VMware vSAN Reviews

This is a fantastic product, it is easy to deploy and to manage, and it suits our requirements. 

It is quite an expensive solution for us and I would like to see some improvements on the backup side of the solution. 

I've been using this solution for three years. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

The price is quite expensive for us. 

We use it for commoditization and cost-effectiveness. We use it only to be able to spin up instances for monitoring and to do some application testing for other contracts. We are using the latest version.

It uncoupled the idea of proprietary technology and component capabilities. It is basically a proprietary technology for a cost-effective infrastructure. 

They can package it in a way that is specific to the hardware infrastructure and the hardware platform. It should stay fairly up to date with the drivers and the manufacturer issues.

The problem with uncoupling the proprietary technology and component capabilities is that by uncoupling them, you run into some concerns or challenges over the poor performance model. These concerns really come when you start talking about high performance, high bandwidth, and high availability types of environments. While vSAN is a leader, in a critical view, it is not about being cost-effective. It is more about the immediate impact of money loss to the business in critical applications where we want to maintain a continuous operational 59 model. It is, however, good for QA/QC tasks. I don't necessarily know how it works in regards to VDI or virtual desktop infrastructure.

I have been using VMware vSAN for one and a half years.

It is fairly good.

I wouldn't really be able to comment on that because we don't really have enough of an environment to understand what the cost of scale would look like. Our customers are small to medium enterprises.

They are pretty good. I would rate them a seven out of ten. 

We didn't use any solution previously. We just had monolithic storage. We just wanted to test this solution out.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward. You just need to do a level of due diligence before you do the installation. You can run into issues depending upon the compatibility with drivers.

It is fairly cost-effective for entry to mid-level performance based on the underlying hardware components.

I would advise doing your homework and making sure that it scales according to your expectations, performance, and ownership cost.

DataCore is a company that competes against them. DataCore is more focused, whereas VMware is wide. DataCore is a little bit better in terms of due diligence and information. vSAN is one of the many products based on the VMware industry, whereas DataCore is very focused and very niche. They've been doing virtualization since 1986.

I would rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten.

We don't have any specific use cases, however, we do have a variety of workloads running on vSAN.

It's a massive shift now to have it in the portfolio and to have a complete software-defined data center.

The policies the solution has been very good. We use them a lot.

The deduplication and compression are excellent. 

There are a couple of features which we are using right now that we really like.

It's the kind of solution that is very easy to use, which may be its most valuable aspect for our organization.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The solution overall is very easy to manage and configure.

There's a lot that can be done to segregate. That may be available now in vSAN 7, I suppose, however, the deduplication and compression can be segregated. 

Increasing the classifiers to maybe more than 64 could be done in future releases.

The file service is something that can be integrated.

Something more could be done to integrate from a monitoring perspective right in the console itself so that we have deeper monitoring capabilities.

I've been using the solution for about three years, however, I suspect it's been even longer than that.

We haven't had any issues I can recall in terms of stability. It's pretty reliable. It doesn't crash or freeze. There aren't bugs or glitches.

In our organization's case, we started with a number of nodes and I scaled it up from there. I didn't find any issues expanding the product. Scalability was not a problem.

This is a pretty recent deployment. While I've been working with the solution for three or four years, it's new to the company for the most part.

We plan to increase usage in the coming year. New workloads will get deployed and we'll begin to expand it more.

The technical support has been very good. They're quite knowledgable and responsive. We're satisfied with the level of support we get.

My organization didn't previously use a different hyper-converged solution. This product is their first in this particular area.

There's no complexity in the original setup of the solution. The implementation is very straightforward.

Deployment was pretty quick. Just testing it out and finally rolling it out we managed to do in a couple of days. I would say within a week we were able to be up and running. 

My company was involved directly with a reseller. The other nitty-gritty elements were something that I took care of it.

I was not directly involved from a pricing perspective. I suppose it was competitive and that's why the company went ahead and with vSAN, therefore I assume the pricing is okay.

We did look at other options. We ended up choosing vSAN mostly due to the price. However, we also liked how easy it was to set up, configure, and manage compared to other options.

We're a partner with VMware.

Overall, I would rate them eight out of ten. They still have room for improvement. However, overall, we've been pleased with the results. It's easy to use, manage, and monitor.

The solution is best suited for small to medium-sized organizations.

If the solution is ideal for a company depends on the workloads and what they're trying to do right now. If a company would like to make a choice between the All-Flash or the Hybrid, I would definitely go for All-Flash. It may be a bit expensive as compared to Hybrid, however, definitely from a feature perspective and a performance perspective, All-Flash is the way to go.

Our primary use case for vSAN has been our branch locations and multiple different office locations. We are running vSAN as an alternative to external storage arrays, and it's working really well to provide us with data storage at these branch sites.

The most valuable features of vSAN are its simplicity to deploy and that we can use commodity disks in our servers without complexity or need for external storage arrays or storage specialists on our teams. It's part of our vSphere admin's duties as opposed to storage experts.

The features of vSAN allow us to reduce our operational complexity to a large degree. It's a single pane of glass for the administrator, and we're able to somewhat reduce costs, other than the fact that vSAN is somewhat expensive to license.

I see room for improvement for vSAN just around general hardware compatibility and expanding that sort of matrix. It's pretty wide already, but everything else within vSAN seems to work really well. It is very well-integrated. 

I don't see a lot to complain about at this point.

Stability with vSAN has been really good. We've had very few issues. When we have had maintenance issues, the vSAN has come back and healed them automatically for us. I don't think that we've had to actually engage support a single time in the six months that we've been running vSAN in our corporate office.

I can't really speak to scalability. We have a fairly limited deployment at this point with three nodes, so it's a bare minimum sort of configuration.

We have not had to engage technical support for vSAN. At this point, we've been able to solve all the problems or basically work through the GUI intuitively to be able to resolve anything that has happened.

The decision to switch away from standard array to vSAN was a fairly simple one for us. We had been decreasing the amount of operations that we do inside of our branch sites. For the sites which remain, vSAN is a good fit versus the legacy Dell EMC VNX arrays that we had been deploying. 

We are finding that vSAN is a lot more scalable and adaptable, because we can go in with hybrid arrays for our lower-end storage needs or with all-flash versions of vSAN for places where we need more performance, and it's coming in at a lower cost point than an actual traditional array.

The initial setup for vSAN was extremely simple. There are some concepts that you need to understand before you go in, install, and click the buttons, but once you have your drives configured and inside of the individual nodes, the configuration takes just a few minutes. Everything gets done and orchestrated for you directly from the vSphere or vCenter consoles.

If I had to rate vSAN, I would give it a nine out of ten.

When we're choosing a vendor, we're looking at the ability for the vendor to be in business:

• The viability of the vendor
• Its reputation in the marketplace
• The technical solution.

These have a lot to do with our decision to work with a particular vendor. We typically seek out the best-of-breed solutions and try to adhere to those. At the same time, we try to work with the same vendors over and over, because we have existing relationships to leverage and existing expertise around the solutions that are adjacent to what we may be evaluating.

We use it as a primary storage for our Horizon View environment. 

The product is great. It runs well. 

It helped us survive power outages in one of our data centers, then continued to function without a hitch.

• Its redundancy
• Its uptime capabilities
• The performance is great.

I would like a better Hardware Certification List (HCL). The HCL should a little easier to deal with.

Making the hardware compatibility not as much of an issue would be a good thing. 

It scales well. We have plenty of room to grow. It should be a good long term solution for us.

Technical support has been fantastic. We always get answers quickly whenever we call.

We wanted to give more redundant access to the users' desktops than they previously had. Before, we were on a single SAN which was causing us issues if we had either an issue with the SAN or an issue with our environment when the SAN would go down. By using vSAN, it would allow us to spread our data across multiple data centers on our campus and be more fault tolerant.

It was really straightforward. 

We had some help from Venture Technologies, who helped us get it going. They didn't really have to do too much. We figured it out.

We have increased our user productivity. However, being in Higher Education, we don't really measure it.

Give it a look. It will save you time and money.

The most valuable vSAN features are:

• Ability to scale easy: Adding additional storage is so easy. You just populate an empty HDD slot on the host with a disk and vSAN will automatically add the additional storage to the storage pool. No specialized skills are required.
• Performance and cost/storage efficiency: With vSAN, you get SSD-like performance with a mix of spinning and solid-state disks at a fraction of the cost. We use a ratio of 30/70 SSDs to spinning disks, respectively, for a high-performance SAN that is within our budget.
• Resilience: We tried to break our vSAN PoC instance to test its robustness. We pulled out hard drives while they were being written to and we unplugged server nodes, and we never lost a VM.
• Ease of use: We set up vSAN with a few mouse clicks in vCenter. We couldn’t believe how simple it was to setup and configure.

We are able to deploy vSAN clusters to remote locations very easily at a fraction of the cost. This saves us time and money. We don’t have to worry about stability issues.

Support for iSCSI access would be great, but this may be supported in the latest versions of vSAN.

We have a few physical servers in our environment and it would be great, if these servers could also access the storage in vSAN. With vSAN iSCSI support, we would be able to connect our physical servers to vSAN as well.

We have been using this solution for two years.

In terms of stability, vSAN is very resilient, self-adapting, and self-healing. In the two years that I’ve worked with vSAN, I haven’t experienced any vSAN stability issues.

There haven't been any issues with scalability. Adding additional storage was as simple as inserting a hard drive into a hard drive bay or adding an additional server node to the data center cluster. That was all we had to do, and vSAN auto-configured everything.

We had a VMware vSAN engineer present to set up our very first vSAN cluster. There was nothing to it, but it was great to have an expert on-site for questions and to provide us with training. Other than that, we have never had to log a support request with VMware for vSAN.

We didn’t use a virtual SAN solution previously. We just used traditional, and very expensive, SAN storage arrays. We moved to vSAN because our budget wasn’t getting any bigger, but our storage requirements were increasing.

The setup was straightforward. It literally took a few mouse clicks to setup vSAN.

You get better value for your money with a vSAN solution than with a traditional SAN with lower TCO.

We looked briefly at alternatives, but nothing stood out like vSAN. Nutanix was another solution, but surprisingly, it would have costed us more.

Get a vSAN specialist to come out and spec your vSAN cluster according to your requirements. Have him configure it and test that it is performing properly.

• It's very simple to use.
• It work on commoditized hardware.
• It provides centralized storage.

It's lowered our storage costs while still maintaining High Availability and with easy installation.

Expand the hardware compatibility list – it's pretty short. Definitely also the diagnostic and monitoring could be improved. That stuff is still very new.

We have been using it since it came out in March 2015.

So far so good.

Unsure – all I know is what I read, if it does what it says it does I'm very impressed.

Very good – quality support.

We have three hosts in a cluster, and it was surprisingly easy.

Try it out – that’s the best way to know whether it's right for your organization.

• Integration with VMware vSphere
• It’s simple to manage
• It’s a relatively inexpensive for a SAN solution
• Good performance based on testing

We just started implementation, so it's hard to give our perspective as we're still doing our evaluation. We purchased the product, and we have ten-fold service on it.

If it works out well, storage is our most important element of our infrastructure. We're looking for a stable and high performing solution and think this is it.

I'd like to see support for iSCI. Right now it’s all internal protocols, and they promise it in the next version. They need to support more types of hardware – the list is too narrow.

It's stable, but it's really picky on the hardware. We knew that going in, but the scale was a surprise, not truly as agnostic as we thought it would be. They have a list, and if you deviate a bit, then it won’t support the environment. We had an issue where we deviated slightly, so we probably will have to follow their hardware compatibility list.

Very scalable, it's one of the reasons we bought it. They are in v2.0, and we feel like now it’s mature.

Support is generally good, but a little slow sometimes. You need to stick to their compatibility list if you want their full support.

We were using EMC and we knew we needed something new. Cost is important to look at, because we're nonprofit, as well as the integration with the other VMware products, and the stability of the product too.

Setup is very straightforward.

It’s a good solution – the trend is going towards converged infrastructure. It's all policy based – you can set general policy and then trust VSAN to do everything else.