VMware vSAN Reviews

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. 

We are resellers and system integrators.

With larger companies, we can use VMware vSAN. We have small and medium-sized businesses in Italy that are customers.

We chose this solution as the domain for hyper-convergence solutions for small businesses with fewer than 200 employees for companies that wanted to increase storage without complications.

It's well documented.

We find it easy to deliver this solution.

If the support could be provided more quickly, it would be very helpful.

I have been selling VMware vSAN for five years.

The stability is standard. Many people use VMware as a virtualization solution.

VMware vSAN is a scalable solution, as are all hyper-converged solutions.

We have 30 customers using vCenter, and five using vSAN.

Technical support is good. It's not excellent, but good. The Sempre support is better.

Technical support could be faster. VMware is slow.

It takes a lot of time to get a technical engineer on the phone, we have to send several emails. It is not a fast procedure.

We are only selling Sempre Solution, and vSAN, vSphere for VMware.

We have 15 customers using Sempre.

It's simple to build a product when you know what you're doing.

Installation and deployment can take anywhere from eight to sixteen hours, depending on the infrastructure.

We have a team of three who deal with everything.

For a classical node plus storage solution, the price is higher.

You have to pay to expand this solution, which is comparable with other similar solutions.

It is not a good price for small and medium-sized businesses.

Making a server solution that includes the license for smaller businesses would be a fantastic idea. Three servers, for example, would be an ideal start-up for a small or medium-sized business.

It's a service that sells nodes. The nodes, hardware, software, and vSAN are all interconnected. It's the brick for the wall, for example, and should be a little less expensive for smaller businesses.

We offer options to our customers. We offer our customers the option of a loan where they can make monthly payments, or they can purchase the solution.

After one year, customers pay for the support.

I would recommend this solution to others, even though we are moving to another solution.

We will be moving to Sempre. The support is cheaper, and the performance is good. It's a good choice for us and for our customers.

I would rate VMware vSAN an eight 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.