VMware vSAN Reviews

Name: VMware vSAN
Brand: VMware
Rating: 4 (52 reviews)

Vendor: VMware

4.1 out of 5

52 reviews

7,402 followers

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VMware vSAN is a software-defined storage product that is used in collaboration with VMware ESXi hypervisor and that provisions and manages storage based on policies, regardless of the underlying hardware. The solution enables you to prime your business for growth through its seamless evolution (it is integrated with vSphere and requires no new tools), its flexibility, and its multi-cloud capabilities. As an industry-leading software, VMware vSAN provides high levels of performance with minimal impact on CPU and memory.

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Featured reviews

Yves Sandfort

CEO & Majority Shareholder at Comdivision Consulting GmbH

Jan 20, 2023

Stability can be improved. Adding all these new features is nice, but we are now at the level where most of the features you need in production are there. The stability is not from a day-to-day operations perspective, but more from a supportability perspective, because currently some of the support scenarios require you to completely evacuate hosts or the complete cluster. That sometimes can be a stretch. This would clearly be an improvement if the support teams were given additional tools to make that easier. Upgradability could be a bit easier sometimes. We are now where vSAN can be updated without ESXi, but there is still enough dependency. So that would be good if that actually would be uncoupled even more. Dashboards are there, and we use vROps as well. So, we have all the beauty of capacity planning and everything over there. That's not really something where we need a lot of other things.

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Naveen Malkani

Solution Architect, Consultant and Corporate Trainer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Feb 23, 2022

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.

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Conrad Cruz

Account Executiveager at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Nov 9, 2021

I would like to see better integration between the cloud and our VMware virtual environment. We only have one virtual environment, which is VMware vSAN. Right now, there is little interoperability with the cloud solution at the moment. We are currently researching to figure out if we can achieve that. It's possible that we'll need to acquire new infrastructure for the new data center. And for that, we need to consult some architects, whether it's a VMware architect or some AWS and Azure architects. And we could come up with a workable blueprint that to use as a guideline so we can manage our infrastructure.

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Pricing

"The first 1-2 years of purchasing vSAN will be expensive. Thereafter, the longer you are running it, the more cost savings you will have."
"Its reasonable, compare with other storage vendors"
"Basically, vSAN is a license in addition to that of the classic VMware Vsphere, which is also mandatory."

Valuable Features

"I like the scalability and the fact that it reduces your total cost for storage over several years."
"IOPS is comparatively best to run VDI solution."
"Storage policies are used to perform operations in the VMs. This feature allows you to create storage policies for VMs to get performance, high availability, I/O policies, etc."

Room For Improvement

"The only thing I can think of at this time is to improve the performance monitoring and performance visibility within the GUI."
"he list of hardware supported should be increased in the future."
"I lose a node in a cluster vSAN, which is also used as a cluster HA. I lose not only the storage part, which is not necessarily serious (depending on the configuration of the vSAN cluster), but on the other hand, I lose also a node of Compute, which can make things complicated quickly."

Pricing

"The first 1-2 years of purchasing vSAN will be expensive. Thereafter, the longer you are running it, the more cost savings you will have."
"Its reasonable, compare with other storage vendors"
"Basically, vSAN is a license in addition to that of the classic VMware Vsphere, which is also mandatory."

Valuable Features

"I like the scalability and the fact that it reduces your total cost for storage over several years."
"IOPS is comparatively best to run VDI solution."
"Storage policies are used to perform operations in the VMs. This feature allows you to create storage policies for VMs to get performance, high availability, I/O policies, etc."

Room For Improvement

"The only thing I can think of at this time is to improve the performance monitoring and performance visibility within the GUI."
"he list of hardware supported should be increased in the future."
"I lose a node in a cluster vSAN, which is also used as a cluster HA. I lose not only the storage part, which is not necessarily serious (depending on the configuration of the vSAN cluster), but on the other hand, I lose also a node of Compute, which can make things complicated quickly."

These insights are based on the in-depth reviews provided by peers to help you make a better buying decision.

Download our VMware vSAN Buyer's Guide for additional reliable information.

Learn more about VMware vSAN

VMware vSAN Features

VMware vSAN has many valuable key features. Some of the most useful ones include:

Storage policy-based management (SPBM): VMware vSAN supports storage policy-based management for automated management of storage profiles.

Software-defined data-at-rest encryption: With this VMware vSAN feature, you can prevent unauthorized access of data at rest.

Multiple nodes: VMware vSAN provides clusters that can include as few as 2 nodes or as many as 64 nodes.

High security and availability: VMware vSAN offers stretched clusters, allowing more than one virtualization host server to be used in the same setup, promoting higher security as well as availability.

Deduplication: VMware vSAN’s deduplication compresses data to ensure efficient storage management and security.

HCI mesh updates: VMware vSAN clusters can share storage capacity with non-HCI Sphere clusters and can adopt HCI without having to scale computing resources and storage or replace existing servers.

Simplified file services: With VMware vSAN’s file services, backup of file shares is simplified. You can use APIs that allow backup and recovery software vendors to integrate with your VMware vSAN file services, which enables backup software to track new data and add scalability enhancements to files.

VMware vSAN Benefits

There are many benefits to implementing VMware vSAN. Some of the biggest advantages the solution offers include:

Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO): VMware vSAN helps you reduce upfront costs for businesses because it can be easily deployed on inexpensive x86 servers. In addition, its highly scalable infrastructure and quick deployment also save organizations time and money, making it an efficient storage solution.

Good manageability: VMWare vSAN is easy to set up, manage, and provision, without sacrificing performance.

Scalability: VMware vSAN is agile and allows administrators to scale storage on demand, quickly, and efficiently via policies and rules.

Simplicity: VMWare vSAN is simple to configure since it is embedded in the vSphere hypervisor. Installing it using the vSphere Web Client can be done quickly.

Reduced risk: VMWare vSAN reduces the risk associated with digital transformations by utilizing existing tools, skill sets, and solutions.

Reviews from Real Users

Below are some reviews and helpful feedback written by PeerSpot users currently using the VMware vSAN solution.

PeerSpot user Yves S., CEO, Cloud Evangelist at Comdivision Consulting GmbH, says, “vSAN gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources. We have an overall larger host infrastructure, and we split that up for specific customer test and use cases. In that specific scenario, we can easily add more hosts or reduce the number of hosts in the environment.”

A reviewer who works in Infrastructure Security explains, “The ease of use is great. The initial setup and upgrade process was pretty straightforward. And, technical support is great.”

Laurent N., Director at Softlogic, comments, "The feature that I have found most valuable is that it is easy to deploy. It is easy to create and delete virtual servers. It is easy to create the load balancing and the clustering."

VMware vSAN was previously known as vSAN.

VMware vSAN is the #3 ranked solution in HCI Software. PeerSpot users give VMware vSAN an average rating of 8.2 out of 10. VMware vSAN is most commonly compared to VxRail: VMware vSAN vs VxRail. VMware vSAN is popular among the midsize enterprise segment, accounting for 51% of users researching this solution on PeerSpot. The top industry researching this solution are professionals from a educational organization, accounting for 44% of all views.