VMware vSAN Reviews

Simplified datacenter failover in the VMware environment is the most valuable feature of this product.

Previously, when using SRM (VMware Site Recovery Manager) we’d have to configure VMware objects (VMs) for failover. With vSAN, all objects in the datastore are replicated and can be failed over using the built-in high availability feature.

vSAN significantly reduced the complexity of our data center failover along with the data center design requirements.

vSAN health reporting needs some work. There were a few instances where the vSAN would report health issues with disks, even though it was functioning correctly. I believe VMware stated this would be corrected in future versions.

We also had some issues with reinstalling hosts that had vSAN enabled. JBOD disks would retain the vSAN configuration information and would need to be manually cleared to allow for the new vSAN instance to be enabled.

I tested it over a period of five months.

We didn’t have any stability problems. Once configured, vSAN operated without issue.

We didn’t have any scalability problems. vSAN scaled quite well.

Technical support is excellent. VMware provides top notch support.

This was our first time moving to a HCI storage solution.

Setup was straightforward. With ESXi as the base, it was quite easy to then enable vSAN. We used the just a bunch of disks (JBOD) configuration and vSAN consumes those disks easily through the vCenter web GUI.

vSAN is not cheap. Weigh the benefits of a reduction in complexity against the cost.

We did not evaluate any other options.

Use the GUI scripting vSAN implementation, at least for ESXi 6.0. We found that it was much quicker (and still fairly simple) to implement via the GUI. I’ve heard this may have gotten better in ESXi 6.5.

The valuable features are:

• It concentrates all our virtual platforms into a really small number of servers.
• It gets rid of dependencies of expensive SAN storage units which decrease our electricity and cooling expenses in a very drastic way.
• It gives us an extra layer of comfort by providing different levels of high availability.

We can deploy new servers faster than ever. Our capacity to grow is bigger than when we had SAN storage dependency. We are now able to deploy a pool of QA virtual machines for testing purposes in minutes rather than in hours.

I would like to see faster re-sync and recovery times after a host failure. It’s so difficult to restore a normal situation after a failure. There is a large amount of data to re-sync after a host failure. We have a 1Gb vSAN network, and the restore process can last several hours or days.

I would also like to see a granular sync system, rather than the current “all data” transfer.

I have been using this solution since 2014.

During normal activity, the vSAN’s behavior is excellent. Performance and stability are awesome.

We have only encountered some issues related to the host update process because they increase the data movement between cluster hosts and it ends up collapsing the network.

The vSAN solution has scalability inside its core. Although it has a widely supported HCL, you have to choose the new components when adding nodes to ensure that you won’t have any bottlenecks. With our vSAN installation, we didn’t encounter any issues like that.

We haven’t required help from VMware technical support yet. At the beginning, there was not much information about troubleshooting available on the internet.

This product is now more mature and there is a lot of information available, such as VMware or independent blogs and forums, that help with vSAN problems.

We used the traditional solution of a pool of hypervisor hosts with a common storage attached (iSCSI class). It did the job until we had scalability problems that were related to storage.

The cost of buying a new iSCSI storage was more expensive than rethinking our current solution. For this reason, we changed to vSAN technology.

The installation was as complex as any iSCSI scenario can be. However, it was radically simple in terms of the networking part.

In our case, we passed from our standard virtual switches to distributed ones in order to meet the vSAN’s requirements. We had to take into consideration the disks/RAID controller configuration. We chose an acceptable balance between performance and cost, creating a RAID 0 with each disk of each server on the cluster and made them available for vSAN.

We adjusted the pricing and licensing costs based primarily on the physical processors per server. We chose each node of the cluster with one physical processor since vSAN is licensed per processor. We calculated the performance requirements of our entire virtual platform to decide if one processor solution was a good decision.

We didn’t evaluate other options, except for the line of traditional iSCSI storage solutions. We wanted to continue working with the same virtualization-based system. We wanted to get a solution with the smallest possible footprint. The vSAN solution met these requirements.

This is a very good solution if you have the adequate budget to provide for the related requirements or recommendations, e.g., a 10Gb network. It has a wide catalog of uses that fulfill the highest requirements of performance at all levels. Without any doubts, I recommend this solution.

The valuable features are:

• The integration into the web client (health, component compatibility checks such as controller drivers and re-sync)
• Integration with storage profiles
• Simple patching process
• Integration into the VMkernel

The solution reduced the deployment administration of the storage components.

The areas of improvement are:

• The performance reports should be improved when customers are using third-party SSL certificates. This service doesn't work if you use it.
• In a hybrid configuration, it would be good if you could mirror the SSD instead of only having access to one DISK for caching.

We have been using this solution for over a year.

I did not encounter stability issues because I used certified hardware and installed the required firmware/drivers.

However, I have the following issues with stability:

• Not all ESX hosts contribute to statistical collection because we use third-party SSL certificates. We opened a case with support.
• Under the "Datastore” and “Datastore Clusters" views, I cannot move the "Datastore" into a more appropriate folder. It has to be located in the root directory of the view.

There have been no scalability issues at this stage.

Technical support is strong in their technical knowledge.

I have deployed several Nutanix and VSAN systems. I have never had to switch between products. Being a technical consultant, our customers generally have decided on the preferred technology before they engage me to design and implement their solution. I openly discuss my view on each product when asked.

I found challenges in setting up a VSAN Cluster that were not related to VMware VSAN itself. They were related to server hardware and network configurations.

Licenses are expensive wherever you go. Many people don't appreciate the long-term savings with a technology like vSphere and VSAN, and therefore complain about the up-front costs.

I would prefer if VSAN were free with the Enterprise edition. It would make its adoption more palatable.

I have deployed Nutanix and VMware VSAN clusters.

RTFM and have realistic expectations about the product.

The most valuable vSAN features are:

• Ability to scale easy: Adding additional storage is so easy. You just populate an empty HDD slot on the host with a disk and vSAN will automatically add the additional storage to the storage pool. No specialized skills are required.
• Performance and cost/storage efficiency: With vSAN, you get SSD-like performance with a mix of spinning and solid-state disks at a fraction of the cost. We use a ratio of 30/70 SSDs to spinning disks, respectively, for a high-performance SAN that is within our budget.
• Resilience: We tried to break our vSAN PoC instance to test its robustness. We pulled out hard drives while they were being written to and we unplugged server nodes, and we never lost a VM.
• Ease of use: We set up vSAN with a few mouse clicks in vCenter. We couldn’t believe how simple it was to setup and configure.

We are able to deploy vSAN clusters to remote locations very easily at a fraction of the cost. This saves us time and money. We don’t have to worry about stability issues.

Support for iSCSI access would be great, but this may be supported in the latest versions of vSAN.

We have a few physical servers in our environment and it would be great, if these servers could also access the storage in vSAN. With vSAN iSCSI support, we would be able to connect our physical servers to vSAN as well.

We have been using this solution for two years.

In terms of stability, vSAN is very resilient, self-adapting, and self-healing. In the two years that I’ve worked with vSAN, I haven’t experienced any vSAN stability issues.

There haven't been any issues with scalability. Adding additional storage was as simple as inserting a hard drive into a hard drive bay or adding an additional server node to the data center cluster. That was all we had to do, and vSAN auto-configured everything.

We had a VMware vSAN engineer present to set up our very first vSAN cluster. There was nothing to it, but it was great to have an expert on-site for questions and to provide us with training. Other than that, we have never had to log a support request with VMware for vSAN.

We didn’t use a virtual SAN solution previously. We just used traditional, and very expensive, SAN storage arrays. We moved to vSAN because our budget wasn’t getting any bigger, but our storage requirements were increasing.

The setup was straightforward. It literally took a few mouse clicks to setup vSAN.

You get better value for your money with a vSAN solution than with a traditional SAN with lower TCO.

We looked briefly at alternatives, but nothing stood out like vSAN. Nutanix was another solution, but surprisingly, it would have costed us more.

Get a vSAN specialist to come out and spec your vSAN cluster according to your requirements. Have him configure it and test that it is performing properly.

Some of the valuable features of this product are:

• Software-defined class which is one of the building blocks for SDDC.
• Flexible – It scales as and when needed.
• Simple – It is easy to manage.
• Performance – The local server can access data at full speed and have low-latency in SSD.
• Since there are no network-attached storage appliances, the infrastructure cost is lower.

It has helped us in reducing the waiting time to provision new storage devices and meet customer SLAs in order to build new VMs.

Some areas where this product can be improved are:

• If we could create multiple datastores rather than a single one, it would be helpful.
• There could be improvements in the hardware failure and data recovery methods.
• There should be an option to create more than one datastore like other SDS vendors have in order to allow the features to support Storage DRS & Storage I/O Control (SIOC).
• A control panel for VMs is absent. Although, other vendors are deploying this for each host to provide better storage control.
• A typical data center for installation of systems requires more storage growth than servers. This limits the scalable features of vSAN.

I have used this solution for around 14 months.

We did see some backup failures due to .vmx lock files in the vSAN datastore.

We have encountered some scalability issues and got a couple of performance tickets.

The technical support from VMware is good.

We were not using any other solution previously. This is our first attempt at the software-defined storage system and Nimble is our product for testing purposes.

It was straightforward. There is a single checkbox if the prerequisites are met with.

The pricing policy varies as below:

• vSAN Standard is still priced at $2,495/CPU or $50/desktop.
• The Advanced Edition license is priced around $3,995/CPU or $100/desktop where as the Enterprise license is priced at $5,495/CPU or $120/desktop.

VMware brought this is as free upgrade, so we did not evaluate any other options but Nimble is the next one.

vSAN 6.2 has lot of new features which can be good for small and medium-sized servers & VDI infrastructures.

Storage policies and I/O are the most valuable features. The storage policies are useful in my job to create my own policies and prioritize some apps over others, and create high availability for some virtual machines.

It increases the performance of the virtual machines and reduces the TCO for storage deployment.

Hardware compatibility needs to be increased to be able to use more RAID controllers available on the market.

I have used it for three years.

I have not encountered any stability issues.

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 8/10.

We previously used another solution. We switched because it reduced the TCO.

Changes have been made in version 6.5.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated EMC ScaleIO.

It is easy to design and easy to implement.

Centered on the VMs, it provides simple and centralized management from a single console. VMware vSAN is focused on the virtual machine and not on a datastore or mon. This allows it to adapt to the workload faster with specific storage policies for virtual machines, without needing to change the storage as in a traditional environment.

Having a single data store for virtual machines, the production of IT administrators has improved because they do not need to work with many LUNs and storage.

The web console, VMware vSphere Web Client, is not based on HTML5, which makes it difficult to manage. It slows down and page refresh is not fast; time is wasted. I know that vSphere 6.5 is already based on HTML5.

I have used it for one year.

I did not encounter any stability issues, as long as it complies with the compatibility matrix.

I have not encountered any scalability issues; very easy to scale.

I have not encountered any problems; no calls to support, but support is very good.

We previously used a traditional environment. We switched because the hyperconverged systems is very easy to deploy, it can scale and provides performance.

If you do not know about this technology, you cannot put it into production easily, but I know about vSAN, so it was very easy to deploy a vSAN environment.

It's a bit pricey. Indeed, there is hardly any price difference with a traditional setting, but it makes that up with the management and ease of use.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated HPE VSA, Nutanix, and DataCore.

Both vSAN and Nutanix give very good performance, but the support when the infrastructure works with VMware is a simple support; with Nutanix, you have two support vendors if the hypervisor is VMware. Nutanix has a proprietary hypervisor based on KVM.

The most valuable features of the product are its basic functionality and that it's all so simple to implement. The performance is also another very useful feature :-)

We are a partner and we're using Virtual SAN for nearly more than half of our customers, VMware-based customers, and we use it as the basis for DMZ environments, production environments, and DR sites. It's getting a lot better to sell VMware solutions and to make the customer happy.

I'm part of the Beta program, so I know what's going to come up in the next version.
Room for improvement would be support for more NVMe-based devices and especially firmware combinations; that's sometimes a problem. Also, support for special SAS controllers. We have some special customer settings where we solved the customer’s special configuration nearly two years ago, and now it's no longer supported officially for the newest release. There’s room for improvement there.

We have used VMware Virtual SAN since the beginning of version 5.5. It is awesome to see the evolution of the product. We implemented it at a customer site since the first version.

We had some purple screens of death at the beginning, but that was only due to hardware problems. Today, it's very stable and nearly rock solid; so, very nice.

Most of our customers are using it for up to eight hosts in a cluster. Normally, we know - and our customers know - that you can easily scale up to 64 machines, but today, up to eight is absolutely enough.

Technical support is very good. I need them only two times. There was a driver firmware issue; that's all. We extracted all the log files and prepared them for support. They were able to identify the problem within about four to six hours; so, really good.

We were pretty happy with the release before, the VSA version, but it was discontinued. We have many customers who implement the VSAN ROBO solution. We are part of the roadmap discussion and we're going to know what comes up next, so we're pretty happy with the new release.

Initial setup and implementation was pretty easy. It's all about the design and all about the thinking process at the beginning of a product; so implementation was pretty easy.

We're a VMware partner, a Nutanix partner, a SimpliVity partner and a Cisco partner. Personally, VSAN is the best solution for most customers and workloads.

I would like to give them a perfect rating if the VMware driver issues, especially with NVMEs, are going to be fixed. Then I would absolutely agree a perfect rating, because we've set up with customers using VSAN Hybrid. We have customers using VSAN All-Flash and it's so simple for the customer to implement, to troubleshoot... It's all about the design and thinking process at the beginning of a project. That's why we are there as a partner.

My advice is to definitely test it out; not listen to all the marketing stuff. Test it out on real-life environments, and especially test it out on newer systems. Don’t test it out on five- or six-year-old servers, because you won’t be able to get the best performance.