VMware vSAN Reviews

We use the solution for data storage virtualization.

The solution is easy to use.

In a future release, they can bring in the object storage capabilities to this solution. Currently, there is not any compatibility.

I have been using this solution for a couple of years.

I have found the solution to be stable.

Technical support could be better for this solution, the response time is too slow.

The initial setup is easy but the deployment can take some time, approximately six hours.

We did the implementation of the solution and we do not need many technicians for the implementation.

I would like to use more advanced models of the solution but the price needs to be reduced. There are some extra costs for this solution including a license.

I rate VMware vSAN a nine out of ten.

We primarily use this solution for consolidation on the cloud.

The most valuable feature is the ability to continue our business needs and have higher visibility. It has definitely increased our business productivity levels. 

I would love for this product to be cheaper and easier to configure.

It is a very stable and strong product that is easily deliverable to our users.

I know it can scale up or scale out but I have not had the need to do so.

We also evaluated Dell EMC before choosing this solution. 

We sell and deploy this solution for our customers in a variety of settings from small data centers to big data analytics clusters. Most recently, we have deployed vSAN for VDI solution. We are VMware partners and I'm a solutions architect.

I like the reliability of this product because we can lose more than one host, more than one disk, and everything still works okay. It's also good on performance and agility. You can change and add things without any issues. 

It would help if the cost of the solution was reduced for smaller sized companies. 

We've been using this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution. 

Scalability is good. We had a customer who bought five hosts a year ago and this year they expanded their infrastructure to 12 hosts, and everything was fine. 

I think the support is very good. They figured out what the issue was and responded very quickly. The problems we had were from a network perspective, nothing to do with the solution. 

The initial setup is very simple and doesn't take long, perhaps two to five days. 

The license is perpetual and there is an additional payment for technical support which is an annual subscription fee. I think it could be cheaper, especially for smaller companies. It's okay for big deployments with a lot of servers and high level of input-output IOPS.

I like this solution very much and I would recommend it. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

Because our company is an architecting company, we require a lot of IOPS going from the server side to the clients who are using the models. They require faster transactions and that's the reason we thought of having a type of HCI solution. That's why we went with the vSAN solution.

Previously, we were going to use traditional systems, so when vSAN was launched it gave us a lot of value. The admins have been able to relax a bit, they don't have as many outages to deal with.

We want see a better monitoring tool in vSAN. Monitoring is not that great as of now because it shows us false alarms in the Health status. We would like that to be improved.

It's pretty much stable for us now, apart from some of the issues which can be tackled. But 80 percent of the time it's stable. The issues are probably on our end, network issues. That's what we have figure out.

We don't scale that much because we have a three-year refresh time. We tend to acquire for how much we predict we will scale up in the next three years.

We have used technical support quite a few times but not frequently. We have had a good experience with them. We usually get good engineers on our calls.

Initially, it was quite difficult to understand the solution because we tend to do a PoC. Later on we got used to it. Now it's quite easy for us, but at first it was not easy. We now have about 48 locations where we have deployed vSAN.

When vSAN was introduced we were quite excited about it. We were looking for something that was not traditional and we wanted something hyperconverged. vSAN was a perfect fit for us.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. To get to a ten it would need improvement in the Health status checkup.

The solution is easy to deploy and manage. It offers stable performance.

Deduplication and compression usage data display is not real-time and is not that accurate.

We have used this solution for more than three months.

There were no issues with stability.

There were no issues with scalability.

Technical support is not very good.

We did not use a different solution before this one.

The initial setup was easy, if you’ve got such experience. It is a little tricky the first time.

We did not evaluate other options.

The valuable features are:

• Easily provided storage
• Easy setup
• No need to be a “storage engineer”
• No need to have FC switches

It is less costly than typical storage and faster to set up than a typical SAN. It does not require “storage competency.”

During some intensive I/O workloads, and on a configuration that had SSDs sub-sized, we reached the limit of the system. When our SSDs became full (due to having too much I/O to manage), performance went down.

We have been using this solution since March, 2015.

There have been no stability issues.

I have never asked anything from technical support. It’s handled by VMware.

The setup is really easy and straightforward. vSAN is built in vSphere, and you have a dashboard to manage the system.

The pricing and licensing models are quite simple. Be careful with the sizing of the SSDs.

Be careful with the sizing of the SSDs, as they’re a big part of the infrastructure. Don’t hesitate to go to 10Gb for the network, even if it can work with 1Gb.

• It's consistent in that our team is able to stand it up on a regular basis.
• Our system now has continuity.
• It provides uniform performance.

We've decreased the time it takes for us to roll out new solutions. It's sped up that process for us.

It needs to allow for more customizations and individualization specific to each user.

It needs to be more malleable and adjustable to changing requirements. There are too many hard-set limitations.

We've used it for two months.

It's not a consideration, because in my impression VSAN is deployed in set-sizing and is not customizable.

Zero issues with tech support. Our TAM answers after some time, but it's not a negative because they're dedicated just to our company.

It's not difficult, but there are still limitations even in in-depth white papers because it's so new.

It's not enterprise class yet because it's a new iteration and a work in progress. Just make sure it fits and meets your requirements.

The feature that is most valuable is the simplicity of implementation, as you only have to enable the feature on the already existing cluster(s).

For a PaaS platform which I’ve developed, the scalability of VMware vSAN was a necessary feature enabling us to grow with the onboard customers.

Although the product is very scalable, it is not scalable in a way that the different host sizes can effectively be added to an existing cluster. All the hosts/disk configuration have to be consistent, for a consistent performance experience.

I’ve been using VMware vSAN for about two years, i.e., since VMware vSAN 6.0 was released.

The stability of VMware vSAN 6.0 is good. You sometimes have to resynchronize the data over the cluster (which is a single button task).

As stated earlier, all the hosts have to be exactly the same for a consistent performance experience, which limits the scalability of the product. Also, the computer and storage components within the HCI solution are linked to each other, it’s not possible to add only storage nodes.

The documentation of VMware vSAN is good. I’ve had no experience with VMware support regarding vSAN.

I haven’t used a different HCI solution before.

The initial setup is really straightforward, you only have to enable it on the VMware cluster. But, before the initial setup you will have to check the HCL of vSAN for the compatibility of the different components. With VMware vSAN-ready nodes, this process is made simple, but it still is something you have to take into consideration.

VMware vSAN is licensed per CPU and the cost is to the other VMware (and Microsoft) products. VMware vSAN is reasonably priced, but with the addition of more nodes to the cluster, the needed CPU licenses (for VMware/Microsoft/etc.) are increasing rapidly, which makes it an expensive solution.

I’ve looked at HPE SimpliVity, but it has a special hardware requirement whereby it failed in terms of the project requirements.

Use VMware vSAN for special use-cases only and don’t use it as an all-purpose storage solution.

Use VMware vSAN for VDI, small VSI, and dev-test environments. Don’t use it for messaging/database solutions as the licensing costs are huge.