VMware vSAN Reviews and Pricing

Engagement Cloud Solution Architect - Ericsson Cloud Services at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees

Jan 17, 2017

I can create my own storage policies and prioritize some apps over others.

What is most valuable?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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

What needs improvement?

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

For how long have I used the solution?

I have used it for three years.

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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I have not encountered any stability issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

How are customer service and support?

Technical support is 8/10.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Changes have been made in version 6.5.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Before choosing this product, we evaluated EMC ScaleIO.

What other advice do I have?

It is easy to design and easy to implement.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: We are an OEM partner.

it_user315612

Cloud Architect Leader at a aerospace/defense firm with 10,001+ employees

Oct 9, 2015

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We can scale as needed since we're not required to buy an entire monolithic solution up front, though I'd like to see software-based disk-level encryption in the next release.

Valuable Features

The ability to scale as you need – we can start with a very small footprint as opposed to a monolithic storage solution where you buy the entire solution up front. We use everything – Hitachi, NetApp, but we're using it more and more because we can start small and scale as you need. Cost saving essentially.

Room for Improvement

I would like to software-based disk-level encryption in the next release. We deal a lot with the Department of Defense, and arms and munitions government-regulated stuff, so we would like to see more. From their roadmap, I see its coming but it has been an impediment.

Stability Issues

It's not quite there yet. We've had a few outages that were addressed. It's not 100% there yet -- give it another six months.

Scalability Issues

Scalability is why were using it – especially with v6. Any scalability issues we had, were addressed.

Customer Service and Technical Support

It was excellent. The response time was great, and as we're a large customer so we had no issues.

Initial Setup

Initial setup was not difficult to do at all.

Implementation Team

We implemented on our own.

Other Advice

I would say that the main reason its attractive is that you can grow as you need. The other thing that makes it especially attractive is that from an IO perspective, VSAN has the better ability to perform more efficiently because it operates within the hypervisor. It's VMWare specific so that can be a downside. But for pure VMWare shops, VSAN is the best option in my opinion.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

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it_user237264

IT Administrator and Sr. VMware Engineer at a retailer with 501-1,000 employees

Aug 30, 2015

It supports two architectures (hybrid and All-Flash), which is useful for all virtualized applications, including business-critical applications.

Originally posted in Spanish at https://www.rhpware.com/2015/02/introduccion-vmware...

The second generation of Virtual SAN is the vSphere 6.0 that comes with sharing the same version number. While the jump from version 1.0 (vSphere 5.5) 6.0 to change really worth it occurred, as this second-generation converged storage integrated into the VMware hypervisor significantly increases performance and features that are based on a much higher performance and increased workloads scale business level, including business-critical applications and Tier 1 capital.

Virtual SAN 6.0 delivers a new architecture based entirely on Flash to deliver high performance and predictable response times below one millisecond in almost all business critical applications level. This is also achieved because in this version doubles the scalability up to 64 nodes per host and up to 200 VMs per host, as well as improvements in technology snapshots and cloning.

Performance characteristics

The hybrid architecture of Virtual SAN 6.0 provides performance improvements of nearly double compared to the previous version and 6.0 Virtual SAN architecture all-flash four times the performance considering the number of IOPS you get in clusters with similar workloads predictable and low latency.

As the hyper convergent architecture is included in the hypervisor efficiently optimizes the ratio of operations of I/O and dramatically minimizes the impact on the CPU, which leads to products from other companies. The distributed architecture based on the hypervisor reduces bottlenecks allowing Virtual SAN move data and run operations I/O in a much more streamlined and very low latencies, without compromising the computing resources of the platform and keeping the consolidation of the VM's. Also the data store Virtual SAN is highly resilient, resulting in preventing data loss in case of physical failure of disk, hosts, network or racks.

The Virtual SAN distributed architecture allows you to scale elastically uninterrupted. Both capacity and performance can be scaled at the same time when a new host is added to a cluster, and can also scale independently simply by adding disks existing hosts.

New capabilities

The major new capabilities of Virtual SAN 6.0 features include:

Virtual Architecture SAN All-Flash: Virtual SAN 6.0 has the ability to create an all-flash architecture in which the solid state devices are used wisely and work as write cache. Using PCI-E devices high performance read / write intensive, economical flash storage devices and data persistence is achieved at affordable costs

Virtual SAN 6.0 All-Flash predictable levels of performance achieved up to 100,000 IOPS per host and response times below one millisecond, making it ideal for critical workloads. - See more at: https://www.rhpware.com/2015/02/introduccion-vmware...

Doubling the scalability

This version duplicates the capabilities of the previous version:

Scaling up to 64 nodes per cluster
Scaling up to 200 VMs per host, both hybrid and All-Flash architectures
Size of the virtual disks increased to 62TB

Performance improvements

Duplicate IOPS with hybrid architectures. Virtual SAN 6.0 Hybrid achieves more than 4 million IOPS for read-only loads and 1.2 million IOPS for mixed workloads on a cluster of 32 hosts
IOPS quadruples with architecture All-Flash: Virtual SAN 6.0 All-Flash achieves up to 100,000 IOPS per host
Virtual SAN File System: The new disk format enables more efficient operations and higher performance, plus scalar much simpler way
Virtual SAN Snapshots and Clones: highly efficient snapshots and clones are supported with support for up to 32 snapshots per clone per VM and 16,000 snapshots per clone per cluster
Fault Tolerance Rack: the Virtual SAN 6.0 Fault Domains allow fault-tolerant level rack and power failures in addition to the disk, network and hardware hosts

Support for systems with high-density disks Direct-Attached JBOD: You can manage external storage systems and eliminate the costs associated with architectures based blades or knives
Capacity planning: You can make the type scenario analyses "what if" and generate reports on the use and capacity utilization of a Virtual SAN data store when a virtual machine is created with associated storage policies
Improving services associated disk: Troubleshooting and associated services is added to the drives to give customers the possibility to identify and fix disks attached directly to hosts:
LED fault indicators. magnetic or solid state devices having permanent faults lit LEDs to identify quickly and easily
Manual operation LED indicators: this is provided to turn on or off the LED and identify a particular device
Mark as SSD drives: you can make devices not recognized as SSDs
Mark as local disks: You can dial without recognizing flash drives as local disks to be recognized for vSphere hosts
Evacuation of disks and disk groups: the evacuation data disks or disk groups are removed from the system to prevent the loss of data supports
Virtual SAN Health Services: This service is designed to provide bug fixes and generate health reports vSphere administrators about Virtual SAN subsystems 6.0 and its dependencies, such as:
- Health Cluster
- Network Health
- Health Data
- Limits Health
- Physical Disk Health

Buyers

Requirements vSphere

Virtual SAN 6.0 requires vCenter Server 6.0. Both the Windows version as visa Virtual SAN can handle. Virtual SAN 6.0 is configurable and monitored exclusively through vSphere Web Client. It also requires a minimum of 3 vSphere hosts with local storage. This amount is not arbitrary, but is used for the cluster meets the fault tolerance requirements of at least one host, a disc network failure.

Storage System Requirements

Disk controllers

Each vSphere host own contribution to the cluster storage Virtual SAN requires a driver disk, which can be SAS, SATA (HBA) or RAID controller. However, a RAID controller must operate in any of the following ways:

Pass-through
RAID 0

The Pass-through (JBOD or HBA) is the preferred mode settings 6.0 Virtual SAN that enables managing RAID configurations the attributes of storage policies and performance requirements defined in a virtual machine

Magnetic devices

When the hybrid architecture of Virtual SAN 6.0 is used, each vSphere host must have at least one SAS, NL-SAS or SATA disk in order to participate in the Virtual Cluster SAN cluster.

flash devices

In architecture-based flash drives 6.0 Virtual SAN devices can be used as a layer of cache as well as for persistent storage. In hybrid architectures each host must have at least a flash based (SAS, SATA or PCI-E) in order to participate in the Virtual SAN disk cluster.

In the All-flash architecture each vSphere host must have at least one flash based device marked as device capacity and one for performance in order to participate Virtual SAN cluster.

Networking requirements

Network Interface Cards (NIC)

In hybrid architectures Virtual SAN, each vSphere host must have at least one network adapter 1Gb or 10Gb. VMware's recommendation is 10 Gb.

The All-flash architectures only support 10Gb Ethernet NICs. For redundancy and high availability, you can configure NIC Teaming per host. NIC Teaming is not supported for link aggregation (performance).

Virtual Switches

Virtual SAN 6.0 is supported by both VMware vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) and the vSphere Standard Switch (VSS). Other virtual switches are not supported in this release.

VMkernel network

You must create a VMkernel port on each host for communicating and labelled for Virtual SAN Virtual SAN traffic. This new interface is used for intracluster communications as well as for read and write operations when a vSphere cluster host is the owner of a particular VM but the current data blocks are housed in a remote cluster host.

In this case, the operations of I / O network must travel through the cluster hosts. If this network interface on a vDS is created, you can use the Network feature I / O control to configure shares or reservations for Virtual SAN traffic.

Conclusion

This new second generation Virtual SAN is a storage solution enterprise-class hypervisor level that combines computing resources and storage from the hosts. With its two supported architectures (hybrid and All-Flash) Virtual SAN 6.0 meets the demands of all virtualized applications, including business-critical applications.

Without doubt Virtual SAN 6.0 is a storage solution that realizes the VMWare defined storage software or SDS (Software Defined Storage) offering great benefits to both customers and the vSphere administrators who every day we face new challenges and complexities. It certainly is an architecture that will change the vision of storage systems from now on.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

it_user186357

Solutions Architect with 51-200 employees

Feb 26, 2015

The solution is simple to manage but redirect-on-write snapshots is needed

Over the past decade VMware has changed the way IT is provisioned through the use of Virtual Machines, but if we want a truly Software-Defined Data Centre we also need to virtualise the storage and the network.

For storage virtualisation VMware has introduced Virtual SAN and Virtual Volumes (expected to be available in 2015), and for network virtualisation NSX. In this, the first of a three part series, we will take a look at Virtual SAN (VSAN).

So why VSAN?

Large Data Centres, built by the likes of Amazon, Google and Facebook, utilise commodity compute, storage and networking hardware (that scale-out rather than scale-up) and a proprietary software layer to massively drive down costs. The economics of IT hardware tend to be the inverse of economies of scale (i.e. the smaller the box you buy the less it costs per unit).

Most organisations, no matter their size, do not have the resources to build their own software layer like Amazon, so this is where VSAN (and vSphere and NSX) come in – VMware provides the software and you bring your hardware of choice.

There are a number of hyper-converged solutions on the market today that can combine compute and storage into a single host that can scale-out as required. None of these are Software-Defined (see What are the pros and cons of Software-Defined Storage?) and typically they use Linux Virtual Machines to provision the storage. VSAN is embedded into ESXi, so you now have the choice of having your hyper-converged storage provisioned from a Virtual Machine or integrated into the hypervisor – I know which I would prefer.

Typical use cases are VDI, Tier 2 and 3 applications, Test, Development and Staging environments, DMZ, Management Clusters, Backup and DR targets and Remote Offices.

VSAN Components

To create a VSAN you need:

From 3 to 32 vSphere 5.5 certified hosts
For each host a VSAN certified:
- I/O controller
- SSD drive or PCIe card
- Hard disk drive
4 GB to 8GB USB or SD card for ESXi boot
VSAN network – GbE or 10 GbE (preferred) for inter-host traffic
- Layer 2 Multicast must be enabled on physical switches
A per socket license for VSAN (also includes licenses for Virtual Distributed Switch and Storage Policies) and vSphere

The host is configured as follows:

The controller should use pass-through mode (i.e. no RAID or caching)
Disk Groups are created which include one SSD and from 1 to 7 HDDs
Five Disk Groups can be configured per host (maximum of 40 drives)
The SSD is used as a read/write flash accelerator
The HDDs are used for persistent storage
The VSAN shared datastore is accessible to all hosts in the cluster

The solution is simple to manage as it is tightly integrated into vSphere, highly resilient as there is zero data loss in the event of hardware failures and highly performant through the use of Read/Write flash acceleration.

VSAN Configuration

The VSAN cluster can grow or shrink non-disruptively with linear performance and capacity scaling – up to 32 hosts, 3,200 VMs, 2M IOPS and 4.4 PBs. Scaling is very granular as single nodes or disks can be added, and there is no dedicated hot-spare disks instead the free space across the cluster acts as a “hot-spare”.

Per-Virtual Machine policies for Availability, Performance and Capacity can be configured as follows:

Number of failures to tolerate – How many replicas (0 to 3 – Default 1 equivalent to a Distributed RAID 1 Mirror)
Number of disk stripes per object – The higher the number the better the performance (1-12 – Default 1)
Object space reservation – How Thickly provisioned the disk is (0-100% – Default 0)
Flash read cache reservation – Flash capacity reserved as read cache for the storage object (0-100% – Default 0)

The Read/Write process

Typically a VMDK will exist on two hosts, but the Virtual Machine may or may not be running on one of these. VSAN takes advantage of the fact that 10 GbE latency is an order of magnitude lower than even SSDs therefore there is no real world difference between local and remote IO – the net result is a simplified architecture (which is always a good thing) that does not have the complexity and IO overhead of trying to keep compute and storage on the same host.

All writes are first written to the SSD and to maintain redundancy also immediately written to an SSD in another host. A background process sequentially de-stages the data to the HDDs as efficiently as possible. 70% of the SSD cache is used for Reads and 30% for Writes, so where possible reads are delivered from the SSD cache.

So what improvements would we like to see in the future?

VSAN was released early this year after many years of development, the focus of the initial version is to get the core platform right and deliver a reliable high performance product. I am sure there is an aggressive road-map of product enhancements coming from VMware, but what we would like to see?

The top priorities have to be efficiency technologies like redirect-on-write snapshots, de-duplication and compression along with the ability to have an all-flash datastore with even higher-performance flash used for the cache – all of these would lower the cost of VDI storage even further.

Next up would be a two-node cluster, multiple flash drives per disk group, Parity RAID, and kernel modules for synchronous and asynchronous replication (today vSphere Replication is required which supports asynchronous replication only).

So are we about to see the death of the storage array? I doubt it very much, but there are going to be certain use cases (i.e. VDI) whereby VSAN is clearly the better option. For the foreseeable future I would expect many organisations to adopt a hybrid approach mixing a combination of VSAN with conventional storage arrays – in 5 years time who knows how that mix will be, but one thing is for sure the percentage of storage delivered from the host is only likely to be going up.

Some final thoughts on EVO:RAIL

EVO:RAIL is very similar in concept to the other hyper-converged appliances available today (i.e. it is not a Software-Defined solution). It is built on top of vSphere and VSAN so in essence it cannot do anything that you cannot do with VSAN. Its advantage is simplicity – you order an appliance, plug it in, power it on and you are then ready to start provisioning Virtual Machines.

The downside … it goes against VMware’s and the industries move towards more Software-Defined solutions and all the benefits they provide.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: We are Partners with VMware.

Igor Zheltukhin

Lead Engineer at IBS Platformix

Jan 23, 2022

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Easy to implement but requires an entire reorganization of the architecture

Pros and Cons

"VMware vSAN is easy to implement in a VMware environment and it is not expensive."

"The architecture of vSAN is not good. vSAN works with objects, such as disks, and it causes problems with availability."

What is most valuable?

VMware vSAN is easy to implement in a VMware environment and it is not expensive.

What needs improvement?

The architecture of vSAN is not good. vSAN works with objects, such as disks, and it causes problems with availability. When we send users caches we lose the total cache disk of the group. It's really a red line for using vSAN. We don't lose all the data because it is replicated in other groups, but when the object is lost in one group, we only have one remaining and this creates a higher risk of losing data.

Another is the restrictions of using deduplication and compression, it requires all-flash for it meaning that deduplication is on for all clusters and you can't control it for specific ones. I would like VMware vSAN to give hybrid configurations more caches and to add deduplication and compression for hybrid configurations.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using VMware vSAN for a year.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The architecture of VMware vSAN is a major issue with stability.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

There have been no problems with scalability of this solution.

How was the initial setup?

The initial set up of VMware vSAN is easy. The implementation requires just one click and VMware will take care of the rest.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

VMware vSAN is not expensive. We compare it with Nutanix and the discounts from VMware are really good for vSAN.

What other advice do I have?

If you want vSAN it is important that you understand all sides of the solution and have the right hardware solution. For example, you should consider if you need reliable disks for cache and split it into more clusters or groups.

I would give this solution a five out of 10.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

DHACHANNAACHAISIN

Managing Director at WISE VARY

Nov 15, 2021

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Easy to manage, with a convenient dashboard and good stability

Pros and Cons

"The solution fits well with my requirements."

"It would be ideal if the solution offered some intelligent monitoring."

What is our primary use case?

We primarily use the solution for virtualization for our organization.

What is most valuable?

The solution is easy to manage due to the fact that it uses the same dashboard as Center.

vSAN is okay for HCI.

The solution fits well with my requirements.

The stability is good.

The product can scale.

I have always found the technical support to be helpful and responsive.

What needs improvement?

So far, the solution is okay with me.

It would be ideal if the solution offered some intelligent monitoring. Right now, most of these features are in another subscription such as Log Insight.

For how long have I used the solution?

I've used the solution for three years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability has been very good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We currently have ten people that directly use the solution in our organization.

The scalability is simple. It's very easy to scale the HCI node.

How are customer service and support?

We rarely use technical support. We might use them for consulting purposes sometimes if, for example, we have a new system and then we are concerned that it might or might not be running on vSAN. We might need them to probe it first. So far, we have been satisfied with the level of support we get.

How was the initial setup?

I was not a part of the implementation process and therefore cannot speak to how easy or difficult it may be.

The solution has very few maintenance requirements. Occasionally, they may recommend a fix or patch by updating it, and we do so. However, other than that, it's pretty simple to maintain.

What about the implementation team?

Normally we use a local system integrator or distributor to do the setup for us.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing is competitive with other vendors. It's mid-range in terms of pricing. It's not cheap and it's not overly expensive.

What other advice do I have?

We are a customer and an end-user.

We are using the latest version of the solution at this time.

I'd recommend the solution to other users. It's easy to deploy and great for virtualization.

I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Sandeep Solanki

Assistant General Manager at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Feb 21, 2021

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Feature-rich, good support, and a trouble-free setup

Pros and Cons

"Technical support is good."

"There is always a challenge with their firmware."

What is our primary use case?

We use this product for server virtualization.

What is most valuable?

We have found many of the features to be valuable.

What needs improvement?

There is always a challenge with their firmware. There is different hardware and they are always looking for different firmware that is compatible with vSAN. It is very difficult to find the compatibility matrix.

They need to do some kind of automation in terms of hardware, firmware, and compatibility with the vSAN. They need to do some sort of upgrade for the customer.

I would like to see the upgraded mechanism, and improvements on the hardware so that we can create a VPN.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using VMware vSAN for more than two years.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

It's a stable solution. So far we have not had any issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

This is a scalable product. As it is only used for server virtualization, we do not consider usage on a per-user basis.

How are customer service and technical support?

Technical support is good. They know what we need. We log a case and they come to us with suggestions to fix the issues.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup was manageable. It was not a problem.

What other advice do I have?

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.

Solution8d8a

Solutions Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Oct 3, 2018

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Gives our clients the ability to make use of storage they already own

Pros and Cons

"The most valuable feature is the simplicity of its scalability: being able to grow it without having to make sure you get the right disks and the right nodes. The solution is also easy to manage. It's all right there in the vSphere Client. You're not going through multiple things. You don't have to know, once you've created the vSAN node. You add storage, it sees it, and you create your data storage from there. Everything is right there for you."

"What I would like to see, for the really small customers, is the ability to have two nodes."

What is our primary use case?

In a lot of cases, the primary use case for vSAN is in small to medium businesses, where they may not have the space or the funds for an actual storage array to provide a shared storage medium for their virtual environment. And even if they do, they may not have the expertise to maintain that and a separate network. vSAN gives them the ability to make use of storage they already own, across their host. As they add more, more storage, more compute, they'll add more memory. It makes their environment simpler to manage and keeps it moving smoothly for them.

What is most valuable?

The most valuable feature is the simplicity of its scalability: being able to grow it without having to make sure you get the right disks and the right nodes.

The solution is also easy to manage. It's all right there in the vSphere Client. You're not going through multiple things. You don't have to know, once you've created the vSAN node. You add storage, it sees it, and you create your data storage from there. Everything is right there for you.

What needs improvement?

What I would like to see, for the really small customers, is the ability to have two nodes.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

I find it to be incredibly stable.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

I've seen it scale up to large databases. I've got some customers who utilize a small vSAN cluster for their Exchange environments because it keeps it encapsulated for them.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is very straightforward.

What other advice do I have?

I would definitely go with the vSAN solution. A lot of times, it's less expensive than third-party software, and it's not managed via third-party plugins. It's there, it's native to the ecosystem, and it works.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner.