VMware vSAN Reviews

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.

We have a backup server using this technology. We move data in real-time. 

The solution is very stable.

The scalability has been quite good.

The initial setup is pretty quick and easy.

We would like to see even more storage capacity. 

Technical support could be more knowledgeable.

I've been using the solution for two to three years. It's been a while. 

The stability is good. The solution doesn't have bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's very reliable and the performance has been great.

The solution is scalable. We have already upgraded to extend it. We do plan to extend it again and we are going to expand.

We've dealt with technical support previously. It would be helpful if they were more knowledgeable. We had a bottleneck with the technical support team. We required a part and we just couldn't get it and it was delayed. It caused an issue around storage for us.

We did previously use internal storage solutions.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's so simple you don't need any technical assistance or anything like that.

The deployment is pretty fast and only takes one to three hours or so. It's not a long process at all. 

We do have an integrator that can assist with the implementation. 

We do have to pay a yearly licensing fee. It's a subscription for the hardware.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten. We are very satisfied with its capabilities.

I would recommend the solution to others.

VMware vSAN is a software-defined storage solution and there are no hardware dependencies. We use it for general-purpose workloads or Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

The solution has high performance.

VMware vSAN could improve by adding NAS and object storage.

I have been using VMware vSAN for approximately four years.

The solution has been stable.

VMware vSAN is scalable.

We have approximately 5,000 people using this solution in my organization. 

Our last customer in India had over 180 servers running.

The technical support has been great from VMware vSAN.

The installation was straightforward. We did not find it difficult.

We have a team of 50 that does the maintenance and support of the solution.

We pay for a license to use the solution through our company CapEx and then we continue to pay annually.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate VMware vSAN a nine out of ten.

We are a solution provider and VMware vSAN is one of the software-defined storage products that we propose to our customers. Most of the use cases that we see from our customers are where they need to utilize their own hardware. When the environment grows then they buy additional storage.

This product has very good performance when it comes to virtualization storage and works well with solutions such as SAP HANA, Exadata, Hadoop, and Big Data Analytics.

The most valuable feature is the integration with vSphere.

The deduplication and compression work well. 

One of the benefits of using this solution is that when you need additional storage, you just add it.

More focus has to be put on deduplication and compression with a hybrid architecture. The reason is that some customers need to have a more cost-effective solution so they don't want to implement all-flash. As such, they need to use a hybrid environment.

I have been working with VMware vSAN for more than ten years, from when vSAN first began.

This is a very reliable product.

It is easy to deploy additional machines when you need them for your workload.

vSAN can be expanded up to 96 hosts.

The support is very good and they respond quickly.

The initial setup is very straightforward. The length of time required for deployment depends on the number of nodes that it will be installed in. The typical setup takes from one week to two weeks.

The pricing vSAN is very expensive. Enterprise customers can customize their licenses according to their own needs and budget.

There is a cloud offering of this solution but our customers always choose the on-premises version. Most of our customers do not use vSAN as a standalone solution but rather, as part of a hyper-converged infrastructure. We normally propose its use with a product like VxRail and my advice is not to implement it standalone.

I would rate this solution 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.

N/A

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 primarily use the solution for remote offices as well as medium-sized businesses.

The solution works well to help businesses simplify their administration. They unify the technology in boxes like vSAN. You see the performance improvements in the configuration with All-Flash.

The solution's unified administration is its most valuable aspect.

Our customers like the HCI functionality, and tiering. My customers enjoy the portion of the solution that can improve the performance of virtual machines

There isn't too much learning involved when picking up the system.

The solution could maybe improve failure protection. The failure protection for vSAN is very expensive sometimes within the clients. The customers want to be able to tolerate two or three nodes in failure. However, sometimes, the budget is limited. Implementing hyper-converged solutions sometimes are very expensive with the dozens of tolerance of failure.

I've been using the solution for at least the last 12 months.

In terms of vSAN functionality for stability, I haven't had any client complaints. It seems to work as it is supposed to. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze at all. Our customers are happy.

Sometimes our clients find the scalability to be lacking and it affects performance. They're not sure, if they scale up, how much performance they will have left afterward.

Our clients are small to medium-sized businesses typically. They aren't to big.

I'm not sure if any of our clients plan to increase usage. It's hard to predict, due to the pandemic situation. The majority of my customers don't have plans to upgrade or acquire some additional equipment.

I'm usually in pre-sales and therefore don't have any experience with VMware support. I've never personally reached out to them.

The company does, however, offer good documentation.

We also sell other solutions. We aren't exclusively using VMware. We also, for example, sell HP solutions. We also work with UHCI with Nimble and SimpliVity and with Cisco, with Nexus, Huawei, or hyper-convergence solutions like Cisco HyperFlex.

My customers typically choose VMware as it is a known platform. The main deciding factor seems to be knowledge of the product itself.

The initial setup isn't too complex. It's pretty straightforward. The entire implementation process, in fact, is very simple.

If I have an infrastructure already in place then deploy it, the configuration of vSAN will take less than an hour. If the implementation is happening from the scratch, with new equipment, then it will take four hours approximately.

We are a partner of VMware.

Customers considering the solution should be aware that the principal benefits they will get from the solution include integration with HCI, NSX, and cloud solutions.

Overall, I would rate the solution nine ut of ten. We've had a good experience overall and our clients are happy with the product.

The primary use case is for VDI. In fact, we have created what's called a virtual research desktop with VDI, which is insulated because we're dealing with HIPAA data. I think it has performed pretty well.

I like the fact that I've got some degree of redundancy built in and, of course, the performance is great.

It would be much improved if we could somehow integrate a better backup with it. Right now, we're using Veeam and it's okay, but I would like more of a VDP vSAN solution. That would be excellent. The VDP, at least the last time we looked at, it was just not quite there.

I was a little bit worried about the stability initially, because I had an experience about three years ago and I wasn't very happy. But so far, it looks pretty good. I'm actually very surprised that its stability has been improved significantly. So far, so good.

I would have liked it to have been more scalable. It's scalable but not as much as, for example, the ScaleIO systems were or the Kaminario. We looked at Kaminario but that was a risky technology, so we didn't want to go there. I think vSAN is okay. It could use a bit more work on the scalability. I think that's key.

I have not had to use technical support myself but my team has. One of the things that I've heard from my team is that, even when they run into significant issues, they have to go through the whole order of support, and they get frustrated. They get a level-one guy or girl, and that person knows less than my team members do, so that's frustrating. When they get to a level-two or level-three, it's okay.

We were using Compellent. I was okay with it, but it wasn't performing as well as I would've liked and, certainly, the expense and scaling the thing was just too expensive. The other issue was that the natural redundancy you can build with vSAN, you can't really build that with Compellent, unless you have at least two of them. With two you can replicate between them, but, again, they are expensive systems.

When selecting a vendor, what's important to me is a partnership. That sums it up. To me, a vendor has to go in with us for the long haul. We can help the vendor and the vendor can help us. We can help each other out. To me, a partnership is key.

So far, we've been able to replace two Compellents which have cost an arm and a leg. And they're just not as performant as the vSAN. So the ROI has been good.

Let's put it this way: I think the VDI/vSAN has replaced quite a few of our desktops or laptops. Over the course of time, give us another year or two, I think the ROI will be very significant.

While vSAN performs pretty well, when we were doing all the performance tests, ScaleIO did pretty well. In fact, it did better than vSAN, but we liked vSAN better because it was more integrated with our VMware environment, obviously. We chose it and we're happy with it.

The hybrid storage strategy is not the best thing you can do; for example, when you're mixing standard drives and flash drives, SSDs. Do all SSDs if you can afford it. 

I give vSAN an eight out of ten. It can stand some improvement, but it's much better than it was three years ago when I looked at it.

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.