Dell vSAN Ready Nodes Reviews

I am dedicated to Cisco and work with multiple products as a consultant from one of the managed service providers.

Mostly it is compute, so I take care of this part only.

The performance issues concern site and IOPS requirements, in the case of PCI cards to the VMs. Sometimes expected IOPS are not there, and storage IOPS are not present. It is not very frequent, but sometimes we encounter disk failure issues with the Dell vSAN Ready Nodes, and it generally takes some time to change the disks.

My job is to be a solution architect, proposing and building items. It is more about designing solutions and implementation, not too much in daily operations and troubleshooting.

I deal with multiple environments. Sometimes we see 20 plus nodes around 32 or even more. Sometimes it is a small cluster, two node cluster, or three node cluster. I would say all kinds of environments based on customer needs.

Regarding existing environments and third-party solutions for backup and monitoring, primarily we do the installation of the VMware platform, VMware vSphere ESXi. VMware has one of the largest ecosystems with on-premises or private cloud providers. Integration perspectives require some API-based work.

It is a starting story for AI, but we are taking some use cases leveraging the Dell vSAN Ready Nodes along with GPU cards from NVIDIA. We are exploring other providers such as AMD, and Intel is also doing enhancements based on AI. We are recommending customers leverage nodes which have AI-supported applications using Dell vSAN Ready Nodes that support AI-based workload primarily. The VMware container technology integration allows VMware customers to enable AI-based applications, but that is with the latest generation only, not with older ones.

First is the administration which makes it easy compared to using third-party storage. Second is the storage policies, with different flavors available all within a single management console when we want to configure different sets of policies as per workload requirements. I would say in-house management, administration, and storage policies are the three key differentiators compared to normal non-Dell vSAN Ready Nodes where we are leveraging external storage.

The primary use case of vSAN ReadyNodes is for block storage and general-purpose compute hosting in a virtualized environment. It is beneficial for companies that want to run a private cloud.

vSAN ReadyNodes provide easy scalability and allow for single-team management. They eliminate the need for a separate storage team to manage storage arrays and fiber channel switches.

The main use case for Dell vSAN Ready Nodes involves general-purpose virtual machines, typically around 10 to 20 virtual machines. Most setups consist of three to four nodes, with our least number being three, and the maximum is four since we never go beyond that. We offer Dell vSAN Ready Nodes because they are VMware certified, which is the preferred hypervisor for our customers.

Initially, with version seven, everything was functioning properly, but as we started using it, it wouldn't work with the later versions since no more patches or support were available. We can still find updates for drivers, but they're running out of support.

There's potential for improvement in the hardware, while the system itself is adequate. The challenge lies with support and renewals, since prices have escalated significantly for customers.

Dell's technical support is generally very good. Whether we have pro support plus or just the basic level, they are helpful and reliable as long as we provide the necessary details.

We use Dell vSAN Ready Nodes for our insurance systems and employee systems, to host everything in one environment.

Using Dell vSAN Ready Nodes has consolidated our storage, which lifts most of the heavy work.

I use the solution to handle corporate use cases since some web-based applications run on it.

If I consider the overall product, I would say that it is an excellent solution that offers very good performance and stability.

Our customers use it to create the cluster. We use it for VMware; it's certified.

Price is a major factor.

The tool's most valuable feature is high availability. 

Dell vSAN Ready Nodes' deployment is complex. 

My customers use the product for server virtualization and as a virtual desktop. 

You don't have to spend much time evaluating the hardware. It can be deployed in a short time. The tool is also easy to upgrade.