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.

Performance is the most valuable feature because you are moving the storage closer to the CPU. It’s also cheap. We also evaluated an all-flash array, but even a low-end flash is much more expensive. This is much cheaper.

Concrete benefits would be manageability; we don’t have a storage guy because there is less stuff to deal with.

The savings is not the issue but I can scale my system – I’m building the node for 200 users, but all I will have to do is order another host and it will be configured exactly the same, and they are over-provisioned in terms of memory.

I have been using VMWare since it was a beta test.

I don’t know, but my gut feeling is that it distributes across the hosts, which should be very stable, and it’s all done at the hypervisor level. I don’t think we’ll have any issues.

I think it’s scalable in a linear fashion. We’ve outgrown our low-end SAN and hit a wall. We didn’t have a storage guy so we hit a wall when we hit 180 users and it was thrashing the SAN. With VSAN, that kind of issue – especially using the sizing tool – says that you should be more than fine. We're a small shop so we don’t have any doubt that it will scale to size.

They are the best in class – I hold everyone else to their standard. They solve the problem and work the problem. I’m kind of spoiled because I also get federal support so I get especially good service. I have always found their support to be stellar.

I had an issue a few years ago where my hosts were dropping and I couldn’t connect to them, so for three days I worked with VMWare. I went through four shifts of support staff, and they stayed with me. It was a 72 hour outage and I got back around to my original guy, and he figured it out. They are amazing. They don’t point a finger – with IBM they would hand it off from one guy to another and will never ever tell you that.

We replaced our infrastructure and did a proper POC. It’s cheap enough that we can still use the hosts and hook a SAN in, and everyone will get an SSD at their desks, so most of the cost is infrastructure. I loved it when I heard about it – virtualized storage and a distributed RAID. Makes total sense.

Their licensing gets a bit confusing, it’s hard to get the hang of that.

From what I saw, you can create the SAN in a small environment, and then grow. That’s a valuable feature of VSAN and makes it cost effective.

It's cost effective because you can start small and grow as needed.

From my experience testing it, VSAN could be more stable.

We tested it for about three months.

I was not sure about its stability because we have a big SAN shop and I got the impression that it’s good for small offices and not the larger ones.

The scalability seems ok – I would give it 6/10 because in a traditional SAN you can go up to a few terabytes. However with VSAN, it seems you can only get a couple hundred terabytes, and I expected more.

We haven’t had a chance to use it for VSAN, but in general we've had pretty good support from VMware, so I think VSAN tech support will also be good.

We haven’t fully implemented, but it should be simple and straightforward.

We will implement it by ourselves without a vendor team.

We looked into Dell and Nutanix, and chose VSAN because of ease of setup.

Customer support, the actual technology, how robust or stable it is and the ease of deployment are the criteria too look for when selecting a vendor.

I would say that if you’re a medium IT organization and looking for a cost effective solution, VSAN is worthwhile; but, if you’re a bigger environment, I would go with a bigger SAN like EMC, NetApp, and IBM.

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.

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. 

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 use VMware vSAN in a private cloud. We deploy company (customers') applications using the application servers in VMware. We have about 10,000+ users using it.

[We deployed it for our customer]

Being able to deploy multiple applications with virtual servers is the most valuable for us. 

I think it needs to be more cost-effective if customers already have existing SAN to compare with.

We have used VMware vSAN for four years. We are using version 6.5 of vSAN.

We have not had much of a problem so I would say it is very stable.

Good.

We have good support and meet SLA.

We switched from traditional deployment to HCI in order to scale and ease management to cope with a large number of applications

The initial setup was easy and straightforward. We had no issues. It took us about a month for installation and configuration.

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Customer also considered Nutanix.

VMware vSAN may not be the right solution for everyone or for every solution. There might be more solutions that you want to consider depending on your issues of application deployment at hand.  So you have to look at your own factors and compare solutions thoroughly before you make a big decision. I would rate VMware vSAN at an eight on a scale of ten.

We have around 70 to 100 VMs, and we use VMware vSAN to store our data. We have a lot of daily data.

It is easy to work with, easy to handle, and easy to manage.

Its price could be improved. It is too expensive for our clients.

I have been using this solution for around a year.

It is quite stable. 

We didn't increase our storage.

Their technical support is really helpful. They are very efficient. I didn't have any problem.

Its initial setup is not difficult.

It is too expensive.

It is a good solution to implement if you have a lot of data. It is quite stable and not too difficult to manage.  

I would rate VMware vSAN a seven out of ten. It is a good solution, but it is too expensive.