VMware vSAN Reviews

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.

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 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.

We use VMware vSAN to manage our resources. It has secured our resources, such as power and server management. We needed one console that can manage all the servers.

The interface is a little complicated, it could be simplified with more graphical gadgets. We have many servers, and the built-in functions, such as rate configuration, are a bit complex.

I have been using VMware vSAN for approximately 11 years.

VMware vSAN is stable.

I have found VMware vSAN to be scalable.

We have approximately 50 people using this solution in my organization.

The technical support is good. We are always thankful for the technical support from VMware. They are very supportive when we have a technical problem.

The initial setup is easy because our architecture is simple.

Our architecture is very simple to understand a new version. We only need to document all the configurations of the servers with all the maps that are designed. Any new person can understand fully within a day. However, we need more simplified versions of VMware vSAN in the future.

VMware vSAN is a little bit expensive and we pay annually. We have an educational institute where we receive discount prices from VMware. We do receive a reasonable discount but it's still expensive.

I advise those people that have a large amount of data and they need very fast retrievals, they must use the scalable feature of VMware vSAN.

I am fully satisfied with VMware vSAN.

I rate VMware vSAN a nine out of ten.

This is a fantastic product, it is easy to deploy and to manage, and it suits our requirements. 

It is quite an expensive solution for us and I would like to see some improvements on the backup side of the solution. 

I've been using this solution for three years. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

The price is quite expensive for us. 

We use this as storage solution for specific VMware services and for backup solution.

The most valuable feature is stability.

Disaster recovery needs to be improved, when there is a crisis, there is a problem with what is the quickest way to get out of it. This should be done automatically, not manually.

If we have a power failure then you have to find your way manually. There 's no way to automatically fix it. So there should be an automatic way to repair such crises from disaster recovery.

In the next release, I would like to see more clarity on where the files are. the details of the files, for example, where the owners of the files are, and more audits.

We have beeing using VSAN for the last three years. 

It is more stable now than it was before. It's not like it was in the first year.

Now it is stable, and we trust it more.

We don't want to enlarge the environment. If we have a new need, we will separate and start a new system.

We don't want to have a general-purpose infrastructure. It's not a good idea for our purposes.

We value less scalability more accurate assessment as it is not the way in our environment. We don't want to add more nodes to the same cluster, it's not a good idea. We separate it.

We get immediate response from the vendor on phone. For tasks onsite its not sufficient.

of course its a matter of service level, no complaints.

No, software solutions from VMware based on VMware platforms no migrations.

The integrator "vendor team" had good experience at the last project. level of expertise was very good.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I find that vSAN allows for very easy administration. The fact that you don't have LUNs to set up and assign is great. The ability to set up storage policies and assign them at the disk level is also a great part of this product. You can allow for different setups for different workload requirements.

vSAN allowed for the expansion of our Public Library Patron computer environment into a three-node VMware cluster using commodity servers. This eliminated the need for expensive disk arrays and controllers while providing greater reliability and performance.

We have been using vSAN in one environment for about eight months and 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 for addition to disk groups.

We have had no issues with stability.

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

We have a Nutanix environment running in production as well. We chose VMware vSAN for several reasons. First, the vSAN solution is part of the ESXi kernel. This allows for the product to be very fast with little overhead. Secondly, vSAN is included in the Enterprise Plus version of ESXi which, compared to competing products, provides a great cost savings.

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 purchase. Our cost savings is in buying commodity server hardware with local hard drives instead of investing in large SAN hardware.

The reduction in cost of storage: In my most recent deployment, we reduced cost from around $20,000 per TB (CapEx) to less than $1,000 per TB (CapEx). This is not taking into account deduplication/compression or the ability to add disks and scale vertically, not incurring licensing costs, which would drive the cost down further.

Traditional SANs require large up-front costs, and with "forklift" upgrades, you end up spending a very large amount of money initially and then expect to recoup the costs over the lifetime of the array. This is not how vSAN – or any other HCI (hyperconverged infrastructure) product – works. The idea is to have a small initial investment and, with horizontal/vertical scaling, you can grow into the needs of your environment. This can be accomplished several ways, by either adding more disks to each host (vertical scaling) or by adding more nodes to the cluster (horizontal scaling). This allows for much greater flexibility with your storage. Before HCI, you were required to guess how much storage you were going to need, and were stuck with what you guessed at.

Upgrades are also much simpler. Because the system is software-defined, you simply upgrade the software rather than the entire hardware stack. If you want to upgrade the hardware, you would then simply add nodes in, and remove older nodes. It is also possible to create a new cluster and do a swing migration; however, this is similar to older-style upgrades. The point is that there are a lot of options available with HCI systems.

Management of the environments is overall simpler, allowing for during-hours patching with no downtime and little risk; also allowing us to stay more current with patching, reducing the overall risk of the environments.

The worst part of vSAN, as with most VMware products, is that you need to use the vSphere Web Client to interact with it. The vSphere Web Client is slow and clunky, making interacting with the system difficult and often times painful. I have been told that the new version of the web client will be significantly better, but do not have personal experience with it. Other than being difficult to work with, it can cause outage scenarios to take significantly longer to troubleshoot because you waste a lot of time waiting for the client to load information, or just load in general. It is a huge drawback for an otherwise very good product.

I have used it in various deployment scenarios since 2015, or about 1.5 years.

I have observed no stability issues when the product is deployed as instructed. It can and will have stability issues if you do not follow the hardware compatibility list (HCL) or the vSAN Deployment and Sizing Guide.

The product scales easily, up easier than down, due to the need to remove the disks and migrate the data from the nodes you wish to remove from the cluster.

Actual support engineers are excellent; however, opening cases is often difficult/frustrating.

In my current project, the customer previously used EMC VMAX arrays. As detailed elsewhere, the CapEx savings were incredible.

During my current project, initial setup was very complex, though this was by our own choosing and was needlessly complex. In the past, setups were often very straightforward, though you need to verify your design properly, as mentioned.

VMware licensing is per socket for VSAN, like everything else. The platform is very flexible, so be sure to look at all your options.

I was not part of the evaluation process but cost was a major factor, as well as high availability.

Discuss the deployment with VMware sales; I've met several of them and they are generally smart people looking to help get you the best deployment possible.