VMware vSAN Reviews

The ability to scale out incrementally instead of doing a big five year capital expense purchase that hurts the budget.

In the storage world, when it's time to buy an array, you buy half that are to be populated, and you buy more disk shelves, but it's not cost effective. Or, you buy it all and don’t use some. But with VSAN, you buy x86 servers as needed and you're done, and you can scale up.

The cost. We had a directive from the CIO to check out and play with VSAN and then to do storage cheaper and better than before, which we have achieved.

The management platforms have some gaps. It's difficult to see what’s going on with the hardware at times. The only platform available doesn’t run full time, and there is a management pack but it requires a product that not many people have (vRealize Operations). So it could use more work in management areas.

Also, it lacks deduplication, so we're using a lot more storage than you necessarily need to.

Prior to deployment, make sure you check your hardware compatibility prior, along with the drivers and firmware, because any one of those three things can cause an outage.

It's very stable, but we ran into some early issues with drivers and firmware, but this is resolved now. You must be careful to be coverd in that respect, otherwise you will have issues.

We’re scaling in a very phased process, running dev test environment with just a small three node cluster, but gradually shifting.

I've never had to use it.

It was pretty straightforward, but we had some issues with drivers, although nothing in the setup. After some time, we were losing some disks that was because of driver issues.

Previously, we couldn’t consolidate more workloads on different types of storage. Now with VSAN, we have the ability to virtualize across multiple data centers.

It's currently doing everything we've ask of it and it meets all our needs right now. To be honest, I don’t think too much about the future of the product or what we might need it to do as our requirements change.

It's got good stability - 10/10.

It's got good scalability - 10/10.

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They are good – the response time is quick. You pay for it, but they are good.

No previous solution was used.

It was simple and straightforward.

We've implemented it both on our own and with a vendor team, and it's straightforward with both.

No other options were looked, but peer reviews are important. My peer reviews are usually on social media channels, but it's important.

Product knowledge is the most important criteria we look for when selecting a vendor.

Try it and evaluate it – it's not a fit for every company, but you should at least do an evaluation to see if it is a fit.

Simple to set up, manage, and integrate it with tools you’re already familiar (vCenter, vClient) with.

It also gives us a policy-based storage on a per-VM level.

Also if you can apply redundancies to machines, they’re all different.

• All built within hypervisor
• Easily stood up with hardware you already have
• Truly virtualized storage
• Get rid of all hardware, and you get a much smaller footprint
• Nodes can be in different datacenter, and so can stretch cluster

• Good job integrating with vRealize, vCOPS, etc.
• Needs complete integration with vRealize for GUI for drill down analysis
• Would be nice to see features like dedupe because it wastes a lot of mass when striping across multiple nodes and vSphere hosts.

Some difficulty finding compatible hardware, but if you follow the HCL provided by VMware. and make sure you're buying the correct nodes, storage devices, and SSD’s that are all supported, then it’s a stable product. Even if you have problems, it's still only one phonecall.

It supports up to 64 nodes so huge scalability.

As a VMware customer for many years, sometimes it takes a few calls, but they have some brilliant people who can solve difficult technical problems.

• Setup just a few clicks after hardware all connected, “pretty stupid easy”.
• Customers can test and validate without going out and buying vSAN ready nodes.

It loses points because it lacks lots of performance and deduplication abilities that competitors have.

• It's easy to implement.
• It performs very well.

The total cost of ownership, as it's really cheap for us and we have budgetary constraints. Plus, as we're a hospital, doctors need to access their patient data quickly, which VSAN allows them to do.

We haven’t had an issue and we've been using it for about six months now.

I find it’s easy to scale, so if you need 100 more VMs, you know the amount of users per node, and you know exactly how much it’s going to cost you to scale up.

Never had an issue.

The only thing is that as we were early adopters, we found tech support was difficult to deal with because our hardware was Cisco, and they didn’t know what we were talking about.

We had one issue with an MTU, but it didn't take me even a day to set up.

Basically we're a one man shop – we like to keep our list short and simple: VMWare and Cisco.

Try it out. It’s worth it.

• 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.

• Integration with VMware vSphere
• It’s simple to manage
• It’s a relatively inexpensive for a SAN solution
• Good performance based on testing

We just started implementation, so it's hard to give our perspective as we're still doing our evaluation. We purchased the product, and we have ten-fold service on it.

If it works out well, storage is our most important element of our infrastructure. We're looking for a stable and high performing solution and think this is it.

I'd like to see support for iSCI. Right now it’s all internal protocols, and they promise it in the next version. They need to support more types of hardware – the list is too narrow.

It's stable, but it's really picky on the hardware. We knew that going in, but the scale was a surprise, not truly as agnostic as we thought it would be. They have a list, and if you deviate a bit, then it won’t support the environment. We had an issue where we deviated slightly, so we probably will have to follow their hardware compatibility list.

Very scalable, it's one of the reasons we bought it. They are in v2.0, and we feel like now it’s mature.

Support is generally good, but a little slow sometimes. You need to stick to their compatibility list if you want their full support.

We were using EMC and we knew we needed something new. Cost is important to look at, because we're nonprofit, as well as the integration with the other VMware products, and the stability of the product too.

Setup is very straightforward.

It’s a good solution – the trend is going towards converged infrastructure. It's all policy based – you can set general policy and then trust VSAN to do everything else.

Scalability, and flexibility.

My conversations, now, have to do with trying to help customers on how to grow with VSAN.

It offers a lower cost of growth for a lot of our customers. They can meet immediate needs, but don’t need to spend a lot of money now. Balancing between capital budget and operational budget, instead of buying SAN to SAN, they can buy what they need now and then have operational costs after that.

If you don't have vRealize Operations, it would detract from usability of VSAN. It allows our customers to see more granularly than other storage solutions.

Never used. Last week, I got in touch with a channel partner, and he talked about different tools and different things they had implemented. Our team excited about it because there we don’t have many resources, but now we have with channel partner.

We set it up for our healthcare customer with our in-house team only.

Look outside of upfraont costs, because it’ll be equivalent to Nutanix. Its biggest value is its scalability. You can buy a little bit, and not a whole infrastructure box when you want to grow. Customers can just spin up half a dozen additional hosts quickly of they want.

I have a lot of confidence in it, but it’s a challenge to convince customers because they’re intrigued but don’t want to take the steps. All the specs and concept of having storage within servers is interesting to customers, but not ready to pull trigger. If we can sell more with Horizon, then licenses included for pricing, and must refresh hosts anyways.

• It's consistent in that our team is able to stand it up on a regular basis.
• Our system now has continuity.
• It provides uniform performance.

We've decreased the time it takes for us to roll out new solutions. It's sped up that process for us.

It needs to allow for more customizations and individualization specific to each user.

It needs to be more malleable and adjustable to changing requirements. There are too many hard-set limitations.

We've used it for two months.

It's not a consideration, because in my impression VSAN is deployed in set-sizing and is not customizable.

Zero issues with tech support. Our TAM answers after some time, but it's not a negative because they're dedicated just to our company.

It's not difficult, but there are still limitations even in in-depth white papers because it's so new.

It's not enterprise class yet because it's a new iteration and a work in progress. Just make sure it fits and meets your requirements.