VMware vSAN Reviews

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.

I am a system integrator, and this is one of the products that we implement for our customers.

VMware vSAN is used in the deployment of OpenShift Containers.

It is simple to manage without the need for configuration which is the feature that I like the most. The simplicity, as well as the integration with virtualization.

On the troubleshooting front, it was occasionally difficult for me to perform some troubleshooting. We are currently working in a demo environment, so we are not encountering many issues. However, when you reach production with a heavy load, troubleshooting the vSAN may become difficult. 

Troubleshooting with vSAN is an area that needs improvement.

Based on my testing, I would like to expand deduplication to include hybrid deployments and not just for all-flash deployments.

I have been working with VMware vSAN for four years.

I use version 6.7 ESXi with vSAN

So far the stability has been good. We have not had any problems with the stability of VMware vSAN.

The scalability appears to be good. I have not tested it that much, but it seems fine similar to clusters in VMware. 

At the moment, we have approximately 300 users who use this solution.

In reality, we haven't used technical support yet. I don't have an opinion on the support at this time.

I have experience with Cisco HyperFlex solutions.

The initial setup was straightforward. We did not have any problems with it at all.

The deployment did not take more than two or three days. It was very fast.

We have two people to deploy this solution.

We completed the deployment ourselves.

As an architect, I am not involved in the negotiating process and don't have many details about the cost and licensing.

I would rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten.

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.