VMware vSAN Reviews

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.

Today, we use it for general compute and VDI. We have not put our VDI into production yet, but on the general compute side, it works great. The performance has been exemplary.

The most valuable features are ease of deployment and ease of management. If you compare it to other software-defined storage products, it's much easier. It's a checkbox. It's lot easier to manage.

The Snapshots feature looks pretty cool, so that will be nice to have. External storage would be a good thing to have in the next release, something other than iSCZI, something a little more, not HA, a little more production-oriented, than iSCZI.

So far we haven't had any issues at all. It has worked very well.

We're not that large at Boys Town. We probably only have 500 VMs. Realistically we have about 50 VSXi hosts. So for us, it's great because we can just buy servers and expand any cluster we need. We split clusters based on other needs, like licensing or something else. It's not like we get to 64 nodes. So we don't have any issues with scalability. It works great for us.

We were having some problems with another software-defined storage vendor so we switched to vSAN. We had problems with the previous vendor's support. While I have never talked to VMware vSAN support, I've talked to GSS, but I've never had issues with GSS, other than their not calling you back right away.

For me, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• ease of use
• single pane of glass - that is huge for me
• enterprise class, obviously
• availability.

We've had no issues with the product. We put it in in two days. The initial deployment was straightforward, easy.

On our shortlist were Dell EMC Vx Rack FLEX, VxRail, and we looked at Nutanix a little bit. We chose vSAN because we had done PoCs in the past and, comparing it to every other software-defined storage product out there, its ease of use is unparalleled. It's very easy to set up and very easy to administer, comparatively.

I would ask a colleague who is looking at this type of solution, "Do you need storage for VMs?" Hands-down, if you need storage for VMs, vSAN is your option. If you need a SAN for some other reason, other than storage for VMs, then go for it. But if you're running VMware VMs, buy vSAN.

I like vSAN because they release features incrementally, every year, and you don't have to upgrade your hardware to get those features. If you bought a traditional SAN, you would have to upgrade your hardware constantly, every three years: You would get it, and it is how it is for three years. But on vSAN, you upgrade when you have to, when your hardware gets old or when you need more capacity. It's great, you get new features constantly.

I would rate vSAN at eight out of ten. It could get to a ten, once we have more time running it.

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.

We use it for localized storage converted into virtual storage. The performance is perfect,  awesome. No complaints.

The most valuable features are

• price point
• you can use existing storage; no specific storage requirements are needed.

I haven't utilized it enough to even know all the features available, much less what might be needed still. It's hitting all of our points pretty well.

The stability is awesome. We love it. 

We haven't dealt that much with scalability because we're rural. It's a small area with small community-type banks. Being able to convert existing storage into vSan is really a perfect solution for a lot of our customers.

I haven't needed to contact technical support yet.

What made us go with this solution was price point. When you can utilize existing storage infrastructure, and not have to continually purchase new SAN products out there that are going up in price as time goes by, then it's a wonderful thing.

When selecting a vSAN vendor, the most important criteria were 

• stability
• dependability
• ease of use
• experience.

I've been using VMware for many years, and I'm still using it. That's a testament to how well it works.

The initial setup was very straightforward, a very simple implementation. It's just an easy product to use. VMware, in general, is a very easy product to use.

The timeframe for return on investment is about three years, and we hit that pretty consistently, if not even sooner.

Look at the ROI carefully, and make sure that you can hit that before pushing the product.

It's cheap, easy, and good for low-end customers. We're a small market, rural area, so we have low-end customers. Price point is just about everything for us.

I would rate vSAN at nine out of ten. What would make it a ten would be lower pricing.

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. 

Our primary use case is to host our hyperconverged solutions. I'm a project manager and team leader and we are implementers of this solution. We carry out everything from implementation to rollout. We are customers of VMware vSAN.

The VCG notification feature is key for me. 

We faced some latency issues but it's been a little better lately. I'd like to see a single dashboard product and an improvement in reporting which currently depends on third party applications. 

I've been using this solution for almost seven years. 

It's relatively stable now although we had some issues in the past. 

The solution is scalable, we have around 5,000 users. I think there are about 15 people in the company who deal with monitoring, management, and implementation.

We had a very good team early on so we were not dependent on Microsoft or VMware to help mitigate issues.

We previously used Nutanix and I was very happy using Prism. We ended up with vSAN following a bidding process.

The initial setup took around 15 months. It was reasonably simple but there were some issues. We migrated around 150 VMs with applications on them.

We have a deal with them so we don't pay for individual licenses, it's a complete solution with an overall license. 

There are many similar solutions on the market. With VMware you get ease of integration because any new product they bring to the market has VMware. 

I rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

We are service providers. We offer pre-billed services anywhere from three-year or five-year contracts for our customers. We provide the maintenance of the solution during that time, and on the backend, we provide L1 and L2 support.

The primary use case of this solution is for third party storage, and to leverage the local hard disk. This avoids the cost of expensive storage, sandboxes, and SAN switches.

The most valuable features are secure IOPs and LAN security.

Also, we can provide VMware with IOPs assurity from the vSAN policy, vSAN cluster, which is an expensive solution from the storage.

It has the iSCSI feature.

The price can be reduced. Small businesses cannot afford this solution.

There are limitations with Kubernetes and vSAN.

In the next release, I would like to have a hybrid flash available with this product.

I have been working with this solution for more than three years.

It's a very stable product.

It is very easy to scale. It's out of the box. You can add to it at any time.

You can add any OEM or any hardware with no problem. There is no hardware lockin. For example, if you are working with HP hardware,  you can store in DELL, or you can add a fifth node from Huawei.

It's a scale-out architecture.

Our customers are medium and enterprise companies. Small companies cannot afford the services.

The initial setup is very simple.

It is less than five minutes to deploy.

We are service providers for our clients. We have a dedicated team in our organization that deploys the products, maintains, and provides support for our customers. 

The price is expensive. This solution is not an option for SBM customers because of the price.

There are limitations because of nodes. There is a minimum purchase requirement of three or four nodes along with two processors, which also increases the price.

The price will go from a small storage box to a higher storage box.

When comparing, other vendors have their own hardware with vSAN. They have hardware with HCI, for example, Hyperflex is a hardware that is OEM locked. If a customer purchased three nodes, with Hyperflex, the next time they will have to buy from Cisco. 

It's the same with HPE; if customers purchase three or four nodes from HPE, the next ones can only be purchased from HPE.

VMware vSAN has the flexibility to buy from anywhere. There is no lock key. They can purchase from any customers and any OEM.

VMware vSAN is a very good product and I would recommend it for other customers.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We have vSAN, and have built-in storage capabilities. We have many hosts, and we use the host through our providers with vSAN, with the storage. This improves everything because it is all internally between the servers. We use an NSX protocol. And what NSX does, it uses an internal network between hosts, so there is no use of an external switch. We create an internal connection between the host and the VMware product. So traffic is all internal and you can create all the firewalls and switches, everything. It becomes virtual. But, it is sometimes complicated when you try to deploy new systems or when you have to scale a system very quickly.

I think the vSAN product uses vSphere to monitor the system. It is sometimes difficult to manage the PCs within the system. VMware is currently working towards moving things to the cloud network. This is a great new addition to the VMware product.

To me, it is very stable. I never have problems. I have used VMware for 15 years and I never had any problems with stability. Like any normal system, you may sometimes have problems with one little platform, or with a host that is not working. But, there are no major issues.

We have 130,000 people connected to the platform and to the servers. Eventually, we want to use the cloud, which will help with the volume.

You can speak with VMware and they will provide you service that you need.

I can set up a platform of VMware in a week, easily. It took me about a week to deploy our platform and we basically set up all he servers, all the network and everything else. Then, it took about two or three days to work and patch everything, and cable in everything.

The older versions were a little more complicated. Nowadays, there are more documentations, videos, and tutorials. So, it is less complicated. There are still some issues, until you have to look at everything. But, I think that because there is more documentation now, and more information, you can speak with VMware and they can provide you service.

The only problem I see with VMware is the price tag. This may start causing problems because there are other solutions out there, like AWS, that are open source and free. So, there is no license fee. VMware is very good, but expensive, in comparison.

I compared VMware to Oracle. They're very good, but Oracle is expensive, so people buy it and then start using open-source. Oasis is another option because it's cheaper and it's a similar process. So that is the problem I think VMware is going to have to compete with them in the future, and it is only going to get worse.

To me, VMware is a leader of virtualization. I think everyone just follows VMware. 

The reason why we use VMware is because all of the areas that VMware can provide. They fill a need for our platforms. There are other platforms now that provide similar solutions. In the old days, it was a simple Microsoft platform, and they had no management costs. Now they use VMN to create a cross-test and to link all of the servers they want. So they can provide restoration of servers. Furthermore, now they are integrating the movement towards cloud solutions. The only issues concerning the future of vSAN is the price. If someone builds a platform that is free, and only has to pay a license fee for a server, that may cause a problem for VMware.