VMware vSAN Reviews

The most valuable features are scalability and speed.

The ability to throw in extra disks on the fly and extend storage with no limits is very useful. I already had to do this twice.

I think performance of my vSAN is better than that of a SAN, even though I am only working with 10 VMs per site. I don’t know how many performance hits we would get if I had more VMs.

Typically when you get a SAN, there’s a size limit or cap, adding more storage means buying an extra shelf.

In our environment we use Dell 530’s (8 bays), the original setup was only 4TB of usable storage from a pair, but later just added 2 extra disks per esx to make a 12TB volume, I still have 4 open bays and could easily add 8TB drives there if I needed to and on-the-fly.

In terms of performance, it beats going through the wire, since the disks are on the bus and with caching, iops are a plenty.

Furthermore, we have a power limitation at our communities, and adding one more box (SAN) would require an extra 8amps of juice.

No single point of failure, although SANs are very reliable these days, there’s connections and switches to content, with vSAN you can now connect 2 ESX servers directly not needing a 10GB switch

Refresh cycles: my storage follows my ESX servers, so no more extra new hardware to purchase.

vSAN Robo’s are inexpensive to own and maintain, the enterprise version is a tad more.

I am able to utilize ESX HW at my robo sites without needing to add a SAN or NAS.

I would like to see the following:

• Fixing the resync function. This needs to be addressed ASAP.
• A better UI showing actual space used and disk space available. The current output is very deceiving. It shows a total that should actually be divided in half, minus the headroom.

When disks are getting full or near 70%, there’s a potential for receiving out-of-sync nodes. One node may have more content than the other, and the re-sync button starts a process that never ends. This is a known issue.

When looking at space details, the available free space depicts the sum of the two nodes. In reality, that should only show half and even more. I would like to see a gauge that marks a safe zone, or under 70%.

The reality is that once you go over 70%, the sync issue comes into play, performance hits are unavoidable, and the rebuild could take a long time.

We have used this solution for over a year.

When dealing with seasoned vSAN experts, the experience was outstanding. Getting them to respond quickly is always an issue. I sometimes had to go ahead and perform a rebuild, as it was quicker than waiting for a callback.

The installation was easy.

I deployed it myself with trial and error support from VMware.

The ROI is negative, the capex is OK, but the opex is outrageous. They need to drop the opex to 20%.

See if you can really afford it and make sure you have the expertise on hand to deal with initial deployment issues.

I found that buying a new SAN by Tegile is less expensive, less complex, and very inexpensive to maintain. In addition, support is the best in the business.

The main thing is the comprehensive data center management type of features. The overall management dashboard, capability to have multiple clusters, link clones, distributed computing, where you have vCenters in different geographies. Site Recovery Manager for failover, VSAN for storage, and again the EVO:RAIL mechanism combining with the type of VSAN architecture that is out there, and previously, the automation capabilities of vCloud Automation Center. Previously, I had experience with vCloud Director, but obviously everything's being transported onto vCloud Automation Center now.

The biggest benefit is cost, so for someone looking to deploy low cost storage, but something that integrates with their virtualization architecture. It's a very good fit for smaller companies who have multiple nodes, and can leverage commodity hardware to go with that. VSAN, by its architecture itself, has inbuilt features for reliability, for load balancing. You could enable VCRE cache, along with VSAN, so it works and integrates with a lot of other VMware technologies.

I would love to see VSAN transform into an EVO:RAIL-type of technology, but EVO:RAIL has a separate use-case. I think it's not meant for all companies either. VSAN does serve that purpose, and kind of addresses the primary need there. At the same time, EVO:RAIL is limited to certain hardware manufacturers and some providers who are kind of combining everything into one package and selling it off. Whereas, customers like to use commodity hardware, like to use regular software, and do things their own way. So, if VSAN continues to offer that flexibility, which it does today, I think there's great significance for it. If it integrates with replication and SRM, that takes it in a really good fashion, right to the area where it can be heavily adopted.

I have experience, personally, as a VMUG leader and as a vExpert in the areas of vSphere 6, SRM, I've tested VSAN in my home lab. I have worked with replication technologies. Done a little bit of vCloud Automation Center as well, and vCloud director.

I personally consider VSAN to be a very stable product. Obviously you have to have a minimum of four nodes, to say that, the minimum spec is for three nodes, but if you have 4 nodes or higher for VSAN, it is a very stable product.

It's all about adding nodes, and the number of drives to it. VSAN is very scalable. I was able to, just for a lab purpose, scale it up to 10 terabytes, and I started off at four, so it tells you that it was easier to scale from 4 to 10 terabytes, and the same mechanisms I've read online reviews and some white papers around it, it goes up to quite a few hundred terabytes.

Very straightforward, you need to obviously follow the configuration guide, read advance, just so that you understand the components around VSAN. Then it was just a matter of enabling VSAN, provisioning all the data storage that it needs. You obviously need to have a Solid State Drive to go with it, so many people don't realize that, but you should have one. That is to allow the performance that is required from commodity hardware to be scaled up.

For our VMUG group, I was trying to set up a lab, and I tried to go with the VSAN for storage purposes. It's a very rock solid product, very robust. Compared to the previous iterations it is very flexible and very strong now. It was a breeze to set up, it didn't take time. The reliability of VSAN is really good, I was able to set it up at four nodes and I purposely took out one node just to see what happens, and it just kept working fine.

Looking at VSAN or a different solution, it depends on the use-case really. Someone looking for Oracle database set up on ASN, is not going to first think of VSAN, but, if you design VSAN the right way, it can host Oracle databases. It's just a matter of how much compute you throw at it, how much storage power you throw at it, and how you design the pool. If you have done things the right way and you have sufficient cache, and you have sufficient Solid State, I think it can be a really good use-case for many different organizations.

It offers a lot of scalability to customers. People looking to scale up in terms of nodes when they need it, it's a perfect fit for it.

The ability to scale out incrementally instead of doing a big five year capital expense purchase that hurts the budget.

In the storage world, when it's time to buy an array, you buy half that are to be populated, and you buy more disk shelves, but it's not cost effective. Or, you buy it all and don’t use some. But with VSAN, you buy x86 servers as needed and you're done, and you can scale up.

The cost. We had a directive from the CIO to check out and play with VSAN and then to do storage cheaper and better than before, which we have achieved.

The management platforms have some gaps. It's difficult to see what’s going on with the hardware at times. The only platform available doesn’t run full time, and there is a management pack but it requires a product that not many people have (vRealize Operations). So it could use more work in management areas.

Also, it lacks deduplication, so we're using a lot more storage than you necessarily need to.

Prior to deployment, make sure you check your hardware compatibility prior, along with the drivers and firmware, because any one of those three things can cause an outage.

It's very stable, but we ran into some early issues with drivers and firmware, but this is resolved now. You must be careful to be coverd in that respect, otherwise you will have issues.

We’re scaling in a very phased process, running dev test environment with just a small three node cluster, but gradually shifting.

I've never had to use it.

It was pretty straightforward, but we had some issues with drivers, although nothing in the setup. After some time, we were losing some disks that was because of driver issues.

The feature we have found most valuable is the compatibility of VMware products with VCF and VMware Cloud Foundation.

We often run out of space but we have enough capacity for memory and CPU. It's difficult to find the balance between storage and memory CPU.

Overall, this is a simple solution but could be improved due to the issue with vSAN ReadyNodes. There are many compatibility requirements for storage using this solution that are difficult to meet.

We have used this solution for two years. 

The enterprise customer service and support are very good and feedback is fast. 

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward but we have experienced some setbacks with deployments. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We are using VMware vSAN for the transformation from the physical server to the virtual environment.

By using VMware vSAN we have limited the need to maintain multiple physical servers. Additionally, we have been able to reduce the entire cost of the IT operation and management because of the reduction of physical servers. There are fewer electricity and cooling systems needed.

The most valuable feature for our customers is vMotion. It allows them to shut down virtual machines and migrate them to others servers.

I have been using VMware vSAN for approximately six years.

The stability of the solution is very good. From customer feedback, VMware is much more stable compared to Hyper-V.

The scalability of VMware vSAN is good.

We currently have approximately 80 customers using this solution.

We plan to increase usage. Our sales team prefers this solution over other solutions.

We use online documentation and videos for support, such as YouTube. If there is a problem we cannot solve then we email the support of VMware.

We deploy many other solutions for our customers, such as Hyper-V, which some of them prefer.

The initial setup is quite simple according to our customer feedback. The time it takes for the deployment depends on many factors, such as use case and environment size.

We have a six-person technical team for maintenance.

We have received a return on investment. Our customers are happy, we do not need to employ a technician after deployment which is good. There is a decent return on investment but it also depends on the customers' use case.

The cost of the solution is high and if it could be reduced the customers would be very happy.

We have used VMware for different kinds of customers. Our target customers are SMB or SME, they normally choose VMware and their first package. We do have customers who use our own data center services, in this case, we use the VMware manage service license.

We typically propose VMware to our customers. We advise the customer to switch to virtualization. The main point is the customer would like to recover their data. If they'll use the physical server they cannot meet the requirement of fast recovery of the data. That's why we ask customers to do the server control check into the virtualization. You can save a lot of time managing the physical server and have a lower cost for the backup option. You can have a better recovery solution is the main point our customer use VMware.

I rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten.

We primarily use VMware vSAN for ERP, for the assisting environment. The main environment in my company does not depend on VMware—for the production environment and operations, we work with Nutanix. 

This solution is deployed on-premises. 

One of the most valuable features of this solution is that it is stable. 

This solution could be improved by having more than one controller for the environment. VMware depends on one controller for the whole environment, whereas Nutanix has one controller for each node. Because there is only one controller with VMware, if there was any drop, then the whole environment would stop working. In Nutanix, I have five nodes—there is one controller for each node and it depends on a virtual controller—so if the controller of any node is down, the whole environment will still work. 

I have been using VMware vSAN for three years. 

This solution is very, very stable. 

This solution is scalable. 

In our organization, there are around 1,000 users of VMware, including some servers and the self-service website. We have plans to increase our usage. 

VMware's support could be faster. We don't currently have a contract with technical support because we didn't make a new one for the support license. 

I previously used Hyper-V from Microsoft, but there were many issues and lots of troubleshooting. 

The installation is easy. My team worked on the installation and, for our company, we only need one engineer for deployment and maintenance. 

We implemented this solution through an in-house team. 

I have two environments: Nutanix AHV and VMware. We use the Nutanix environment more than the VMware environment. 

I rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten. For virtualization, I would recommend Nutanix over VMware. 

We are a university and we initially designed our data center such that it would be centralized, between branch offices and headquarters. There is a small data center in each branch but we're not interested in having local storage in every one of the branches.

Our plan is to purchase three physical hosts and deploy them with VMware, using vSAN to create virtual storage using each physical host's internal storage. 

The backup features and monitoring features are good.

We would like to see additional backup and recovery options added. In particular, integration with popular applications like databases.

We evaluated and deployed VMware vSAN but have not yet deployed it for production. We will be doing so within the next six months.

This is a stable product. We have been testing it extensively.

Scalability is based on your hardware. We can scale the hardware and then it only requires extending the license.

At this point, we have not had a very heavy workload. We plan to increase our usage once it goes into production.

There is approximately 50 IT staff that have access to it. Our users will include between 30,000 and 35,000 students, and approximately 3,000 staff made up of instructors and doctors. 

The technical support is good. The Ministry of Education has established contracts with all of our vendors including VMware, Microsoft, Oracle, and others. They provide us with 24/7 premium support.

We expect to rely on support for our migration to production. As part of our implementation, we have to redesign the centralized servers for a distributed environment. This includes Active Directory, Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager, and others. We don't have experience in this area. We can handle the daily operations but we lack design experience.

We implemented a PoC for Nutanix but did not test it in a production environment. I have done a little bit of work with Hyper-V but otherwise, I have only worked on traditional architectures.

There is not a lot of maintenance required.

We pay a yearly licensing fee. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees because they are standardized and negotiated by the Ministry of Education.

We provided the sizing and after that, the Ministry arranged for the correct licensing.

We evaluated Nutanix and other hyper-converged solutions, but we choose VMware vSAN.

This is a product that I recommend. My advice for anybody who is implementing it is to use a hybrid or private cloud. It's scalable, robust, and secure. Do not go back to the old technologies. Instead, focus on security and a good design. Having a good design will save in terms of cost.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We have a backup server using this technology. We move data in real-time. 

The solution is very stable.

The scalability has been quite good.

The initial setup is pretty quick and easy.

We would like to see even more storage capacity. 

Technical support could be more knowledgeable.

I've been using the solution for two to three years. It's been a while. 

The stability is good. The solution doesn't have bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's very reliable and the performance has been great.

The solution is scalable. We have already upgraded to extend it. We do plan to extend it again and we are going to expand.

We've dealt with technical support previously. It would be helpful if they were more knowledgeable. We had a bottleneck with the technical support team. We required a part and we just couldn't get it and it was delayed. It caused an issue around storage for us.

We did previously use internal storage solutions.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's so simple you don't need any technical assistance or anything like that.

The deployment is pretty fast and only takes one to three hours or so. It's not a long process at all. 

We do have an integrator that can assist with the implementation. 

We do have to pay a yearly licensing fee. It's a subscription for the hardware.

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten. We are very satisfied with its capabilities.

I would recommend the solution to others.