VMware vSAN Reviews

For a new full site, vSAN was used instead of going with the usual fibre SAN. Since vSAN requires SSDs, it was a great way to introduce that tech to the company. If we would have gone with a traditional SAN SSD, it would have been an option, so a debatable feature.

We gained fantastic performance with the benefit of simplifying the whole hardware stack requiring less sum of knowledge to run and maintain.

The simplicity of everything, even though it was a new technology at the time with some quirks. The lower skill cost of maintaining it meant that we could do more with the people that we had.

When it was implemented, we were one of the first to jump into using vSAN for production use. The main problem we had was hardware compatibility, finding the right hardware that was certified. This caused further problems because the hardware reseller had little knowledge of the requirements and we even had issues with firmware from the hardware vendor. This delayed the implementation time by a few months. This should not be a issue today, but still be cautious when choosing the hardware.

Standard fibre SAN infrastructure. We switched due to fibre switches, fibre cards, and fibre SAN.

The setup was very easy if you have the correct hardware and firmware.

Factor in operational costs.

Compared it to a similar sized fibre SAN.

• Easy to set up
• Very Fast
• Good investment
• Surprised at beta ration
• Works very well

• Price
• We don’t need special network or hardware, just add a new network card
• If you have 10GB, you can just go with vSAN
• All-flash gives improved performance over hybrid, and competes with other solutions
• If combined with Horizon, it lowers the price of solution

• Better integration with VMware DOS
• vBackup with vSAN is not so easy, because it's distributed storage so must be careful not to make host unavailable.

I tried to install it on one cluster and the host got stuck.

Awesome stability.

• Awesome scalability, especially when combined with vSphere 6
• With vSphere 5.5, limited scalability

• In beta, no technical support
• Great fourm support

Very easy, just a few clicks. You don’t need special knowledge of storage .because it can be fully automated or you can set it manually if you want

There are a few products on the market. vSAN has lots of competitors, but if you want to play with a single software provider, go with vSAN. However, if you want more hardware, maybe go with Nutanix.

They lose points because its tricky to fully understand.

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.

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.