We use it for all our virtual desktop storage.
VDI Administrator at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Easy to predict IOPS needs and we can design for low latency using all-flash
Pros and Cons
- "it's easy to scale, it's easy to predict IOP needs, and you can design for low latency using all-flash... 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. 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."
What is our primary use case?
How has it helped my organization?
It's definitely cheaper to buy it piece by piece, instead of an entire shelf at a time.
What is most valuable?
- 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.
What needs improvement?
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.
Buyer's Guide
VMware vSAN
March 2025

Learn what your peers think about VMware vSAN. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2025.
842,767 professionals have used our research since 2012.
For how long have I used the solution?
One to three years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It's stable. We haven't had any major issues.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Scalability is easy. You just buy a node and go.
How are customer service and support?
The vSAN technical support guys are great.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We chose it because of cost considerations. We already had an enterprise agreement with VMware, so vSAN licensing was included.
How was the initial setup?
There was a small learning curve, but it's pretty straightforward once you understand the basics of how everything works.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We did evaluate other vendors initially but this was our second hyperconverged solution. We went with it because of the cost.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Senior Systems Administration at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Helps give us a disaster recovery option and do replication across multiple data centers
Pros and Cons
- "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."
What is our primary use case?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Buyer's Guide
VMware vSAN
March 2025

Learn what your peers think about VMware vSAN. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2025.
842,767 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Principal Technical Consultant at Fujitsu Consulting India
It can handle all infra tasks and due to policy based storage we can manage the I/O performance also.
What is most valuable?
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).
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What needs improvement?
vSAN health monitoring has room for improvement because they have many known and unknown bugs which may be resolved in a future release version.
For how long have I used the solution?
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.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
In scalability I didn’t face any issues.
How are customer service and technical support?
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.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
In my past experience, I didn’t use policy based storage; I always worked with standard storage.
How was the initial setup?
Initial setup is straightforward but somehow we need to understand the high level topology and way of working with it.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
Nutanix and VxRail because these also serve the same function.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Infrastructure Manager at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees
You can populate an empty HDD slot on the host with a disk and the tool adds the additional storage.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable vSAN features are:
- Ability to scale easy: Adding additional storage is so easy. You just populate an empty HDD slot on the host with a disk and vSAN will automatically add the additional storage to the storage pool. No specialized skills are required.
- Performance and cost/storage efficiency: With vSAN, you get SSD-like performance with a mix of spinning and solid-state disks at a fraction of the cost. We use a ratio of 30/70 SSDs to spinning disks, respectively, for a high-performance SAN that is within our budget.
- Resilience: We tried to break our vSAN PoC instance to test its robustness. We pulled out hard drives while they were being written to and we unplugged server nodes, and we never lost a VM.
- Ease of use: We set up vSAN with a few mouse clicks in vCenter. We couldn’t believe how simple it was to setup and configure.
How has it helped my organization?
We are able to deploy vSAN clusters to remote locations very easily at a fraction of the cost. This saves us time and money. We don’t have to worry about stability issues.
What needs improvement?
Support for iSCSI access would be great, but this may be supported in the latest versions of vSAN.
We have a few physical servers in our environment and it would be great, if these servers could also access the storage in vSAN. With vSAN iSCSI support, we would be able to connect our physical servers to vSAN as well.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have been using this solution for two years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
In terms of stability, vSAN is very resilient, self-adapting, and self-healing. In the two years that I’ve worked with vSAN, I haven’t experienced any vSAN stability issues.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
There haven't been any issues with scalability. Adding additional storage was as simple as inserting a hard drive into a hard drive bay or adding an additional server node to the data center cluster. That was all we had to do, and vSAN auto-configured everything.
How are customer service and technical support?
We had a VMware vSAN engineer present to set up our very first vSAN cluster. There was nothing to it, but it was great to have an expert on-site for questions and to provide us with training. Other than that, we have never had to log a support request with VMware for vSAN.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We didn’t use a virtual SAN solution previously. We just used traditional, and very expensive, SAN storage arrays. We moved to vSAN because our budget wasn’t getting any bigger, but our storage requirements were increasing.
How was the initial setup?
The setup was straightforward. It literally took a few mouse clicks to setup vSAN.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
You get better value for your money with a vSAN solution than with a traditional SAN with lower TCO.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We looked briefly at alternatives, but nothing stood out like vSAN. Nutanix was another solution, but surprisingly, it would have costed us more.
What other advice do I have?
Get a vSAN specialist to come out and spec your vSAN cluster according to your requirements. Have him configure it and test that it is performing properly.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Senior Consultant at Computacenter
We use it as the basis for DMZ environments, production environments, and DR sites.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable features of the product are its basic functionality and that it's all so simple to implement. The performance is also another very useful feature :-)
How has it helped my organization?
We are a partner and we're using Virtual SAN for nearly more than half of our customers, VMware-based customers, and we use it as the basis for DMZ environments, production environments, and DR sites. It's getting a lot better to sell VMware solutions and to make the customer happy.
What needs improvement?
I'm part of the Beta program, so I know what's going to come up in the next version.
Room for improvement would be support for more NVMe-based devices and especially firmware combinations; that's sometimes a problem. Also, support for special SAS controllers. We have some special customer settings where we solved the customer’s special configuration nearly two years ago, and now it's no longer supported officially for the newest release. There’s room for improvement there.
For how long have I used the solution?
We have used VMware Virtual SAN since the beginning of version 5.5. It is awesome to see the evolution of the product. We implemented it at a customer site since the first version.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
We had some purple screens of death at the beginning, but that was only due to hardware problems. Today, it's very stable and nearly rock solid; so, very nice.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Most of our customers are using it for up to eight hosts in a cluster. Normally, we know - and our customers know - that you can easily scale up to 64 machines, but today, up to eight is absolutely enough.
How are customer service and technical support?
Technical support is very good. I need them only two times. There was a driver firmware issue; that's all. We extracted all the log files and prepared them for support. They were able to identify the problem within about four to six hours; so, really good.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We were pretty happy with the release before, the VSA version, but it was discontinued. We have many customers who implement the VSAN ROBO solution. We are part of the roadmap discussion and we're going to know what comes up next, so we're pretty happy with the new release.
How was the initial setup?
Initial setup and implementation was pretty easy. It's all about the design and all about the thinking process at the beginning of a product; so implementation was pretty easy.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We're a VMware partner, a Nutanix partner, a SimpliVity partner and a Cisco partner. Personally, VSAN is the best solution for most customers and workloads.
What other advice do I have?
I would like to give them a perfect rating if the VMware driver issues, especially with NVMEs, are going to be fixed. Then I would absolutely agree a perfect rating, because we've set up with customers using VSAN Hybrid. We have customers using VSAN All-Flash and it's so simple for the customer to implement, to troubleshoot... It's all about the design and thinking process at the beginning of a project. That's why we are there as a partner.
My advice is to definitely test it out; not listen to all the marketing stuff. Test it out on real-life environments, and especially test it out on newer systems. Don’t test it out on five- or six-year-old servers, because you won’t be able to get the best performance.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: My company is a partner.
Virtualization & Storage Administrator at Franklin University
You can buy x86 servers as needed and scale up from there instead of buying more arrays and shelves than needed, although there are gaps in the management platforms.
Valuable Features
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.
Improvements to My Organization
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.
Room for Improvement
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.
Deployment Issues
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.
Stability Issues
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.
Scalability Issues
We’re scaling in a very phased process, running dev test environment with just a small three node cluster, but gradually shifting.
Customer Service and Technical Support
I've never had to use it.
Initial Setup
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.
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
Director - DC & Hybrid Cloud Presales Lead for APAC at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
OEM agnostic and easy to configure, but needs easier updates and better pricing
Pros and Cons
- "Its ease of use is most valuable. It is easy to configure, and there is a unified interface, which makes things slightly easier."
- "They should make the software updates easier. We should be able to upgrade it more easily."
What is our primary use case?
We are VMware and Nutanix partners. I'm more into the architecting role. I propose solutions to the customers. I'm not using it as an end-user.
Our customers use it for their core business applications. They use it for production and non-production workloads.
We are mostly working with its latest version.
How has it helped my organization?
There are definitely cost benefits. There is also no OEM dependency. I can reach out to any OEM and deploy VMware vSAN.
What is most valuable?
Its ease of use is most valuable. It is easy to configure, and there is a unified interface, which makes things slightly easier.
What needs improvement?
They can be more competitive in terms of pricing.
They should make the software updates easier. We should be able to upgrade it more easily.
If we can have a unified dashboard for managing the public cloud environment, it would be good.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with this product for more than five years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is stable.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is scalable. We had a maximum of around 10,000 users.
How are customer service and support?
Our delivery team contacts them. Their response time was good enough.
How was the initial setup?
It is not really difficult, but you need a skilled resource to manage that. The deployment duration varies. It usually takes a week or so.
What about the implementation team?
We set it up for our customers. We have around four to five people for deployment and maintenance.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
It is slightly expensive. They can be more competitive in terms of pricing.
What other advice do I have?
I would definitely recommend it to others. vSAN is not suitable for all environments. It is better to do the assessment before going ahead with vSAN.
I would rate it a seven out of 10.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
Head Of Products And Solutions Architect at a government with 201-500 employees
Responsive technical support, easy to use, and stable
Pros and Cons
- "The solution is simple to use compared to other solutions, such as Hyperflex, VxRail, and Nutanix"
- "VMware vSAN needs to improve its features because other solutions have more advanced features."
What is our primary use case?
VMware vSAN is a hyper-converged infrastructure and we use it as a software-defined storage solution for our customers.
What is most valuable?
The solution is simple to use compared to other solutions, such as Cisco Hyperflex, Dell VxRail, and Nutanix
What needs improvement?
VMware vSAN needs to improve its features because other solutions have more advanced features.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using VMware vSAN for approximately four years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The solution is quite stable in small and medium environments. However, I do not have experience using the solution in enterprises companies.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have 31 people in my organization using this solution.
How are customer service and technical support?
Technical has been good in my experience but they could improve.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The price of VMware vSAN is expensive and there is an annual license required.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I have evaluated many other solutions, such as Cisco Hyperflex, Dell VxRail, and Nutanix
What other advice do I have?
In my country, Myanmar, both VMware, and Cisco are the most reliable solution for networking and virtualization than other related solutions. Other vendors, such as Nutanix and SimpliVity are quite strange to our IT environments at this time.
I rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten.
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: partner

Buyer's Guide
Download our free VMware vSAN Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros
sharing their opinions.
Updated: March 2025
Product Categories
HCIPopular Comparisons
VxRail
Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)
StarWind Virtual SAN
Dell PowerFlex
HPE SimpliVity
Sangfor HCI - Hyper Converged Infrastructure
HPE Alletra dHCI
DataCore SANsymphony
HPE Hyper Converged
Dell vSAN Ready Nodes
StorMagic SvSAN
Scale Computing Platform
Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series
Huawei FusionCube Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
Azure Stack HCI
Buyer's Guide
Download our free VMware vSAN Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros
sharing their opinions.
Quick Links
Learn More: Questions:
- I am looking to compare Nutanix and VMware vSAN. Which one is better in terms of functionality and management?
- Nutanix and vSAN: Which is best for cloud services?
- What Is The Biggest Difference Between vSAN And VxRail?
- Do you think VMware’s HCI solution is a good alternative to AWS?
- What Is The Biggest Difference Between Nutanix And VMware vSAN?
- Which is your recommended HCI solution in 2022: Nutanix Acropolis AOS, VMware vSAN or anything else?
- What is the biggest difference between HPE SimpliVity and VMware vSAN?
- Which would you choose - Nutanix Acropolis AOS or VMware vSAN?
- Which solution performs better: Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure or VMware vSAN?
- How does HPE Simplivity compare with VMware vSAN?