VMware vSAN Reviews

The most valuable features of VSAN are consistent and increased performance with a linear cost which helped us in our data center.

Using VSAN Observer, we were able to see exactly what the VSAN environment is doing on a day to day basis, so we've gotten to really enjoy that interface.

The benefits that we're seeing are directly related to our customers. They have better experiences using their EMR and practice management systems.

The manageability is better, it's definitely fully integrated into the VMware stack so it's very easy to use from the web client.

The features I am most looking forward to are the performance monitoring capabilities of VSAN Observer being transitioned into the web client. That's what I'm really looking forward to.

UPDATE: Capacity and performance monitoring is now available in the web client and works well in 6.2. I am looking forward to DARE(data at rest encryption) in the next version.

We have used vSAN for approximately a two years.

We had one issue with deployment, which was related to using the legacy vsphere client to place the hosts into maintenance mode. Which is easily resolved by using the web client for maintenance.

The stability exceeds what we're currently on from a standard SAN platform.

The scalability is much greater than the current SAN that we're on because we're technically locked in to a certain number of discs and a certain number of performance and so the scalability is drastically improved. We currently have a four node cluster and we're going to be just incrementally moving off of our legacy SAN.

UPDATE: We expanded our cluster to five vsan nodes however we are now in process of retrofitting four legacy hosts for a total of nine vsan nodes.

Technical support was very responsive, the technical support staff was. Specifically patching hosts, we inadvertently caused VSANdata evacuations during the middle of the day. Whereas, if you were to do a maintenance mode with non-evacuation, that wouldn't happen but they were able to get to the root cause and provide us an answer on why that happened.

We made the jump to VSAN primarily due to cost renewals going up year over year on traditional platforms. The software and hardware costs that we see now is just linear, we know what it's going to be.

We actually have been with VMware for quite a while so we made the choice to use VSAN because of that partnership that we have had over the years. We're fully focused in VMware and we love the product. That's why we chose VSAN.

I wasn't familiar at all with VSAN at the time, so there was a little learning curve there but outside of that it would be comparable to setting up a legacy SAN environment.

We actually, just by incrementally increasing the cost of our servers, plus the licensing, we were able to linearly scale our environment as opposed to doing forklift upgrades.

We evaluated other all-flash arrays and hyper converged infrastructure.

Everybody wants to say 10 and I would say it's going to be a 10. I love VSAN and I would say it's probably an 8 and there's room for improvement. It's constantly being worked on and I think it's going to be the storage platform going forward.

Colleagues looking into VSAN, I would recommend looking into the VSAN Ready Nodes, they're pre-configured and you can customize your build to whatever you want really, without having to build your own necessarily.

We aren't currently using the Ready Nodes, but I could see where a Ready Node would be beneficial for deployment. The time to deploy would be improved using a Ready Node.

Peer reviews and peer contents are amazing things to be doing. That's part of the reason why we come here. We want to maintain our relevance, industry wide, and so we always constantly bounce ideas off of other peers in the industry.

• Performance
• High Availability

It's relatively low-cost for a high-performance solution. By using VSAN, we've been able to simplify our infrastructure considerably.

VSAN currently has no data deduplication, and having such a feature would both be an improvement and provide a feature that Nutanix has.

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The stability is very good.

Having now deployed it, it's actually difficult to have any downtime or to even lose data.

Considering I've only done one VSAN cluster, I'd say that the scalability is good. We haven't yet tried to add more clusters.

Our company currently has 20,000 users and we expect further growth, so we'll likely have to scale down the road. That said, I don't anticipate really any issues with scalability at that point.

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Tech support is very good as they're responsive.

We have the Technical Account Manager service, which is very helpful.

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Setup was not complex at all, was very straightforward, and was easily implemented by everyone on the team.

We implemented it with out in-house team.

We chose VSAN based on a POC. We looked at Nutanix, but VSAN was more robust for our needs and less expensive.

We normally use Gartner as a source, as well as some testing and a POC. The POC was the most important criteria, so my advice would be to do that before committing the resources.

VMware vSAN is a storage virtualization software.

What I found most valuable in this software is its storage management feature.

I don't recall an area for improvement in VMware vSAN, because it's a concept, a brand, and a product. If the concept doesn't change, we can't improve this software that much, but VMware can probably make the monitoring feature much better.

I've been dealing with VMware vSAN for eight years now.

VMware vSAN is a stable software.

VMware vSAN is a scalable software.

Clients have to pay for VMware vSAN licensing based on the number of CPUs. Whether it'll be a yearly or a monthly subscription, you have to check with the vendor, because you can buy it for one year, two years, or three years. The purchases would be lifetime or perpetual, but you need to have support, e.g. the support is negotiated from one, two, three, or four years.

VMware vSAN is my main product, and I'm an integrator for it.

The current version we're using is the VMware vSAN 6.2 version.

The setup of VMware vSAN is the same setup as the ReadyNodes, because the ReadyNodes are built on top of vSAN technology. As for how long it takes to deploy, it depends on the number of hosts you're deploying.

We have six clients currently using this software.

For deployment and maintenance of VMware vSAN, we have two technical staff who are in charge: one for setting up the network, and the other one for setting up the physical environment.

I'm recommending this software to others who want to start using it. You can install it on any kind of ReadyNodes.

I'm rating VMware vSAN nine out of ten.

our primary use case is storage; hyper-converged solutions for our customers. We develop and design higher availability infrastructure for customers with the vSAN as its base. I'm a consultant and an architect for solutions with the software. My company is a partner with VMware.

High availability is a valuable aspect of this solution.

An integrated backup solution within the vSAN platform would improve the product. Competitors like SimpliVity, UCS, and Cisco Hyperconverged all have a backup feature in their hyper converged infrastructure, it's something that a lot of people use now.

I've been using this solution for four years. 

This solution is super stable. 

This solution is very scalable. However, we've seen some limits within the platform although I believe the latest version may have solved those problems. 

The initial setup is very simple and straightforward. If the setup also involves hardware deployment, the process can take a day or so, but if it's just the vSAN deployment, it can be done in several minutes. I generally carry out the implementation. 

It's important to use someone who is familiar with the solution to carry out the implementation. It's fairly straightforward but if you set it up incorrectly then you'll have issues with your underlying storage. It's worth having a professional service to manage things. 

I rate this solution 10 out of 10. 

The main use case for VMware vSAN is auxiliary services, such as Windows, Linux, and not a specific server, but mixed loads.

We were able to replace lots of negative servers and replace them with VMware.

VMware vSAN is compatible with the legacy hypervisor solutions and most of the features are good.

I have been using VMware vSAN for approximately five years.

The solution is stable.

The scalability of the solution is good. The node cluster they are using has been enough for them.

we have approximately 1,000 users using this solution.

The technical support, it's not satisfactory. Whenever we raise a ticket it takes a lot of time to have an engineer get involved sometimes, or we receive a less experienced engineer. We then have to repeat the situation to the next engineer which all takes time.

The setup is not complicated. The deployment of VMware vSAN with VxRail can be completed in three to four hours, for one cluster out of the physical setup. The physical setup could take approximately one day. After that, deployment is very easy to complete.

We have four people that do the deployment and physical setup of the solution.

The price of the solution package depends on the nodes and other factors. The cost some of our customers paid was $500,000. The licensing cost for the components is very good.

My customers were comfortable with VMware and then they decided to use VMware instead of another solution.

My advice is if someone is interested in VMware vSAN it is a good solution. It is stable, supportive, and compatible with many solutions. VMware vSAN is the best.

Customers have to consider when choosing VMware to receive a lot of features, such as replication backup, and if they went with another solution it would be more expensive.

I rate VMware vSAN a nine out of ten.

VMware vSAN is a software-defined storage solution and there are no hardware dependencies. We use it for general-purpose workloads or Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).

The solution has high performance.

VMware vSAN could improve by adding NAS and object storage.

I have been using VMware vSAN for approximately four years.

The solution has been stable.

VMware vSAN is scalable.

We have approximately 5,000 people using this solution in my organization. 

Our last customer in India had over 180 servers running.

The technical support has been great from VMware vSAN.

The installation was straightforward. We did not find it difficult.

We have a team of 50 that does the maintenance and support of the solution.

We pay for a license to use the solution through our company CapEx and then we continue to pay annually.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate VMware vSAN a nine out of ten.

The most valuable features of vSAN are:

• Instead of having a separate SAN storage, VMware uses all the local storage of the servers to combine its virtualized storage.
• Hyper-converged, an infrastructure system that is software defined: It integrates the computing, storage, and networking into a single platform.
• vMotion: This is one of the best features in this setup. From the name itself, vMotion allows migration without downtime. Others call it live migration. Planed server downtime is dramatically reduced by this feature.
• High availability (HA): This is my favorite. vSAN requires you to have at least three servers. Those three servers are being combined into one platform; that's vSAN. HA actually works during server failure. The server will automatically distribute to other servers in the environment.
• SSD tiering: You can combine a magnetic disk and solid-state drives to have a hybrid drive. This is actually fast because the SSD will be used for caching and the magnetic disk will store the actual data.

The most valuable feature of ESXi is that it is free. I strongly recommend this for those who have a huge development environment. ESXi is the best no-cost virtualization platform in the market right now, where you can consolidate your server into one platform.

The virtualization itself really helped me as a network and system administrator with a lot of servers to maintain. That's a pain. A virtualized environment is really easy to manage. Almost everything is in one dashboard. This really gives us more time in our research and innovation, and less time for maintenance or upgrades.

The minimal downtime alone is a winning blow for both the management and the ITs. Unexpected downtime is inevitable. It's been part any organization. Addressing that pitfall really gives an edge (from a business perspective).

Long-term savings in both buying more server in the future and absolutely the power consumption, not to mention the data center space it released or freed.

The mobility, flexibility, and scalability are really amazing and astonishing features.

I would like to see lowered cost. vSAN is very expensive.

I have used vSAN for two or three months. ESXi has been with us for around three years.

We are using vSAN 6.2, ESXi 5.5 and 6.0, and vSphere 6.0.

We have not had any stability issues so far.

Scalability is one of its strengths.

We haven't called technical support so far. But the web (Google) actually has plenty of good articles and forums and discussions. The website has also one of the best FAQ and DIY sections; 90% level of technical support.

We did not have a chance to try other virtualization platforms because the first one we tried really gave us a strong enough reason to stay loyal.

Initial setup was straightforward. You'll only have what you want.

Hopefully, over the next few years the pricing will be dramatically lower.

We are biased from the start to use VMware products only.

Study and evaluate your current setup. Conduct a case study to see if the advantages really outweigh the disadvantages. Virtualization really is the future. Especially here in my corner, almost all or most of the data centers are still in bare-metal setup. Because of the big price (CAPEX), most of the time, management will disapprove this project. But, if you help them see the big picture, I'm sure they are going to promote you for providing this project.

Snapshot: You know, that is amazing.

In our routine work, there is repeatable testing and validation. With the snapshot feature, we are able to keep our system in a specific status, including application parameters and network settings.

That has totally reduced our valuable time.

Currently, the work style of our organization has changed; when we get new projects, we can rapidly handle them.

If vSAN developed a "unified system" (that can support block + file + object), it would help users a lot in facing hybrid cloud environments.

I would prefer to use a complete and deep dashboard so I can give a supervisor a way to easily monitor the status of all drives and pool tiers. I think that would be a powerful feature for the future.

I have used it for two years.

Stability is great; however, you have to notify your counterparts if the system breaks down. :-D

Many popular SDS products can support up to 1000 nodes. This is an area where I hope vSAN is improved.

Hmmm, the level of technical support depends on the engineer who supports you when you contact the call center.

Traditional storage is scale-up type, which means there are a lot of supplier limitations and it costs too much.

Why not break though this situation? Now, flash is getting cheaper and bigger. With the changes mentioned, I think it will just stimulate SDS.

Initial setup was very simple for me. It is easy to set up if you get used to using vCenter.

SDS is going to be popular and common. If vSAN wants to remain #1 in the market, offering more discounts or something to attract customers is inevitable.

Currently, our environment is running VMware; therefore, we can consider using original distributed storage that connects directly to the kernel. That would reduce latency and data transfer loss.

It is easy to use and rapidly build up.