately 3,000 staff made up of instructors and doctors. 

The technical support is good. The Ministry of Education has established contracts with all of our vendors including VMware, Microsoft, Oracle, and others. They provide us with 24/7 premium support.

We expect to rely on support for our migration to production. As part of our implementation, we have to redesign the centralized servers for a distributed environment. This includes Active Directory, Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager, and others. We don't have experience in this area. We can handle the daily operations but we lack design experience.

We implemented a PoC for Nutanix but did not test it in a production environment. I have done a little bit of work with Hyper-V but otherwise, I have only worked on traditional architectures.

There is not a lot of maintenance required.

We pay a yearly licensing fee. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees because they are standardized and negotiated by the Ministry of Education.

We provided the sizing and after that, the Ministry arranged for the correct licensing.

We evaluated Nutanix and other hyper-converged solutions, but we choose VMware vSAN.

This is a product that I recommend. My advice for anybody who is implementing it is to use a hybrid or private cloud. It's scalable, robust, and secure. Do not go back to the old technologies. Instead, focus on security and a good design. Having a good design will save in terms of cost.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We have a backup server using this technology. We move data in real-time. 

The solution is very stable.

The scalability has been quite good.

The initial setup is pretty quick and easy.

We would like to see even more storage capacity. 

Technical support could be more knowledgeable.

I've been using the solution for two to three years. It's been a while. 

The stability is good. The solution doesn't have bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's very reliable and the performance has been great.

The solution is scalable. We have already upgraded to extend it. We do plan to extend it again and we are going to expand.

We've dealt with technical support previously. It would be helpful if they were more knowledgeable. We had a bottleneck with the technical support team. We required a part and we just couldn't get it and it was delayed. It caused an issue around storage for us.

We did previously use internal storage solutions.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's so simple you don't need any technical assistance or anything like that.

The deployment is pretty fast and only takes one to three hours or so. It's not a long process at all. 

We do have an integrator that can assist with the implementation. 

We do have to pay a yearly licensing fee. It's a subscription for the hardware.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten. We are very satisfied with its capabilities.

I would recommend the solution to others.

It is used as a remote/branch office solution for a new site that we acquired.

It consolidated our workload and brought the cost down over a long.

Ease of use and implementation.

More modularity in terms of how nodes are provisioned (all nodes having to be the same size when deployed).