VMware vSAN Reviews

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.

Our primary use case is server workload and mission critical work.

It has improved our organization in all situations.

All the features are working great.

Only the stretched cluster requires a minor improvement.  

We have a traditional, multi-host cluster with SAN and a small (three host) vSAN cluster alongside it. I built the vSAN cluster mostly to experiment with the platform. 

As a VAR, it has been about gaining expertise in the platform. Additionally, it has allowed us to benchmark against traditional systems. We are now in a good position to help our clients decide when and where to deploy this solution.

The ability to have an HA cluster in the absence of a shared storage device or SAN. Not having to retain SAN expertise and the cost of a storage area network (SAN) warranty are big pluses, too.

Perhaps a bundle, like Essentials, would allow more businesses to make the leap to the product.

I would like to see this technology be made available to smaller businesses, who might benefit from high availability but struggle with the entry fee.

Coming from the early networking days when storage was software-defined, and seeing the announcement of this product caught my interest. The platform has been improved much over the first version. Today, we are comfortable running any of our mission critical apps on it.

We use vSAN as our server virtualization solution for Dell install of our customer base, and vSAN is our primary solution.

vSAN can help customers save on storage system costs, and also save on the human cost. For an SI (like us), vSAN can save tech service time and easily deploy for maintenance.

VMware vSphere with vSAN HCI system: It is easy to train customers to operate the system even if they have or do not have a VMware operator KB. Most customers can save tech service time via vSAN. vSAN is easy for deploying and maintenance, so some customers can do service themselves.

Simple manager with only one datastore. vSAN has just one datastore. so customers do not need to think where to put their VMs, how to design the physical disk RAID, the LUN size, the LUN mapping, etc. when they use NetApp/EMC/HDS or other storage systems.

• Online dedupe
• VM disk size limitations

vSAN does not have online dedup. When opening the inline dedupe, the performance will be lower than off inline.

Virtual machines disk size cannot cap more than a single node. For a VDI user, it may not save enough to hold a file server or exchange server on a single node storage space.

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.

For a new full site, vSAN was used instead of going with the usual fibre SAN. Since vSAN requires SSDs, it was a great way to introduce that tech to the company. If we would have gone with a traditional SAN SSD, it would have been an option, so a debatable feature.

We gained fantastic performance with the benefit of simplifying the whole hardware stack requiring less sum of knowledge to run and maintain.

The simplicity of everything, even though it was a new technology at the time with some quirks. The lower skill cost of maintaining it meant that we could do more with the people that we had.

When it was implemented, we were one of the first to jump into using vSAN for production use. The main problem we had was hardware compatibility, finding the right hardware that was certified. This caused further problems because the hardware reseller had little knowledge of the requirements and we even had issues with firmware from the hardware vendor. This delayed the implementation time by a few months. This should not be a issue today, but still be cautious when choosing the hardware.

Standard fibre SAN infrastructure. We switched due to fibre switches, fibre cards, and fibre SAN.

The setup was very easy if you have the correct hardware and firmware.

Factor in operational costs.

Compared it to a similar sized fibre SAN.

• 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 solution is easy to deploy and manage. It offers stable performance.

Deduplication and compression usage data display is not real-time and is not that accurate.

We have used this solution for more than three months.

There were no issues with stability.

There were no issues with scalability.

Technical support is not very good.

We did not use a different solution before this one.

The initial setup was easy, if you’ve got such experience. It is a little tricky the first time.

We did not evaluate other options.