VMware vSAN Reviews

In a lot of cases, the primary use case for vSAN is in small to medium businesses, where they may not have the space or the funds for an actual storage array to provide a shared storage medium for their virtual environment. And even if they do, they may not have the expertise to maintain that and a separate network. vSAN gives them the ability to make use of storage they already own, across their host. As they add more, more storage, more compute, they'll add more memory. It makes their environment simpler to manage and keeps it moving smoothly for them.

The most valuable feature is the simplicity of its scalability: being able to grow it without having to make sure you get the right disks and the right nodes.

The solution is also easy to manage. It's all right there in the vSphere Client. You're not going through multiple things. You don't have to know, once you've created the vSAN node. You add storage, it sees it, and you create your data storage from there. Everything is right there for you.

What I would like to see,  for the really small customers, is the ability to have two nodes.

I find it to be incredibly stable.

I've seen it scale up to large databases. I've got some customers who utilize a small vSAN cluster for their Exchange environments because it keeps it encapsulated for them.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

I would definitely go with the vSAN solution. A lot of times, it's less expensive than third-party software, and it's not managed via third-party plugins. It's there, it's native to the ecosystem, and it works.

Our vSAN setup is used in our development system, not our production system, for ease of use and ease of access.

The benefit is easier deployment of storage. We don't have to order a storage system, we can just use whatever we have on hand and roll it into our virtualization system.

I would like to see a little bit more documentation on the initial setup, and a little bit more explanation on the expandability: How to extend out your vSAN much more simply through the console because, a lot of the time, you have to do it through the command line.

So far, the stability has been very good.

We haven't tested the scalability as much, but the small amount we have done has been very good.

We have not had to use technical support. 

We use in-place storage systems, but I wanted to be able to spin something up quickly, for the development side, for our clusters. Since it's not a permanent thing, it's much easier to go in and re-do it without having to re-blow-out a whole storage system. It works well.

When selecting a vendor, what's important for me are support and value. The support is especially important. When I have a problem I need solutions. And return on investment is very big for me. I want to make sure that when we buy something, it's going to return the investment very quickly.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. I had a couple of Knowledge Bases I followed, but it was straightforward, once I read all of them.

It has provided good value on the development side. Once I'm comfortable with it, we'll start looking at moving towards a production setup. But for now, just development.

I would definitely tell colleagues to move towards this solution. I've had a lot of people wanting to go to Hyper-V, not VMware. I have told them VMware is much more mature, it's got the feature list, it has a lot of good qualities.

We use if for our primary infrastructure. In terms of performance, vSAN is fine.

Being able to do maintenance on the fly is a real benefit: migrating off, updating, and then moving the guest back on to the nodes.

Software-defined storage.

Everything that has been mentioned as part of Update 1 solves part of the HCL list issue. They're handling the firmware version but, at the moment, they're only handling the storage IO. They're not handling the rest, which would be firmware, the BIOS, the fNIC, and so forth. After speaking with them, they said they're looking at that for a future update.

Because of the vendor, we are very neutral on the stability at this moment. The main issue is drivers. Every time we move to a new vSAN version, we're having problems finding the correct drivers for the vendor.

The scalability is fine. Adding new nodes is very simple.

Our experience with technical support has been excellent. Every single time we've had an issue so far, they've been able to find the issue with the vendor.

Because of the time that we've had to spend dealing with the vendor, we haven't seen a return on investment yet.

Go with the full managed support, something like VxRail or, if you go with Cisco, get their full central management system.

vSAN alone, with the current features and version we're at, rates an eight out of ten. The vendor would be a definite one out of ten.

To make the solution a ten, it needs to be vanilla. There shouldn't be any custom drivers, any custom anything. It should just be, "Hey, you know what? These drivers are going to work for this version, the next version, and the version after that." That's the difficulty in this. It takes too much upkeep.

The primary use case is bringing redundancy into our plants for failover. It has been performing great.

The most valuable feature is the flexibility, the ability to move the machines around without hesitation.

The UI could certainly be better. The inside into what's actually going on with vSAN would be nice to know.

There have been a few issues, but VWware support has been tremendous in resolving them, so it's been good.

Scalability is easy to do. It's just drop-and-add and you're good.

The process with technical support is pretty good. Escalation up to the top-tier engineers is really good. We have a direct path there. There are no problems with tech support.

We probably already reached our ROI aftertwo and a half years.

Make sure your storage network is strong. But I would recommend vSAN.

It's a pretty solid product now that's it's at 6.5 Update 2. I know that it's going to get better, but right now I'm pretty happy with where we're at. I would rate it at seven out of ten. Nothing's perfect. There's always room for improvement.

The primary use of the product is for storage for VDI plus some other storage for file servers and the like. The performance is great. We use it on all-flash.

Performance and the ability to use all-flash.

I would like to see it be more hardware-agnostic.

Other than that, the only other complication is - and it has gotten better with the newer versions - that lately, once you're running an all-flash, if you need to grow or scale down your infrastructure, it's a long process. You need to evacuate all the data and make sure you have enough space on the host, then add more hosts or take out hosts. That process is a little bit complex. You cannot scale as needed or shrink as needed. 

Right now, the stability is pretty good. It's getting a lot better.

It has its quirks but the scalability is good. Given that you have to have the hardware, the right driver, the right framework, and so on, it's not easy to put it together, it's not a plug-and-play solution. But once you get all of that done, it becomes a good product.

I have used the technical support, but most of the time it comes down to the manufacturer of the hardware; Cisco or whoever we're using for it. It's a compatibility type of thing. But tech support is okay.

Our previous solution was SAN-based. I wanted to bring in something new and not only stay with the market, where it's going with the trends, but also to bring in something that is stable enough for production.

Once we got all of the driver configurations done, etc., it was easy enough.

We have definitely seen value, especially in performance.

Give it a try.

Our primary use case is production data and the performance has been great.

• Cost
• Being hyperconverged, it simplifies what equipment we have to buy

I'd like to see better integration with the Update Manager, in terms of firmware updates for hardware.

It has been pretty stable for us.

It's very scalable. I like that. Adding a node is easy. Adding a disk group is easy.

Tech support has been very knowledgeable for the issues that we've had. They have been able to troubleshoot or determine exactly what is going on and then resolve it in a timely manner.

We were end-of-life on our previous storage and looking at replacements. It made sense to look at something that was going to integrate both the servers and the storage.

The most important criteria, for me, when selecting a vendor are

• reputation
• ease of use
• value.

We went with vSAN because of cost and ultimate value. Ease of use and the cost, compared to some of the alternatives, were pretty compelling. I also liked that we could choose whatever hardware we wanted, rather than having to use one particular vendor.

The setup had some complexity, and some of that was figuring out newer releases. Networking, originally, was kind of a pain, with having to have everything talk Multicast. They've gone to Unicast which simplifies things.

It has simplified things for us. It was one purchase for servers and storage so that made it easier on us. It's been a good product, it's something that we'll continue to use.

For our shortlist, we looked at SimpliVity, some Dell EMC solutions, and Nutanix. 

Make sure you do a proof of concept. And look at your options for hardware if you're looking at vSAN, compared to some competitors where you have just one option.

I would rate the solution at eight out of ten. To get to a ten they would have to drop the cost. That would get a point right there. Then, going forward, I'd like to see better integration with Update Manager. Some of the manual processes that you still have to do, being able to automate those, have it do them on its own, would be great.

Today, we use it for general compute and VDI. We have not put our VDI into production yet, but on the general compute side, it works great. The performance has been exemplary.

The most valuable features are ease of deployment and ease of management. If you compare it to other software-defined storage products, it's much easier. It's a checkbox. It's lot easier to manage.

The Snapshots feature looks pretty cool, so that will be nice to have. External storage would be a good thing to have in the next release, something other than iSCZI, something a little more, not HA, a little more production-oriented, than iSCZI.

So far we haven't had any issues at all. It has worked very well.

We're not that large at Boys Town. We probably only have 500 VMs. Realistically we have about 50 VSXi hosts. So for us, it's great because we can just buy servers and expand any cluster we need. We split clusters based on other needs, like licensing or something else. It's not like we get to 64 nodes. So we don't have any issues with scalability. It works great for us.

We were having some problems with another software-defined storage vendor so we switched to vSAN. We had problems with the previous vendor's support. While I have never talked to VMware vSAN support, I've talked to GSS, but I've never had issues with GSS, other than their not calling you back right away.

For me, the most important criteria when selecting a vendor are

• ease of use
• single pane of glass - that is huge for me
• enterprise class, obviously
• availability.

We've had no issues with the product. We put it in in two days. The initial deployment was straightforward, easy.

On our shortlist were Dell EMC Vx Rack FLEX, VxRail, and we looked at Nutanix a little bit. We chose vSAN because we had done PoCs in the past and, comparing it to every other software-defined storage product out there, its ease of use is unparalleled. It's very easy to set up and very easy to administer, comparatively.

I would ask a colleague who is looking at this type of solution, "Do you need storage for VMs?" Hands-down, if you need storage for VMs, vSAN is your option. If you need a SAN for some other reason, other than storage for VMs, then go for it. But if you're running VMware VMs, buy vSAN.

I like vSAN because they release features incrementally, every year, and you don't have to upgrade your hardware to get those features. If you bought a traditional SAN, you would have to upgrade your hardware constantly, every three years: You would get it, and it is how it is for three years. But on vSAN, you upgrade when you have to, when your hardware gets old or when you need more capacity. It's great, you get new features constantly.

I would rate vSAN at eight out of ten. It could get to a ten, once we have more time running it.

We use it for all of our Production and it has been very effective.

It's more scalable and faster than what we had, and it's easier to support.

• The non-complexity
• The cost

I would like to see some of the more traditional SAN functions that are out there now. I can list them: being able to Snapshot on the back-end, better de-dupe, and better compression. Those are the major ones.

We haven't had any issues with the stability.

The scalability is very good. You plug it in and it goes.

We have not had to use technical support for vSAN yet.

We knew we needed a new solution. The other one was too complex and too costly and was never really maintained properly. Too many teams had too many hands in it. With the new ACI solution with the Vx Rack, and SDDC, everything is a lot more easily managed.

The most important criterion when selecting a vendor is reputation.

The initial setup was straightforward.

It's a liitle hard to say what our ROI is because we bought it to replace an old, traditional setup. It was either pay for maintenance and the like, refresh it, or go to an ACI. We went to an ACI. I don't know what the cost to refresh the other environment was, so I don't know exact numbers for return on investment.

Our shortlist was really just EMC. That decision was made before I took over the project. We were always an EMC shop, so we moved away from Cisco and went to Dell EMC for it. I don't know why, exactly, but they said to me, "Here, make it work."

Be careful of your FTT policies.

I rate it a nine out of ten. It would be a ten if it had better deduping, compression, and the ability to Snapshot volumes on the back-end.