VMware vSAN Reviews

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.

The use case is mainly for greenfields deployment. I'm a senior solutions architect and we are system integrators. Our company is a partner with VMware.

Very easy to implement in any existing environment.

I'd like to see more storage terabytes available after excluding the management. 

I've been using this solution for two years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

The technical support is very good. 

The initial setup is straightforward and it's very easy to implement in any X86 server so anyone can use it in their existing environment. 

I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

Our customers who use VMware vSAN are in these industries: government, healthcare, education, and supply.

The most valuable feature of VMware vSAN is that it's easy to manage and it's also comfortable to use. Another unique feature is its hardware upgrade, but I'm unsure if this is also present in other players in the market. Upgrade and authorization for this product is very easy. Deployment of VMware vSAN is also easy. Everything in this product is perfect.

As no product is 100% perfect, the price for VMware vSAN could still be improved, though it is good when compared to some of its competitors.

We've been working with VMware vSAN for seven years.

This product is stable and comfortable to use.

Technical support for VMware vSAN is very good.

This product is easy to set up. It is easy to deploy.

If you compare the price of VMware vSAN with other players like Nutanix and Cisco, its price is good, but could still have some improvement.

We evaluated Nutanix and Cisco.

We are a partner of different vendors, e.g. Dell, VMware, Microsoft, AWS, Azure, etc. As we are a partner, we don't use the technology. It's our customers who use it. We've been working with the newest model of VMware vSAN.

There are four engineers who handle the deployment and maintenance of this product.

I strongly recommend VMware vSAN to others because it is easy to manage, especially if you compare it with traditional server and network storage solutions. It's also easy to deploy. Upgrade and authorization for this product is also very easy. These are the reasons why I strongly recommend VMware vSAN to people looking into using it.

I'm giving VMware vSAN a score of ten out of ten.

VMware comes with different stacks like VMware Cloud Foundation, which is integrated with different VMware modules. There's interoperability between VMware products. 

Another good feature is that you can create profiles for each VM. You can mirror one set of VMs according to another set of VMs. You can also define the quality of service for that profile.

I would like to see more support for applications. I think currently it only supports applications between two vSAN clusters. I heard that VMware is planning to have applications using vSAN at the hypervisor layer. I'm not sure whether it's available or it's being planned for the next release. I would prefer it to be on the storage layer than on the hypervisor layer.

I've been working with VMware vSAN for two years.

I haven't had any issues with the stability of VMware vSAN.

I haven't had any issues with scalability, but I think historically it supports only 64 nodes. It's a VMware limitation, but in our deployment in Sri Lanka, hardly any customers use that many nodes. If you consider that aspect, then scalability is okay. The largest customer we have here uses two nodes.

For Nutanix, there is no such limit as far as I know.

I'm not happy with the VMware support. There are so many delays attributed to different reasons, like when you transfer the case from one engineer to the other, the second engineer is not aware of what the first engineer has done, so we need to update the second engineer from the beginning. 

Their response is also not that fast. We have seen that sometimes the competency of the backend engineers is not that high, and because of that VMware support is a bit of a concern for us. Apart from that, I don't have many issues with the product.

Setup is not that difficult. We have had a few issues with the implementation. Initial setup is not as straightforward as Nutanix.

Compared to Nutanix, the design of VMware vSAN is probably the highest in the marketplace in terms of market penetration. I think it's number one, and Nutanix is not that far behind.

From an upgrade perspective, it's not as straightforward compared to a Nutanix. You need to do a lot of checks and balances before you do the upgrade. With Nutanix, you don't need to worry about it at all, probably because those nodes are coming from Nutanix itself. Because of that, they kind of keep everything to a single file where all these checks will be done initially when you run it. With vSAN, the server could be coming from different vendors like HP or Huawei. So it won't be that easy to come up with a single package to check all of these formula licenses because the upgrade is not that smooth compared to Nutanix.

I would rate this solution 7 out of 10.

My advice is to plan well which workload you're going to use for VMware vSAN. Not all workloads are suitable for VMware vSAN. Before using VMware vSAN, you should consider implementation planning, network sites, and group layout.