VMware vSAN Reviews

• The integration with other VMware solutions, such as vSphere, is valuable for us.
• It's also fast -- faster than hybrid and all-flash setups.
• Three-host configuration provides security.

I think that it brings speed and security as we have patient-sensitive data that we need to store.

N/A

I love VMware – it’s allowed us to virtualize our server infrastructure, but I haven’t tested the stability of VSAN extensively yet.

From what I’ve seen it’s extremely scalable.

VMware is top notch, but I can’t evaluate yet for VSAN.

You should look at scalability and integration withing the vSphere environment.

We're primarily using this solution for VDI.

Previously, we were using three-tier architecture. Therefore, we would have three different consoles. However, after adopting a CA solution, we are only on a single console and we have cut down the EU engineers we needed as we didn't require multiple engineers for managing multiple layers. Now, we have a single engineer who can manage everything from the top layer from a single console.

The single console for management is the most valuable aspect of the solution. 

The initial setup is very simple. 

The solution has been quite stable.

I have found the solution to be scalable.

VMware is currently working on quite a lot of improvements and they're coming out with lots of novel features in their new releases. There's only one improvement area, and that is it needs a little bit more software and hardware to make it similar to Nutanix.

The pricing could be better when it comes to renewing the licenses. 

Technical support could have a faster response time.

It's hard to come up with an exact feature that might be good to include in a future release, as each customer is different and each customer likely has different feature needs.

I've been using the solution for almost four years at this point. It's been a while now. 

The solution is very stable. We have been using VMware for almost more than 10 years and there have been no issues regarding VMware products. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The solution is scalable. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so. 

Technical support is quite good. Occasionally, it could be faster sometimes, however, largely, I have been pleased with the level of response I get. 

The product's initial setup is not overly complex or difficult. I found it to be straightforward and relatively easy. A company shouldn't have any issues with the setup process. 

When it comes to the renewal of the license, it's a very expensive solution.

We require price protection. VMware doesn't provide price protection. Many other products provide that, however, it's not something that VMware does.

We're a VMware partner. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

If you are using VMware for a long time, there is no need to change your platform, and you can easily add vSAN as a solution. On top of that, there are multiple tools available to be able to have a hybrid cloud solution available for vSAN. If you go with the VMware Cloud, you've got the SCA as well as a hybrid cloud solution in a single product. If you are not willing to use VMware, then you can definitely choose either Nutanix or maybe a Microsoft option or any number of other solutions that may be available in the market.

The vSAN is similar to other VMware products that are quite popular in Thailand. Everyone uses virtualization to more efficiently utilize hardware resources. That's the main point of vSAN and VMware.

The UI falls short compared to other solutions. It needs some development to make it more user-friendly. 

I've been using vSAN for six years. 

vSAN isn't easy to install, because it's separate from VMware. You have to install vSAN and monitoring separately. Configuration is not straightforward. You have to define the policy first and then allocate through the virtual machine.

We used the VMware professional team to install, and it took them around two days. After it was deployed, we used one engineer to maintain the system.

The license for vSAN is a yearly subscription. 

I would rate vSAN seven out 10.

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. 

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. 

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 most valuable features are:

• Automation
• RecoverPoint for VMware
• Self-healing capability

In a production environment, these features ramp up the provisioning, security and provides faster deployment.

There is not much improvement needed. If you work with the HC Platform, vSAN is not directly touched, i.e., once the HC appliance takes care of it.

I have worked with VxRail, which is a Hyper converged Platform, as it has vSAN embedded as well as it is fully automated the vSAN configuration.

As I did not work with the implementation, but the analyses of functionalities of VxRAIL, would be unfair tell how vSAN would be improved.

I have used this solution for nine months (but only for sales proposal, it has not been implemented, just technical sales information).

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

Always when I was in need of any technical support, I was promptly answered by them.

As I have worked with the HC Platform, the setup was very simple and easy.

For Latin America, the costs are very higher; even if you go deep on functionalities, but still it is sellable.

Work hard on the sizing matters.

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.