VMware vSAN Reviews

We use the platform for virtualization and data capacity management.

VMware vSAN's most valuable features are the capability to consolidate standalone physical infrastructure into virtualization and the ease of management.

The platform's cost affects the business. This particular area needs improvement.

We have been using VMware vSAN for six years.

It is a stable platform. I rate the stability as ten out of ten.

We have seven to eight VMware vSAN users in our organization. It is a highly scalable product. I rate the scalability a ten out of ten.

The technical support services are far better than other vendors.

It has a user-friendly configuration process. The deployment typically takes approximately one to two hours. For instance, if we consider deploying a three-node vSphere operating system, it usually takes about two to three minutes to deploy. However, when factoring in the configuration of logical networking aspects, the overall deployment time extends to one to two hours. Once completed, the product is ready for usage.

We have a team of 12 engineers in our technical team working on the implementation.

We've encountered challenges, particularly with the recent policy changes after Broadcom acquired VMware. The current pricing needs to meet the customers' expectations, posing significant issues. It is difficult to explain the cost implications of upgrades to the customers.

I rate the pricing a three out of ten.

We are exploring other vendors. One consideration is Microsoft Hyper-V clusters, and we are also looking into Microsoft Azure Stack HCI. Additionally, we are evaluating Red Hat solutions as potential alternatives. The decision-making process involves assessing the pricing factor.

We've been utilizing VMware vSAN internally within our organization for the past three years and offering it as a solution to our customers. It helps eliminate the need for external storage and leverage the latest technology provided by VMware.

It significantly improved our storage efficiency by supporting disk groups. However, there were limitations as it only allowed for five disks. To enhance efficiency further, we needed the capacity to increase to at least seven disks per group. Additionally, for better tiering capabilities, it would be advantageous if it could support 12 disks per tier.

The recent integration with VMware's ecosystem has improved our operations by simplifying deployment and management tasks. With internal integration, deploying and managing the repository from a single dashboard has become easier.

The scalability has supported our business growth effectively. As an organization, we utilize it in various customer roles, which proves advantageous for our organization and clients.

I recommend the product to customers looking for better and more efficient storage capacity. It is a good solution. I rate it a ten out of ten.

I use the solution in my company for virtual servers.

The solution's most valuable feature stems from its ability to add a lot of servers and the fact that it allows users to use different operating systems. Sometimes, I can use the product on Windows XP. There are certain products for which I might need to use Windows XP. I load different operating systems on VMware vSAN, and sometimes, I even use iOS on it.

The product is not user-friendly. From an improvement perspective, the product needs to be made more user-friendly. Lately, I have noticed that there is a possibility of data leakage by hackers in the product. Hackers are able to manage to leak information or data from the product using some corrupt files, making it an area of major concern where improvements are required. From a security perspective, leakage happens when some of the company's internal information is exposed to outsiders. VMware vSAN should release a version that is faster than the current ones offered.

I have been using VMware vSAN since 2015. I have around nine years of experience with the product. My company is a customer of VMware.

It is a stable solution. I have never encountered any stability issues with the product unless there is an update. I update the product whenever needed so that I don't have to face any issues.

Considering the IT support team and engineers in my company, I would say that around 25 people use the product.

If I face any issues with a product that I don't understand, I normally use Google and forums to get answers to deal with the problems since it is an easy process for me.

I have experience with Oracle.

The product's initial setup phase is simple.

The solution is deployed on the cloud.

Users can use the free version of the product. Users may also start off with the demo version of the tool. After you learn to use the solution, you can buy it if it is beneficial.

My company chose VMware vSAN over other products, considering the stability it offers.

Considering my IT background, I would say that it is easy to learn to use the product.

I recommend the product to those who plan to use it.

I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten.

I'm running an application that's running under a virtual machine on vSAN. That vSAN environment is only for this specific application. We didn't only choose vSAN; we chose VMware because of SR-IOV, which is more on the hypervisor level and not on the vSAN storage. It's part of the whole system.

The solution is deployed on-prem.

There are seven users in my organization. They are all in IT roles.

There could be more features with the automatic backup.

I've been using this solution for a year and a half. I'm still using the solution with a bigger environment, not vSAN.

It's stable.

The solution is scalable.

Technical support is bad. They pointed me to professional services, and I had to pay someone when I already had the basic support agreement. I think we took the standard support agreement with VMware.

I'm still using a different solution. I only took two servers with vSAN to support one application that needs one feature that only VMware has. If not for that feature, I wouldn't touch VMware.

Now, I'm looking at products like Nutanix, Silver Peak, Flexione, and FortiGate. For products that I choose, I don't need a specialist of that vendor. In VMware, I need a specialist in VMware.

That's the issue I have with VMware. It's not like I can take any IT person, and they will know what to do. I need to make sure he will do the call, get the certificate and time to practice.

Initial setup was complex. I would rate the complexity a 5 on a scale of 1 to 5.

For an experienced IT person, it isn't that complex. But if I compare it to the  competition, Nutanix would be a 1, and VMware would be a 5. If you have never touched Nutanix, VMware is not that complex. But if I compare it to Nutanix, it's complex.

Deployment of VMware vSAN took four days.

We used a third party for deployment. We didn't have a good experience with them.

The person didn't have knowledge in VMware, and we had to pay someone to do the installation, and they said things like, "We need this. We need a certificate. We need another VLAN. We need another number."

The cost is expensive. I purchased two servers. The hardware cost was $19,000. The software cost for these two servers, including the vSAN, was $30,000, which is $11,000 more than the hardware. Then I had to pay another $5,000 for installation and implementation for professional services. In total, it was $54,000 for two vSAN Servers.

I would rate this solution 4 out of 10. 

For my needs on virtual machine and HCI, which is hyperconverged infrastructure, I have another solution that costs less and gives me better features. When it comes to one feature that only VMware supports, I had to pay. They have the patents, and they have things that only they can do. But I work in the telecom world, and we give services to a lot of companies. On my infrastructure, there are more than 80 million people using the infrastructure on a daily basis. Most of it is not VMware, and I'm so happy.

For the last two years, Gartner and even Nutanix have been above VMware.

My advice is to be sure you really need it, as there are other vendors in the market that give good solutions. Nutanix and Hyper-V give a solution that is good for most cases in the market. If I take the business world, 80% of the businesses in the world will be okay with other vendors and they cost less. 

My environment is 26 physical servers that aren't VMware and two physical servers that are VMware.

Previously, we had 400 servers, and only five of them were VMware. When you look in the market, you know the better solution for your needs. No one in the world has been fired or lost their job for purchasing Cisco; it's the name. It's the same with VMware; it's just too expensive.

We primarily rely on VMware vSAN for our virtualization infrastructure, with all servers virtualized using this platform. We've implemented a hyper-converged infrastructure with vSAN handling all storage needs across our primary and disaster recovery sites.

While we haven't made major changes to our disaster recovery and business continuity processes yet, moving towards stretch vSAN across sites will simplify and expedite our DR processes in the future.                 

Currently, one of the available features is shareable VMBKs. You can create the VMBK disc and you can make them shareable between the ends. But as soon as you start using this feature, you lose the ability to create snapshots.

There is a significant limitation with this feature as it prevents VMs using shared VMDKs from creating snapshots, which is a crucial functionality. This limitation greatly reduces the practicality of using shared VMDKs despite their benefits in cluster environments. Integrating shared VMDKs with snapshot functionality, even if it means excluding them from snapshots, would greatly enhance the usability of this feature and make it more valuable for many users.

I have been using Vmare vSAN for the past 15 years.

We faced a specific issue with vSan, related to a known bug in VMware, which led to activating our DR vSan on our primary production site. This required us to switch to our DR site for a period. While vSan is generally stable and performs well, this event does impact my overall review. I would rate it a 8 out of 10.

The support we received for vSAN was excellent.

Positive

We switched to vSAN for HCI after reaching end-of-life with our external vSAN storage and physical hosts. We compared different options, including renewing with updated vSAN infrastructure, but found vSAN on Dell infrastructure to be the best in terms of management simplicity and cost-effectiveness.

Due to recent changes in VMware's licensing approach by Broadcom, the cost has increased significantly, making it less attractive from a cost perspective.

VMware vSAN is used for virtualization and general-purpose computing. Instead of going for the SAN (storage area network) storage, customers go for VSAN (virtual storage area network). The solution is used for general-purpose computing, production computing, and storage.

Instead of going for SAN storage, customers can use the scale-up and scale-out features of VMware vSAN.

Enterprise customers get discounts on the solution's licensing pricing, but it is too expensive for SMB customers. Maintenance-wise, when the capacity is utilized beyond 60% to 70%, then the time of the upgrade is a little higher compared to the standard SAN storage.

I have been using VMware vSAN for more than five years.

VMware vSAN is a pretty stable solution. We haven't seen any issues with the solution's stability in five to seven years. The customers would face issues if they ignore some key points.

I rate VMware vSAN a nine out of ten for stability.

In terms of scalability, we have to just add the nodes. If you require more computing or storage, you have to add the nodes to the existing cluster. Our clients for VMware vSAN are medium and enterprise businesses.

I rate the solution nine and a half out of ten for scalability.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy, I rate the solution's initial setup an eight or eight and a half out of ten.

The solution's deployment time totally depends on the customer or the deployment guide. However, we can deploy VMware vSAN in a day.

The solution's licensing pricing could be improved. The level of discounts available on the solution's licensing price varies from customer to customer. Enterprise customers get discounts on the solution's licensing pricing, but it is too expensive for SMB customers.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten.

Our clients are government and private customers working with VMware vSAN in the manufacturing, defense, oil and gas, and ITIS industries. The solution is generally built on top of the virtualization layer with VMware. It's a part of virtualization. The solution's performance and management are pretty easy.

VMware vSAN is tightly integrated with other VMware products because it's a part of vSphere. It is tightly integrated with the virtualization layer. We can integrate and utilize VMware vSAN for other VMware products very easily.

Using VMware vSAN is totally dependent on the customer's use case. A standard three-tier architecture is recommended for customers who want to use a tier-one application for ERP protection. VMware vSAN is recommended to customers with a use case for VDI, general-purpose computing, and test development environments.

Overall, I rate VMware vSAN a nine out of ten.

The product’s most valuable features are performance and expandability.

The platform’s pricing needs improvement. Additionally, there should be an appliance module included in it.

We have been using VMware vSAN for seven out of years.

The product is stable.

It is a scalable product. It is suitable for enterprises.

Since we are an advanced partner, we receive on-time and adequate support services. However, their response time needs improvement for critical cases.

Neutral

It is an easy-to-install and maintain product. It requires one or two executives, depending on the environment, to conduct implementation.

VMware vSAN is an expensive platform. We purchase its yearly license.

I recommend VMware vSAN and rate it an eight out of ten. The product’s support team’s response time and pricing could be better.

We are using it for a redundant, local front-end environment for our WiFi portal. We're also using it for critical backend services, our DCP instances, and our internal monitoring environments. We have instances inside that system right now.

I believe we are using its latest update.

The flexibility is most valuable. Being able to manage things quickly if something goes wrong is also valuable. Very recently, we had one node that went down due to a power problem, but there was really no major impact on the systems running on top of it. 

It is pretty straightforward. We're able to manage multiple platforms with ease. In terms of the overhead of understanding how the entire platform is being administered, it was fairly quick for our team to get the hang of it.

It could have some automation. We haven't involved ourselves in a lot of automation around the vSAN environment capabilities. We're still running it using a very traditional setup. So, there could be some plugins to automate it using third-party environments, such as Jenkins.

We were trying to explore a solution for a hybrid setup, and VMware had proposed something, but we wanted to understand a deeper setup where our existing vSAN and our HCI environment can interact better with our platforms on the cloud in AWS. So, there should be those types of interactions wherein we can better explore cost-saving opportunities from some platforms in the cloud versus the one that we have on-prem.

I have been using this solution for more than two years.

It has been a pretty stable system so far.

We had a long discussion with our vendor partner about a plan to scale up the system. They gave us several options, but we ended up with the most cost-effective one where we had to trim down some of the node requirements that we were planning to buy initially.

We had an experience with them recently, and the correspondence with the technical support from VMware was fairly quick. It was aligned with the expected SLA. There were no major issues with the support people who assisted us during that time.

It was fairly straightforward. We were surprised at how fast it was implemented. The entire implementation took about two weeks. After that, it was turned over to us, and then we planned on the migration of the platforms from our old converged environment into this new environment.

In terms of the maintenance, apart from the normal operational maintenance that we're doing, we always ensure that there is a back-to-back maintenance agreement with VMware and the vendor partner who sold us the solution. So far, there has been very low admin maintenance on the platform. There have been no major issues except the last one where one node got affected by a power problem in the data center. That's just about it.

We worked with a vendor partner for its implementation. Right now, in our team, we have around five admins who work with this solution.

Cost-wise, the Nutanix licenses were cheaper, but in terms of the hardware, there was some contention around it. So, in terms of implementation, the way Nutanix was projecting the implementation on their end was that there were a lot of open-source admin platforms. vSAN is a licensed product in VMware, and Nutanix was proposing a KVM solution, which is open source. That's why their pricing was a bit cheaper, but when we were trying to compare it with an enterprise version of their management platform, it boiled down to the VMware vSAN being most effective in the long run.

When we were exploring an HCI solution, we zoned in on the VMware vSAN, HPE solution, and Nutanix solution. 

I would recommend this solution to others. It is easy to implement, scale, and maintain. The operational work required to maintain the platform is not that difficult.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The majority of our customers already vSphere in their infrastructure, so we usually upgrade the infrastructure by adding new hardware, or we migrate to a hyperconverged solution with vSAN ReadyNode and VxRail in some cases.

The vSAN storage cluster is the most interesting feature.

Many VMware products are specialized, where one solution does one thing and another does something else. It would be better if VMware consolidated these products and offered modules or add-ons instead of selling 10 different solutions.

Also, a vSAN cluster must have compression and deduplication to be an all-flash array, but it's not supported with a hybrid array. Deduplication and compression work better with an all-flash array, so I think that VMware should give customers the option to activate and support this feature for hybrid arrays. Other products like Nutanix support this.

We first implemented vSAN about three or four years ago.

We had some complaints about the recent firmware update. 

I think vSAN is more scalable than some solutions we've tried. We don't have the same issues as we do with VxRail. It's less of a concern because the software is more independent of the hardware.

I've never had to contact support. 

Our engineers have a lot of experience with vSAN, so we think it's easy to implement. One person is usually enough to set up the solution and apply updates. 

I rate VMware vSAN eight out of 10. In my opinion, vSAN is the most natural way to migrate to a fully hyperconverged solution. If a customer needs a more scalable solution with consolidated management, vSAN is excellent. It causes fewer disruptions from changing the administration. You need about the same amount of knowledge and expertise as vSphere.