VMware vSAN Reviews

We plan to switch products since the hardware nowadays is a little bit outdated and we need to scale up a bit. We are looking for better performance and storage. This is why we are examining other solutions, including VxRail. 

We have been using VMware vSAN for at least 10 years.

The solution is quite stable. We have encountered some minor issues but, overall, are quite satisfied.

While the solution is scalable, I feel that this can be better. 

Although we have not made much use of the technical support, we found them to be good and helpful in finding solutions. 

The solutions we previously used were dissimilar to the current one. We had VMware for an extremely long time, at least 15 or 16 years. First, there was VMware servers, followed by us building and setting up VMware custom within a couple of servers.

I feel the pricing to be reasonable. We pay monthly. 

We have 50 users making use of the solution in our organization.

I rate VMware vSAN as an eight 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 this product for server virtualization.

We have found many of the features to be valuable.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use it for hosting all our business products on virtual machines.

It's cost-effective.

• Hyperconverged storage
• Computing

The only thing I care about is that the solution is stable, reliable. They need to improve on those factors. I don't want to have to wake up at night to deal with problems.

It's pretty stable now. We had some challenges when we deployed them. There were software bugs.

The scalability is pretty good. I'm pretty satisfied with it.

Technical support, at times, has not been very good, but we are okay with it now. The problem was that they were not taking care of our issues promptly. They would average a couple of days to get back to us. But if there was a tough question, it would take them days or weeks.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We probably reduced our hardware footprint by 50 percent, which is a lot.

We looked at other vendors but we chose VMware because it has a good reputation and because the underlying technology is pretty solid.

The solution is an eight out of ten. To get to a ten it would need to be more stable and easier to upgrade.

The primary use case is bringing redundancy into our plants for failover. It has been performing great.

The most valuable feature is the flexibility, the ability to move the machines around without hesitation.

The UI could certainly be better. The inside into what's actually going on with vSAN would be nice to know.

There have been a few issues, but VWware support has been tremendous in resolving them, so it's been good.

Scalability is easy to do. It's just drop-and-add and you're good.

The process with technical support is pretty good. Escalation up to the top-tier engineers is really good. We have a direct path there. There are no problems with tech support.

We probably already reached our ROI aftertwo and a half years.

Make sure your storage network is strong. But I would recommend vSAN.

It's a pretty solid product now that's it's at 6.5 Update 2. I know that it's going to get better, but right now I'm pretty happy with where we're at. I would rate it at seven out of ten. Nothing's perfect. There's always room for improvement.

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 use vSAN because it's a VMware product which integrates with all the other virtualization, and it simplifies hyper-converged environments.

• I would like more integration with the hardware when it comes to disc types and supporting the newer types of storage. 
• I would like compression and deduplication to be offered for offloading hardware, instead of doing it with software. That would be nice.

The latest version is very stable. It had a couple of hiccups in the earlier versions. The deployment and integration were simple, but we did have some bugs that we hit on, which have since been fixed.

Adding new nodes and expanding vSAN forward is simple and non-disruptive for a lot of our customers. It makes it simpler so we are not doing late night deployments, and we can answer the needs of the business immediately.

It is easy to find information out there, not only from searching the web, but even the times I have engaged VMware support. We were able to get an engineer within minutes of opening a case who understood vSAN, and they were able to help us out.

The initial setup for vSAN is simple. A couple clicks, we were up and running. 

It does takes more time to rack it than to actually configure it.

As far as a software-based, storage control product, it is great. They are staying ahead of a lot of the competition out there. vSan is what a lot of the competition is using.

Virtual Desktop.

Easy to use.

Horizon VDI

Raw disk and block disk.