VMware vSAN Reviews

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.

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.

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.

We have been using this solution for two years.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The setup was straightforward. It literally took a few mouse clicks to setup vSAN.

You get better value for your money with a vSAN solution than with a traditional SAN with lower TCO.

We looked briefly at alternatives, but nothing stood out like vSAN. Nutanix was another solution, but surprisingly, it would have costed us more.

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.

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 :-)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The use case is mainly for greenfields deployment. I'm a senior solutions architect and we are system integrators. Our company is a partner with VMware.

Very easy to implement in any existing environment.

I'd like to see more storage terabytes available after excluding the management. 

I've been using this solution for two years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

The technical support is very good. 

The initial setup is straightforward and it's very easy to implement in any X86 server so anyone can use it in their existing environment. 

I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

VMware vSAN is a hyper-converged infrastructure and we use it as a software-defined storage solution for our customers.

The solution is simple to use compared to other solutions, such as Cisco Hyperflex, Dell VxRail, and Nutanix

VMware vSAN needs to improve its features because other solutions have more advanced features.

I have been using VMware vSAN for approximately four years.

The solution is quite stable in small and medium environments. However, I do not have experience using the solution in enterprises companies.

We have 31 people in my organization using this solution.

Technical has been good in my experience but they could improve.

The price of VMware vSAN is expensive and there is an annual license required.

I have evaluated many other solutions, such as Cisco Hyperflex, Dell VxRail, and Nutanix

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.

We have a lab setup using VMware vSAN which is on Nutanix. We are using the vSAN for testing purposes and attempting to answer some questions. For example, how will the application be supported, how will the exit configuration be, and what would happen in terms of failures.

One of the valuable features of vSAN is it has a universal type of technology that allows you to deploy it on any server or hardware. Competitors, such as Nutanix, provides the AOS and can be deployed only on certified hardware. For vSAN, it does not require any kind of certified hardware.

Additionally, the dashboards and user interface provide a lot of details.

In a future release, they could add micro-segmentation or security level features integrated into vSAN.

I have been using this solution within the last 12 months.

We have never had any kind of hardware issues or problems. The solution is stable.

The technical was responsive and was helpful. There is a lot of documentation online if we need assistance.

The initial setup was complex.

We had assistance doing the implementation from the vSAN engineers.

This solution is expensive.

Nutanix provides us with Acropolis Operating System (AOS) along with its hardware, while VMware provides vSAN, vCenter, and vSphere which all have separate licenses and costs.

We have evaluated Nuranix and HPE.

If you have storage, separate servers, or any kind of traditional architecture you can convert it to FCI with vSAN. It is a very simple and easy-to-use solution.

I rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for our applications and its high availability.

The high availability is very good.

It's a good place to store our applications.

You can install the solution yourself.

The solution isn't as scalable as we would like it to be.

The stability needs to be improved.

The installation process is difficult.

I've used the solution for about three months. I installed it around a year or so ago.

The stability could be better. We're not really happy with the reliability or performance.

The scalability isn't ideal. A company might have trouble with this aspect of the solution.

We have about 500 users still using the solution.

The installation process isn't easy. It's not straightforward. It's a bit difficult, actually. They could work to make it easier.

We have about 17 people on staff that can handle maintenance tasks.

I handled the installation myself. I did not get help from a consultant or integrator. It was all handled in-house.

We do not currently pay a license fee. I cannot speak to any costs related to having this product in the company.

We're using version seven of the solution. I'm not sure if it is the latest version or not.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of then.

I would recommend the solution to other users.

We are a non-profit and we are working on a project utilizing the solution for infrastructure.

The solutions best feature is that it is easy to use. The integration between different operating system is easy. It is reliable. 

I have been using the solution for more than fifteen years.

The solution is totally stable.

The customer service is good but there is a cost for it. It does not come free.

It is an expensive solution. There should be more flexible with licensing to allow small businesses the essentials of the solution's features. They should have a reduced license fee for a certain amount of memory and nodes, or some kind of restriction like this, that would allow smaller businesses a reduced price. We have had a hard time to afford the solution.

There are a lot of other companies that offer similar solutions and they are becoming more and more competitive with VMware at a fraction of the price. For example, Red Hat. 

The solution is very good but the price is its downside, this is the reason for my low rating. 

I rate VMware vSAN a seven out of ten.