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.

Deduplication and compression: Software-based deduplication and compression optimizes the all-flash storage capacity.

Compared to other vendors, vSAN is compatible with more expensive hardware, and Nutanix is available on multiple hardware platforms, like Supermicro, Dell and Lenovo.

I have used it for two months; just for test purposes.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 10/10.

We did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup was straightforward; I had the KB from VMware to help me deploy the solution.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated OpenStack Object Storage.

It is a good solution for customers that are looking for performance, storage efficiency, and scalability.

VMware comes with different stacks like VMware Cloud Foundation, which is integrated with different VMware modules. There's interoperability between VMware products. 

Another good feature is that you can create profiles for each VM. You can mirror one set of VMs according to another set of VMs. You can also define the quality of service for that profile.

I would like to see more support for applications. I think currently it only supports applications between two vSAN clusters. I heard that VMware is planning to have applications using vSAN at the hypervisor layer. I'm not sure whether it's available or it's being planned for the next release. I would prefer it to be on the storage layer than on the hypervisor layer.

I've been working with VMware vSAN for two years.

I haven't had any issues with the stability of VMware vSAN.

I haven't had any issues with scalability, but I think historically it supports only 64 nodes. It's a VMware limitation, but in our deployment in Sri Lanka, hardly any customers use that many nodes. If you consider that aspect, then scalability is okay. The largest customer we have here uses two nodes.

For Nutanix, there is no such limit as far as I know.

I'm not happy with the VMware support. There are so many delays attributed to different reasons, like when you transfer the case from one engineer to the other, the second engineer is not aware of what the first engineer has done, so we need to update the second engineer from the beginning. 

Their response is also not that fast. We have seen that sometimes the competency of the backend engineers is not that high, and because of that VMware support is a bit of a concern for us. Apart from that, I don't have many issues with the product.

Setup is not that difficult. We have had a few issues with the implementation. Initial setup is not as straightforward as Nutanix.

Compared to Nutanix, the design of VMware vSAN is probably the highest in the marketplace in terms of market penetration. I think it's number one, and Nutanix is not that far behind.

From an upgrade perspective, it's not as straightforward compared to a Nutanix. You need to do a lot of checks and balances before you do the upgrade. With Nutanix, you don't need to worry about it at all, probably because those nodes are coming from Nutanix itself. Because of that, they kind of keep everything to a single file where all these checks will be done initially when you run it. With vSAN, the server could be coming from different vendors like HP or Huawei. So it won't be that easy to come up with a single package to check all of these formula licenses because the upgrade is not that smooth compared to Nutanix.

I would rate this solution 7 out of 10.

My advice is to plan well which workload you're going to use for VMware vSAN. Not all workloads are suitable for VMware vSAN. Before using VMware vSAN, you should consider implementation planning, network sites, and group layout.

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.

• 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.

VMware has been around for a long time are are doing a decent job at catching up with the latest technologies i.e. bringing in kubernetes and containerization. Overall, this is a great tool for virtualization.

I would like for the next release to be a bit cheaper.

I have been using VMware vSAN for 10+ years.

VMware is not a cost effective solution, especially if you have a Microsoft shop. In this case, you would have to purchase the VMware license when there are already Hyper-V solutions that could do it for much cheaper.

If you are already using VMware, then it is great to fun your applications and carries your infrastructure to the cloud. But, I would not recommend this solution to new customers. I give this solution a seven out of ten.

VMware vSAN is a software-defined storage solution and there are no hardware dependencies. We use it for general-purpose workloads or Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

The solution has high performance.

VMware vSAN could improve by adding NAS and object storage.

I have been using VMware vSAN for approximately four years.

The solution has been stable.

VMware vSAN is scalable.

We have approximately 5,000 people using this solution in my organization. 

Our last customer in India had over 180 servers running.

The technical support has been great from VMware vSAN.

The installation was straightforward. We did not find it difficult.

We have a team of 50 that does the maintenance and support of the solution.

We pay for a license to use the solution through our company CapEx and then we continue to pay annually.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate VMware vSAN a nine out of ten.

We are a solution provider and VMware vSAN is one of the products that we implement for our clients.

The most valuable features are productivity and data storage.

I have been working with VMware vSAN for between one and two years.

vSAN is a stable solution.

This is a scalable product.

I have not dealt with them directly but my understanding is that they have good technical support.

We are trying to support Nutanix, so I have some experience with it.

The suitability of one solution over the other depends on the use case.

As a system architect, I have not deployed it myself.

The price of vSAN could be lower.

The licensing fees are paid quarterly.

My advice when it comes to products like vSAN or Nutanix is that these are products for new customers. Existing customers have a classic architecture and they have no reason to implement a hyper-converged infrastructure.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.