VMware vSAN Reviews

We use if for our primary infrastructure. In terms of performance, vSAN is fine.

Being able to do maintenance on the fly is a real benefit: migrating off, updating, and then moving the guest back on to the nodes.

Software-defined storage.

Everything that has been mentioned as part of Update 1 solves part of the HCL list issue. They're handling the firmware version but, at the moment, they're only handling the storage IO. They're not handling the rest, which would be firmware, the BIOS, the fNIC, and so forth. After speaking with them, they said they're looking at that for a future update.

Because of the vendor, we are very neutral on the stability at this moment. The main issue is drivers. Every time we move to a new vSAN version, we're having problems finding the correct drivers for the vendor.

The scalability is fine. Adding new nodes is very simple.

Our experience with technical support has been excellent. Every single time we've had an issue so far, they've been able to find the issue with the vendor.

Because of the time that we've had to spend dealing with the vendor, we haven't seen a return on investment yet.

Go with the full managed support, something like VxRail or, if you go with Cisco, get their full central management system.

vSAN alone, with the current features and version we're at, rates an eight out of ten. The vendor would be a definite one out of ten.

To make the solution a ten, it needs to be vanilla. There shouldn't be any custom drivers, any custom anything. It should just be, "Hey, you know what? These drivers are going to work for this version, the next version, and the version after that." That's the difficulty in this. It takes too much upkeep.

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.

Our primary use of vSAN is to set up a deployment of a small subset of clusters that we have out in our gas and oil prepossessing plants, in remote areas.

Performance-wise, it has gone above and beyond what we originally spec'ed it for. From that respect, for us, it's like the "golden gun".

It gave us the ability to get the storage-processing and CPU power that we needed in remote areas. It's something like "the big bullet in a small gun", where it actually works and does what it needs to do. It's very useful for what we need it to do.

The most valuable feature is that we're not spending any additional money on an external storage solution for it. It gives us the all-in-one, Swiss Army knife kind of solution.

The usability is pretty good but it could use a little tweaking on the UI, with a clearer definition of exactly what some of the things do. For example, sometimes when sticking hosts into maintenance mode, you have to re-read the definition a couple of times. I have to say to myself, "Okay. I actually want to evacuate the data off of this host. Or no, I actually don't. I want to keep it there but I still put the host into maintenance mode." So a little bit more clear and concise definition of what some of the options do would help.

The first impressions of its stability were really good. After using it a little bit more and going through some issues with it, it still shows that it's a very robust tool. From that point of view, I'm going to keep on using it.

Scalability is very easy. We've already run into one scenario where we've needed some more storage. We were able to provision the drives, slide them into our current hosts in that cluster, and expand it. It was very easy.

I have used technical support and it leaves a little bit to be desired. I've gone through a few people to get to the person who actually has all the knowledge, who can actually solve the problem.

There was a lot of Hyper-V deployed out in this environment, and things of that nature. Hardware was coming to a service-contract end, so the next step for us was to get rid of a lot of one-on-one virtualization that was happening with the Hyper-V environment and start consolidating and bringing it down into something that was a little bit more manageable.

If you're coming from a small enough environment, where you have to provision out a stand-alone datastore for this, and you don't have the resources to do it, I would definitely say go look at vSAN for that, because you can definitely combine your compute and resources into one environment.

Dataprev has a strategic partnership with VMware and the federal government of Brazil. We're developing a new public cloud and private cloud for the whole government of Brazil.

There are so many valuable features.

I need some additional features, and to learn more, to develop best practices for the Brazilian federal government.

I would like to see machine-learning. This is the biggest problem because, in Brazil, our federal government doesn't know about moving to the cloud. We have city, state, and federal governments to move to the cloud. Dataprev is beginning the work towards a private cloud and machine-learning would be an important feature, one I really need.

I'm really impressed with the stability of vSAN.

My team is starting to develop and make use of the scalability. The team in Brazil is very big in cloud performance but we are just beginning to move into a cloud program.

The technical account team works with my team in Brazil, together, whether in London, China, India - many teams working with us in Brazil. I would rate technical support as very good.

In Brazil, our strategy is that we need to move to the cloud. But there are federal rules and, connected to the government's strategy, there are some questions with many of the solutions. All governments have a problem moving to AWS, to Google, or to Microsoft. Dataprev's strategy, in the employment of the federal government, is to apply the new features while staying within the principles set by the federal government. All governments have a big problem with many data centers, a lot of code, with auditors, etc. I can't go into our strategy in depth here.

The government decided to move to the cloud but there are many problems with regulations, with agencies' sensitive information. VMware provides primary and strategic development features, in working with us in the federal government.

When looking at vendors the most important criterion for us is trust. We need to be able to trust the vendor, the solution, the whole technical development team, because the technical account manager and other teams work with my team inside my data centers.

I can't comment on the initial setup.

I rate vSAN a 10 out of 10 because the VMware team works with my team to develop a better, more timely response. We have made improvements for the federal government. We have been working with VMware for almost 15 years

For a new full site, vSAN was used instead of going with the usual fibre SAN. Since vSAN requires SSDs, it was a great way to introduce that tech to the company. If we would have gone with a traditional SAN SSD, it would have been an option, so a debatable feature.

We gained fantastic performance with the benefit of simplifying the whole hardware stack requiring less sum of knowledge to run and maintain.

The simplicity of everything, even though it was a new technology at the time with some quirks. The lower skill cost of maintaining it meant that we could do more with the people that we had.

When it was implemented, we were one of the first to jump into using vSAN for production use. The main problem we had was hardware compatibility, finding the right hardware that was certified. This caused further problems because the hardware reseller had little knowledge of the requirements and we even had issues with firmware from the hardware vendor. This delayed the implementation time by a few months. This should not be a issue today, but still be cautious when choosing the hardware.

Standard fibre SAN infrastructure. We switched due to fibre switches, fibre cards, and fibre SAN.

The setup was very easy if you have the correct hardware and firmware.

Factor in operational costs.

Compared it to a similar sized fibre SAN.

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.

The most important feature for us is the converged infrastructure, which is all this tool is about. There is no need to manage separate storage areas in SAN/NAS environments. Storage management comes built-in with the vSAN tool. Storage is managed via policies. Define a policy and apply it to the datastore/virtual machine and the software-defined storage does the rest. These are valuable features.

Scalability and future upgrades are a piece of cake. If you want more IOPS, then add disk groups and/or nodes on the fly. If you want to upgrade the hardware, then add new servers and retire the old ones. No service breaks at all.

The feature that we have not yet implemented but are looking at, is the ability to extend the cluster to our other site in order to handle DR situations.

Provisioning virtual machines has been simplified, as there is no provisioning/management of the separate storage layer and it is no more in question.

The management client, i.e., the Flash-based client, is just not up to the mark. I’m really waiting for the HTML5 client to be fully ready and all the features are implemented to it. This, of course, is not a vSAN issue but a vSphere issue.

Of course as vSAN is tightly embedded into vSphere, it is also managed by the same tool. vSphere management is done via browser, and currently the only supported client is the flash-based one. VMware is rolling out a new HTML5 –based client, but that is a slow process. It began as a Fling and since then, there has been quite a number of releases as new features are added. It is today quite usable, but still not complete yet.

There is also the C# -client, also known as the fat-client, which is to be installed onto a management system. Recent versions of vSphere do not support the C#-client anymore. Thus the browser is the only possibility with current versions.

So, my criticism is aimed towards the current Flash-based client, which is utterly slow, and Flash itself being deprecated technology. The sooner we can get rid of it, the happier we all will be.

I have used this solution for around a year.

Stability has not been an issue for us. We have not run into any serious software faults. VMware ESXi is a mature product with very few problems and today, vSAN is also getting there.

The scalability of the product is way beyond our needs.

L1 technical support, which I have mostly been dealing with, has been pretty solid, especially the guys in Ireland, who do handle it pretty well, both technically and in reference to the customer service aspect.

We did not have any comparable solution previously. We did previously use traditional SAN / NAS environments from where the storage areas were provisioned for the VMware clusters.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. All in all, it took three days to complete the entire process; that included installation of the hardware itself, installation of ESXi onto the hardware, creating the data center and the cluster, configuring the networks and multicasting on the surrounding network infrastructure, defining all the disk groups and networks at the cluster, and finally turning the vSAN on. vSAN was the simplest part of the whole process.

As VMware products are licensed per number of sockets, you need to think this fully through. However, don’t go cheap on the number of hosts. You’ll thank me later.

We got presentations both from SimpliVity and Nutanix. No serious evaluation of other products was made. We did evaluate vSAN a couple months before the purchase, so as to get familiar with it, and we do have a lab environment now to play with.

In hindsight, we could have carried out a more-thorough evaluation of vSAN to get a really good feel about it; maybe even run a part of your actual production there for an extended period of time to see all the pros and cons.

Study the VMware Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) carefully with your server hardware provider and make sure all the components/firmware versions are on the HCL; either that or buy predefined hardware, a.k.a. vSAN-ready nodes, from a certified vendor. Always make sure that the hardware and firmware levels are on par with the HCL. You may have to upgrade; for example, you may need to upgrade the disk controller firmware when the updates to ESXi are installed. VMware does a pretty good job here and vCenter tells you that there are inconsistencies. However, you should still be prepared for that in advance, before actually installing the updates.

Don’t go with the minimum number of (storage) nodes, as that won’t give you enough room for a hardware failure during a scheduled maintenance break. For a minimum setup, without advanced options in vSAN 6.5 such as deduplication, compression and when Failures to Tolerate (FTT) = 1, the required number of nodes is three. VMware recommends in best practices a minimum number of four nodes. Do yourself a favour and go with at least that or even five would be good.

When disk groups are designed, it is always better to have more smaller disk groups than a few larger disk groups. This increases your availability, decreases time to heal from disk troubles and gives you an improved performance, as there are more cache devices.

If your budget allows it, then go with the all-flash storage. If not, go with even more disk groups. Our cluster has pretty good performance; although we have spinning disks, the read latency usually stays below 1ms and write latency stays below 2ms.

Plan your network infrastructure carefully, especially that part which handles the vSAN traffic. Go with separate 10G switches and dual interfaces for each server just for vSAN. Handle the virtual machine traffic, migration traffic and management traffic elsewhere. Go with 10G or faster, if you need that. Don’t use 1G for vSAN traffic, unless your environment is really small or is a lab.

Plan your backup / restore strategy really well and test it through. Test restore periodically for both full virtual machines and single files inside virtual machines. To carry out test restore is always important, but with vSAN it is even more so, as all your eggs are in the same basket and there are no more traditional .vmdk files that you can fiddle with. A separate test / lab vSAN cluster would be really good to test various things such as installing updates, restoring backups etc.

Storage policies and I/O are the most valuable features. The storage policies are useful in my job to create my own policies and prioritize some apps over others, and create high availability for some virtual machines.

It increases the performance of the virtual machines and reduces the TCO for storage deployment.

Hardware compatibility needs to be increased to be able to use more RAID controllers available on the market.

I have used it for three years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 8/10.

We previously used another solution. We switched because it reduced the TCO.

Changes have been made in version 6.5.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated EMC ScaleIO.

It is easy to design and easy to implement.