VMware vSAN Reviews

We're primarily using it in a VDI environment, a four-node VDI environment. Performance is very good. We're very happy with it. Networking setup was a little bit of a challenge, but we got around that.

Reduced complexity. We don't have to worry about the physical SAN anymore. That makes it easier. The learning curve as well, when people learn vSAN, they find it very easy to manage compared to a physical SAN.

Flexibility, growth, and expansion are probably the more important features for us.

As our environment grows, the more users come on, the more VDI workstations that we need, we can easily expand either horizontally or vertically with the environment. We're very happy with that.

A bit more information on the upgrade path, upgrade availability, how to upgrade, that would be very useful.

We find the stability very good. It really reduces our overall operations.

We find the scalability very good. We've been able to upgrade very easily as users come on, as we need to create more VDI workstations. Adding the extra drives gives us the capacity we need.

We haven't needed to use technical support so far; nothing at all.

Up until about a year-and-a-half ago, we were using physical SANs. Space is a problem in our environments that we deploy, so we knew we had to get rid of the physical SAN and go toward the more virtual environment. The number of nodes we deploy, we need them. By integrating the vSAN, we're able to get the space requirements we need.

I was involved in the initial setup. In fact, I was involved with the selection of vSAN compared to other products, as well as physical SANs, and I was involved in some of the design and configuration.

It was fairly straightforward, actually. After we got around the networking issues, we found that the vSAN setup was very good.

In terms of return on investment, we don't have any kind of requirement there.

We considered EMC as well. We considered HPE LeftHand, which we had used in the past, so we were familiar with the virtualized SAN. We like the vSAN a lot.

The advice I would give is to properly analyze your host infrastructure. Make sure that your network cards are sufficient for the environment you're trying to deploy in, whether it be all-flash. There are already some Ready Nodes available. Go with the Ready Nodes when it comes to vSAN. Don't try and buy your own parts - something we looked at originally that we scrapped. That would be my main advice. Go with Ready Nodes when it comes to virtual SAN.

In terms of improving the product, we're very familiar with the new features in 6.7, which we're going to be upgrading to. Data encryption, we would like to deploy, as well as compression and deduplication. Those features are already available in the new version. We just have to take the time to deploy them.

Out of ten, I'd give it an eight. We're very happy with the product. To bring it to a ten we'd rather not upgrade as often. Right now, we're at 6.2 and that wasn't long ago. They're already going to 6.8 now. We'd like to have a little bit of a normalization period before we get to the next product. I understand it's a focus for VMware. We're very happy they're focusing on it.

• vSAN ROBO with two physical nodes

I'm working as a consultant, so I can’t directly say how it helped my customer. But I know that my customer started to equip some branches with our building block and it replaces NetApp filers. We are using a building block of two vSAN nodes and the wireness appliances in the main datacenter. With the next release of our building block, based on vSphere 6.5 and vSAN 6.5, we are switching to direct cabling, so no 10GbE switch is needed for vSAN traffic.

I’m often asked for a vSAN stretched cluster in combination with erasure coding. Currently with vSAN 6.5, you can use one of them but not both at the same time. It is kind of a German behaviour to have two datacenters with active/active architecture and syncronized mirror. But for this type of customer, it’s pretty important to get a vSAN stretched cluster with erasure coding.

I have been using it for three months now. I use VMware vSphere 6.0 Update 2 and vSAN 6.2 (hybrid).

We have not had stability issues. Even losing the witness appliances is no big deal. vSAN 6.2, as well as vSAN 6.5, seems to be a pretty stable and reliable platform.

We have not had scalability issues in both ways. Scaling down to two hosts with direct cabling is possible for ROBO, as well as big clusters with over 32 hosts.

I rate technical support 4.5/5.

My customer switched (or currently is switching) from NetApp filers to vSAN. The main reason is cost. You need the ESXi host hardware anyway, but you now save the costs of storage maintenance. The costs per vSAN license (and the maintenance) are usually lower than for NetApp in this case. Plus, you gain the benefit of only having one management console which is well known and built-in to the management tools used for the central datacenters.

The initial setup is straightforward, but only after deploying the vCenter service. Once the vCenter is up and running, it is pretty easy to enable vSAN. Despite the automatic selection of disks, we chose the manual selection and it was extremely easy to set up vSAN.

When you don’t have a chance to build upon an existing vCenter service, you have to think about the deployment of vCenter without having vSAN. There are several options, like deploying vCenter temporarily on a client PC and then migrating it later onto the vSAN cluster. But it’s always a bit tricky and you probably need some extra time to get the installation done. In most of my vSAN installations, the vCenter was already up and running, so the initial setup of the vSAN cluster literally takes minutes.

Licensing is pretty straightforward. Have a look at the features you need and choose the license that fits. For ROBO scenarios, there is a special ROBO license that could save you some money.

dvSwitch functionality is included in every vSAN license. You don’t have to have vSphere Enterprise Plus to use dvSwitches. You only need vSAN licenses. And despite that, vSAN comes with all flash functionality within every license.

My customer was focusing on continuing with NetApp filers and ESXi hosts or vSAN for ROBO.

Have a look at the simplicity of vSAN and how it easily integrates into the existing management tools. It’s not even the ease of implementation; it’s the ease of managing and maintaining the complete stack.

Currently, we are on version 6.2. Having all flash, I would say that the most valuable feature for us is deduplication, as it gives us better utilization of the space available. In the latest release, there are already features that we have been waiting for. iSCSI presentation, for example, is something we were waiting for. With iSCSI presentation, we will be able to present the vSAN datastore to our other blade servers; therefore better utilising our investment.

We face the same challenges most organisations do; probably the most common one being that of keeping up with growth and expansion, while keeping within the budgets. vSAN is very scalable, so we can plan our costs well in advance, knowing that additional nodes will be expanding both our compute and storage resources.

I think that the product is evolving in the right direction, most of the improvements and suggestions we had in mind are already available in 6.5. Obviously, there is always room for improvement.

For example, in our case, we had to go with vSAN Advanced license in order to have all flash. I remember attending the vSAN summit at VMworld 2015, and this licensing issue came up during the discussions; so did the request to present vSAN via iSCSI and the 2-node direct connect for ROBOs. In 6.5, all-flash is now supported by all vSAN editions, and ROBO sites can be deployed with a 2-node crossover cable, so it looks like VMware are taking on-board the suggestions we are making, as always J.

We have been using vSAN for the last two years, now. Initially, we decided to try vSAN in our test and dev environment. We started with the hybrid solution using some hardware that we already had in-house. Our development team had already noticed faster build and deployment time frames, so we explored the vSAN option further. Today, we moved to an all-flash solution, which we are now using both for dev and production.

The only issue that I recall having was with a controller driver that did not pass the HCL check; this happened following an update to 6.2, but a patch was released soon after. We did not experience any service interruption or downtime.

Customer support for vSAN was very good; response time was very fast and within the agreed support time frames. The technical guys where very knowledgeable and helped out to address our queries and issues right away.

In most of our environments, we still have "traditional" storage, some of which is becoming end of life and will be decommissioned. Others are relatively still recent and are being used as a secondary storage together with vSAN. It’s like having the best of both worlds in a way. We have been using and implementing most of the VMware products for several years now; vSAN keeps consolidating our infrastructure under one vendor.

When we were setting it up the very first time, we had to start over a few times, but again it was just a learning curve. I think during the first setup, especially if it’s in a testing environment, it’s the best time to hammer it and experiment a little.

We do implementations as service vendors and obviously implemented our own. My advice to whoever is considering vSAN is to try it out, even if it’s just on some hardware you already have. If you don’t have any hardware, most service vendors will be willing to give you a remotely accessible demo. My advice when it comes to production, in regards of hardware, is definitely to go for vSAN-Ready nodes (“VMware-approved hardware”).

In some of our environments, introducing vSAN helped reduce our datacentre hosting costs. In one case, we were able to completely remove a cabinet that had a legacy blade chassis and a legacy SAN. We only had two cabinets in this environment; by consolidating storage and compute in a few servers, we reduced the hosting costs by half. As for pricing and licensing, I think this is something which needs to be discussed on a case-by-case basis; I do not think it’s a “one size fits all”.

I think vSAN together with other alternatives is the future. Actually, it has already been here with us for a while; network, compute and storage are merging in one box. It’s just a matter of time for it to become the norm.

My rating is for this point in time. However, there have been improvements and new features in the latest release, which will probably make me increase my rating in the coming days.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.