VMware vSAN Reviews

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.

We use this solution for our entire architecture. They have removed the storage part. We used to use IBM and NetApp for storage solutions.

Data management and recovery processes are the most valuable features.

Unless there is some network issue, everything is fine. 

Improvements are also needed as per the customer's requirements.

I have been using VMware vSAN for six years. 

The initial setup is easy. 

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

We are using VMware vSAN for many purposes, such as NVI workload, edge computing, open run 5G for large customers, onsite installations, and low latency systems like mobile edge computing.

The most valuable feature of VMware vSAN is you do not have to use additional hardware for storage. The operation of VMware vSAN does not take a lot of effort. If you have VMware technology on your site, then it's easy for the operational support of the system.

The orchestration is well integrated into the stack of the VMware management suite.

VMware vSAN could improve by having faster reload time and a single point of failure. Resynchronization of many hardware could be better. If you have an outage of a disc or a full system, the replication time is too slow. This has room for improvement.

I have used VMware vSAN for approximately three years.

The stability is satisfactory, it has been working well.

VMware vSAN is scalable, it is easy to scale out.

The number of people that use the solution can be anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000,000 depending on the customer.

We are one of the largest customers on the site for this kind of usage worldwide, and the support is very good. We have direct access to the development, R&D, and third-level support, they are very good.

The cost of VMware vSAN is reasonable.

A good solution should be small and fast and at the moment VMware vSAN is the best product that can solve our use cases.

I rate VMware vSAN a five out of ten.

We recently adopted vSAN. We adopted VDI for our desktop solution about ten years ago and we have a single KPI for delivery which is clinical data accessed in five seconds.

Throughout the last decade, as new back-end technologies have come to market, we have always been investing in the hosting end of VDI. Five years ago, we went to an all-flash array, and two years ago, we went to the vSAN hyperconverged. 

When we went to vSAN, at that point in time, we doubled the density of our desktops per host and, for the first time ever, I could demonstrate a significantly lower TCO for a VDI desktop versus a rich or fat client.

For my organization, the most valuable features of vSAN are as follows:

1. The most important to me, in my role, is cost. In the renewal cycle for storage, it was about a 40 percent saving compared to going to an all-flash array, which is what we first looked at doing.
2. Performance: our clinical data access in five seconds; we need to do everything we can to retain that metric.
3. I was really pleasantly surprised during the data migration across to vSAN, that it happened almost instantly. Whereas, in the past, migrating from array to array was an arduous and fraught process.

Room for improvement could be in the planning stage of going to hyperconverged. And this is a big ask: some modeling tools or guidance on how to work out the optimal TCO. For example, core size - the amount of RAM that you're running - versus the licensing cost you're up for with, say, Mircrosoft data center, versus the number of hosts you're going to run and have to license for the vSAN. It's quite a complex equation and it's really difficult to work out, in advance of implementing the solution, that you've got it right. That creates some uncertainty around the total cost of ownership.

Stability on the vSAN has been 100 percent. As part of the implementation process, the VMware customer success team for vSAN assisted us. We actually retrofitted hard disk into our own existing hosts and they went through a process of review and remediation to get all the "green ticks". We went through that process in advance of putting it into production for our data center, which we did this year. So, there have been absolutely no problems from that perspective.

When talking about scalability, the real value is that, for the first time, I can just build it out one host a time. Over the years, I'm sure everyone has experienced hitting the wall on their array where it's too old or the technology has changed, and they're up for a large sum of money in one hit. The actual, repeatable, non-quantity of the cost to increase the storage, is very valuable.

On a scale of one to ten, I am giving it a nine. It's probably because I can't bring myself to give a ten for anything, in case it could be improved.

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 value that VSAN brings to our organization, really there are two major areas. One is the ability to replace very expensive proprietary SANs. The other is the need to replicate and keep data available at all times across three separate data centers. Those two elements are really where VSAN plays.

Probably the biggest benefit we get is the replacement of the SANS and it's purely a cost one. To give you an idea, we spend roughly 50% less on equivalent storage by using VSAN to replace our more traditional SAN architecture. Further, the operating costs are 20, 30 percent less. The ability to scale our storage as we need it is far simpler with VSAN than buying the more traditional route. So I would argue that that's probably the single best feature we get.

There are features that I would love to see added to VSAN and I think they're being worked on. One of the major limitations is its inability to provide storage to things outside the hyper-converged world. Any traditional SAN we have left over in our institution will be for that function. Ultimately, if we can remove that by simply extending VSAN's access outside of its little virtual bubble, so to speak, that's the key. And as I said I think that's going to be added.

VeriTech is a consulting and engineering firm specializing in health care. We provide, management and technical skills often acting as the CTO of, healthcare institutions. One of our engagements is I'm actually the interim acting CTO of Baystate Health, in western Massachusetts. VSAN is one of the primary ones but, software defined, architecture and complete hyper-convergence is really what we use VMware for. We use NSX and VSAN as part of our, absolute total infrastructure. And that's all part of vCloud, initiative. We also use Horizon for our VDI, implementation. And that pretty much-those products are 99% of what we use.

The stability of VSAN so far has been excellent. We're just beginning to enter production. We're beginning to migrate our data off a traditional SANS which are a collection of EMC, IBM, NetApp, whole range of them onto the VSAN platform and so far we haven't had any problems.

It's actually the internal feature that I think gets us the great feature of savings out of it. With VSAN I simply add disk drives and hosts to my infrastructure at any of the facilities I have. The net result is an increase of both storage and processing.

In the older model, if I need to add, let's say a terabyte of space for some particular tier one application, I have to add a terabyte, from let's say EMC, into data center one, a terabyte into data center two, a terabyte into data center three, and if, in my adding of those, I cross one of those magic boundaries where I'm out of cabinet space or whatever, then I have all those expenses. None of that is true with VSAN. In VSAN, I simply add drives into a chassis anywhere in my system. If I need more space, I buy a simple chassis, throw it in there, and continue to add the drives. Much more scalable. There really is no limit to it.

Technical support on VSAN has been excellent also. It's been a bit of a paradigm shift for our employees. They're used to that traditional sort of big iron, I'm going to call it stair-step limited approach and it's taken a little bit of skill to get them used to it, but VMware has been there right for us from the beginning. They've helped our people understand the difference and we're pretty much now self-sufficient.

The choice of VSAN was almost made for us. And let me step back for a minute and say it's not particularly the product, although we love the product, it's where we suggested after quite a lot of testing of other-of other competing products, we knew that traditional SAN architecture and the cost of deploying it, maintaining it, was unsustainable. Our budgets in healthcare IT are flat. No one's giving us extra money. But, with all the images and the doctors and the sharing of data, the need to store data is not being held flat. It's going way up.

We simply don't have the money. So we needed some new, way to address storage. And that meant software defined storage. So that was a given. The next step was we needed something that would provide the levels of service we have, and stability we have with the traditional architecture but at far less price. That's where VSAN shone. That's where when we did all the necessary testing and reviews VSAN acted in a secure performance and cost, areas needed.

The selection of VSAN, it's really part of a larger hyper-convergence model and for technical reasons and for simplicity, we wanted products. If we were going to move our entire, siloed approach of storage here, processing here, networking there, onto one single platform, we wanted all of those abilities buried into the extraction or the hypervisor level itself. We didn't want to buy independent little products and snap them in so to speak. Really, that means the only solution suite was the VMware world of products -- NSX for networking, VSAN for storage, and vCloud for everything else. So it really was a no brainer. That was really the essential relationship between VSAN and the other products.

The implementation of VSAN along with the implementation of all hyper-convergence technology is tricky. Although we benefit greatly for it now, there were a lot of issues that, we simply had to work through. And these are not really an issue related to the product itself but more related to the nature of what the product does. Since VSAN is a software component that allows you to add storage to your hyper-converged system, which in turn is based on products like Cisco’s UCS, the revision of code in the Cisco UCS chassis, the types of drives, the levels of drivers across the entire platform are essential to keep in lock step. So, we had many cases where, as we added capacity, turned on new features, began to migrate, we ran into all sorts of, um, difficulty. But the truth is, with our people, with VMware’s, with Cisco’s, everybody supplied the skills we needed and now we're pretty much, we're there.

Well, VSAN is a solution of replacement. VSAN is going to replace all of our traditional SAN. So ultimately at the end of the day a couple years from now, almost all of our storage should be on VSAN. It really should be very little if anything left.

When we selected VSAN, as I said, remember, it's part of a total package, so the better question is, when we were selecting hyper-convergence, who would be the vendor for that. Well, there aren't that many options out there. There's really three. You have Microsoft. You have, open stack solutions and open source solutions, and then you have VMware. The Microsoft product, although engaging, isn't really ready for prime time according to our needs. The open source open/stack option is potentially interesting but requires a great deal of internal engineering and support that healthcare systems really don't have. Really left VMware as the only viable, affordable, complete solution. And hence we chose it.

On one side is a strategic vendor and that's where VMware, Microsoft, in the medical case, Cerner, which is a large application provider. There are four or five vendors that I would consider strategic and these are vendors that we could simply not operate without the function that they provide. So when a vendor's classified as strategic and then we look at the function they provide, there has to be a level of commitment. They must be a market leader. They must have enormous R&D capabilities. They must be flexible. They must interact with our engineers at a peering level, not simply as a dictatorial here, use this, and that's what's good for you and no more. VMware clearly acts appropriately like that. So, because, VSAN is part of hyper-convergence, hyper-convergence is a strategic imperative you can connect the dots where a company like VMware is necessary.

I would say, that they are definitely there. They're a high nine [out of 10]. Anybody that's looking to do hyper-convergence I think needs to understand a few basic principals. And all of these apply to VSAN as it applies to any of the elements of hyper-convergence. This is a long project. It's not something that's going to happen all at once and the value is after completion, the sum total of the parts.

If you go through a project like this for example, at Baystate, it's a two to three year project with required funding across that period of time. If, for some reason, we withdrew funding halfway through this process we would end up with less than the sum of our parts, we would end up with a lot of disconnected stuff. So be sure to make sure that your management and the people involved understand that this is a major commitment. It's not, oh, I'm just going to buy this once and forget it.

The other thing I would suggest, be paid attention to, is the affect this has on your people, on your engineers, on your workers, your HR considerations. In a traditional environment like ours, we're siloed. We have our storage guys here, our networking guys here and so on and so on - very expensive, a lot of duplication. In a hyper-converged model, all of that becomes one. Really what you have is a series of better trained, more effective engineers, but less of them. That doesn't mean you fire people.

That means you now put those people to other projects that have been sort of languishing because we just could never get around to them. That's, I think, a big thing to understand, that you will affect the way your users work. If they're not willing to learn new skills, if they're not willing to cross boundaries which were once siloed, your project could be in jeopardy.

When researching anything like hyper-convergence, the more information the better. We spent a great deal of time talking to not just health care institutions, and to be fair, this is a relatively new trend in health care so there really aren't all that many to talk to, but there are a number of non-healthcare institutions that are further along in some of these projects than healthcare is. We spoke with them, we spoke with vendors, we spoke with even other consulting firms. I think it's very important to gather as much information as you can before, you know, embarking on this.

Finding the resources for the gathering of this information is both hard and easy. It depends on which one we're talking about. The ability to get information from other institutions if they're outside of healthcare, and remember I'm speaking from a healthcare point of view, may be difficult, because they may not be allowed to share certain information. Getting consulting information is difficult unless you, of course, engage them. And I would argue that it's not necessarily such a bad idea to engage for a small amount of money the relative experts in some of these consulting firms and just have a quick conversation with them. If all of a sudden they seem to be knowledgeable, you do your homework on them, I would argue a further engagement is not necessarily a bad idea. But you do have to put some efforts into finding the info. It's not just going to fall out of space.

We are using it for the consolidation of compute, network, and storage.

For VMware, we're mostly using on-premises deployment.

It is very well known in the industry, and there are a lot of technical resources around it. This is a big thing for me because, at the end of the day, when you implement it, you need to support it.

It is easy to use and easy to implement.

The big thing is pricing, and the rest of it is mostly good. From a scalability point of view, scaling the storage from network or compute should be easier. It is again all around the cost, and it would be good if it was easier to scale your storage separately from your compute. One of the things that I have observed is that when you start off, you've got too much storage, and over time, you've got less storage, and you have to build new clusters to scale. So, if you can scale compute and storage, it would be good. I know it is scalable separately, but it is a complex process.

I have been using this solution for more than 10 years.

It is pretty scalable. 

Currently, we've deployed VxRail, and it comes with everything. So, support is good.

We used Nutanix with VMware for about a year, and then we switched over to the packaged solution with VMware. 

Dell has got a product called VxRail, which incorporates vSAN. So, it's a packaged solution. We've now implemented VxRail, and it is a new experience with them. VxRail is an all-in solution, but there might be an additional cost that you have to pay to get the support at the vSAN level.

It is easy to implement, but for big organizations with multiple products, it becomes complicated. If you're going to have different clusters for your databases and workload, then setting up and deploying it could become complex. 

Its price could be improved. 

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

While we have some applications running on VMware, mostly we are providing and proposing these solutions to our clients.

I have one client, for example, that is running the CRM and accounts and manufacturing applications on VMware and they're using HP infrastructure for them. They have some SQL databases they're running on that and some back-office applications, and also an Extend Server as well.

The migration capabilities are a very useful aspect of the solution. 

The way it handles failovers is very good. 

The imaging is helpful.

Right now, VMware is number one in the virtual space.

The initial setup is very easy.

The management is very straightforward. It's an extremely user-friendly product.

It integrates very well with other products. 

The scalability is very good and the solution is stable and reliable.

So far, everything is okay.

Currently, there aren't any shortcomings to discuss or missing features that we worry about. 

This product is very expensive. 

I've used the solution for a long time. I'd used VMware since it come out in the '90s. It's been decades. 

I have found the stability to be great. There aren't bugs. It doesn't glitch. There aren't issues around it crashing or freezing. It's reliable. 

The scalability has been great. If you need to expand it, you can do so. 

Technical support has been great. They are helpful and responsive. I've been happy with their level of service when we've needed them. We are satisfied. 

The initial setup is very straightforward and simple. There shouldn't be an issue if a company wants to set it up. 

If you have, for example, 100 VMs, you only need one person to manage it. It requires very little maintenance or overhead in terms of staff. 

The solution can be expensive. However, if you are a big company, such as a telco, likely you can get a good deal on pricing. That said, being so big, likely the cost won't be a deterrent. 

We are partners and also a solution provider.

The solution is great. I'd rate it at a nine out of ten. I'd advise other people to give it a try.