VMware vSAN Reviews

The value that VSAN brings to our organization, really there are two major areas. One is the ability to replace very expensive proprietary SANs. The other is the need to replicate and keep data available at all times across three separate data centers. Those two elements are really where VSAN plays.

Probably the biggest benefit we get is the replacement of the SANS and it's purely a cost one. To give you an idea, we spend roughly 50% less on equivalent storage by using VSAN to replace our more traditional SAN architecture. Further, the operating costs are 20, 30 percent less. The ability to scale our storage as we need it is far simpler with VSAN than buying the more traditional route. So I would argue that that's probably the single best feature we get.

There are features that I would love to see added to VSAN and I think they're being worked on. One of the major limitations is its inability to provide storage to things outside the hyper-converged world. Any traditional SAN we have left over in our institution will be for that function. Ultimately, if we can remove that by simply extending VSAN's access outside of its little virtual bubble, so to speak, that's the key. And as I said I think that's going to be added.

VeriTech is a consulting and engineering firm specializing in health care. We provide, management and technical skills often acting as the CTO of, healthcare institutions. One of our engagements is I'm actually the interim acting CTO of Baystate Health, in western Massachusetts. VSAN is one of the primary ones but, software defined, architecture and complete hyper-convergence is really what we use VMware for. We use NSX and VSAN as part of our, absolute total infrastructure. And that's all part of vCloud, initiative. We also use Horizon for our VDI, implementation. And that pretty much-those products are 99% of what we use.

The stability of VSAN so far has been excellent. We're just beginning to enter production. We're beginning to migrate our data off a traditional SANS which are a collection of EMC, IBM, NetApp, whole range of them onto the VSAN platform and so far we haven't had any problems.

It's actually the internal feature that I think gets us the great feature of savings out of it. With VSAN I simply add disk drives and hosts to my infrastructure at any of the facilities I have. The net result is an increase of both storage and processing.

In the older model, if I need to add, let's say a terabyte of space for some particular tier one application, I have to add a terabyte, from let's say EMC, into data center one, a terabyte into data center two, a terabyte into data center three, and if, in my adding of those, I cross one of those magic boundaries where I'm out of cabinet space or whatever, then I have all those expenses. None of that is true with VSAN. In VSAN, I simply add drives into a chassis anywhere in my system. If I need more space, I buy a simple chassis, throw it in there, and continue to add the drives. Much more scalable. There really is no limit to it.

Technical support on VSAN has been excellent also. It's been a bit of a paradigm shift for our employees. They're used to that traditional sort of big iron, I'm going to call it stair-step limited approach and it's taken a little bit of skill to get them used to it, but VMware has been there right for us from the beginning. They've helped our people understand the difference and we're pretty much now self-sufficient.

The choice of VSAN was almost made for us. And let me step back for a minute and say it's not particularly the product, although we love the product, it's where we suggested after quite a lot of testing of other-of other competing products, we knew that traditional SAN architecture and the cost of deploying it, maintaining it, was unsustainable. Our budgets in healthcare IT are flat. No one's giving us extra money. But, with all the images and the doctors and the sharing of data, the need to store data is not being held flat. It's going way up.

We simply don't have the money. So we needed some new, way to address storage. And that meant software defined storage. So that was a given. The next step was we needed something that would provide the levels of service we have, and stability we have with the traditional architecture but at far less price. That's where VSAN shone. That's where when we did all the necessary testing and reviews VSAN acted in a secure performance and cost, areas needed.

The selection of VSAN, it's really part of a larger hyper-convergence model and for technical reasons and for simplicity, we wanted products. If we were going to move our entire, siloed approach of storage here, processing here, networking there, onto one single platform, we wanted all of those abilities buried into the extraction or the hypervisor level itself. We didn't want to buy independent little products and snap them in so to speak. Really, that means the only solution suite was the VMware world of products -- NSX for networking, VSAN for storage, and vCloud for everything else. So it really was a no brainer. That was really the essential relationship between VSAN and the other products.

The implementation of VSAN along with the implementation of all hyper-convergence technology is tricky. Although we benefit greatly for it now, there were a lot of issues that, we simply had to work through. And these are not really an issue related to the product itself but more related to the nature of what the product does. Since VSAN is a software component that allows you to add storage to your hyper-converged system, which in turn is based on products like Cisco’s UCS, the revision of code in the Cisco UCS chassis, the types of drives, the levels of drivers across the entire platform are essential to keep in lock step. So, we had many cases where, as we added capacity, turned on new features, began to migrate, we ran into all sorts of, um, difficulty. But the truth is, with our people, with VMware’s, with Cisco’s, everybody supplied the skills we needed and now we're pretty much, we're there.

Well, VSAN is a solution of replacement. VSAN is going to replace all of our traditional SAN. So ultimately at the end of the day a couple years from now, almost all of our storage should be on VSAN. It really should be very little if anything left.

When we selected VSAN, as I said, remember, it's part of a total package, so the better question is, when we were selecting hyper-convergence, who would be the vendor for that. Well, there aren't that many options out there. There's really three. You have Microsoft. You have, open stack solutions and open source solutions, and then you have VMware. The Microsoft product, although engaging, isn't really ready for prime time according to our needs. The open source open/stack option is potentially interesting but requires a great deal of internal engineering and support that healthcare systems really don't have. Really left VMware as the only viable, affordable, complete solution. And hence we chose it.

On one side is a strategic vendor and that's where VMware, Microsoft, in the medical case, Cerner, which is a large application provider. There are four or five vendors that I would consider strategic and these are vendors that we could simply not operate without the function that they provide. So when a vendor's classified as strategic and then we look at the function they provide, there has to be a level of commitment. They must be a market leader. They must have enormous R&D capabilities. They must be flexible. They must interact with our engineers at a peering level, not simply as a dictatorial here, use this, and that's what's good for you and no more. VMware clearly acts appropriately like that. So, because, VSAN is part of hyper-convergence, hyper-convergence is a strategic imperative you can connect the dots where a company like VMware is necessary.

I would say, that they are definitely there. They're a high nine [out of 10]. Anybody that's looking to do hyper-convergence I think needs to understand a few basic principals. And all of these apply to VSAN as it applies to any of the elements of hyper-convergence. This is a long project. It's not something that's going to happen all at once and the value is after completion, the sum total of the parts.

If you go through a project like this for example, at Baystate, it's a two to three year project with required funding across that period of time. If, for some reason, we withdrew funding halfway through this process we would end up with less than the sum of our parts, we would end up with a lot of disconnected stuff. So be sure to make sure that your management and the people involved understand that this is a major commitment. It's not, oh, I'm just going to buy this once and forget it.

The other thing I would suggest, be paid attention to, is the affect this has on your people, on your engineers, on your workers, your HR considerations. In a traditional environment like ours, we're siloed. We have our storage guys here, our networking guys here and so on and so on - very expensive, a lot of duplication. In a hyper-converged model, all of that becomes one. Really what you have is a series of better trained, more effective engineers, but less of them. That doesn't mean you fire people.

That means you now put those people to other projects that have been sort of languishing because we just could never get around to them. That's, I think, a big thing to understand, that you will affect the way your users work. If they're not willing to learn new skills, if they're not willing to cross boundaries which were once siloed, your project could be in jeopardy.

When researching anything like hyper-convergence, the more information the better. We spent a great deal of time talking to not just health care institutions, and to be fair, this is a relatively new trend in health care so there really aren't all that many to talk to, but there are a number of non-healthcare institutions that are further along in some of these projects than healthcare is. We spoke with them, we spoke with vendors, we spoke with even other consulting firms. I think it's very important to gather as much information as you can before, you know, embarking on this.

Finding the resources for the gathering of this information is both hard and easy. It depends on which one we're talking about. The ability to get information from other institutions if they're outside of healthcare, and remember I'm speaking from a healthcare point of view, may be difficult, because they may not be allowed to share certain information. Getting consulting information is difficult unless you, of course, engage them. And I would argue that it's not necessarily such a bad idea to engage for a small amount of money the relative experts in some of these consulting firms and just have a quick conversation with them. If all of a sudden they seem to be knowledgeable, you do your homework on them, I would argue a further engagement is not necessarily a bad idea. But you do have to put some efforts into finding the info. It's not just going to fall out of space.

With Virtual SAN we did like the performance, the simplicity, the fact that it’s very easy to manage and upgrade and the integration with all of the VMware technologies that we are very familiar with. Also the fact that it's completely different from the old paradigm of provisioning storage and different storage systems and it's also saving rack space. We use less physical space for the deployment of storage systems.

When we first were shown Virtual SAN, we compared our traditional storage system what we had with the Virtual SAN performance in one of our labs and we showed that the performance was impressive with Virtual SAN. So, we started adding more applications to it and expanded this Virtual SAN Proof of Concept that we had. So, we realized that our performance is comparable to old flash, disk carriage at a much better core structure that we get as cloud providers. So, the fact that it is very fast, very simple and the fact that it's also easy to consume as a cloud provider, this made it a no brainer for us.

The simplicity to provisioned VMs and applied policy to specific VMs for our customers is one of the most important features for us without having to separate the area of storage like we had before with our traditional storage system. As a cloud provider the biggest challenge with storage is that you get completely mixed workloads. You don't know what the customers will be landing on. So, there is no way to predict the storage performance needs of a customer before they actually start using the systems.

There's some features in the future releases that we would really like to see: encryption as part of the offering. The application and compression would be nice to have those features available in the next Virtual SAN releases and also the capability to serve storage through other protocols. Like NSF or iSCSI for other vendors, for other applications that are not VMware. We have some solutions now that we use like Nexenta, in order to do that but it would be nice if Virtual SAN support of this natively. So we have one vendor to deal with.

Cloud Carib is a cloud provider in the Bahamas, and it’s targeting enterprise customers in the Caribbean. The company started about three years ago and because we're using VMware products since the beginning, working with Virtual SAN on the new storage offering in addition to our vCloud stock which is the Cloud Director, vSphere, and VCNS.

There’s never been an issue with Virtual SAN over the last year that we've been testing it. Support is really efficient because it's same global support with VMware that we've been with and we are familiar with. As far as I know, some of the highest rated support from any vendors that we use. We did all sorts of tests initially before we deployed in the production environment. We simulated disk failures, host failures, network failures, and Virtual SAN didn't have any issues dealing with all of these failures, so we're confident in that deploy more applications, more VMs in this system.

Since the original deployment, we have doubled the capacity of our recent cluster with zero down time. So the more nodes we have the more capacity we get the more performance and there's no downtime. So, it's very easy to scale up, scale-scale out with VSAN and all it takes is a few clicks. It's a very efficient way to upgrade your storage without adding more rack space than you actually need because by having converged storage network in the computer capacity, we don't have to waste rack space which is at a premium where we are in the Caribbean. So we did like the fact that we can scale our compute and our storage at the same time without wasting rack space.

The technical support that we get from VMware is part of our cloud provider contract is very efficient, very quick responses. The support is always knowledgeable and they can resolve the issues. As far as I know it's one of the highest rated support from any vendors that we use and this is very important for our storage system because that's the most critical aspect of customers' data. They need to be able to have confidence that the data is on a solid stable system.

So the way that we found out about Virtual SAN, we kept running into performance problems and capacity problems with our current storage that we had before. With all storage that we had and Virtual SAN is a radically different approach. So we were intrigued by that and, after testing it, we realized that all of our requirements were met by this approach. So some of the criteria that we look at when we evaluate vendors is the credibility of the vendor in the industry. The support history that we have with them, customer references.

So with VMware, we know that VMware is already used by everybody in the Fortune 500. Huge companies globally rely on VMware for day to day operations. So, we’re fully con=fident in basically running all of our infrastructure through the VMware technologies.

We spent quite a bit of time studying the design guides from VMware about the proper implementation and the hardware compatibility list. Ran all of the self-checks that were listed on the website and we used hardware that was certified ATL. And with these requirements- having passed the requirements it was very simple to enable Virtual SAN. So, after the initial, deployment design we're able to implement it in a matter of hours. It was, very, very simple. Much easier than deploying a hardware based storage system.

The vendors that were directly competing with Virtual SAN for our project were hardware vendors that were providing all-flash systems. This would be the comparison for us. The cost of the all-flash systems was prohibitive for us. We are a relatively small cloud provider in the Caribbean and, with Virtual SAN, we like the fact that we can pay through the VCOM program where we pay for only what we use and this was another huge benefit with Virtual SAN in our use case.

There's no issues that we have with it so far. We're very happy with it. I would highly recommend Virtual SAN for any demanding application that this running on VMware. We have no have reservations at all with Virtual SAN. We recommend Virtual SAN to anybody was has demanding applications.

So a lot of people think that Virtual SAN is a new unproven solution that people might use for testing or development but, what we actually see when we talk with our peers and with what we see with our customers is that people are using it in production and we are using it in production. If it can be used in production for a demanding app environment like cloud provider, then it means that it can definitely be used in production for any company that has storage requirements, demanding storage requirements.

Peer reviews and peer comments are very important factors when evaluating storage solutions or any other priced IT solutions is the raw data that you see from the people that are using it the way that we are going to be using something. It's not media or something that's not tested. So, this has the most weight for us. The most important factor when considering a solution whether PRC.

Performance is the most valuable feature because you are moving the storage closer to the CPU. It’s also cheap. We also evaluated an all-flash array, but even a low-end flash is much more expensive. This is much cheaper.

Concrete benefits would be manageability; we don’t have a storage guy because there is less stuff to deal with.

The savings is not the issue but I can scale my system – I’m building the node for 200 users, but all I will have to do is order another host and it will be configured exactly the same, and they are over-provisioned in terms of memory.

I have been using VMWare since it was a beta test.

I don’t know, but my gut feeling is that it distributes across the hosts, which should be very stable, and it’s all done at the hypervisor level. I don’t think we’ll have any issues.

I think it’s scalable in a linear fashion. We’ve outgrown our low-end SAN and hit a wall. We didn’t have a storage guy so we hit a wall when we hit 180 users and it was thrashing the SAN. With VSAN, that kind of issue – especially using the sizing tool – says that you should be more than fine. We're a small shop so we don’t have any doubt that it will scale to size.

They are the best in class – I hold everyone else to their standard. They solve the problem and work the problem. I’m kind of spoiled because I also get federal support so I get especially good service. I have always found their support to be stellar.

I had an issue a few years ago where my hosts were dropping and I couldn’t connect to them, so for three days I worked with VMWare. I went through four shifts of support staff, and they stayed with me. It was a 72 hour outage and I got back around to my original guy, and he figured it out. They are amazing. They don’t point a finger – with IBM they would hand it off from one guy to another and will never ever tell you that.

We replaced our infrastructure and did a proper POC. It’s cheap enough that we can still use the hosts and hook a SAN in, and everyone will get an SSD at their desks, so most of the cost is infrastructure. I loved it when I heard about it – virtualized storage and a distributed RAID. Makes total sense.

Their licensing gets a bit confusing, it’s hard to get the hang of that.

From what I saw, you can create the SAN in a small environment, and then grow. That’s a valuable feature of VSAN and makes it cost effective.

It's cost effective because you can start small and grow as needed.

From my experience testing it, VSAN could be more stable.

We tested it for about three months.

I was not sure about its stability because we have a big SAN shop and I got the impression that it’s good for small offices and not the larger ones.

The scalability seems ok – I would give it 6/10 because in a traditional SAN you can go up to a few terabytes. However with VSAN, it seems you can only get a couple hundred terabytes, and I expected more.

We haven’t had a chance to use it for VSAN, but in general we've had pretty good support from VMware, so I think VSAN tech support will also be good.

We haven’t fully implemented, but it should be simple and straightforward.

We will implement it by ourselves without a vendor team.

We looked into Dell and Nutanix, and chose VSAN because of ease of setup.

Customer support, the actual technology, how robust or stable it is and the ease of deployment are the criteria too look for when selecting a vendor.

I would say that if you’re a medium IT organization and looking for a cost effective solution, VSAN is worthwhile; but, if you’re a bigger environment, I would go with a bigger SAN like EMC, NetApp, and IBM.

• Easy to set up
• Very Fast
• Good investment
• Surprised at beta ration
• Works very well

• Price
• We don’t need special network or hardware, just add a new network card
• If you have 10GB, you can just go with vSAN
• All-flash gives improved performance over hybrid, and competes with other solutions
• If combined with Horizon, it lowers the price of solution

• Better integration with VMware DOS
• vBackup with vSAN is not so easy, because it's distributed storage so must be careful not to make host unavailable.

I tried to install it on one cluster and the host got stuck.

Awesome stability.

• Awesome scalability, especially when combined with vSphere 6
• With vSphere 5.5, limited scalability

• In beta, no technical support
• Great fourm support

Very easy, just a few clicks. You don’t need special knowledge of storage .because it can be fully automated or you can set it manually if you want

There are a few products on the market. vSAN has lots of competitors, but if you want to play with a single software provider, go with vSAN. However, if you want more hardware, maybe go with Nutanix.

They lose points because its tricky to fully understand.

The ability to scale as you need – we can start with a very small footprint as opposed to a monolithic storage solution where you buy the entire solution up front. We use everything – Hitachi, NetApp, but we're using it more and more because we can start small and scale as you need. Cost saving essentially.

I would like to software-based disk-level encryption in the next release. We deal a lot with the Department of Defense, and arms and munitions government-regulated stuff, so we would like to see more. From their roadmap, I see its coming but it has been an impediment.

It's not quite there yet. We've had a few outages that were addressed. It's not 100% there yet -- give it another six months.

Scalability is why were using it – especially with v6. Any scalability issues we had, were addressed.

It was excellent. The response time was great, and as we're a large customer so we had no issues.

Initial setup was not difficult to do at all.

We implemented on our own.

We have played with Nutanix but it wasn’t there yet – VSAN is more attractive because it operates kernel level, as opposed to Nutanix.

Picking a vendor also depends on which segment is looking – I run most of the IT stuff and to me peer reviews are very important. Others within our company look to Gartner.

I would say that the main reason its attractive is that you can grow as you need. The other thing that makes it especially attractive is that from an IO perspective, VSAN has the better ability to perform more efficiently because it operates within the hypervisor. It's VMWare specific so that can be a downside. But for pure VMWare shops, VSAN is the best option in my opinion.

• The integration with other VMware solutions, such as vSphere, is valuable for us.
• It's also fast -- faster than hybrid and all-flash setups.
• Three-host configuration provides security.

I think that it brings speed and security as we have patient-sensitive data that we need to store.

N/A

I love VMware – it’s allowed us to virtualize our server infrastructure, but I haven’t tested the stability of VSAN extensively yet.

From what I’ve seen it’s extremely scalable.

VMware is top notch, but I can’t evaluate yet for VSAN.

You should look at scalability and integration withing the vSphere environment.

• It's very simple to use.
• It work on commoditized hardware.
• It provides centralized storage.

It's lowered our storage costs while still maintaining High Availability and with easy installation.

Expand the hardware compatibility list – it's pretty short. Definitely also the diagnostic and monitoring could be improved. That stuff is still very new.

We have been using it since it came out in March 2015.

So far so good.

Unsure – all I know is what I read, if it does what it says it does I'm very impressed.

Very good – quality support.

We have three hosts in a cluster, and it was surprisingly easy.

Try it out – that’s the best way to know whether it's right for your organization.