VMware vSAN Reviews

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.

It's fast – it’s really blazing fast.

It saves us the expense of an all-flash array. All-flash would work for us, but VSAN is cheaper. I think that this solution is really new, but it has real benefits over all-flash arrays.

We are seeing some improvements coming up, but at the moment you have to store every object on multiple disks to protect it, and they should be better distributed over disks to help parity.

It's very stable – we have had no failures.

It’s really scalable in terms of both capacity and performance, at least for our needs.

We haven’t had to use it – the product is really stable.

We were using a traditional storage array from Dell and we will see more VSAN usage in the future.

The initial setup was a little bit complicated because we have to do everything from scratch. It’s a new world, and much easier in the newer releases.

We looked at other vendors – classic storage vendors – but we thought this direction was faster as things are moving towards a software designed storage.

I think you should try it – its really stable and valuable and help to drill your costs down.

The ability to scale out incrementally instead of doing a big five year capital expense purchase that hurts the budget. Vith vSAN, you buy x86 servers and you're done, and you can scale up.

The cost. VSAN allows us to do storage cheaper and better than before.

Deduplication feature is needed, and I'm thinking maybe it needs a lot of nodes to store all redundant data. This will be addressed in their next beta version.

Assuming we get policies set up where they need to be, it's a stable technology. It's distributed architecture is slick, and will hold up.

First and foremost, it offers a different way to scale, it’s smaller and easier to digest in smaller bites. As older ESXi hosts are phased out, you can replace with VSAN and add more nodes. Very incremental approach.

I've never had to use it.

It feels forward thinking and I can see this as big game changer, which is exciting, but it's only one-and-a-half-years old -- a toddler. There are some minor things wrong, but it's potential value could far overshadow it curent weaknesses, Currently we don’t have NSX, and that could be a pivotal thing, but we don’t have that licensing yet.