VMware vSAN Reviews

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.

Previously, we couldn’t consolidate more workloads on different types of storage. Now with VSAN, we have the ability to virtualize across multiple data centers.

It's currently doing everything we've ask of it and it meets all our needs right now. To be honest, I don’t think too much about the future of the product or what we might need it to do as our requirements change.

It's got good stability - 10/10.

It's got good scalability - 10/10.

N/A

They are good – the response time is quick. You pay for it, but they are good.

No previous solution was used.

It was simple and straightforward.

We've implemented it both on our own and with a vendor team, and it's straightforward with both.

No other options were looked, but peer reviews are important. My peer reviews are usually on social media channels, but it's important.

Product knowledge is the most important criteria we look for when selecting a vendor.

Try it and evaluate it – it's not a fit for every company, but you should at least do an evaluation to see if it is a fit.

We use this solution for our entire architecture. They have removed the storage part. We used to use IBM and NetApp for storage solutions.

Data management and recovery processes are the most valuable features.

Unless there is some network issue, everything is fine. 

Improvements are also needed as per the customer's requirements.

I have been using VMware vSAN for six years. 

The initial setup is easy. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

Our customers use this product when they don't want to deploy an expensive storage device but they're looking for good storage technology. I'm a system integrator.

This is a mature, easy-to-use, and easy-to-scale type of technology. When a customer wants network security and integration of NSX technology, vSan is a good solution.

I'd like to see a simplification of the upgrading process. For now, I have to verify each and every component before upgrading. If there were a technology to check the compatibility without the complexity, it would be helpful to users.

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

Whenever I need support from VMware, I get very good support from the team.

The initial setup is somewhat complex. It involves checking hardware compatibility before buying it and installing the VMware components. One person can deploy an entire environment in a day.

Licensing costs are more or less on par with other similar products. 

It's important to check the compatibility before deploying. This is a good solution and I rate it nine out of 10. 

Virtual environment.

It helped to reduce storage costs.

Straightforward and easy to use.

Data services like remote replication.

We use it for all our virtual desktop storage.

It's definitely cheaper to buy it piece by piece, instead of an entire shelf at a time.

• It's easy to scale.
• It's easy to predict IOPS needs.
• You can design for low latency using all-flash.
• The whole hyperconverged notion is pretty neat.

Also, for setting up new clusters for VDI quickly, it's nice. You don't have to wait on an order for a storage vendor to ship you a system and help you configure it, you do it all yourself. It's kind of convenient that way. And the sizing guides are pretty straightforward.

I would like to see better performance graphs, maybe something that you can export outside to a different console, and maybe a little bit longer time period. The 18-hour maximum, or 24-hour maximum, is kind of short.

Also, the hardware compatibility limitations are a little frustrating sometimes, but as everybody's starting to adopt vSAN more, you get more options for hardware.

It's stable. We haven't had any major issues.

Scalability is easy. You just buy a node and go.

The vSAN technical support guys are great.

We chose it because of cost considerations. We already had an enterprise agreement with VMware, so vSAN licensing was included.

There was a small learning curve, but it's pretty straightforward once you understand the basics of how everything works.

We did evaluate other vendors initially but this was our second hyperconverged solution. We went with it because of the cost.

Do your homework. Make sure you know what kind of IOPS and latency requirements you need to meet. Picking hardware is not hard anymore. Everybody has an HCL. vSAN has a great list. Just pick what you want and go, it's not that hard.

I rate it at eight out of 10 because nothing is perfect. I'm hard to please. I'm not saying there are growing pains, but vSAN was still new at the time. They didn't have dedupe and compression yet. The performance was pretty good. Most of it was hybrid in the beginning, but now with all-flash, it's speedy, when it needs to be. It's a young product and nobody gets a 10 out of the gate.

For us, vSAN is a really good option for our EDGE network sites. We're able to use it in a high-available environment that enables our end-users to get to the data they need. We're heavily leveraging it for our VDI deployments.

It has helped us reach a much higher satisfaction rate in our VDI deployments. With the VDI, we didn't really focus on an ROI, although we did see some ROI benefits.

The ability to have a disaster recovery option for our end-users by being able to use VDI and the vSANs, and the ability to do replication across multiple data centers, are valuable to us.

One thing I would have said I'm looking for is vSAN in the cloud but, obviously, they announced that here today at VMworld 2018. That is something that I'm looking forward to.

vSAN has come a long way. It's a highly stable product and something that everyone should look at. Even in a large data center, now, vSAN makes sense.

For me, it scales really well. We have multiple product vendors. We're able to leverage all of them using the vSAN capabilities of all of those vendors.

I was not involved in the initial setup but I have taken it over since then and I have implemented some of the newer features that vSAN has come out with; capabilities that we weren't using when I came in.

We leveraged a partner who helped to make it an easy implementation.

My advice is to look beyond what your initial scope is. If you're looking at using it just for VDI implementations, look at more than just that and how you can leverage it for a lot of different datasets in your data center.

When I look to work with a vendor it's important to find one that is agnostic to either software or hardware and a solution that fits our specific environment.

If we are looking for a valuable prospective, then we can go with the All-Flash vSAN cluster which will provide data compression and deduplication (i.e. actual used storage 30TB; in that case deduplication will be stored in 10TB and save 20TB storage).

Firstly, I want to offer an example in terms of the deployment process and manageability of the vSAN storage environment. vSphere admins can handle all infra tasks and, due to policy based storage, we can manage the I/O performance as well.

vSAN health monitoring has room for improvement because they have many known and unknown bugs which may be resolved in a future release version.

We are using it for the last two and a half years, and started working with vSAN 5.5 and drives file system 1 and in the last six months it has been upgraded to vSAN version 6.2 and drive file system 3.

Yes, in some of cases after I have built a big vSAN cluster of 64 nodes, all hosts start showing different network partition groups. In that case, without correction, you can’t go further on next level.

In scalability I didn’t face any issues.

I can give them an 8 out of ten because it is a game-changing technology so we need to add more vSAN engineers to our team.

In my past experience, I didn’t use policy based storage; I always worked with standard storage.

Initial setup is straightforward but somehow we need to understand the high level topology and way of working with it.

In terms of pricing and licensing, we need to understand the requirements of the project and the cost model as well, because that has a very important effect on our project delivery.

Nutanix and VxRail because these also serve the same function.