VMware vSAN Reviews

It is inside the data center as software-defined storage for the infrastructure.

The most important thing is the simplicity of the product. It is a well-established product with good stability.

Its installation should be easier, and its price should be cheaper. 

It would be good for the product if they can include the data locality feature.

It has good stability.

It is scalable. We have around ten customers of this solution.

Their technical support is fine.

It is neither easy nor complicated. It is in-between. The deployment took one to two days. You need one to two engineers for its deployment and maintenance.

It is expensive. It should be cheaper.

It has a perpetual license as well as a subscription-based license, but they are moving towards subscription-based licenses.

I would rate VMware vSAN a seven 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.

• HA
• No physical SAN overhead

Having high availability without the need for a full vCentre/host license is a plus that, along with not needing a physical SAN, makes this solution great when you need functionality without the extra overhead of additional hardware and licences.

It accelerated our P2V plan.

There are bugs in the SAN Health Check utility. It misreports latency issues when the hosts are actual within the correct tolerances. I have been on the phone with VMware about this and they have said it’s a bug.

I have used it for 10 months.

I have not encountered any stability issues yet.

We have not crossed this bridge yet.

So far, technical support is 8/10.

We did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup was straightforward.

Licensing is fairly straightforward.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

Take a look at the network requirements and use 10GbE.

The storage policies allow the administrator to define which VMs have specific storage requirements. For example: Our critical VMs have an increased flash read cache percentage enabled. This improves the overall performance of these machines. The ability to specify policies for every kind of VM in your data center improves storage efficiency, as well as improving performance, redundancy, and so on for specific VMs. With traditional SANs, configuring this was only possible on a LUN level. With vSAN, we can do this on the VM objects themselves.

One of the things that surprised me was the way vSAN handles a disk failure. It auto-rebuilds the vSAN objects when a failure has been detected. (Note: There are two kinds of failures, and this has a different effect on the rebuild timer.) But, in the end, the cluster is self-healing without any user input needed. The only thing that is affected is purely the raw storage that is lost with the drive.

The ease of managing and configuring vSAN. This means that all our VMware administrators are now able to do the daily maintenance and operations. Previously, only a couple of IT administrators were responsible for maintaining our previous storage solution and the complex tasks that came with it.

• The daily maintenance can be high, especially due to the lack of documentation and reporting in vCenter, and only on the vSAN health page.
• If the vSAN cluster can’t self-heal due to an internal error, we can’t repair the vSAN cluster ourselves.
• A case with VMware is always needed to fix the issue, resulting in an increased time to resolve. This can be very time-consuming.
• I would like to see more documentation on the errors, impact, and solutions. This could improve the product knowledge.
• Some essential storage features (deduplication/compression) are only available on all-flash vSAN clusters. These limitations need to be taken into account when sizing and designing your environment.

We have been using this solution for a year.

Keep a close eye on the vSAN HCL. As vSAN is continuously in development, the HCL changes as well and so the HCL gets updates.

When you are planning to upgrade the vSAN version, all other components (ESX version, server firmware, server BIOS) need to be checked to see if they are all on that version’s HCL.

Scalability on vSAN is extremely easy. If the host is compliant with the prerequisites (one SSD and one spinning disk), it will be accepted by the cluster instantaneously. All raw storage will be committed to the vSAN data store and directly available for usage.

In terms of sizing the cluster, as deduplication and compression are only available on all-flash arrays, this can heavily impact the storage capacity of the vSAN cluster.

Since we chose a hybrid-configuration, the lack of deduplication and compression caused a storage growth that exceeded the limits quite rapidly. We had to scale up and address the issue in other ways.

Technical support is good. When encountering issues with vSAN, 99% of the time a VMware support case needs to be opened. All of the standard steps of a support case are run through. In the end, a VMware engineer will solve the issue with you and bring the cluster back to a fully healthy state.

Our previous hyper-converged system broke down due to a power failure. A new system was needed. vSAN was the logical choice, as we are a VMware Partner.

The way VMware integrated the vSAN hyper-converged storage functionalities in their vSphere Kernel is really revolutionary.

It allows the environment to scale out on storage resources when the business needs it. You no longer have to buy those expensive traditional SAN setups scaled for the “future requirements” that you had in mind at the time.

Even an IT administrator with some basic VMware experience would be able to set up vSAN in just a couple of minutes. This is one of the easiest setups I have had in a while.

We had previous solutions, but vSAN was the logical choice.

I would definitely recommend vSAN to others. The old, cumbersome, and traditional storage environments are done and belong to the past. Hyper-converged is the next big thing. It is more cost effective, easier to manage, and scaling up can be done almost on the fly.

I recommend going for an all-flash vSAN setup, if the budget allows it. Some vSAN features like deduplication/compression are only available on an all-flash configuration.

With the falling GB/$, an all-flash is becoming the evident choice. The benefits are there (more features and all-flash performance for all VMs).

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.

our primary use case is storage; hyper-converged solutions for our customers. We develop and design higher availability infrastructure for customers with the vSAN as its base. I'm a consultant and an architect for solutions with the software. My company is a partner with VMware.

High availability is a valuable aspect of this solution.

An integrated backup solution within the vSAN platform would improve the product. Competitors like SimpliVity, UCS, and Cisco Hyperconverged all have a backup feature in their hyper converged infrastructure, it's something that a lot of people use now.

I've been using this solution for four years. 

This solution is super stable. 

This solution is very scalable. However, we've seen some limits within the platform although I believe the latest version may have solved those problems. 

The initial setup is very simple and straightforward. If the setup also involves hardware deployment, the process can take a day or so, but if it's just the vSAN deployment, it can be done in several minutes. I generally carry out the implementation. 

It's important to use someone who is familiar with the solution to carry out the implementation. It's fairly straightforward but if you set it up incorrectly then you'll have issues with your underlying storage. It's worth having a professional service to manage things. 

I rate this solution 10 out of 10. 

We use VMware vSAN to build storage for our virtual machines.

I like the tolerance of VMware vSAN.

The integration could be improved. I would like to see integration with other platforms.

We have been using VMware vSAN in our environment. I have used this solution for more than five years.

VMware vSAN is a stable solution.

It is easy to scale VMware vSAN.

In our organization, we have 100 members.

We may increase our usage in the future. With the company's growth, there are plans to expand in the future. We may require additional members. It's possible that we'll be able to scale this solution more in the future.

We read the manual, which provided us with a thorough explanation. It was sufficient. We use technical support only on rare occasions.

Nutanix is a product that I am familiar with. We were able to use the Nutanix supported trial version.

In Microsoft's system center, both Nutanix and VMware can be easily maintained.

We will not be using the Nutanx system at this time.

Nutanix's integration with other platforms could be improved.

This solution was easily installed by our team.

We have a team of four people to deploy and maintain this solution, including one administrator and one manager.

This solution requires the purchase of a license.

Because of COVID-19's impacts, we looked for a different IT system that would match our budget.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I would rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten.