VMware vSAN Reviews

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.

The most important feature for us is the converged infrastructure, which is all this tool is about. There is no need to manage separate storage areas in SAN/NAS environments. Storage management comes built-in with the vSAN tool. Storage is managed via policies. Define a policy and apply it to the datastore/virtual machine and the software-defined storage does the rest. These are valuable features.

Scalability and future upgrades are a piece of cake. If you want more IOPS, then add disk groups and/or nodes on the fly. If you want to upgrade the hardware, then add new servers and retire the old ones. No service breaks at all.

The feature that we have not yet implemented but are looking at, is the ability to extend the cluster to our other site in order to handle DR situations.

Provisioning virtual machines has been simplified, as there is no provisioning/management of the separate storage layer and it is no more in question.

The management client, i.e., the Flash-based client, is just not up to the mark. I’m really waiting for the HTML5 client to be fully ready and all the features are implemented to it. This, of course, is not a vSAN issue but a vSphere issue.

Of course as vSAN is tightly embedded into vSphere, it is also managed by the same tool. vSphere management is done via browser, and currently the only supported client is the flash-based one. VMware is rolling out a new HTML5 –based client, but that is a slow process. It began as a Fling and since then, there has been quite a number of releases as new features are added. It is today quite usable, but still not complete yet.

There is also the C# -client, also known as the fat-client, which is to be installed onto a management system. Recent versions of vSphere do not support the C#-client anymore. Thus the browser is the only possibility with current versions.

So, my criticism is aimed towards the current Flash-based client, which is utterly slow, and Flash itself being deprecated technology. The sooner we can get rid of it, the happier we all will be.

I have used this solution for around a year.

Stability has not been an issue for us. We have not run into any serious software faults. VMware ESXi is a mature product with very few problems and today, vSAN is also getting there.

The scalability of the product is way beyond our needs.

L1 technical support, which I have mostly been dealing with, has been pretty solid, especially the guys in Ireland, who do handle it pretty well, both technically and in reference to the customer service aspect.

We did not have any comparable solution previously. We did previously use traditional SAN / NAS environments from where the storage areas were provisioned for the VMware clusters.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. All in all, it took three days to complete the entire process; that included installation of the hardware itself, installation of ESXi onto the hardware, creating the data center and the cluster, configuring the networks and multicasting on the surrounding network infrastructure, defining all the disk groups and networks at the cluster, and finally turning the vSAN on. vSAN was the simplest part of the whole process.

As VMware products are licensed per number of sockets, you need to think this fully through. However, don’t go cheap on the number of hosts. You’ll thank me later.

We got presentations both from SimpliVity and Nutanix. No serious evaluation of other products was made. We did evaluate vSAN a couple months before the purchase, so as to get familiar with it, and we do have a lab environment now to play with.

In hindsight, we could have carried out a more-thorough evaluation of vSAN to get a really good feel about it; maybe even run a part of your actual production there for an extended period of time to see all the pros and cons.

Study the VMware Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) carefully with your server hardware provider and make sure all the components/firmware versions are on the HCL; either that or buy predefined hardware, a.k.a. vSAN-ready nodes, from a certified vendor. Always make sure that the hardware and firmware levels are on par with the HCL. You may have to upgrade; for example, you may need to upgrade the disk controller firmware when the updates to ESXi are installed. VMware does a pretty good job here and vCenter tells you that there are inconsistencies. However, you should still be prepared for that in advance, before actually installing the updates.

Don’t go with the minimum number of (storage) nodes, as that won’t give you enough room for a hardware failure during a scheduled maintenance break. For a minimum setup, without advanced options in vSAN 6.5 such as deduplication, compression and when Failures to Tolerate (FTT) = 1, the required number of nodes is three. VMware recommends in best practices a minimum number of four nodes. Do yourself a favour and go with at least that or even five would be good.

When disk groups are designed, it is always better to have more smaller disk groups than a few larger disk groups. This increases your availability, decreases time to heal from disk troubles and gives you an improved performance, as there are more cache devices.

If your budget allows it, then go with the all-flash storage. If not, go with even more disk groups. Our cluster has pretty good performance; although we have spinning disks, the read latency usually stays below 1ms and write latency stays below 2ms.

Plan your network infrastructure carefully, especially that part which handles the vSAN traffic. Go with separate 10G switches and dual interfaces for each server just for vSAN. Handle the virtual machine traffic, migration traffic and management traffic elsewhere. Go with 10G or faster, if you need that. Don’t use 1G for vSAN traffic, unless your environment is really small or is a lab.

Plan your backup / restore strategy really well and test it through. Test restore periodically for both full virtual machines and single files inside virtual machines. To carry out test restore is always important, but with vSAN it is even more so, as all your eggs are in the same basket and there are no more traditional .vmdk files that you can fiddle with. A separate test / lab vSAN cluster would be really good to test various things such as installing updates, restoring backups etc.

I like this solution because policies (such as resiliency) are applied per virtual disk instead of applied on an entire volume.

In a standard SAN solution, and in almost all software-defined storage solutions, the resiliency is applied to an entire volume. For example, you create a volume (or LUN) and you choose RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10 and so on. With vSAN, the notion of volume that we know with SAN doesn’t exist. Instead we have VVOL. Thanks to this, we can apply specific settings like the resiliency per virtual disk. It is more flexible because we don’t need to dedicate an entire volume for a specific resiliency.

I’m a consultant, so I don’t have vSAN in my organization. But customers take this solution to increase efficiency, scalability and ease of management.

Currently, vSAN supports stretched cluster. You need to have the exact same number of nodes in each room and only the RAID 1 resiliency is supported. I hope in the future that vSAN supports also the RAID 5 and RAID 6 resiliency mode for stretched cluster.

I have been working with this solution for seven months.

Some customers report that resync doesn’t work very well.

We have not had scalability issues.

I rate technical support 3.5/5.

As a consultant, I use different solutions, such as Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, and Nutanix.

The initial setup is straightforward because a wizard helps you to enable vSAN.

The license price is too expensive compared to other market actors.

I will evaluate alternatives depending on customer’s needs, but I compare it with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and Nutanix.

Be careful about the chosen hardware, especially HBA, storage devices and CPU depending on deduplication or not.

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.

We had several servers we used in our VMware cluster, as well as a storage device. The implementation of vSAN reduced the rack space, since we no longer required several slots in the cabinet to rack a storage device. vSAN also made it very easy for us to scale out. Power consumption was also reduced within our datacentre.

I like the scalability and the fact that it reduces your total cost for storage over several years.

The only thing I can think of at this time is to improve the performance monitoring and performance visibility within the GUI. They have already made several improvements in vSAN 6.2, but there's always room for improvement when it comes to monitoring performance.

We had no stability issues.

We had no scalability issues.

VMware technical support provides a great service.

We switched to move towards a software-defined datacentre.

It is very easy to configure and setup. vSAN is already part of vSphere ESXi. You simple need to apply a license and do minor configuration to get it to work.

The first 1-2 years of purchasing vSAN will be expensive. Thereafter, the longer you are running it, the more cost savings you will have.

We looked into several other products, such as Pure Storage and Dell solutions.

Keep it simple, and don’t try and over-complicate things. Make sure to follow VMware best practices when it comes to implementing your vSAN solution. Read those whitepapers and make sure you understand how you want to implement it in your environment.

There was a significant increase in the IOPS and the cost. VMware, on paper, guarantees you up to 3 million IOPS on vSAN. The more efficient hard disk drives (HDDs) you have, the better the IOPS speed. Since this works on the local storage cluster, there is very little loss of IOPS compared to the traditional SAN boxes, where you need FC connectivity.

There was a significant reduction in the total cost of ownership. Due to the local storage architecture involved in vSAN, the prices are significantly cheaper if compared to the SAN disks that you have in the SAN boxes. The price difference is anywhere between 20% to 40%, which is a significant amount.

Since I am working in the banking and finance industry, speed is of paramount importance to us since we deal with millions of records fetching data everyday. vSAN helped us to leverage this and speed up the response time from our applications to the end users.

The vSAN Hardware Compatibility List Checker needs to improve, since currently it is a sore point for vSAN. You need to thoroughly check and re-check the HCL with multiple vendors like VMware, in the first instance, and manufacturers like Dell, IBM, HPE, etc., as the compatibility list is very narrow. I would definitely be happy if there is significant additional support for more models of servers from Dell, IBM, HPE, etc.

I have used this solution for a year and a half.

We did encounter stability issues. Initially, we faced issues due to the lack of visibility of the HCL from VMWare and the hardware vendor (Dell). But once the issue was sorted out, the product gave rock-solid stability.

We did encounter scalability issues. Similarly, when we added a new host in the existing cluster, we faced a similar issue on HCL, but that was resolved soon.

I would give the technical support a 8/10 rating.

We were using traditional SAN technology before moving over to vSAN.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

Make sure that you verify and again verify the HCL, before you place an order for the hardware.

This will definitely reduce your TCO by at least 50%. Hence, if you are planning to go with this product, just go ahead. But again, as I have said previously, please make sure that you take a look at the HCL up to the micro-level.

I find that vSAN allows for very easy administration. The fact that you don't have LUNs to set up and assign is great. The ability to set up storage policies and assign them at the disk level is also a great part of this product. You can allow for different setups for different workload requirements.

vSAN allowed for the expansion of our Public Library Patron computer environment into a three-node VMware cluster using commodity servers. This eliminated the need for expensive disk arrays and controllers while providing greater reliability and performance.

We have been using vSAN in one environment for about eight months and another environment for about four months.

The only issue I encountered during deployment was with the hardware and not with vSAN itself. The disks in the new servers were installed at the factory as RAID disks. I had to mark them as non-RAID disks, so that vSAN would be able to see them correctly for addition to disk groups.

We have had no issues with stability.

Fortunately, I have not had to contact support for any issues with my implementations.

We have a Nutanix environment running in production as well. We chose VMware vSAN for several reasons. First, the vSAN solution is part of the ESXi kernel. This allows for the product to be very fast with little overhead. Secondly, vSAN is included in the Enterprise Plus version of ESXi which, compared to competing products, provides a great cost savings.

The initial setup was straightforward, as was learning the vSAN environment. The complexity comes in setting up and managing the storage policies. These can be simple or complex depending on the environment. When using VMware Horizon View, there are several storage policies that are auto-created and -managed. Creating and managing your own policies and rule sets depend on your needs and workloads.

VMware vSAN is included in the Enterprise Plus level of software that we purchase. Our cost savings is in buying commodity server hardware with local hard drives instead of investing in large SAN hardware.

In our model, the price of vSAN storage space is a bit lower than SATA-based storage space from other storages, and vSAN usually has better characteristics (IOPS + latency).

We can easily scale up our vSAN cluster horizontally. All we need is to buy the same hardware nodes and put them in racks.

vSAN has better integration with virtualization than any other datastore.

Stretched All Flash vSAN is the leading product to build a disaster recovery solution. We have a plan to build it in near future.

It’s simple: We are service provider and if a solution can give us new opportunities, it is a good solution. We can build economically effective IaaS clusters on top of vSAN.

vSAN is very complex inside. For example, you need to have a plan for any emergency situation, beginning from the PoC stage; how you monitor SSD and HDD; how you change them. It looks simple, but you cannot just remove a broken component and an install new one. Under the vSAN layer, you need many accurate steps to make these simple actions.

And when you operate a big environment, you need to have more tools to control the health of the solution, to troubleshoot issues and so on. VMware has improved this side from 5.5 to 6.5, and there’s still room for it.

vSAN is not a hardware-agnostic product. We would like to have more compatible SAS controllers and other components in the market. There is room for improvement for both hardware vendors and for VMware.

On the other hand, vSAN is a production-ready solution and all these possible improvements are cosmetic issues.

We have used it from the vSAN 5.5 release date, more than two years.

We use VMware vSAN 5.5 with the latest updates in our products.
The first product is a B2B sector solution, CloudLine, and we sell space on vSAN as one of the storage tiers.
The second one is our B2C solution, CloudLite.ru. It looks like Digital Ocean – we sell IaaS to retail customers in the mass market.
We have plans to build new clusters using vSAN 6.5.

We have encountered stability issues. We had run many tests with vSAN before production. To avoid any issues with vSAN stability, one needs HCL hardware and compatible BIOS drivers for each of the components. The crucial part is that you need HBA without RAID and with disk pass-through, which is important. Finally, you need strong network expertise and a solid network.

We have not encountered any scalability issues; you can scale vSAN horizontally without any issues. But you need to start from 5 (!) nodes; not 3 or 4. It’s a long story – why? :)

Rating technical support is not a simple question. VMware has great technical experts at level 2 and 3, and they are always available if you have severity 1 issue. Technical support is not so good for minor issues.

Previously we use traditional datastores - NetApp, EMC, IBM. And we continue to use it.

Initially, you need to have enough expertise. You need to read some popular bloggers and select hardware from “recommended nodes”. And then you can start a PoC.

We are part of the VMware vCAN program, so our licensing is different from the retail model and it’s comfortable for us.

We keep an eye on all solutions that come to the market. We have tested SimpliVity and Nutanix. We use MS Storage Spaces in our production. All these products have their pros and cons.

You need to use it for the reason of economical efficiency. It’s one of VMware’s great products.

vSAN is a great product, and we see improvement from 5.5 to 6 and 6.5.