VMware vSAN Reviews

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 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.

The primary use case is that we're getting ready to deploy a VDI solution across the campus and our healthcare network.

The opportunity gained with the relationship we have now is limitless, as new features and products roll out, especially with today's announcements: the news about microsegmentation, the RDS in the cloud with AWS, as well as some security features. It's a constant evolution for us. That's really why we're with vSAN.

The most valuable feature for us, long-term, is the integration with VMware that we're going to be using. We're currently using AirWatch, we're working in Workspace ONE. We want to make sure that our VDIs, with the integration of the Windows 10 solution - as well as any-device, anywhere, anytime mobility - work, yet still offer them the ability to gain access to that VDI. That is huge for us.

If you want to get down to the nuts and bolts of room for improvement, we would really like them to look at what Nutanix did for day-one/day-two operations deployment: Bringing in the equipment, getting it deployed, getting it setup, and ease of use of one-click for deploying our 30-node solution. With vSAN we had to go into each one individually and set it up.

The stability is there.

It absolutely scales, that's the beauty of it.

We actually involved VMware from the beginning. We brought in Nutanix, Simplivity, and vSAN technicians, as well as integration with our hardware platforms. But the true key was bringing those guys in, helping us set up the best environment, and seeing exactly what our endpoint was going to look like with our business integration. That was better than, "Yay, we can deploy 40 VDIs in 10 seconds." What does that do for the environment we're currently existing in? So for them to help us set up as a true test in our actual environment, that was a huge help, from all three that we tested. It was really impressive.

I am the manager of the guys who will be implementing the product. We recently received our client from Dell and we have installed it. My two main CI guys are here with me at VMWorld 2018 this week, so we're on a temporary hiatus, but we did get one full rack installed so far, and we're getting ready to deploy the vSAN to it.

The solution is only as good as the technicians you have and the investment put into proof of concept testing. My two technicians are some of the smartest people. You always hire someone smarter than you and I definitely did with these two guys. They've already got it worked out. We had the tasks laid out, what we were going to do day-one, day-two, rolling it into a test environment, and then production. We already had that done before we had the equipment on site.

We're just wrapping up year-two of our five-year ROI plan and this VDI solution, with vSAN, is part of it.

We purchased a VMware Enterprise agreement so vSAN was already included with what we had. It was just a smart choice, given where we were heading eventually, to go with vSAN. That was one of the deciding factors.

We just wrapped up proofs of concept for both hardware and software. We did vSAN, we did Nutanix, and we did Simplivity. We looked at HPE hardware and we looked at Dell EMC hardware, among others.

We actually decided to go with Dell with a vSAN solution, even though Nutanix had better day-one/day-two operations, straight out of the box for us. Long-term, we felt that the vSAN solution itself was going to serve us in terms of to utilizing and leveraging the power of VMware, either going to a private and hybrid-cloud solution or public and hybrid cloud solution.

As far as the hardware goes, we didn't really have that much of a preference among the three, but we did see that Dell EMC's OpenManage solution for managing the hardware, the bare metal itself, was much more productive than the other two.

You'd want to give it a 10 out of 10 based on what they're doing in the future, but if you always give a company a 10 they'll feel like they're already there. I would actually rate vSAN one below Nutanix, as far as maturity of the model goes.

I would give vSAN a very solid eight. There is room for improvement to catch up to Nutanix. Nutanix is definitely a nine. Again I don't like giving anybody a 10 because we always want to see what the next evolution or innovation is that they're bringing to the table. The way vSAN would get to a 10 depends on how they get me to "tomorrow".

We use it to provide and sell infrastructure as a service.

The performance for us is very good. Our infrastructure now is only solid-state disks, with two different levels. There is one for write-intensive and one for read-intensive. Our decision was to change traditional storage to vSAN.

One of the valuable features for us is the ability to restrict the performance capacity per client. Other solutions don't have this feature.

I would like to be able to limit IOPS.

When we began with this product, we made some mistakes. But through collaboration with the vendor we were able to find a solution to the problems and, today, it is a stable solution.

We have about 2,000 machines under this solution with about 100 hosts. It can scale beyond what our needs are. We have no problems with scalability.

We have used technical support a lot for this product and for other VMware products. For vSAN, in the beginning, we used tech support intensively. The support is very good for us because we get technical support in Spanish, in Panama.

We are using the different levels of support for different kinds of problems. We are online with them and the response time is very good.

We previously used traditional storage solutions such as HPE, Dell Compellent, Hitachi, and others. We did not use a software storage solution before vSAN.

It depends on the project, but vSAN, in particular, is an easy setup.

Our model is different. Our interest is in how we provide a solution for our clients. vSAN results in indirect benefits for our clients because it helps us reduce costs. But the client does not necessarily know that vSAN is the product behind the solution.

When we began the program with vSAN, it was more expensive than it is now. The price is improving over time. In addition, it includes more features in the same bundle. That is really good for us.

We compared it with Nutanix but Nutanix was so expensive for us because our infrastructure is not as high-end as in America. In Chile, it's lower-end. Also, because we are a service provider, the price of vSAN is not expensive for us. Other products, like Nutanix, don't have a program for service providers and the price is prohibitive for us.

For me, vSAN is a nine out of 10. I don't know what could make it a 10 because I have not really compared it with other products in the last three years. Maybe today there are other products that are better. When we started using it three years ago, vSAN was, perhaps, a seven out of 10 but they have improved the features.

For us, vSAN is a really good option for our EDGE network sites. We're able to use it in a high-available environment that enables our end-users to get to the data they need. We're heavily leveraging it for our VDI deployments.

It has helped us reach a much higher satisfaction rate in our VDI deployments. With the VDI, we didn't really focus on an ROI, although we did see some ROI benefits.

The ability to have a disaster recovery option for our end-users by being able to use VDI and the vSANs, and the ability to do replication across multiple data centers, are valuable to us.

One thing I would have said I'm looking for is vSAN in the cloud but, obviously, they announced that here today at VMworld 2018. That is something that I'm looking forward to.

vSAN has come a long way. It's a highly stable product and something that everyone should look at. Even in a large data center, now, vSAN makes sense.

For me, it scales really well. We have multiple product vendors. We're able to leverage all of them using the vSAN capabilities of all of those vendors.

I was not involved in the initial setup but I have taken it over since then and I have implemented some of the newer features that vSAN has come out with; capabilities that we weren't using when I came in.

We leveraged a partner who helped to make it an easy implementation.

My advice is to look beyond what your initial scope is. If you're looking at using it just for VDI implementations, look at more than just that and how you can leverage it for a lot of different datasets in your data center.

When I look to work with a vendor it's important to find one that is agnostic to either software or hardware and a solution that fits our specific environment.

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.

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.

We use it for storage and redundancy.

It has changed the way we design our infrastructure. We're looking at a new infrastructure.

Also, it allows us to put our infrastructure in remote locations and still get the same performance we get from our onsite SAN solutions.

I like the availability aspects of it.

The stability has been very good. I don't think we've had any real issues from what we have been setting up so far.

It's very scalable. That is a really good feature of the product.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

I rate it at 10 out of 10 because it is just a really good product. I've used other products like it and it seems to be the most stable and easiest to configure.