VMware vSAN Reviews

It is used as a remote/branch office solution for a new site that we acquired.

It consolidated our workload and brought the cost down over a long.

Ease of use and implementation.

More modularity in terms of how nodes are provisioned (all nodes having to be the same size when deployed).

It's going to be employed for our VDI infrastructure and, potentially, we will move it into our VSI infrastructure.

Considering that we have many storage arrays, this seems to keep us a little bit more contained and it's easier to manage versus some of the legacy storage where we don't have manageability, or we're losing manageability for it.

We have greater uptimes, we're not down nearly as much, and we can identify and deal with solutions to problems that we're encountering in those environments.

• Scalability
• Cost

I would like to see more ease of use, more compatibility with different areas.

The stability is good. 

We have a couple of problems but we're working through them. In the deployments we have in our Dev environment, it's more about how the hardware is interacting. We have them on Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes and we're just working through some of the driver issues and some random rebooting that we're having to deal with. But we have support contracts. Everything seems to be doing fine.

Our experience working with technical support has been good.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor for us are the stability of the product, as much uptime as we can get, and service contracts so that we can get people to react more quickly to cases that we open and get things escalated properly.

I rate vSAN at nine out of ten. What would help make it a ten would be if we didn't have so much inconsistency in the information around how to deploy it. That that would be a little bit better.

We use our vSan primarily for our VCF deployment. We run our production workloads on it, mostly for Microsoft SQL databases and various WebSphere and web-based front-end applications.

It performs pretty well for the most part. The older versions had some issues, specifically regarding upgrade paths and the robustness of the product, but in the last two or three versions they've really addressed those issues and brought it up to speed and made it a real enterprise solution.

• Encryption
• Deduplication
• Compression
• The ability to manage all of your storage within your server rack

I would like to see more comprehensive lifecycle management. The current path and process for upgrading or updating the firmware, as well as the storage controller software to interact with that firmware, is fairly manual and not very well documented. A little more time and effort spent on the documentation of the lifecycle management for vSan would be really great.

Currently, it's very stable. Previous versions, which are still active and out there online: upgrade to the new version.

Scalability is slightly limited in that you're pinned by the physical disks in your hosts, but provided that your solution doesn't require you to have specific disk technology, you can get the size you need and expand it out as much as you need to.

I give technical support an A-plus, from my experience. It was perfect, it was awesome. They helped us recover from a very major outage and we would have been down for much longer had they not been involved.

We were on old hardware and we needed to move to a new solution.

It completely removes the need for a storage network and for a storage administrator and all of that infrastructure and the costs that are involved with them. That, right there, is a huge return.

It's great for DevTest and, as long as you're not going to be consuming data at huge rates, it's great for Prod too.

I would rate vSAN as six-and-a-half or seven out of ten, but only because of the major problems we experienced with them a few months ago that led to some big outages. From what I understand, the current version alleviates those issues. If we're evaluating the current version, I would give it an eight.

It would be a ten if there were more robust lifecycle management and a better-documented implementation within vSphere.

We use it for our developer clusters.

It's a little too early to tell what the benefits are. We've only implemented it over the past three to six months.

• The ease of implementation
• The ease of expandability

Perhaps they could provide encryption without having to use an encryption manager.

No issues so far. It's been pretty stable.

The scalability has been pretty good for us so far.

We are primarily NetApp. The decision to invest in a new solution was a C-level-down recommendation.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

Go for it. As long as you don't have a very high IOPS-oriented application, it's a great way to go.

I rate it eight out of 10. While it's a little too early to tell, it doesn't seem like it gives the performance that an actual SAN would give for heavy IOPS, read/writes.

We use vSAN because it's a VMware product which integrates with all the other virtualization, and it simplifies hyper-converged environments.

• I would like more integration with the hardware when it comes to disc types and supporting the newer types of storage. 
• I would like compression and deduplication to be offered for offloading hardware, instead of doing it with software. That would be nice.

The latest version is very stable. It had a couple of hiccups in the earlier versions. The deployment and integration were simple, but we did have some bugs that we hit on, which have since been fixed.

Adding new nodes and expanding vSAN forward is simple and non-disruptive for a lot of our customers. It makes it simpler so we are not doing late night deployments, and we can answer the needs of the business immediately.

It is easy to find information out there, not only from searching the web, but even the times I have engaged VMware support. We were able to get an engineer within minutes of opening a case who understood vSAN, and they were able to help us out.

The initial setup for vSAN is simple. A couple clicks, we were up and running. 

It does takes more time to rack it than to actually configure it.

As far as a software-based, storage control product, it is great. They are staying ahead of a lot of the competition out there. vSan is what a lot of the competition is using.

• Allows for very easy administration
• You don't have LUNs to set up and assign
• The ability to set up storage policies and assign them at the disk level
• Allows for different setups for different workload requirements

• Allows for the expansion of our public library patron computer environment into a three-node VMware cluster using commodity servers
• Eliminates the need for expensive disk arrays and controllers
• Provides greater reliability and performance

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

There have been no issues with stability.

We have had no issues with scalability.

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

We chose VMware vSAN for these reasons:

• It is part of the ESXi kernel. This allows for the product to be very fast with little overhead.
• It is included in the Enterprise Plus version of ESXi. Compared with competing products, it provides great cost savings.

We have a Nutanix environment running in production as well.

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 purchased. Our cost savings were due to buying commodity server hardware with local hard drives instead of investing in large SAN hardware.

We had several servers we used in our VMware cluster, as well as a storage device. The implementation of vSAN reduced the rack space, since we no longer required several slots in the cabinet to rack a storage device. vSAN also made it very easy for us to scale out. Power consumption was also reduced within our datacentre.

I like the scalability and the fact that it reduces your total cost for storage over several years.

The only thing I can think of at this time is to improve the performance monitoring and performance visibility within the GUI. They have already made several improvements in vSAN 6.2, but there's always room for improvement when it comes to monitoring performance.

We had no stability issues.

We had no scalability issues.

VMware technical support provides a great service.

We switched to move towards a software-defined datacentre.

It is very easy to configure and setup. vSAN is already part of vSphere ESXi. You simple need to apply a license and do minor configuration to get it to work.

The first 1-2 years of purchasing vSAN will be expensive. Thereafter, the longer you are running it, the more cost savings you will have.

We looked into several other products, such as Pure Storage and Dell solutions.

Keep it simple, and don’t try and over-complicate things. Make sure to follow VMware best practices when it comes to implementing your vSAN solution. Read those whitepapers and make sure you understand how you want to implement it in your environment.

The most valuable features of VSAN are consistent and increased performance with a linear cost which helped us in our data center.

Using VSAN Observer, we were able to see exactly what the VSAN environment is doing on a day to day basis, so we've gotten to really enjoy that interface.

The benefits that we're seeing are directly related to our customers. They have better experiences using their EMR and practice management systems.

The manageability is better, it's definitely fully integrated into the VMware stack so it's very easy to use from the web client.

The features I am most looking forward to are the performance monitoring capabilities of VSAN Observer being transitioned into the web client. That's what I'm really looking forward to.

UPDATE: Capacity and performance monitoring is now available in the web client and works well in 6.2. I am looking forward to DARE(data at rest encryption) in the next version.

We have used vSAN for approximately a two years.

We had one issue with deployment, which was related to using the legacy vsphere client to place the hosts into maintenance mode. Which is easily resolved by using the web client for maintenance.

The stability exceeds what we're currently on from a standard SAN platform.

The scalability is much greater than the current SAN that we're on because we're technically locked in to a certain number of discs and a certain number of performance and so the scalability is drastically improved. We currently have a four node cluster and we're going to be just incrementally moving off of our legacy SAN.

UPDATE: We expanded our cluster to five vsan nodes however we are now in process of retrofitting four legacy hosts for a total of nine vsan nodes.

Technical support was very responsive, the technical support staff was. Specifically patching hosts, we inadvertently caused VSANdata evacuations during the middle of the day. Whereas, if you were to do a maintenance mode with non-evacuation, that wouldn't happen but they were able to get to the root cause and provide us an answer on why that happened.

We made the jump to VSAN primarily due to cost renewals going up year over year on traditional platforms. The software and hardware costs that we see now is just linear, we know what it's going to be.

We actually have been with VMware for quite a while so we made the choice to use VSAN because of that partnership that we have had over the years. We're fully focused in VMware and we love the product. That's why we chose VSAN.

I wasn't familiar at all with VSAN at the time, so there was a little learning curve there but outside of that it would be comparable to setting up a legacy SAN environment.

We actually, just by incrementally increasing the cost of our servers, plus the licensing, we were able to linearly scale our environment as opposed to doing forklift upgrades.

We evaluated other all-flash arrays and hyper converged infrastructure.

Everybody wants to say 10 and I would say it's going to be a 10. I love VSAN and I would say it's probably an 8 and there's room for improvement. It's constantly being worked on and I think it's going to be the storage platform going forward.

Colleagues looking into VSAN, I would recommend looking into the VSAN Ready Nodes, they're pre-configured and you can customize your build to whatever you want really, without having to build your own necessarily.

We aren't currently using the Ready Nodes, but I could see where a Ready Node would be beneficial for deployment. The time to deploy would be improved using a Ready Node.

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