VMware vSAN Reviews

We use vSAN primarily as an R&D tool to test our products and see how they work on it, and it is absolutely phenomenal. It is one of the best hyperconverged solutions I've been able to get my hands on.

vSAN has improved our organization by allowing us to perform faster workflows, get better overall performance, and create some really new solutions.

The most valuable features for us are the ability to scale out the nodes independently, and the flexibility of the nodes. We can put almost any type of server in there with our connectivity and everything works great. 

The biggest room for improvement I see in vSAN is the lack of SAN connectivity. I've kind of joked around that there is no "SAN" in vSAN. And it's something that we've worked to try and introduce some options for, and we're going to continue to work towards that. But it looks like the door is starting to open and there may be some options, with some of the announcements that came out of VMworld 2018.

vSAN has been very stable for us. Once we get it up and settled in and the workflows going, usually we don't have to intervene at all. Things just keep working. Stability is important for us with vSAN because it becomes the rock that we depend on. When we need an application to stay up and maintain that ability to bounce between hosts, to work in a true hyperconverged manner, it's the only choice for us.

Scalability in vSAN has been really good. It's very easy to add nodes in, to automatically generate the drives and the disk groups. It has been a piece of cake, surprisingly so.

We have not needed to use vSAN tech support, believe it or not. We have not had any kind of an instance where we couldn't resolve it on our own, or it didn't fix itself.

We had no hyperconverged solution beforehand. We knew that we needed to do some testing with them. It started off as a compatibility (test) and just kept ballooning from there until we went and implemented it.

When choosing a vendor, our most important criteria are reputation and stability. You can't go into something without understanding just how good it is, and if you roll the dice, sometimes you get burned. We're a risk-averse company.

I was involved in the initial vSAN setup. The experience was really wonderful, it was really easy, it was very intuitive. There were some learning curves for us because we had never done it before but, overall, the wizard and the experience with the online tutorials that we were able to find solved every concern or question that we had, very quickly.

ROI for us comes in uptime, keeping applications up and running. That's important to us because that's directly attributable to our revenue stream.

Do your research, dig, find out what your particular needs are, what would the overall cost be to - sometimes it's a forklift, sometimes it's a migration. But look at all the factors, look at the requirements of vSAN, look at the requirements of other hyperconverged solutions, and then make the decision.

I would rate vSAN as a solid nine. To get it to a ten it would need: the ability to support a SAN and a little bit of a larger scale. Those would be the two things that I would request.

We use it for our compute clusters, for running our virtual machines. We use it for our vROps clusters. Our customers use it for their compute workloads.

It is scalable, overall. If you need to add storage, it makes it easy to scale by adding additional hard drives into the existing servers or you can add storage by just adding more servers.

I would like to see replication as part of it. I would also like to see direct file access, being able to run SIF shares and NFS and the like. I think that would be critical to continuing the use of it, going forward.

One of the things that we've had challenges with is when we place hosts into maintenance mode. Sometimes doing so triggers large re-sync processes which can be time-consuming and which have, at times, pushed the capacity to the threshold. I definitely think making some changes in that area would provide some big improvements.

Overall, it's stable. When it's designed properly for the proper workloads, it's a very stable product. We had some challenges, initially, with getting the workloads aligned to the proper storage policies and configurations, but since we worked through that it has been very stable.

Technical support is getting better. We've been using vSAN for a couple of years now. Initially, it was a little more challenging, but it seems like GSS is scaling up as well and, perhaps, learning the product along with us, at times. But overall, they do a great job in giving us support when we need it.

The initial setup is pretty easy. I would like to have some additional automation wrapped around it. In the earlier versions, PowerCLI was very limited, but as the versions have progressed the modules have progressed as well. It's getting better. I consider it to still be a fairly new product and, over time, it's continually getting better and better.

Properly align your workloads to the storage policies and make sure you know what your workloads are before you leverage vSAN. Have a good understanding of the size of your VMs, the amount of change that they have, and how you are going to be doing maintenance in your cluster. Understand the workload and what you're going to be doing with it before you jump in.

We have a traditional, multi-host cluster with SAN and a small (three host) vSAN cluster alongside it. I built the vSAN cluster mostly to experiment with the platform. 

As a VAR, it has been about gaining expertise in the platform. Additionally, it has allowed us to benchmark against traditional systems. We are now in a good position to help our clients decide when and where to deploy this solution.

The ability to have an HA cluster in the absence of a shared storage device or SAN. Not having to retain SAN expertise and the cost of a storage area network (SAN) warranty are big pluses, too.

Perhaps a bundle, like Essentials, would allow more businesses to make the leap to the product.

I would like to see this technology be made available to smaller businesses, who might benefit from high availability but struggle with the entry fee.

Coming from the early networking days when storage was software-defined, and seeing the announcement of this product caught my interest. The platform has been improved much over the first version. Today, we are comfortable running any of our mission critical apps on it.

VNF apps.

Storage policies are used to perform operations in the VMs. This feature allows you to create storage policies for VMs to get performance, high availability, I/O policies, etc.

Hardware supported by VMware vSAN: The list of hardware supported should be increased in the future. I would improve these areas by increasing the number of partners to support as many as possible.

We have not had stability issues.

We have not had scalability issues.

Technical support is perfect. VMware provides some of the best support in the market.

We had no previous solution.

With a good hardware design, the setup is straightforward.

I have no advice about pricing.

We evaluated Cisco vSAN.

It is easy to design and deploy to react to a changing environment.

The most valuable features of vSAN are:

• Instead of having a separate SAN storage, VMware uses all the local storage of the servers to combine its virtualized storage.
• Hyper-converged, an infrastructure system that is software defined: It integrates the computing, storage, and networking into a single platform.
• vMotion: This is one of the best features in this setup. From the name itself, vMotion allows migration without downtime. Others call it live migration. Planed server downtime is dramatically reduced by this feature.
• High availability (HA): This is my favorite. vSAN requires you to have at least three servers. Those three servers are being combined into one platform; that's vSAN. HA actually works during server failure. The server will automatically distribute to other servers in the environment.
• SSD tiering: You can combine a magnetic disk and solid-state drives to have a hybrid drive. This is actually fast because the SSD will be used for caching and the magnetic disk will store the actual data.

The most valuable feature of ESXi is that it is free. I strongly recommend this for those who have a huge development environment. ESXi is the best no-cost virtualization platform in the market right now, where you can consolidate your server into one platform.

The virtualization itself really helped me as a network and system administrator with a lot of servers to maintain. That's a pain. A virtualized environment is really easy to manage. Almost everything is in one dashboard. This really gives us more time in our research and innovation, and less time for maintenance or upgrades.

The minimal downtime alone is a winning blow for both the management and the ITs. Unexpected downtime is inevitable. It's been part any organization. Addressing that pitfall really gives an edge (from a business perspective).

Long-term savings in both buying more server in the future and absolutely the power consumption, not to mention the data center space it released or freed.

The mobility, flexibility, and scalability are really amazing and astonishing features.

I would like to see lowered cost. vSAN is very expensive.

I have used vSAN for two or three months. ESXi has been with us for around three years.

We are using vSAN 6.2, ESXi 5.5 and 6.0, and vSphere 6.0.

We have not had any stability issues so far.

Scalability is one of its strengths.

We haven't called technical support so far. But the web (Google) actually has plenty of good articles and forums and discussions. The website has also one of the best FAQ and DIY sections; 90% level of technical support.

We did not have a chance to try other virtualization platforms because the first one we tried really gave us a strong enough reason to stay loyal.

Initial setup was straightforward. You'll only have what you want.

Hopefully, over the next few years the pricing will be dramatically lower.

We are biased from the start to use VMware products only.

Study and evaluate your current setup. Conduct a case study to see if the advantages really outweigh the disadvantages. Virtualization really is the future. Especially here in my corner, almost all or most of the data centers are still in bare-metal setup. Because of the big price (CAPEX), most of the time, management will disapprove this project. But, if you help them see the big picture, I'm sure they are going to promote you for providing this project.

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.