VMware vSAN Reviews

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) implementation on vSAN with an environment of about 2000 desktops and 1000 servers.

Teams required to manage the storage for the entire VDI infrastructure were not required after implementing the vSAN solution. Any seasoned VMware engineer can easily manage the whole vSAN without any issues. 

It is simple to manage, very easy to implement and troubleshoot in case of any failures.

• Hot add
• Upgrades
• Ease of management

Any VMware engineer can easily manage vSAN, troubleshoot issues, and perform an upgrade on the vSAN without any downtime. Since the storage space is local to the hosts, it reduces the overall response time and improves the performance.

Some storage tiering options can be included, like other mature storage systems. Some intelligence can be added to the newest version to provide more flexibility between storage tiers, like Nutanix, to make this product a true software defined storage product.

• vSAN ROBO with two physical nodes

I'm working as a consultant, so I can’t directly say how it helped my customer. But I know that my customer started to equip some branches with our building block and it replaces NetApp filers. We are using a building block of two vSAN nodes and the wireness appliances in the main datacenter. With the next release of our building block, based on vSphere 6.5 and vSAN 6.5, we are switching to direct cabling, so no 10GbE switch is needed for vSAN traffic.

I’m often asked for a vSAN stretched cluster in combination with erasure coding. Currently with vSAN 6.5, you can use one of them but not both at the same time. It is kind of a German behaviour to have two datacenters with active/active architecture and syncronized mirror. But for this type of customer, it’s pretty important to get a vSAN stretched cluster with erasure coding.

I have been using it for three months now. I use VMware vSphere 6.0 Update 2 and vSAN 6.2 (hybrid).

We have not had stability issues. Even losing the witness appliances is no big deal. vSAN 6.2, as well as vSAN 6.5, seems to be a pretty stable and reliable platform.

We have not had scalability issues in both ways. Scaling down to two hosts with direct cabling is possible for ROBO, as well as big clusters with over 32 hosts.

I rate technical support 4.5/5.

My customer switched (or currently is switching) from NetApp filers to vSAN. The main reason is cost. You need the ESXi host hardware anyway, but you now save the costs of storage maintenance. The costs per vSAN license (and the maintenance) are usually lower than for NetApp in this case. Plus, you gain the benefit of only having one management console which is well known and built-in to the management tools used for the central datacenters.

The initial setup is straightforward, but only after deploying the vCenter service. Once the vCenter is up and running, it is pretty easy to enable vSAN. Despite the automatic selection of disks, we chose the manual selection and it was extremely easy to set up vSAN.

When you don’t have a chance to build upon an existing vCenter service, you have to think about the deployment of vCenter without having vSAN. There are several options, like deploying vCenter temporarily on a client PC and then migrating it later onto the vSAN cluster. But it’s always a bit tricky and you probably need some extra time to get the installation done. In most of my vSAN installations, the vCenter was already up and running, so the initial setup of the vSAN cluster literally takes minutes.

Licensing is pretty straightforward. Have a look at the features you need and choose the license that fits. For ROBO scenarios, there is a special ROBO license that could save you some money.

dvSwitch functionality is included in every vSAN license. You don’t have to have vSphere Enterprise Plus to use dvSwitches. You only need vSAN licenses. And despite that, vSAN comes with all flash functionality within every license.

My customer was focusing on continuing with NetApp filers and ESXi hosts or vSAN for ROBO.

Have a look at the simplicity of vSAN and how it easily integrates into the existing management tools. It’s not even the ease of implementation; it’s the ease of managing and maintaining the complete stack.

The vSAN technology is clearly the big game changer here. VMware's software-defined storage finally enables us to build a private cloud solution that scales much easier than we are used to.

We wanted to be able to grow much more dynamically than what we have been able to until now. Instead of big investments and complex storage installations, we now have an infrastructure where expansion is a lot easier because we can just buy four more new servers, plug them in and add them to the pool of resources.

We are moving faster every day and are developing new systems and services all the time. We expect the amount of projects this year to be 4-5 times as many as last year and we will be able to support that growth with this solution.

We did plan on using deduplication in our original specification, but during the planning of the configuration, we were advised against it by VMware.

It was a brand new feature, so it was, at the time, perhaps, too early to use it. I am expecting that we will use it in the future when it has matured.

I have used vSphere for seven months for the latest installation, but we have been running VMware for the last 10 years.

We haven't had stability issues that have affected our running servers. However, that is partly because we pay attention to new releases and what they contain, and we don't update just because a new version is available.

Some updates that we chose not to install had bugs that could have caused instability. Also, because we run such a wide range of products from VMware, one has to look at the support matrix before updating/upgrading software, as it may take some time before all products support each other.

We have had a few alarms and alerts in the system, but they have been resolved without any downtime.

Scalability is one of the major advantages of this new installation.

Technical support is no better or worse than what we have seen from other vendors. Usually it works well, but once in a while there are cases that seem to run in circles where you need to get in touch with your account manager and have them escalate the case to get progress.

We have used VMware for virtualization and NetApp for storage for about 10 years.

We stayed with VMware and decided to switch to vSAN because they have had a good track record here with stable products and we could save money (and grow more gradually) by running vSAN instead of a traditional storage system.

I would say initial setup is complex. But we decided to go with best practices and we had consultants from VMware designing and planning the configuration for us, so it wasn't an issue.

Make sure your designs are complete so you can buy all the licenses and products you need as one purchase to get the best deal.

We did not look into alternative solutions for the virtualization part. But for storage, we looked at other vendors. For example: NetApp, Tintri, and Nimble.

Start from scratch. Reject all your old dogmas about how things should be and what is right and embrace the functionality that is available.

We designed our system so we can use NSX and all the other features VMware has to offer, even though we didn't plan on using it in the beginning.

If you are putting constraints on your design because of ties to old legacy systems and designs, then you will never get the full benefits.

• Converged solution for shared storage

When configuring a HA vSphere cluster, you need shared storage. Traditionally, one would need a SAN or NAS to provide this kind of HA. Using vSAN, you can use the same servers as the hypervisor uses for the vSAN storage. No SAN or NAS is needed and much less hardware is needed to provide the same HA solution.

• No need for additional storage
• Hypervisor can provide storage as well
• Integration in a virtualization stack

I would like to see improvement in monitoring and performance statistics. When installing the product, it has limited statistics. The default vCenter statistics are available, but deep IOPS/latency and block sizing is absent. You can connect vRealize Operations to vSAN, giving much more information, but this is not available by default.

We have been using this solution for two years.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability. I suggest starting with a four-node cluster.

I would give technical support a rating of 7/10.

We use this solution along with another solution, so there was no hard switch.

It is easy for a VMware administrator to install.

We use it in a cloud-provider model based on usage. The end user pricing is not known.

Start with a four-node cluster.

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.

The valuable features are:

• The integration into the web client (health, component compatibility checks such as controller drivers and re-sync)
• Integration with storage profiles
• Simple patching process
• Integration into the VMkernel

The solution reduced the deployment administration of the storage components.

The areas of improvement are:

• The performance reports should be improved when customers are using third-party SSL certificates. This service doesn't work if you use it.
• In a hybrid configuration, it would be good if you could mirror the SSD instead of only having access to one DISK for caching.

We have been using this solution for over a year.

I did not encounter stability issues because I used certified hardware and installed the required firmware/drivers.

However, I have the following issues with stability:

• Not all ESX hosts contribute to statistical collection because we use third-party SSL certificates. We opened a case with support.
• Under the "Datastore” and “Datastore Clusters" views, I cannot move the "Datastore" into a more appropriate folder. It has to be located in the root directory of the view.

There have been no scalability issues at this stage.

Technical support is strong in their technical knowledge.

I have deployed several Nutanix and VSAN systems. I have never had to switch between products. Being a technical consultant, our customers generally have decided on the preferred technology before they engage me to design and implement their solution. I openly discuss my view on each product when asked.

I found challenges in setting up a VSAN Cluster that were not related to VMware VSAN itself. They were related to server hardware and network configurations.

Licenses are expensive wherever you go. Many people don't appreciate the long-term savings with a technology like vSphere and VSAN, and therefore complain about the up-front costs.

I would prefer if VSAN were free with the Enterprise edition. It would make its adoption more palatable.

I have deployed Nutanix and VMware VSAN clusters.

RTFM and have realistic expectations about the product.

It's fast – it’s really blazing fast.

It saves us the expense of an all-flash array. All-flash would work for us, but VSAN is cheaper. I think that this solution is really new, but it has real benefits over all-flash arrays.

We are seeing some improvements coming up, but at the moment you have to store every object on multiple disks to protect it, and they should be better distributed over disks to help parity.

It's very stable – we have had no failures.

It’s really scalable in terms of both capacity and performance, at least for our needs.

We haven’t had to use it – the product is really stable.

We were using a traditional storage array from Dell and we will see more VSAN usage in the future.

The initial setup was a little bit complicated because we have to do everything from scratch. It’s a new world, and much easier in the newer releases.

We looked at other vendors – classic storage vendors – but we thought this direction was faster as things are moving towards a software designed storage.

I think you should try it – its really stable and valuable and help to drill your costs down.

Getting rid of sharing storage, especially VSAN 6. That would be even better than having an all-flash array.

I hear a lot of issues of stability whenever you go to maintenance, but people who are having spectacular experiences are not speaking the loudest so it can be hard to tell.

I haven’t looked at configuration maximums but it seems like you can scale it up pretty hard in terms of clusters with vSphere 6.

In general, VMware customer support is world class. Response time is really quick – you get connected to experts much faster than in other companies, like Microsoft for example.

All I've seen is community support, especially from bloggers and community experts. I haven’t had any experience.

It's not very different than vSphere 3. If you're comfortable with VMware it’s straightforward. From what Ive seen, it’s a simple install once you have all the hardware. I have heard you have to tweak it performance wise.

Support is up there in the top five things to look at. If you can call, have online communities, easy access to articles. I would also add that if you can get through to someone who has deep knowledge of the product quickly.

Stability, the issue that we have run into is that they are fly-by-night brand new startups and you can get stranded without support.

You need to vet the company, they need to be around in a few weeks to help you. Also, peer reviews are very important – invaluable. Salesmen will tell you everything, we look at whitepapers and vendor supplied information. Google is your friend.