VMware vSAN Reviews

We use VMware vSAN in a private cloud. We deploy company (customers') applications using the application servers in VMware. We have about 10,000+ users using it.

[We deployed it for our customer]

Being able to deploy multiple applications with virtual servers is the most valuable for us. 

I think it needs to be more cost-effective if customers already have existing SAN to compare with.

We have used VMware vSAN for four years. We are using version 6.5 of vSAN.

We have not had much of a problem so I would say it is very stable.

Good.

We have good support and meet SLA.

We switched from traditional deployment to HCI in order to scale and ease management to cope with a large number of applications

The initial setup was easy and straightforward. We had no issues. It took us about a month for installation and configuration.

N/A

Customer also considered Nutanix.

VMware vSAN may not be the right solution for everyone or for every solution. There might be more solutions that you want to consider depending on your issues of application deployment at hand.  So you have to look at your own factors and compare solutions thoroughly before you make a big decision. I would rate VMware vSAN at an eight on a scale of ten.

We have around 70 to 100 VMs, and we use VMware vSAN to store our data. We have a lot of daily data.

It is easy to work with, easy to handle, and easy to manage.

Its price could be improved. It is too expensive for our clients.

I have been using this solution for around a year.

It is quite stable. 

We didn't increase our storage.

Their technical support is really helpful. They are very efficient. I didn't have any problem.

Its initial setup is not difficult.

It is too expensive.

It is a good solution to implement if you have a lot of data. It is quite stable and not too difficult to manage.  

I would rate VMware vSAN a seven out of ten. It is a good solution, but it is too expensive.

We are a non-profit and we are working on a project utilizing the solution for infrastructure.

The solutions best feature is that it is easy to use. The integration between different operating system is easy. It is reliable. 

I have been using the solution for more than fifteen years.

The solution is totally stable.

The customer service is good but there is a cost for it. It does not come free.

It is an expensive solution. There should be more flexible with licensing to allow small businesses the essentials of the solution's features. They should have a reduced license fee for a certain amount of memory and nodes, or some kind of restriction like this, that would allow smaller businesses a reduced price. We have had a hard time to afford the solution.

There are a lot of other companies that offer similar solutions and they are becoming more and more competitive with VMware at a fraction of the price. For example, Red Hat. 

The solution is very good but the price is its downside, this is the reason for my low rating. 

I rate VMware vSAN a seven out of ten.

We use this as storage solution for specific VMware services and for backup solution.

The most valuable feature is stability.

Disaster recovery needs to be improved, when there is a crisis, there is a problem with what is the quickest way to get out of it. This should be done automatically, not manually.

If we have a power failure then you have to find your way manually. There 's no way to automatically fix it. So there should be an automatic way to repair such crises from disaster recovery.

In the next release, I would like to see more clarity on where the files are. the details of the files, for example, where the owners of the files are, and more audits.

We have beeing using VSAN for the last three years. 

It is more stable now than it was before. It's not like it was in the first year.

Now it is stable, and we trust it more.

We don't want to enlarge the environment. If we have a new need, we will separate and start a new system.

We don't want to have a general-purpose infrastructure. It's not a good idea for our purposes.

We value less scalability more accurate assessment as it is not the way in our environment. We don't want to add more nodes to the same cluster, it's not a good idea. We separate it.

We get immediate response from the vendor on phone. For tasks onsite its not sufficient.

of course its a matter of service level, no complaints.

No, software solutions from VMware based on VMware platforms no migrations.

The integrator "vendor team" had good experience at the last project. level of expertise was very good.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use this solution exclusively for our VDI.

We are running vSAN on six Cisco C240 M4 servers.

The newer versions of this solution are much more stable and easier to manage.

We had a near meltdown with 5.5, upgrading firmware and vSphere versions is a hassle.

The most valuable feature of this solution is that it is cheap storage.

This solution would benefit from better collaboration with Cisco for driver updates.

The support from VMware is phenomenal.

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.

We use it for our developer clusters.

It's a little too early to tell what the benefits are. We've only implemented it over the past three to six months.

• The ease of implementation
• The ease of expandability

Perhaps they could provide encryption without having to use an encryption manager.

No issues so far. It's been pretty stable.

The scalability has been pretty good for us so far.

We are primarily NetApp. The decision to invest in a new solution was a C-level-down recommendation.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

Go for it. As long as you don't have a very high IOPS-oriented application, it's a great way to go.

I rate it eight out of 10. While it's a little too early to tell, it doesn't seem like it gives the performance that an actual SAN would give for heavy IOPS, read/writes.

Our primary use of vSAN is to set up a deployment of a small subset of clusters that we have out in our gas and oil prepossessing plants, in remote areas.

Performance-wise, it has gone above and beyond what we originally spec'ed it for. From that respect, for us, it's like the "golden gun".

It gave us the ability to get the storage-processing and CPU power that we needed in remote areas. It's something like "the big bullet in a small gun", where it actually works and does what it needs to do. It's very useful for what we need it to do.

The most valuable feature is that we're not spending any additional money on an external storage solution for it. It gives us the all-in-one, Swiss Army knife kind of solution.

The usability is pretty good but it could use a little tweaking on the UI, with a clearer definition of exactly what some of the things do. For example, sometimes when sticking hosts into maintenance mode, you have to re-read the definition a couple of times. I have to say to myself, "Okay. I actually want to evacuate the data off of this host. Or no, I actually don't. I want to keep it there but I still put the host into maintenance mode." So a little bit more clear and concise definition of what some of the options do would help.

The first impressions of its stability were really good. After using it a little bit more and going through some issues with it, it still shows that it's a very robust tool. From that point of view, I'm going to keep on using it.

Scalability is very easy. We've already run into one scenario where we've needed some more storage. We were able to provision the drives, slide them into our current hosts in that cluster, and expand it. It was very easy.

I have used technical support and it leaves a little bit to be desired. I've gone through a few people to get to the person who actually has all the knowledge, who can actually solve the problem.

There was a lot of Hyper-V deployed out in this environment, and things of that nature. Hardware was coming to a service-contract end, so the next step for us was to get rid of a lot of one-on-one virtualization that was happening with the Hyper-V environment and start consolidating and bringing it down into something that was a little bit more manageable.

If you're coming from a small enough environment, where you have to provision out a stand-alone datastore for this, and you don't have the resources to do it, I would definitely say go look at vSAN for that, because you can definitely combine your compute and resources into one environment.