VMware vSAN Reviews

We are service providers. 

vSan is a system with defined storage, it doesn't work on a public cloud. It works and is built in your private cloud.

The most valuable features are Erasure Coding, Deduplication, and Compression, and the advancement in stretching regarding replication.

They should provide Deduplication and Compression over the hybrid drives. The Deduplication and Compression are locally only on all flash drives.

When you compare with Nutanix, you will find the performance in the Deduplication and Compression is over hybrid and on the flash drives. This feature is needed in vSan.

I have been working with VMware vSan for five years.

We are using the latest version.

VMware vSAN is very stable.

It's scalable up to 96 nodes. We have over 500 users in our company who are using this solution.

VMware technical support is remarkable.

We did not work with a similar software preciously. We were working with traditional solutions such as storage, and servers, but not software-defined storage like vSAN.

The vSAN is very easy to deploy.

To deploy a full cluster in a data center, can take four hours.

We are all engineers. We don't need a team to maintain this solution, as everyone services themselves.

The price could be lower. vSAN has many versions with standard and advanced including Enterprise and Enterprise Plus. Regarding the Enterprise and the Advanced, it could be lower.

I would rate this solution an eight out 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.

We use this solution exclusively for our VDI.

We are running vSAN on six Cisco C240 M4 servers.

The newer versions of this solution are much more stable and easier to manage.

We had a near meltdown with 5.5, upgrading firmware and vSphere versions is a hassle.

The most valuable feature of this solution is that it is cheap storage.

This solution would benefit from better collaboration with Cisco for driver updates.

The support from VMware is phenomenal.

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.

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

We are thinking of using vSAN instead of the traditional SAN. We are just starting to explore how vSAN can benefit us.

This is not yet deployed, we are just starting to explore how vSAN can benefit us. it seems very expensive to obtain a vSAN license.

Based on my findings, it seems easier to deploy than the traditional SAN. I was told vSAN can be deployed in a few minutes.

Dedupe in non flash drives can be improved. The raw capacity for PFTT two is only able to use 67% of the raw capacity.

The valuable features are:

• It concentrates all our virtual platforms into a really small number of servers.
• It gets rid of dependencies of expensive SAN storage units which decrease our electricity and cooling expenses in a very drastic way.
• It gives us an extra layer of comfort by providing different levels of high availability.

We can deploy new servers faster than ever. Our capacity to grow is bigger than when we had SAN storage dependency. We are now able to deploy a pool of QA virtual machines for testing purposes in minutes rather than in hours.

I would like to see faster re-sync and recovery times after a host failure. It’s so difficult to restore a normal situation after a failure. There is a large amount of data to re-sync after a host failure. We have a 1Gb vSAN network, and the restore process can last several hours or days.

I would also like to see a granular sync system, rather than the current “all data” transfer.

I have been using this solution since 2014.

During normal activity, the vSAN’s behavior is excellent. Performance and stability are awesome.

We have only encountered some issues related to the host update process because they increase the data movement between cluster hosts and it ends up collapsing the network.

The vSAN solution has scalability inside its core. Although it has a widely supported HCL, you have to choose the new components when adding nodes to ensure that you won’t have any bottlenecks. With our vSAN installation, we didn’t encounter any issues like that.

We haven’t required help from VMware technical support yet. At the beginning, there was not much information about troubleshooting available on the internet.

This product is now more mature and there is a lot of information available, such as VMware or independent blogs and forums, that help with vSAN problems.

We used the traditional solution of a pool of hypervisor hosts with a common storage attached (iSCSI class). It did the job until we had scalability problems that were related to storage.

The cost of buying a new iSCSI storage was more expensive than rethinking our current solution. For this reason, we changed to vSAN technology.

The installation was as complex as any iSCSI scenario can be. However, it was radically simple in terms of the networking part.

In our case, we passed from our standard virtual switches to distributed ones in order to meet the vSAN’s requirements. We had to take into consideration the disks/RAID controller configuration. We chose an acceptable balance between performance and cost, creating a RAID 0 with each disk of each server on the cluster and made them available for vSAN.

We adjusted the pricing and licensing costs based primarily on the physical processors per server. We chose each node of the cluster with one physical processor since vSAN is licensed per processor. We calculated the performance requirements of our entire virtual platform to decide if one processor solution was a good decision.

We didn’t evaluate other options, except for the line of traditional iSCSI storage solutions. We wanted to continue working with the same virtualization-based system. We wanted to get a solution with the smallest possible footprint. The vSAN solution met these requirements.

This is a very good solution if you have the adequate budget to provide for the related requirements or recommendations, e.g., a 10Gb network. It has a wide catalog of uses that fulfill the highest requirements of performance at all levels. Without any doubts, I recommend this solution.

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.