VMware vSAN Reviews

We mainly use vSAN for two purposes. One is to improve application performance with the HCI. The second is to migrate customers from legacy storage to high-speed SSD-based infrastructure. They are moving the computer network and storage capacity together. 

The vSAN features we've found most helpful are live application migrations and storage policies. It has storage, policies, application, and DRS policies. Automation is there. 

Also, if a customer wants to go for a VMware stack, vSAN has flexible, completely integrated solutions for two clouds. Stretched Cluster, vMotion, VXLAN—there are so many features. 

We are an IT solution provider, and we've been using VMware for 15 years. 

I would say vSAN is stable. 

Once you develop all three of your stacks, you can plug in the rack servers and all. If you are increasing in parallel, vSAN automatically increases the overall computing capacity of the IT infrastructure in terms of network storage and what you can compute.

Technical support is also good. I would rate VMware support eight out of 10 because nobody is perfect.

Setting up vSAN isn't too tricky. All HCI providers—Microsoft, Cisco, and VMware—have very smooth implementation except for Microsoft storage, which is complex. 

Maintenance is required. Sometimes hard disks crash, but thanks to the mobility and abstraction of the software from the hardware, we can migrate the entire infrastructure layer to some spare PC's main server and perform maintenance. This is the standard patching practice in the industry.

The pricing model is sometimes a challenge for us because their licenses are very costly.

I rate VMware vSAN nine out of 10. I am a VMware fanatic. As a solution architect, I've designed solutions for many customers. Clients have personal preferences, and they're generally swayed by what the vendors tell them, but my perspective is purely technical. If you are going for features, scalability, and performance, VMware is the best solution. 

It's not dependent on any vendor. The VMware layer is there, and VMware is required, but it saves a lot of costs and provides flexibility. Let's say I bought around 10 or 15 servers, and I'm not satisfied with the performance. I can change my server and migrate all my workloads to the new servers in the future.

VMware has an edge in terms of computing and networking because if we are going for a VMware infrastructure solution, there's a storage layer, so it can work with any kind of server or vendor. Suppose I buy some of my servers from Dell, some from HP, and a few from various companies. VMware gives you the flexibility to work with any vendor, networking, switches, and storage. They can come together in a complete software layer. I can have five servers from five different vendors. If I don't like one, I can plug in a server from any vendor in the stack, and it'll work. 

We use it for our whole infrastructure. We use it for about 50 servers.

We are using its latest version.

We use it on three hosts, and we find it very easy to administer.

It is user-friendly, and its performance is good.

It could be cheaper.

We have been using it for two years.

Its stability is good. Its performance is good. We haven't had any breakdown in the last two years. We are very satisfied with the solution.

At the moment, we have a limit because we host 50 servers. We could have a bit more memory, and we have to buy it.

There are 60 users who are using all the servers. Its usage is moderate.

Normally, when we have a problem, we contact the consultant who had set up the system. He can usually fix the problem, but there haven't been many problems since we set up the system.

We used VMware but not vSAN.

Its setup was done by a consultant. It took about one or two days, but I don't remember exactly.

In terms of maintenance, it doesn't require much. We have to update it once in a while. It takes about two or three days a month.

We don't look at these figures. We buy a system and use it. We don't look at the figures like ROI.

It could be cheaper.

We are very satisfied with this solution. I would advise others to go ahead and just use it.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. It is a good product.

VMware vSAN is a global solution, so we can manage all the storage solutions in one place. It's embedded in VCI solutions. 

When you upgrade the vSAN, there are some issues like lost data and problems with the log. The log disappears. When you upgrade the solution, you must have several logs, so if you have some problems, you can check the log server to find them. But this solution has some improvements, like its snapshot feature. When you have to upgrade the version, vSAN makes a snapshot, and if there is a problem, you can revert to the old version.

The company has been using vSAN for about 18 or 19 months. 

vSAN isn't very stable. 

It's easy to manage and scale vSAN. We can increase the volume as necessary for the VM or the user. We have around 2,000 users. Right now, we're not planning to increase usage yet, but maybe we will take another look in six months to see if we need to scale the solution or not.

I'm satisfied with VMware support. 

If you have some networking skills, it's straightforward to install, deploy, and manage vSAN. 
We have three engineers maintaining all the VSI and vSAN solutions as well as all the features and management components.

We're looking for another solution like Nutanix to use concurrently with vSAN. Nutanix is more efficient but also more expensive. Nutanix is a little more stable, efficient, and simple to manage. However, I expect VMware and EMC will improve soon. I think in the next year, VMware's solution will become more stable and easier to manage.

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 use it for our DMZ and any test environments that we put into our industry.

It's performing pretty well. We have no issues with vSAN at all.

It has improved our organization in a way of scaling it. 

• Cost was big for us.
• Speed
• Scalability

We can scale it very easily for a test environment. We were able to segment our DMZ so it wasn't connected to anything, which we really liked.

One thing in vSAN that I would like to improve is using vSAN as a repository for files or other things. For example, with Horizon, maybe we can save profiles with UEM on there. That would be a good feature that I would like.

The stability has been great with vSAN. We have not yet seen downtime.

We scale it with our test environment. We are looking to do it with Horizon. We are able to scale it to see how many VMs that we can host and how long it will take us to add new hosts, if needed.

Technical support has been very good. They respond pretty fast, especially if we have a critical issue. Their responses have been great.

vSAN is one of the easiest implementations of any VMware product. It's almost like click it to enable it, then you're almost done. So, vSAN is very easy to set up.

We did consider other hyperconverged solutions. It usually came down to price. vSan was the most cost effective thing. That's why we went with it. Also, we didn't have to get a connected array. We can put it in small places, remote sites, etc.

Nutanix, Cisco HyperFlex Edge, and VxRail were on our shortlist.

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. To make it a ten, it needs to be able to scale the amount of data that we can hold so we can put bigger, more data-intensive apps on it.

My advice to a person looking at vSAN is get your hands dirty in the labs. Show how easy it is to set up, because it's not very complicated. It's an easy solution that you can implement at your company.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Since we're a hospital, we have multiple hospitals in the area. We look at local site resiliency, so we're looking to see if we can put it in each of our hospitals.

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.

Our primary use case is production data and the performance has been great.

• Cost
• Being hyperconverged, it simplifies what equipment we have to buy

I'd like to see better integration with the Update Manager, in terms of firmware updates for hardware.

It has been pretty stable for us.

It's very scalable. I like that. Adding a node is easy. Adding a disk group is easy.

Tech support has been very knowledgeable for the issues that we've had. They have been able to troubleshoot or determine exactly what is going on and then resolve it in a timely manner.

We were end-of-life on our previous storage and looking at replacements. It made sense to look at something that was going to integrate both the servers and the storage.

The most important criteria, for me, when selecting a vendor are

• reputation
• ease of use
• value.

We went with vSAN because of cost and ultimate value. Ease of use and the cost, compared to some of the alternatives, were pretty compelling. I also liked that we could choose whatever hardware we wanted, rather than having to use one particular vendor.

The setup had some complexity, and some of that was figuring out newer releases. Networking, originally, was kind of a pain, with having to have everything talk Multicast. They've gone to Unicast which simplifies things.

It has simplified things for us. It was one purchase for servers and storage so that made it easier on us. It's been a good product, it's something that we'll continue to use.

For our shortlist, we looked at SimpliVity, some Dell EMC solutions, and Nutanix. 

Make sure you do a proof of concept. And look at your options for hardware if you're looking at vSAN, compared to some competitors where you have just one option.

I would rate the solution at eight out of ten. To get to a ten they would have to drop the cost. That would get a point right there. Then, going forward, I'd like to see better integration with Update Manager. Some of the manual processes that you still have to do, being able to automate those, have it do them on its own, would be great.

I use VMware vSAN for storage management, particularly for managing our data center and virtual machines (VMs). It significantly reduces downtime, especially during maintenance, allowing seamless machine movement.

The platform's most valuable features are centralized management capability and vMotion. These features provide a central management point and allow seamless VM movement during maintenance.

We have encountered some challenges related to administrative tasks and licensing issues for the product. 

I suggest improvements in processing speed, user-friendliness, and resource utilization for the next release. Additionally, making the system more user-friendly and easier to manage would be beneficial.

I have been working with VMware vSAN for approximately four years.

I rate the product stability a six and a half. We encountered issues related to hardware and vulnerability patches. 

The product is highly scalable and significantly supports our organization's needs. Our company has approximately seven to eight users who manage and work with VMware vSAN. We plan to increase the usage in the future.

I rate the scalability an eight out of ten.

The technical support team takes time to respond to queries. 

Neutral

We have had experience with Hyper-V. We decided to switch to VMware vSAN due to its advantages in management, scalability, and overall performance compared to other solutions like Hyper-V.

I rate the initial setup process an eight out of ten, as it is relatively straightforward. The deployment typically takes up to 30 minutes.

The solution is relatively expensive compared to similar products.

The product has simplified our storage management by reducing downtime during maintenance and allowing for seamless VM migration without disrupting ongoing work.

It was most beneficial during our migration phase when we transitioned from a third-party storage solution to VMware vSAN. The seamless process helped resolve the challenges we faced with the previous solution.

Integrating VMware vSAN into our existing vSphere environment has been smooth. It works seamlessly with our existing hardware platforms, such as those from HP and IBM, thereby increasing operational efficiency and reducing hardware costs.

I recommend it to others and rate it an eight.