VMware vSAN Reviews

Our primary use case for vSAN is server virtualization. We've used it to virtualize close to 500 servers which would normally have been on physical hardware. We have virtualized and consolidated it down to run on nine nodes of vSAN. That workload primarily consist of web servers running Linux or Windows Servers to support the Windows Active Directory that we have for the environment onsite.

It's improved the organization overall primarily because the storage is local on the boxes. Before we were with vSAN, we were with another iSCSI product which was a clustered product that went across the network. We had multiple instances where we would have either a network hiccup (caused by us) or a network hiccup (caused by the device). This took a whole bunch of VMs down with a lot of repercussions. It took a long time to recover. By eliminating dependency on that back-end storage, we now depend on everything that's in the VMkernel with vSAN. So, we eliminate the middleman.

We like that it is a hyperconverged solution. Everything is in a box. You got the compute, memory, and storage. So, we can scale out by adding nodes as we go and eliminate the back-end storage, whether that's a NAS or iSCSI device. 

You get the benefit of local storage, but you have the protection of shared storage.

I see room for improvement with vSAN in particularly in the reporting realm. Now, with vSAN 6.7, they're starting to include vRealize Operations components in the vSphere Client, even if you're not a vRealize Operations customer. So, that's really good. It exposes some really low-level reporting. I would like to see more of that. However, you have to be a vRealize Operations customer to obtain that. I would like to see more include of this included in the vSAN licensing.

The vSAN licensing is not an inexpensive product. It does cost more than hypervisor. I would like to see more basic reporting, or even expert reporting. I think with our licensing that we've paid our dues, and we should get the information.

Stability is working very well. vSAN is very dependent upon your network. If your network is stable, vSAN will most likely be stable. 

Our network is very stable. Therefore, we have not had issues.

We started with a three-node cluster. We are now at a nine-node cluster. We can just add nodes piecemeal as needed to add capacity. It's been very transparent. Users have never noticed when we've had to do that. So, scalability has worked real well for us.

We've been with vSAN since the early days of ESX 5.5, when it first went general availability. In those early days, we used support quite a bit. They were very good. The vSAN team that VMware has are top-notch. I think they pick the best of their support people and make them vSAN representatives. In the early days, I used them a lot. Not so much lately, because the product has gotten so much better. 

I was involved with the initial deployment of vSAN at our site. The most complex thing is you have to live and die by the vSAN HCL list. You can't put a product or a component into a vSAN node that is not on the host compatibility list, particularly the SSDs and their firmware which is specified on the HCL. You have to match that explicitly to receive good results.

I see ROI on vSAN because we have gotten out of the business of depending on the back-end NAS device or the back-end iSCSI device. We get the return on investment by decreased administrators' time, decrease exposure to network issues and stuff that would take a lot of VMs down. That's where we see our ROI.

We looked at Nutanix before we went with vSAN. For budgeting reasons, we weren't able to pursue Nutanix after a pilot.

The product is at least an eight to eight and a half out of ten. Because the feature growth that I've seen them put into the product since we've been with them since 5.5, they are innovating with each release. They're adding more features and all that adds up to a better ROI on our investment.

As we were consolidating so many servers, we had a really high consolidation ratio. We wanted to have something that was close to being local disk. However, we also needed to have redundancy so we could take a node down for maintenance or if a node would crash. All the same standard reasons of why you would want high availability.

What I look to see in a vendor is good customer support. I want to talk technical with someone. I don't want a lot of marketing PowerPoint stuff. I want to talk to people that know the product very well. Because if I start using the product, I will need that support on the back-end. I don't want to be flailing by myself in the wind. I want to have good expertise that I can call on to help.

Some of the valuable features of this product are:

• Software-defined class which is one of the building blocks for SDDC.
• Flexible – It scales as and when needed.
• Simple – It is easy to manage.
• Performance – The local server can access data at full speed and have low-latency in SSD.
• Since there are no network-attached storage appliances, the infrastructure cost is lower.

It has helped us in reducing the waiting time to provision new storage devices and meet customer SLAs in order to build new VMs.

Some areas where this product can be improved are:

• If we could create multiple datastores rather than a single one, it would be helpful.
• There could be improvements in the hardware failure and data recovery methods.
• There should be an option to create more than one datastore like other SDS vendors have in order to allow the features to support Storage DRS & Storage I/O Control (SIOC).
• A control panel for VMs is absent. Although, other vendors are deploying this for each host to provide better storage control.
• A typical data center for installation of systems requires more storage growth than servers. This limits the scalable features of vSAN.

I have used this solution for around 14 months.

We did see some backup failures due to .vmx lock files in the vSAN datastore.

We have encountered some scalability issues and got a couple of performance tickets.

The technical support from VMware is good.

We were not using any other solution previously. This is our first attempt at the software-defined storage system and Nimble is our product for testing purposes.

It was straightforward. There is a single checkbox if the prerequisites are met with.

The pricing policy varies as below:

• vSAN Standard is still priced at $2,495/CPU or $50/desktop.
• The Advanced Edition license is priced around $3,995/CPU or $100/desktop where as the Enterprise license is priced at $5,495/CPU or $120/desktop.

VMware brought this is as free upgrade, so we did not evaluate any other options but Nimble is the next one.

vSAN 6.2 has lot of new features which can be good for small and medium-sized servers & VDI infrastructures.

We primarily used the solution for development, tests and UAT proposals. We did initially run it without backup and later added Commvault.

introducing vSAN dramatically increased the speed for deployment and decomissioning VMs for developers without the requierement to involve storage team

When we started using vSAN, the speed (performance) of the solution was dramatically higher than the speed of our production systems. 

The integration with the rest of the DVM suite is great as always. The look and feel for the administrators is like a classic virtualization environment and it cannot be better. 

The solution is very easy to set up. 

The stability is good.

We had very good access to technical support.

The ability to access SAN environments via fiber channel (or even NVMe) would be a good addition.

While I do not currently use the product in my new company, I used the solution up until I left my former company. I had used it for nearly six years up until then.

The stability is excellent. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable 

In my former company, we had a direct technical account manager. We were very satisfied with the level of assistance we were able to get when we needed it. 

But you have to consider the level of support you purchase and the amount of systems covered by this support - of course a TAM isn't effordable for each and every company.

It was easy to set up. 

If I would have introduce vSAN in an environment without any existing VMWare virtualization deployment and with the intention to expand to cloud based resoruces as a next step, I would not choose the product itself, I would do it with Dell and would implement the VxRail, what is actually vSAN based, it's the same product, however, in the end, you have better services. If you cover hardware and software management as well underneath one GUI, it's better for the administrators.

In the past deployment, it took us about a week to set everything up and to get everything up and running. We did need this week to bring up two 6 node clusters and today, these original six node clusters both expanded to 16 nodes on both sides.

We had a vSAN at my last company. I started my employment here at this new company one month ago and we do not have VMware products at all. Previously, I worked with vSAN simply as a customer and an end-user.

I've used many versions of the solution. We started shortly before the 6.0 came out. We may have started with vSAN 5.5. That was the first version we ever used, and then we upgraded again and again over the years.

I'd advise those considering the solution to think and plan before you simply do. You should do an accounting of what capacities, what performance, which backup you require or have. Do you need redundancy? Do you need network isolation? All the steps that normal people do afterwards should be done before you do it. Everything is about planning.

I'd give the solution a perfect ten out of ten rating. 

Primary use is just for VMDK storage. We're running an all-flash array with NVME caching tier. The performance is really good, we're using SATA drives. We're about to do a complete rebuild with 12-gig SATA drives as the capacity tier, and bigger, newer, faster NVME for the caching tier.

vSAN has improved our organization by giving us yet another high-speed data store. Previously, we were using VNX that had some Nearline-SAS drives with some SSD caching on it. But the all-flash vSAN is obviously much, much faster. We also use a Pure Storage array that we just got in a few months ago.

The most valuable feature would be: You own the hardware already. Why not just throw some drives into it and have a software-defined network storage system?

I know they're working on this: better support for an all-NVME array. Better metrics.

vSAN itself is a great storage platform, but one of the issues with it is that you have to be fully locked into the VMware package to use it. We're going to be deploying 72 Kubernetes nodes, and we're not going to buy VMware licenses for 72 of them, just so they can access vSAN. That's what we're using the Pure for. Opening it up so you could have vSAN as a data store, use it as a data lake, hit it with an NFS, S3 from outside the VMware ecosystem, would be great.

Stability is okay. We do see weird things crop up every now and again. It will say that a drive gets kicked off even though it's fine, and we have to re-add it. So a few gremlins here and there, but for the most part, it's pretty good.

So far, for scalability, we've just been running it on five nodes at our primary data center, and we're building out a second data center. It's going to be running on five nodes there. We haven't really scaled it up since we built it.

I've had to use tech support once or twice. It went okay, as with any tech support.

When we started with VMware, it was a three-node package with the VSA, virtual storage appliance, which was sort of the precursor to vSAN. And it just came as a package, so we said, "Okay, great. We have our storage and our compute tied together."

I'd say vSAN, on a scale of one to 10, would be a seven or an eight now. (If I have to choose it's a) seven. But with what I've heard while I've been at VMworld, I'd say that they'll probably go up to an eight.

It runs our core virtualization, both in our data centers and our edge or remote-site data centers. The performance has exceeded our expectations and exceeded our traditional converged infrastructure.

• Scalability 
• Standardization - one size fits all

It's also intuitive and easy to use because one size fits all. Obviously, it scales out, but it's the same solution at every physical location I manage.

After hearing more today, here at VMworld 2018, about what's coming, it seems that what's coming covers us: It's the Snapshotting and the DR and the replication. Historically, we've had to leverage third-parties. They were third-party solutions we were happy with, but all-in-one would be better.

It has been stable.

It scales out.

I haven't used the technical support but my team has. No issues have been escalated to me, so that's a good sign.

We were using traditional converged infrastructure with storage, network, and compute tiers. We had a mandate from a U.S. government entity that required physical separation of a lot of our infrastructure. Thus, we had we had an urgent need to duplicate everything we had. So it was a technology refresh.

There were a handful of important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• ease of use
• scalability
• price.

We didn't calculate a formal ROI on it because it was a technology refresh, but, "seat-of-the-pants," it's less expensive than traditional infrastructure.

We looked at Nutanix, we looked at Cisco, and we looked at Dell in the hyperconverged space. On the flip side, we were looking at the traditional SAN vendors and the traditional compute and networking vendors. We selected vSAN because it met the three criteria that I called out.

I would tell a colleague to highly consider it. Do your research and test it. If it fits, it fits.

We've been live about nine months so I would rate it at eight out of ten right now, just because I haven't used it long enough to be confident to say ten. To get it to a ten it will need to be stable for 12 months.

The primary use case is that we're getting ready to deploy a VDI solution across the campus and our healthcare network.

The opportunity gained with the relationship we have now is limitless, as new features and products roll out, especially with today's announcements: the news about microsegmentation, the RDS in the cloud with AWS, as well as some security features. It's a constant evolution for us. That's really why we're with vSAN.

The most valuable feature for us, long-term, is the integration with VMware that we're going to be using. We're currently using AirWatch, we're working in Workspace ONE. We want to make sure that our VDIs, with the integration of the Windows 10 solution - as well as any-device, anywhere, anytime mobility - work, yet still offer them the ability to gain access to that VDI. That is huge for us.

If you want to get down to the nuts and bolts of room for improvement, we would really like them to look at what Nutanix did for day-one/day-two operations deployment: Bringing in the equipment, getting it deployed, getting it setup, and ease of use of one-click for deploying our 30-node solution. With vSAN we had to go into each one individually and set it up.

The stability is there.

It absolutely scales, that's the beauty of it.

We actually involved VMware from the beginning. We brought in Nutanix, Simplivity, and vSAN technicians, as well as integration with our hardware platforms. But the true key was bringing those guys in, helping us set up the best environment, and seeing exactly what our endpoint was going to look like with our business integration. That was better than, "Yay, we can deploy 40 VDIs in 10 seconds." What does that do for the environment we're currently existing in? So for them to help us set up as a true test in our actual environment, that was a huge help, from all three that we tested. It was really impressive.

I am the manager of the guys who will be implementing the product. We recently received our client from Dell and we have installed it. My two main CI guys are here with me at VMWorld 2018 this week, so we're on a temporary hiatus, but we did get one full rack installed so far, and we're getting ready to deploy the vSAN to it.

The solution is only as good as the technicians you have and the investment put into proof of concept testing. My two technicians are some of the smartest people. You always hire someone smarter than you and I definitely did with these two guys. They've already got it worked out. We had the tasks laid out, what we were going to do day-one, day-two, rolling it into a test environment, and then production. We already had that done before we had the equipment on site.

We're just wrapping up year-two of our five-year ROI plan and this VDI solution, with vSAN, is part of it.

We purchased a VMware Enterprise agreement so vSAN was already included with what we had. It was just a smart choice, given where we were heading eventually, to go with vSAN. That was one of the deciding factors.

We just wrapped up proofs of concept for both hardware and software. We did vSAN, we did Nutanix, and we did Simplivity. We looked at HPE hardware and we looked at Dell EMC hardware, among others.

We actually decided to go with Dell with a vSAN solution, even though Nutanix had better day-one/day-two operations, straight out of the box for us. Long-term, we felt that the vSAN solution itself was going to serve us in terms of to utilizing and leveraging the power of VMware, either going to a private and hybrid-cloud solution or public and hybrid cloud solution.

As far as the hardware goes, we didn't really have that much of a preference among the three, but we did see that Dell EMC's OpenManage solution for managing the hardware, the bare metal itself, was much more productive than the other two.

You'd want to give it a 10 out of 10 based on what they're doing in the future, but if you always give a company a 10 they'll feel like they're already there. I would actually rate vSAN one below Nutanix, as far as maturity of the model goes.

I would give vSAN a very solid eight. There is room for improvement to catch up to Nutanix. Nutanix is definitely a nine. Again I don't like giving anybody a 10 because we always want to see what the next evolution or innovation is that they're bringing to the table. The way vSAN would get to a 10 depends on how they get me to "tomorrow".

We use it for our management cluster. All of our network services are on this cluster, on vSAN. That way, it's off the production network, it's off by itself. We have four nodes in case there is an issue with it, it has the failover capabilities.

The performance is very good. We have NVMe performance in it so it's very fast.

The most valuable features are being able to keep it off by itself and the ease of use.

We have been talking to VMware about things we'd like to see and I think they have done them in their 6.6 release. I don't think we need any more enhancements at this time.

The stability is very good. We have some HCI solutions like this in our environment and this one is on par with those solutions.

The scalability is very good. If we know that we need more CPU, more memory, we can add more nodes to it. We don't need to do that today but we know, tomorrow, that we have that capability.

We have a VMware TAM and they have helped us out with technical support. We haven't needed to call support. Things have been very smooth, no issues whatsoever.

We knew from doing the DR project and from having some issues with our production vSphere that we needed some type of solution to help us out, to keep it off the production network. But we did not have a product before this one. This is a new product for us.

For us, the most important criteria when selecting a new vendor are

• ease of use, because we have an operations group that we need to worry about
• cost is always up there
• the future of it - making sure it has a future because we hate to get something and then, after a year or so, it goes out-of-support and no one is using it anymore and there are no upgrades.

The initial setup was a little complex. We did it a couple of years ago and we've heard that it is so much easier now. I know that they are working on that capability right now.

I don't see this solution as an ROI type of thing. We tried to do it as a DR solution, or for making sure that it's a solution that is off by itself. At this point, cost was not a major factor for this.

We were using Dell and then we had a Dell EMC box, a hybrid. But it was a lot more money and it seemed we would always be a version behind. But with this one, the vSAN that we chose, we can upgrade it as needed. We can always be at the latest and greatest.

Make sure you use a solution that is supported. There are a lot of companies out there that are new and sometimes they don't have a life. We have been in that situation before where we have bought something and then it has gone end-of-life or no more support. Make sure you get a solution that is going to be supported for five to seven years, such as vSAN.

I would rate it at nine out of 10. I know it's very young and that they're growing it or doing a lot of updates to it, so I'm thinking it will be a 10. It's just very new to us. To make it a 10 will take some time.

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.