VMware vSAN Reviews

The valuable feature of the solution is the total hyperconverged facility. And that either it's hyperconverged, or it's standalone with storage arrays.

From the implementer side, the solution is very comparable to Nutanix. The only difference is that VMware requires more initial nodes.

I've been working with VMware for fifteen years.

Regarding the scalability of the solution, you've got 64 nodes into a stretched cluster for VMware. Nutanix goes a little bit above. The only problem is that due to licensing things, such as when you have Oracle and other things, what you tend to do is multiple clusters in order to avoid licensing costs.

The biggest network I have implemented was 16 nodes.

My advice to others looking into implementing VMware vSAN is to stick to the rules. That's where the problem is. If you don't stick to the rules and prerequisites, you end up having a nightmare.

People have a tendency to take hyper-converged solutions for granted. They function as the marketing says, as long as you follow certain rules. If those rules are not followed, you end up with a slower infrastructure than you ever had before.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten because it lacks flexibility. Those rules I'm talking to you about, how you have to follow the prerequisites, that is well hidden, is that you can't do what you want. You don't have total freedom. You have to respect the rules and that's why respecting the rules sometimes is a burden.

They always recommend that nodes are the same type, have the same disk structure, and if you change some disk structures, you have to change them on all the nodes. Although somewhere it's understandable, it's a burden. It should not happen.

We use it for all our virtual desktop storage.

It's definitely cheaper to buy it piece by piece, instead of an entire shelf at a time.

• It's easy to scale.
• It's easy to predict IOPS needs.
• You can design for low latency using all-flash.
• The whole hyperconverged notion is pretty neat.

Also, for setting up new clusters for VDI quickly, it's nice. You don't have to wait on an order for a storage vendor to ship you a system and help you configure it, you do it all yourself. It's kind of convenient that way. And the sizing guides are pretty straightforward.

I would like to see better performance graphs, maybe something that you can export outside to a different console, and maybe a little bit longer time period. The 18-hour maximum, or 24-hour maximum, is kind of short.

Also, the hardware compatibility limitations are a little frustrating sometimes, but as everybody's starting to adopt vSAN more, you get more options for hardware.

It's stable. We haven't had any major issues.

Scalability is easy. You just buy a node and go.

The vSAN technical support guys are great.

We chose it because of cost considerations. We already had an enterprise agreement with VMware, so vSAN licensing was included.

There was a small learning curve, but it's pretty straightforward once you understand the basics of how everything works.

We did evaluate other vendors initially but this was our second hyperconverged solution. We went with it because of the cost.

Do your homework. Make sure you know what kind of IOPS and latency requirements you need to meet. Picking hardware is not hard anymore. Everybody has an HCL. vSAN has a great list. Just pick what you want and go, it's not that hard.

I rate it at eight out of 10 because nothing is perfect. I'm hard to please. I'm not saying there are growing pains, but vSAN was still new at the time. They didn't have dedupe and compression yet. The performance was pretty good. Most of it was hybrid in the beginning, but now with all-flash, it's speedy, when it needs to be. It's a young product and nobody gets a 10 out of the gate.

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.

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.

We are thinking of using vSAN instead of the traditional SAN. We are just starting to explore how vSAN can benefit us.

This is not yet deployed, we are just starting to explore how vSAN can benefit us. it seems very expensive to obtain a vSAN license.

Based on my findings, it seems easier to deploy than the traditional SAN. I was told vSAN can be deployed in a few minutes.

Dedupe in non flash drives can be improved. The raw capacity for PFTT two is only able to use 67% of the raw capacity.

Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) implementation on vSAN with an environment of about 2000 desktops and 1000 servers.

Teams required to manage the storage for the entire VDI infrastructure were not required after implementing the vSAN solution. Any seasoned VMware engineer can easily manage the whole vSAN without any issues. 

It is simple to manage, very easy to implement and troubleshoot in case of any failures.

• Hot add
• Upgrades
• Ease of management

Any VMware engineer can easily manage vSAN, troubleshoot issues, and perform an upgrade on the vSAN without any downtime. Since the storage space is local to the hosts, it reduces the overall response time and improves the performance.

Some storage tiering options can be included, like other mature storage systems. Some intelligence can be added to the newest version to provide more flexibility between storage tiers, like Nutanix, to make this product a true software defined storage product.

• vSAN ROBO with two physical nodes

I'm working as a consultant, so I can’t directly say how it helped my customer. But I know that my customer started to equip some branches with our building block and it replaces NetApp filers. We are using a building block of two vSAN nodes and the wireness appliances in the main datacenter. With the next release of our building block, based on vSphere 6.5 and vSAN 6.5, we are switching to direct cabling, so no 10GbE switch is needed for vSAN traffic.

I’m often asked for a vSAN stretched cluster in combination with erasure coding. Currently with vSAN 6.5, you can use one of them but not both at the same time. It is kind of a German behaviour to have two datacenters with active/active architecture and syncronized mirror. But for this type of customer, it’s pretty important to get a vSAN stretched cluster with erasure coding.

I have been using it for three months now. I use VMware vSphere 6.0 Update 2 and vSAN 6.2 (hybrid).

We have not had stability issues. Even losing the witness appliances is no big deal. vSAN 6.2, as well as vSAN 6.5, seems to be a pretty stable and reliable platform.

We have not had scalability issues in both ways. Scaling down to two hosts with direct cabling is possible for ROBO, as well as big clusters with over 32 hosts.

I rate technical support 4.5/5.

My customer switched (or currently is switching) from NetApp filers to vSAN. The main reason is cost. You need the ESXi host hardware anyway, but you now save the costs of storage maintenance. The costs per vSAN license (and the maintenance) are usually lower than for NetApp in this case. Plus, you gain the benefit of only having one management console which is well known and built-in to the management tools used for the central datacenters.

The initial setup is straightforward, but only after deploying the vCenter service. Once the vCenter is up and running, it is pretty easy to enable vSAN. Despite the automatic selection of disks, we chose the manual selection and it was extremely easy to set up vSAN.

When you don’t have a chance to build upon an existing vCenter service, you have to think about the deployment of vCenter without having vSAN. There are several options, like deploying vCenter temporarily on a client PC and then migrating it later onto the vSAN cluster. But it’s always a bit tricky and you probably need some extra time to get the installation done. In most of my vSAN installations, the vCenter was already up and running, so the initial setup of the vSAN cluster literally takes minutes.

Licensing is pretty straightforward. Have a look at the features you need and choose the license that fits. For ROBO scenarios, there is a special ROBO license that could save you some money.

dvSwitch functionality is included in every vSAN license. You don’t have to have vSphere Enterprise Plus to use dvSwitches. You only need vSAN licenses. And despite that, vSAN comes with all flash functionality within every license.

My customer was focusing on continuing with NetApp filers and ESXi hosts or vSAN for ROBO.

Have a look at the simplicity of vSAN and how it easily integrates into the existing management tools. It’s not even the ease of implementation; it’s the ease of managing and maintaining the complete stack.

The vSAN technology is clearly the big game changer here. VMware's software-defined storage finally enables us to build a private cloud solution that scales much easier than we are used to.

We wanted to be able to grow much more dynamically than what we have been able to until now. Instead of big investments and complex storage installations, we now have an infrastructure where expansion is a lot easier because we can just buy four more new servers, plug them in and add them to the pool of resources.

We are moving faster every day and are developing new systems and services all the time. We expect the amount of projects this year to be 4-5 times as many as last year and we will be able to support that growth with this solution.

We did plan on using deduplication in our original specification, but during the planning of the configuration, we were advised against it by VMware.

It was a brand new feature, so it was, at the time, perhaps, too early to use it. I am expecting that we will use it in the future when it has matured.

I have used vSphere for seven months for the latest installation, but we have been running VMware for the last 10 years.

We haven't had stability issues that have affected our running servers. However, that is partly because we pay attention to new releases and what they contain, and we don't update just because a new version is available.

Some updates that we chose not to install had bugs that could have caused instability. Also, because we run such a wide range of products from VMware, one has to look at the support matrix before updating/upgrading software, as it may take some time before all products support each other.

We have had a few alarms and alerts in the system, but they have been resolved without any downtime.

Scalability is one of the major advantages of this new installation.

Technical support is no better or worse than what we have seen from other vendors. Usually it works well, but once in a while there are cases that seem to run in circles where you need to get in touch with your account manager and have them escalate the case to get progress.

We have used VMware for virtualization and NetApp for storage for about 10 years.

We stayed with VMware and decided to switch to vSAN because they have had a good track record here with stable products and we could save money (and grow more gradually) by running vSAN instead of a traditional storage system.

I would say initial setup is complex. But we decided to go with best practices and we had consultants from VMware designing and planning the configuration for us, so it wasn't an issue.

Make sure your designs are complete so you can buy all the licenses and products you need as one purchase to get the best deal.

We did not look into alternative solutions for the virtualization part. But for storage, we looked at other vendors. For example: NetApp, Tintri, and Nimble.

Start from scratch. Reject all your old dogmas about how things should be and what is right and embrace the functionality that is available.

We designed our system so we can use NSX and all the other features VMware has to offer, even though we didn't plan on using it in the beginning.

If you are putting constraints on your design because of ties to old legacy systems and designs, then you will never get the full benefits.