VMware vSAN Reviews

We primarily use vSAN for cloud automation, so we provide test workloads for specific test use cases for customers who want to do software testing. In these specific cases, we also use vSAN because it gives us flexibility from a profile perspective on how we roll out specific workloads and specific test scenarios, making it easier for us to actually deploy things in comparison to legacy storage platforms.

vSAN improved our organization by allowing us to deploy scenarios or workloads more easily because, from a vSAN perspective, we don't need to reconfigure underlying storage or anything else. We can actually adjust for each individual machine and individual workload characteristics. We don't have to deal with different types of disk shelves, rate groups, etc. We can directly take that off.

vSAN gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources. We have an overall larger host infrastructure, and we split that up for specific customer tests and use cases. In that specific scenario, we can easily add more hosts or reduce the number of hosts in the environment. This is an advantage when we use vSAN.

We have pretty constant performance results, which are sometimes, on a normal three-tier storage architecture, harder for us to achieve because the customer doesn't want us to verify that the performance of a specific device works. What we typically have to test is that we have a constant scenario across different versions, platforms, and similar things. Here, vSAN gives us an advantage that we can actually work with it. 

We can also create test cases, which is maybe not something in other customer scenarios, but for us, it's important. We can even throttle down performance or release more performance. So, we can run more precise test scenarios. If someone says, "We need to run this later on a relatively small or lower-scale edge device," we can actually configure vSAN in a way that reduces the number of resources.

When we do more scaled load testing, we can run more dense workloads and still have the same results across all specific nodes. Otherwise, we could have that noisy neighbor effect when we work with legacy output.

Stability can be improved. Adding all these new features is nice, but we are now at the level where most of the features you need in production are there. The stability is not from a day-to-day operations perspective, but more from a supportability perspective, because currently some of the support scenarios require you to completely evacuate hosts or the complete cluster. That sometimes can be a stretch. This would clearly be an improvement if the support teams were given additional tools to make that easier.

Upgradability could be a bit easier sometimes. We are now where vSAN can be updated without ESXi, but there is still enough dependency. So that would be good if that actually would be uncoupled even more.

Dashboards are there, and we use vROps as well. So, we have all the beauty of capacity planning and everything over there. That's not really something where we need a lot of other things. 

I have been using this solution for six years.

We had some issues in very early releases, and it has become much better over time. Stability with vSAN has come it's way. When we look at 5.5, then 6.0, 6.2, 6.6, 6.7 it has moved ahead every time. Clearly, 5.5 and 6.0 have their issues, but the product is constantly improving. 

We need to keep in mind that we are talking about relatively new technology. Whenever you are adopting something early on, you need to accept not everything runs as smoothly as you would expect it to. However, we can see the progress with vSAN, and that's one of the reasons why we built our platforms on it.

Scalability for us is an important part of the product because we resize clusters all the time in our environment. We clean them out and actually start from scratch. With vSAN, it's easier for us to add nodes. If in a test scenario that we are building, we currently might have only four or five nodes in the beginning. If we add more, it's an easy add-on for us. It's easier for us to manage it this way than with legacy storage, where we would have to add additional disk shelves.

Tech support with vSAN is a mixed relationship. We have had issues with tech support because sometimes VMware comes out of the software-defined space. 

In the software-defined space, you start off with the approach that you can basically tell the customer to change everything. However, vSAN needs a different approach. It's a storage platform. I cannot actually say, "You need to upgrade everything or replace everything." That sometimes has been a bit of a challenge with the support teams, explaining to them, "No, it's not an option that we completely upgrade the stack. We need to get a different fix for it." 

However, over the last few years, it has improved. I think VMware gets the story now that doing support on the storage side is different than for a lot of the other software programs. So, I think we are getting there, but it could definitely improve.

We previously used Legacy 3-tier storage architecture with a multi-tier disk approach.

From a setup perspective with vSAN, I was involved in the original architecture and design of our specific platform. It was pretty straightforward. It's more or less point-and-click. The most challenging part is choosing the correct hardware and platform behind it. It's not so much about the fact of how to deploy vSAN. 

Once the physical hardware is there, the ESXi is installed, and configuring vSAN is pretty straightforward. It's just a few clicks. It's much easier than most other storage platforms, but the challenge is to identify the correct hardware for the use case. There are ReadyNotes and all types of other solutions, but sometimes the ReadyNote configuration doesn't match exactly what you need.

You need to be careful with some of these vendors because they might upgrade individual devices. That was one case that we had, and all of a sudden that version was no longer supported. So, we had to fight the battle of whether it is now the fault of the hardware vendor versus VMware. Those are scenarios where I can always only warn people. It's like sticking very strictly with what's in the HCL because it's nice that vSAN tells you in the UI that you are in an unsupported state, but at that point, you have the hardware already in your environment, cabled up, and in production. So, you should identify that early on. However, I think that's going to get better as well.

ROI is difficult for us to deal with because of our approach and what we do in our business with test and demo cases. It's hard for us to judge because some of the hardware and stuff we get during tests is actually provided by vendors. 

Therefore, I don't necessarily have what an online customer would pay for it. We still pay for the stuff. But it's a different story.

ROI from an administrative perspective is clearly much better because I only have to deal with one user interface. I can go into one place and be on top of it for some scenarios, even using vCloud Director. So, it's much easier to use vSAN from that perspective because it's all in the vSphere Client. I can configure my profiles and use them on all the other tools. Whereas, in the legacy storage approach, I still have to deal with all these additional details on each individual storage, which can be challenging, even though some of these vendors provide integration into the vSphere Client. In many ways, that's just the HTML UI of their storage device in the vSphere Client. That's not really integration. It's still a different UI. It's still a different training effort.

Setup cost, pricing, and licensing should be secondary factors. We talk about primary system storage, which if not performing well or if the storing is reliable, can have a massive business impact.

We evaluated different 3-tier approaches, 2-tier and HCI approaches.

I would rate the solution somewhere around an eight out of ten. It is in the perfect place. There is room for improvement, but with the current versions, we are in a good stage.

Our customers use the vSAN solution for many use cases. The first one is the installations for the branch office or some production use case where they have a small environment, but they need higher availability. The other use case is inside the data center where we installed a big data center solution for virtualization with VMware.

Most of the customers are using the latest version, but I have also done some vSAN installations with version 6.7.

It is easy to use. It is easy to implement for us, and it is also easy to maintain for the customers. It is not necessary to buy some extra devices and talk with other vendors.

It can be very expensive.

I have been using this solution for about four or five years.

Its stability is good.

Its scalability is quite good.

I don't know exactly how many customers are using vSAN because some of our customers install it on their own, but we probably have more than 20 customers.

I haven't had any problems with the solution, but I have heard from a few people that they are a little bit slow in answering the questions.

It is straightforward. The duration depends on the size and the use case, but it usually takes one to four days.

For its implementation, normally, you only need one engineer or admin from the storage team, but sometimes, you need a specialist from the networking/infrastructure team, which is a very important point for vSAN implementation.

It is not a subscription model. It is a purchase model, but it is very important that you also buy technical support from VMware. This is probably the only disadvantage of vSAN. It depends on the use case, but it can be very expensive.

I would recommend this solution for all use cases. It works for all users and customers. It doesn't matter if it is inside the data center or outside the data center. It also works for VDI use cases. It just works.

We have no problems with the vSAN solution, but it is very important that you use the recommended hardware from the compatibility list. If you follow the recommendations from VMware, you should have no problems.

I would rate it a nine out of 10.

We are a solution provider and I am a consultant that works with products such as VMware vSAN.

The most valuable feature is the fast performance.

The licensing includes all of the recent features.

This solution should be easier to support and upgrade.

As a software-based product, it requires a lot of system resources.

I have been working with VMware vSAN for approximately two years.

The stability is quite good.

Scalability-wise, I would describe it as medium-level when compared to others.

I have been in contact with technical support but I have not needed to ask them a lot of questions. They are not the best but not the worst. Overall, I am satisfied with the support.

I would rate the support a four out of five.

In addition to VMware vSAN, we have HPE SimpliVity and Nutanix.

VMware vSAN operates at the software level, whereas SimpliVity operates at the hardware level. The price of SimpliVity is higher than a software-based product.

The disadvantage to VMware, operating at the software level, is that you have to have more resources.

The bottom line is that it's cheaper and easier to set up VMware vSAN.

The initial setup is not quite easy but rather, a medium-level difficulty. The installation should be simple but the instructions from the vendor are not quite enough. This means that you have to conduct some trial and error.

On a scale of one to where, where five is the easier, I would rate the initial setup and deployment a three.

This is a cost-effective product. It's a bit cheaper than the other solutions.

Price-wise, I would rate vSAN a four out of five.

My advice for anybody who is considering this solution is that you need to think about what it's going to be used with. For example, it may be more or less suitable depending on whether it will be used for normal database applications, VDI, or something else. The reason it needs consideration is that the initial hardware purchase depends on it. With respect to the software, there is only one choice, which is the VM license. However, for the hardware, you have to think about the servers, including the storage and other components.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

VMware vSAN is a global solution, so we can manage all the storage solutions in one place. It's embedded in VCI solutions. 

When you upgrade the vSAN, there are some issues like lost data and problems with the log. The log disappears. When you upgrade the solution, you must have several logs, so if you have some problems, you can check the log server to find them. But this solution has some improvements, like its snapshot feature. When you have to upgrade the version, vSAN makes a snapshot, and if there is a problem, you can revert to the old version.

The company has been using vSAN for about 18 or 19 months. 

vSAN isn't very stable. 

It's easy to manage and scale vSAN. We can increase the volume as necessary for the VM or the user. We have around 2,000 users. Right now, we're not planning to increase usage yet, but maybe we will take another look in six months to see if we need to scale the solution or not.

I'm satisfied with VMware support. 

If you have some networking skills, it's straightforward to install, deploy, and manage vSAN. 
We have three engineers maintaining all the VSI and vSAN solutions as well as all the features and management components.

We're looking for another solution like Nutanix to use concurrently with vSAN. Nutanix is more efficient but also more expensive. Nutanix is a little more stable, efficient, and simple to manage. However, I expect VMware and EMC will improve soon. I think in the next year, VMware's solution will become more stable and easier to manage.

The purpose of vSAN is to cluster nodes and distribute storage usage. Like, if a server has ten hard disks, for example, and the main server also has ten hard disks, and the two other nodes or servers each have ten hard disks as well, then it will combine them all. Once combined, it becomes clustered. That's the reason why most clients want to use vSAN - to save on external storage and use the internal storage for the VMware environment.

vSAN that has been most effective in streamlining storage operations.

For data recovery alerts, it uses tools like snapshots and vMotion.

Overall, the features I find most valuable are related to the reliability and availability of the servers.

vSAN is the fastest in regards to creating VMs and connecting them to virtual networks. It compresses data, and if you have a physical server form factor, it fits only on one cluster node. That's why we use vSAN.

Better options would be clustered nodes, or even cloud configuration.

There is room for improvement in cloud configuration, we typically do web browsing for management. So, when we configure or manage VMs or vSAN, we usually open a browser and use VMware credentials. That's what we call cloud configuration.

We have been dealing with it since 2016. And since that year, we've been a distributor.

Stability depends on the network. Some clients use networks with slow switches. Here, we're using ten gig to twenty-five gig. So, more often, it's the fastest network connectivity. But if the client is using one gig or ten Mbps. Some smaller companies face issues with a slow network.

When it comes to scale up or scale out, it means that the servers or the clustered nodes can be added, or another cluster can be installed to increase the resources of the clustered nodes.

The customer service and support are quite good. 

Positive

The deployment process is complex because it's a GUI infrastructure. There are two-ways configurations for the nodes or vSAN setup. You can do it on a GUI management interface or by console or CRM recommendation.

So, it could take half a day or a whole day.

It is sort of difficult to maintain without any training. If you don't have any ideas on maintaining, then it could be difficult. But if you're a master of VMware, you know how to handle it. You're already a professional and can easily handle it.

Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. 

The feature that I have found most valuable is that it is easy to deploy.

It is also easy to configure with the vCenter and the other solutions that we have. It is easy to create and delete virtual servers. It is easy to create the load balancing and the clustering, and the new version includes different features that allow us to quickly see what happened if we shut down a virtual server. It is an arrays of disks. It works like a RAID file. You shut down one server and you can start the two others that work together.

VMware vSAN is better than SimpliVity. We once tried to run SimpliVity, but it was difficult for us, because the people from HP were not easy to work with, the costs of their white papers where higher, and it was not as easy to deploy as VMware. VMware vSAN also costs for licensing, but it costs less than HPE SimpliVity and I'm not depending on the HP team. I can run it myself with my engineers.

The only negative point relates to the licensing. If you want multiple, different servers, it costs money, but you have all the capacity for vSAN. You do not reach the data, but the processor arrays and the current architecture.

I have been using VMware vSAN for two and a half years.

We are using version 6.7 and we are processing now to switch to 7.0 because we are testing the new version.

VMware vSAN is a stable solution.

We have made many tests, we have also shut down the servers and made an extraction of the disk and everything, and vSAN was very good.

VMware vSAN is scalable, if you choose good servers at the beginning with many slots for disks, you can then add disks and extend the storage. You can add memory if you have good servers, and then you can enable your construction. But you have to choose good servers for production from the beginning.

VMware has very good support. They have technical support which is divided into three areas. In each area you always have the one who can reply to you and they are really good at the technical support.

We previously worked with Nutanix, which HP bought. At the beginning, we were also working with a free solution called KVM. There was no licensing cost with them, but there was also no real support and the customers were afraid of that. They wanted something that is known in the market. We also worked with Dell in the past.

If you already work with vCenter and VMware, the initial setup is easy. The process is easy to understand and easy to configure. You just have to be sure that when you connect the servers with the LAN that everything is in 10 giga, then it will be easy to configure. You have to configure the root storage of the LAN and give it a switch.

You have to configure everything from the beginning to make everything work, so you must have an expert on vSAN from your side and an expert for LAN on the other side.

I do think that VMware vSAN's cost could be lower.

We pay for the license every year.

The cost depends on your contract. The pricing for the government is not the best, but for each licensing, because its arrays are in your servers, it can cost $4,000 for each of the servers for a simple solution and up to $20,000 per server for vSAN solutions. It's very, very expensive.

I am also working with Microsoft and Safe Key, another solution for the clustering, and I tried HPE SimpliVity for simple cluster and for multi-cluster. When I saw the costs of HPE SimpliVity for multi-cluster, there were two points that made me not feel good about it: the price and that when we needed more than 20 or 40 terabytes of data, the HP license was such that I could not use this solution alone. We had to use the HP team at the beginning.

On a scale of one to ten I would give VMware vSAN an eight for the technology, eight for scalability, and a six for the price. Overall, I give it an eight.

The primary use of the solution is the virtualization and storage process in a simple platform. 

The solution is not independent, it is interlaced with other solution such as vSphere and NSX. If you work with one you will be working with others. vSphere is connected to NSX and the NSX will connect to the vSAN. vSphere connects for storage purpose. When the virtualization process is happening, the storage area network would be vSAN. It resembles a managed service from VMware, where all the data and everything will be put into the vSAN.

This solution has a dashboard that you can log into and control if you need too while the VM is getting created.

The solution could be improved by having more filtered and multiple view volumes instead of a single view.

In the next release, I would like to see a more user-friendly dashboard with the potential to display issues. It should be capable of detecting the issues faster. For example, if something is wrong with your LAN, controller, or storage volumes.

I have used the solution for ten years.

The solution is scalable. We have more than 50 administrators and approximately 200 operators using the solution.

The technical team is provided by VMware and has workers in all different areas. For example, there will be people working in the storage control part or in the technical area.

It was quite easy to install and took a couple of hours.

I did the installation by myself. 

The solution requires a license. The payment is on a yearly basis and It is not overly expensive. 

We evaluated Microsoft Hyper-V which has a similar storage area network. However, it can not be used together with NSX and vSpere like this solution. 

I will continue using and recommend this solution.

I rate VMware vSAN a seven out of ten. 

VMware vSAN is our hypervisor and we are using it for all our applications.

We are facing some problems with updates with the VMware vSAN. When we upgraded from version 6.5 to 7, we have been faced with many problems. They have been deploying many hotfixes for this version, and they need to continue to improve this version.

I have been using VMware vSAN for approximately three years.

VMware vSAN is a stable solution.

The solution is scalable.

We have approximately 1,000 users using this solution.

VMware is the host of all of our servers. We have many kinds of servers, such as application, service, call manager, and mail servers. Many users use these servers from all the titles in the company. We use this solution every day in our company.

When we faced some problems, we opened support tickets with VMware, and their support was very fast. They were able to fix the problems we had.

We were previously using Microsoft Hyper-V.

VMware vSAN is more professional than Microsoft Hyper-V for this kind of application. The scalability for VMware is better than  Microsoft. There are limitations in Microsoft Hyper-V. and many applications support VMware vSAN, such as Oracle, Cisco, and Linux.

The implementation is simple, it was very straightforward. It took us approximately three weeks because it was installed in four locations.

We used a consultants company called Adaptive here in Cairo, Egypt for the installation.

The consultant was very good, and their information was perfect. They were very helpful to us.

We have a two-person technical team that supports this solution.

There is a license to use this solution and we pay approximately $30,000 annually. There were not any additional fees required other than the license. The solution is expensive.

I can recommend VMware vSAN if there are problems that they face, such as limitations for their applications. It would be good to use VMware vSAN. If they have not found limitations in their operating system while working with Windows, they can use Microsoft Hyper-V instead.

I rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten.