VMware vSAN Reviews

We plan to switch products since the hardware nowadays is a little bit outdated and we need to scale up a bit. We are looking for better performance and storage. This is why we are examining other solutions, including VxRail. 

We have been using VMware vSAN for at least 10 years.

The solution is quite stable. We have encountered some minor issues but, overall, are quite satisfied.

While the solution is scalable, I feel that this can be better. 

Although we have not made much use of the technical support, we found them to be good and helpful in finding solutions. 

The solutions we previously used were dissimilar to the current one. We had VMware for an extremely long time, at least 15 or 16 years. First, there was VMware servers, followed by us building and setting up VMware custom within a couple of servers.

I feel the pricing to be reasonable. We pay monthly. 

We have 50 users making use of the solution in our organization.

I rate VMware vSAN as an eight out of ten. 

We are a solution provider and VMware vSAN is one of the software-defined storage products that we propose to our customers. Most of the use cases that we see from our customers are where they need to utilize their own hardware. When the environment grows then they buy additional storage.

This product has very good performance when it comes to virtualization storage and works well with solutions such as SAP HANA, Exadata, Hadoop, and Big Data Analytics.

The most valuable feature is the integration with vSphere.

The deduplication and compression work well. 

One of the benefits of using this solution is that when you need additional storage, you just add it.

More focus has to be put on deduplication and compression with a hybrid architecture. The reason is that some customers need to have a more cost-effective solution so they don't want to implement all-flash. As such, they need to use a hybrid environment.

I have been working with VMware vSAN for more than ten years, from when vSAN first began.

This is a very reliable product.

It is easy to deploy additional machines when you need them for your workload.

vSAN can be expanded up to 96 hosts.

The support is very good and they respond quickly.

The initial setup is very straightforward. The length of time required for deployment depends on the number of nodes that it will be installed in. The typical setup takes from one week to two weeks.

The pricing vSAN is very expensive. Enterprise customers can customize their licenses according to their own needs and budget.

There is a cloud offering of this solution but our customers always choose the on-premises version. Most of our customers do not use vSAN as a standalone solution but rather, as part of a hyper-converged infrastructure. We normally propose its use with a product like VxRail and my advice is not to implement it standalone.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use our vSan primarily for our VCF deployment. We run our production workloads on it, mostly for Microsoft SQL databases and various WebSphere and web-based front-end applications.

It performs pretty well for the most part. The older versions had some issues, specifically regarding upgrade paths and the robustness of the product, but in the last two or three versions they've really addressed those issues and brought it up to speed and made it a real enterprise solution.

• Encryption
• Deduplication
• Compression
• The ability to manage all of your storage within your server rack

I would like to see more comprehensive lifecycle management. The current path and process for upgrading or updating the firmware, as well as the storage controller software to interact with that firmware, is fairly manual and not very well documented. A little more time and effort spent on the documentation of the lifecycle management for vSan would be really great.

Currently, it's very stable. Previous versions, which are still active and out there online: upgrade to the new version.

Scalability is slightly limited in that you're pinned by the physical disks in your hosts, but provided that your solution doesn't require you to have specific disk technology, you can get the size you need and expand it out as much as you need to.

I give technical support an A-plus, from my experience. It was perfect, it was awesome. They helped us recover from a very major outage and we would have been down for much longer had they not been involved.

We were on old hardware and we needed to move to a new solution.

It completely removes the need for a storage network and for a storage administrator and all of that infrastructure and the costs that are involved with them. That, right there, is a huge return.

It's great for DevTest and, as long as you're not going to be consuming data at huge rates, it's great for Prod too.

I would rate vSAN as six-and-a-half or seven out of ten, but only because of the major problems we experienced with them a few months ago that led to some big outages. From what I understand, the current version alleviates those issues. If we're evaluating the current version, I would give it an eight.

It would be a ten if there were more robust lifecycle management and a better-documented implementation within vSphere.

We had several servers we used in our VMware cluster, as well as a storage device. The implementation of vSAN reduced the rack space, since we no longer required several slots in the cabinet to rack a storage device. vSAN also made it very easy for us to scale out. Power consumption was also reduced within our datacentre.

I like the scalability and the fact that it reduces your total cost for storage over several years.

The only thing I can think of at this time is to improve the performance monitoring and performance visibility within the GUI. They have already made several improvements in vSAN 6.2, but there's always room for improvement when it comes to monitoring performance.

We had no stability issues.

We had no scalability issues.

VMware technical support provides a great service.

We switched to move towards a software-defined datacentre.

It is very easy to configure and setup. vSAN is already part of vSphere ESXi. You simple need to apply a license and do minor configuration to get it to work.

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.

We looked into several other products, such as Pure Storage and Dell solutions.

Keep it simple, and don’t try and over-complicate things. Make sure to follow VMware best practices when it comes to implementing your vSAN solution. Read those whitepapers and make sure you understand how you want to implement it in your environment.

The reduction in cost of storage: In my most recent deployment, we reduced cost from around $20,000 per TB (CapEx) to less than $1,000 per TB (CapEx). This is not taking into account deduplication/compression or the ability to add disks and scale vertically, not incurring licensing costs, which would drive the cost down further.

Traditional SANs require large up-front costs, and with "forklift" upgrades, you end up spending a very large amount of money initially and then expect to recoup the costs over the lifetime of the array. This is not how vSAN – or any other HCI (hyperconverged infrastructure) product – works. The idea is to have a small initial investment and, with horizontal/vertical scaling, you can grow into the needs of your environment. This can be accomplished several ways, by either adding more disks to each host (vertical scaling) or by adding more nodes to the cluster (horizontal scaling). This allows for much greater flexibility with your storage. Before HCI, you were required to guess how much storage you were going to need, and were stuck with what you guessed at.

Upgrades are also much simpler. Because the system is software-defined, you simply upgrade the software rather than the entire hardware stack. If you want to upgrade the hardware, you would then simply add nodes in, and remove older nodes. It is also possible to create a new cluster and do a swing migration; however, this is similar to older-style upgrades. The point is that there are a lot of options available with HCI systems.

Management of the environments is overall simpler, allowing for during-hours patching with no downtime and little risk; also allowing us to stay more current with patching, reducing the overall risk of the environments.

The worst part of vSAN, as with most VMware products, is that you need to use the vSphere Web Client to interact with it. The vSphere Web Client is slow and clunky, making interacting with the system difficult and often times painful. I have been told that the new version of the web client will be significantly better, but do not have personal experience with it. Other than being difficult to work with, it can cause outage scenarios to take significantly longer to troubleshoot because you waste a lot of time waiting for the client to load information, or just load in general. It is a huge drawback for an otherwise very good product.

I have used it in various deployment scenarios since 2015, or about 1.5 years.

I have observed no stability issues when the product is deployed as instructed. It can and will have stability issues if you do not follow the hardware compatibility list (HCL) or the vSAN Deployment and Sizing Guide.

The product scales easily, up easier than down, due to the need to remove the disks and migrate the data from the nodes you wish to remove from the cluster.

Actual support engineers are excellent; however, opening cases is often difficult/frustrating.

In my current project, the customer previously used EMC VMAX arrays. As detailed elsewhere, the CapEx savings were incredible.

During my current project, initial setup was very complex, though this was by our own choosing and was needlessly complex. In the past, setups were often very straightforward, though you need to verify your design properly, as mentioned.

VMware licensing is per socket for VSAN, like everything else. The platform is very flexible, so be sure to look at all your options.

I was not part of the evaluation process but cost was a major factor, as well as high availability.

Discuss the deployment with VMware sales; I've met several of them and they are generally smart people looking to help get you the best deployment possible.

Performance is the most valuable feature because you are moving the storage closer to the CPU. It’s also cheap. We also evaluated an all-flash array, but even a low-end flash is much more expensive. This is much cheaper.

Concrete benefits would be manageability; we don’t have a storage guy because there is less stuff to deal with.

The savings is not the issue but I can scale my system – I’m building the node for 200 users, but all I will have to do is order another host and it will be configured exactly the same, and they are over-provisioned in terms of memory.

I have been using VMWare since it was a beta test.

I don’t know, but my gut feeling is that it distributes across the hosts, which should be very stable, and it’s all done at the hypervisor level. I don’t think we’ll have any issues.

I think it’s scalable in a linear fashion. We’ve outgrown our low-end SAN and hit a wall. We didn’t have a storage guy so we hit a wall when we hit 180 users and it was thrashing the SAN. With VSAN, that kind of issue – especially using the sizing tool – says that you should be more than fine. We're a small shop so we don’t have any doubt that it will scale to size.

They are the best in class – I hold everyone else to their standard. They solve the problem and work the problem. I’m kind of spoiled because I also get federal support so I get especially good service. I have always found their support to be stellar.

I had an issue a few years ago where my hosts were dropping and I couldn’t connect to them, so for three days I worked with VMWare. I went through four shifts of support staff, and they stayed with me. It was a 72 hour outage and I got back around to my original guy, and he figured it out. They are amazing. They don’t point a finger – with IBM they would hand it off from one guy to another and will never ever tell you that.

We replaced our infrastructure and did a proper POC. It’s cheap enough that we can still use the hosts and hook a SAN in, and everyone will get an SSD at their desks, so most of the cost is infrastructure. I loved it when I heard about it – virtualized storage and a distributed RAID. Makes total sense.

Their licensing gets a bit confusing, it’s hard to get the hang of that.

From what I saw, you can create the SAN in a small environment, and then grow. That’s a valuable feature of VSAN and makes it cost effective.

It's cost effective because you can start small and grow as needed.

From my experience testing it, VSAN could be more stable.

We tested it for about three months.

I was not sure about its stability because we have a big SAN shop and I got the impression that it’s good for small offices and not the larger ones.

The scalability seems ok – I would give it 6/10 because in a traditional SAN you can go up to a few terabytes. However with VSAN, it seems you can only get a couple hundred terabytes, and I expected more.

We haven’t had a chance to use it for VSAN, but in general we've had pretty good support from VMware, so I think VSAN tech support will also be good.

We haven’t fully implemented, but it should be simple and straightforward.

We will implement it by ourselves without a vendor team.

We looked into Dell and Nutanix, and chose VSAN because of ease of setup.

Customer support, the actual technology, how robust or stable it is and the ease of deployment are the criteria too look for when selecting a vendor.

I would say that if you’re a medium IT organization and looking for a cost effective solution, VSAN is worthwhile; but, if you’re a bigger environment, I would go with a bigger SAN like EMC, NetApp, and IBM.

Previously, we couldn’t consolidate more workloads on different types of storage. Now with VSAN, we have the ability to virtualize across multiple data centers.

It's currently doing everything we've ask of it and it meets all our needs right now. To be honest, I don’t think too much about the future of the product or what we might need it to do as our requirements change.

It's got good stability - 10/10.

It's got good scalability - 10/10.

N/A

They are good – the response time is quick. You pay for it, but they are good.

No previous solution was used.

It was simple and straightforward.

We've implemented it both on our own and with a vendor team, and it's straightforward with both.

No other options were looked, but peer reviews are important. My peer reviews are usually on social media channels, but it's important.

Product knowledge is the most important criteria we look for when selecting a vendor.

Try it and evaluate it – it's not a fit for every company, but you should at least do an evaluation to see if it is a fit.