VMware vSAN Reviews

The user-friendliness could be better. 

The solution is quite pricey in comparison with other products, such as HP or Cisco. 

While I like the replication and compression features, there is a problem with them running too slowly. This is not of benefit to the customers, but it is important when it comes to migrating. 

I've been using VMware vSAN for around two years.

The solution is stable. 

It is difficult for me to comment on the technical support, as we are not the customer or user. 

The complexity of the initial setup varies with the customer. 

In comparison with other solutions, such as HP or Cisco, I find the solution to be quite pricey.

HP and Cisco have lower priced solutions than VMware vSAN, which I find to be quite pricey. 

I think I am satisfied with the product. I would say it is so so. 

I rate VMware vSAN as a seven out of ten. 

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.

• 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 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.

VMware vSAN is software-defined storage. I think that says it all. You don't have to buy additional external storage, and you can manage all the storage entities from the console. That's very important to our customers.

vSAN is very integrated.

Ease of administration is one area where vSAN could be improved. 

We've been using vSAN for probably four to five years.

For our purposes, vSAN's stability is okay.

vSAN is scalable.

As far as I know, any VMware tickets that we've escalated have been handled professionally. and their support team is very skilled.

It's straightforward. Because we are deploying it from the VxRail global setup, there is no dedicated vSAN setup that we are providing. It's all integrated into the VxRail setup. However, installing vSAN itself can be quite complex if you're doing it from scratch.

I rate vSAN eight out of 10. I would recommend it to others. 

We primarily use this solution for consolidation on the cloud.

The most valuable feature is the ability to continue our business needs and have higher visibility. It has definitely increased our business productivity levels. 

I would love for this product to be cheaper and easier to configure.

It is a very stable and strong product that is easily deliverable to our users.

I know it can scale up or scale out but I have not had the need to do so.

We also evaluated Dell EMC before choosing this solution. 

Because our company is an architecting company, we require a lot of IOPS going from the server side to the clients who are using the models. They require faster transactions and that's the reason we thought of having a type of HCI solution. That's why we went with the vSAN solution.

Previously, we were going to use traditional systems, so when vSAN was launched it gave us a lot of value. The admins have been able to relax a bit, they don't have as many outages to deal with.

We want see a better monitoring tool in vSAN. Monitoring is not that great as of now because it shows us false alarms in the Health status. We would like that to be improved.

It's pretty much stable for us now, apart from some of the issues which can be tackled. But 80 percent of the time it's stable. The issues are probably on our end, network issues. That's what we have figure out.

We don't scale that much because we have a three-year refresh time. We tend to acquire for how much we predict we will scale up in the next three years.

We have used technical support quite a few times but not frequently. We have had a good experience with them. We usually get good engineers on our calls.

Initially, it was quite difficult to understand the solution because we tend to do a PoC. Later on we got used to it. Now it's quite easy for us, but at first it was not easy. We now have about 48 locations where we have deployed vSAN.

When vSAN was introduced we were quite excited about it. We were looking for something that was not traditional and we wanted something hyperconverged. vSAN was a perfect fit for us.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. To get to a ten it would need improvement in the Health status checkup.

The most valuable features are:

• Automation
• RecoverPoint for VMware
• Self-healing capability

In a production environment, these features ramp up the provisioning, security and provides faster deployment.

There is not much improvement needed. If you work with the HC Platform, vSAN is not directly touched, i.e., once the HC appliance takes care of it.

I have worked with VxRail, which is a Hyper converged Platform, as it has vSAN embedded as well as it is fully automated the vSAN configuration.

As I did not work with the implementation, but the analyses of functionalities of VxRAIL, would be unfair tell how vSAN would be improved.

I have used this solution for nine months (but only for sales proposal, it has not been implemented, just technical sales information).

I did not encounter any stability issues.

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

Always when I was in need of any technical support, I was promptly answered by them.

As I have worked with the HC Platform, the setup was very simple and easy.

For Latin America, the costs are very higher; even if you go deep on functionalities, but still it is sellable.

Work hard on the sizing matters.