VMware vSAN Reviews and Pricing

IT Specialist at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 9, 2015

Even as we anticipate an increase in the number of users, it's allowed us to simplify our infrastructure, although it currently has no data deduplication feature.

What is most valuable?

Performance
High Availability

How has it helped my organization?

It's relatively low-cost for a high-performance solution. By using VSAN, we've been able to simplify our infrastructure considerably.

What needs improvement?

VSAN currently has no data deduplication, and having such a feature would both be an improvement and provide a feature that Nutanix has.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

N/A

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What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is very good.

Having now deployed it, it's actually difficult to have any downtime or to even lose data.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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.

How are customer service and support?

Customer Service:

N/A

Technical Support:

Tech support is very good as they're responsive.

We have the Technical Account Manager service, which is very helpful.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

N/A

How was the initial setup?

Setup was not complex at all, was very straightforward, and was easily implemented by everyone on the team.

What about the implementation team?

We implemented it with out in-house team.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We chose VSAN based on a POC. We looked at Nutanix, but VSAN was more robust for our needs and less expensive.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user312501

Director Of IT Infrastructure and Operations at a university with 501-1,000 employees

Oct 9, 2015

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Storage is the most important element of our infrastructure, and this solution provides us stability and high performance. The supported-hardware list is too narrow, however.

What is most valuable?

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.

How has it helped my organization?

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.

What needs improvement?

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.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

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.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

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

How are customer service and technical support?

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

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

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.

How was the initial setup?

Setup is very straightforward.

What other advice do I have?

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.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

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September 2025

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it_user101577

VMware Pre-Sales Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 9, 2015

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For my customers who must balance capital and operational budgets, it allows them to buy only what they need now and then grow as needed. However, not having VRealize detracts from its usability.

Valuable Features

Scalability, and flexibility.

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

Improvements to My Organization

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.

Room for Improvement

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.

Customer Service and Technical Support

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.

Implementation Team

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

Other Advice

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.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. We're a VMware Partner

it_user316464

Technology Architect at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

Oct 9, 2015

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With it, we're now able to roll out new solutions in less time, although it needs to allow for enough customization and individualization for specific user requirements.

Valuable Features

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.

Improvements to My Organization

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

Room for Improvement

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.

Use of Solution

We've used it for two months.

Scalability Issues

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

Customer Service and Technical Support

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.

Initial Setup

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

Other Advice

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.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user315723

Systems Engineer at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 9, 2015

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We've gotten rid of shared storage, which is a better solution than an all-flash array. I've heard, however, that maintenance of it causes stability issues.

Valuable Features

Getting rid of sharing storage, especially VSAN 6. That would be even better than having an all-flash array.

Stability Issues

I hear a lot of issues of stability whenever you go to maintenance, but people who are having spectacular experiences are not speaking the loudest so it can be hard to tell.

Scalability Issues

I haven’t looked at configuration maximums but it seems like you can scale it up pretty hard in terms of clusters with vSphere 6.

Customer Service and Technical Support

Customer Service:

In general, VMware customer support is world class. Response time is really quick – you get connected to experts much faster than in other companies, like Microsoft for example.

Technical Support:

All I've seen is community support, especially from bloggers and community experts. I haven’t had any experience.

Initial Setup

It's not very different than vSphere 3. If you're comfortable with VMware it’s straightforward. From what Ive seen, it’s a simple install once you have all the hardware. I have heard you have to tweak it performance wise.

Other Advice

Support is up there in the top five things to look at. If you can call, have online communities, easy access to articles. I would also add that if you can get through to someone who has deep knowledge of the product quickly.

Stability, the issue that we have run into is that they are fly-by-night brand new startups and you can get stranded without support.

You need to vet the company, they need to be around in a few weeks to help you. Also, peer reviews are very important – invaluable. Salesmen will tell you everything, we look at whitepapers and vendor supplied information. Google is your friend.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user237264

IT Administrator and Sr. VMware Engineer at a retailer with 501-1,000 employees

Aug 30, 2015

It supports two architectures (hybrid and All-Flash), which is useful for all virtualized applications, including business-critical applications.

Originally posted in Spanish at https://www.rhpware.com/2015/02/introduccion-vmware...

The second generation of Virtual SAN is the vSphere 6.0 that comes with sharing the same version number. While the jump from version 1.0 (vSphere 5.5) 6.0 to change really worth it occurred, as this second-generation converged storage integrated into the VMware hypervisor significantly increases performance and features that are based on a much higher performance and increased workloads scale business level, including business-critical applications and Tier 1 capital.

Virtual SAN 6.0 delivers a new architecture based entirely on Flash to deliver high performance and predictable response times below one millisecond in almost all business critical applications level. This is also achieved because in this version doubles the scalability up to 64 nodes per host and up to 200 VMs per host, as well as improvements in technology snapshots and cloning.

Performance characteristics

The hybrid architecture of Virtual SAN 6.0 provides performance improvements of nearly double compared to the previous version and 6.0 Virtual SAN architecture all-flash four times the performance considering the number of IOPS you get in clusters with similar workloads predictable and low latency.

As the hyper convergent architecture is included in the hypervisor efficiently optimizes the ratio of operations of I/O and dramatically minimizes the impact on the CPU, which leads to products from other companies. The distributed architecture based on the hypervisor reduces bottlenecks allowing Virtual SAN move data and run operations I/O in a much more streamlined and very low latencies, without compromising the computing resources of the platform and keeping the consolidation of the VM's. Also the data store Virtual SAN is highly resilient, resulting in preventing data loss in case of physical failure of disk, hosts, network or racks.

The Virtual SAN distributed architecture allows you to scale elastically uninterrupted. Both capacity and performance can be scaled at the same time when a new host is added to a cluster, and can also scale independently simply by adding disks existing hosts.

New capabilities

The major new capabilities of Virtual SAN 6.0 features include:

Virtual Architecture SAN All-Flash: Virtual SAN 6.0 has the ability to create an all-flash architecture in which the solid state devices are used wisely and work as write cache. Using PCI-E devices high performance read / write intensive, economical flash storage devices and data persistence is achieved at affordable costs

Virtual SAN 6.0 All-Flash predictable levels of performance achieved up to 100,000 IOPS per host and response times below one millisecond, making it ideal for critical workloads. - See more at: https://www.rhpware.com/2015/02/introduccion-vmware...

Doubling the scalability

This version duplicates the capabilities of the previous version:

Scaling up to 64 nodes per cluster
Scaling up to 200 VMs per host, both hybrid and All-Flash architectures
Size of the virtual disks increased to 62TB

Performance improvements

Duplicate IOPS with hybrid architectures. Virtual SAN 6.0 Hybrid achieves more than 4 million IOPS for read-only loads and 1.2 million IOPS for mixed workloads on a cluster of 32 hosts
IOPS quadruples with architecture All-Flash: Virtual SAN 6.0 All-Flash achieves up to 100,000 IOPS per host
Virtual SAN File System: The new disk format enables more efficient operations and higher performance, plus scalar much simpler way
Virtual SAN Snapshots and Clones: highly efficient snapshots and clones are supported with support for up to 32 snapshots per clone per VM and 16,000 snapshots per clone per cluster
Fault Tolerance Rack: the Virtual SAN 6.0 Fault Domains allow fault-tolerant level rack and power failures in addition to the disk, network and hardware hosts

Support for systems with high-density disks Direct-Attached JBOD: You can manage external storage systems and eliminate the costs associated with architectures based blades or knives
Capacity planning: You can make the type scenario analyses "what if" and generate reports on the use and capacity utilization of a Virtual SAN data store when a virtual machine is created with associated storage policies
Improving services associated disk: Troubleshooting and associated services is added to the drives to give customers the possibility to identify and fix disks attached directly to hosts:
LED fault indicators. magnetic or solid state devices having permanent faults lit LEDs to identify quickly and easily
Manual operation LED indicators: this is provided to turn on or off the LED and identify a particular device
Mark as SSD drives: you can make devices not recognized as SSDs
Mark as local disks: You can dial without recognizing flash drives as local disks to be recognized for vSphere hosts
Evacuation of disks and disk groups: the evacuation data disks or disk groups are removed from the system to prevent the loss of data supports
Virtual SAN Health Services: This service is designed to provide bug fixes and generate health reports vSphere administrators about Virtual SAN subsystems 6.0 and its dependencies, such as:
- Health Cluster
- Network Health
- Health Data
- Limits Health
- Physical Disk Health

Buyers

Requirements vSphere

Virtual SAN 6.0 requires vCenter Server 6.0. Both the Windows version as visa Virtual SAN can handle. Virtual SAN 6.0 is configurable and monitored exclusively through vSphere Web Client. It also requires a minimum of 3 vSphere hosts with local storage. This amount is not arbitrary, but is used for the cluster meets the fault tolerance requirements of at least one host, a disc network failure.

Storage System Requirements

Disk controllers

Each vSphere host own contribution to the cluster storage Virtual SAN requires a driver disk, which can be SAS, SATA (HBA) or RAID controller. However, a RAID controller must operate in any of the following ways:

Pass-through
RAID 0

The Pass-through (JBOD or HBA) is the preferred mode settings 6.0 Virtual SAN that enables managing RAID configurations the attributes of storage policies and performance requirements defined in a virtual machine

Magnetic devices

When the hybrid architecture of Virtual SAN 6.0 is used, each vSphere host must have at least one SAS, NL-SAS or SATA disk in order to participate in the Virtual Cluster SAN cluster.

flash devices

In architecture-based flash drives 6.0 Virtual SAN devices can be used as a layer of cache as well as for persistent storage. In hybrid architectures each host must have at least a flash based (SAS, SATA or PCI-E) in order to participate in the Virtual SAN disk cluster.

In the All-flash architecture each vSphere host must have at least one flash based device marked as device capacity and one for performance in order to participate Virtual SAN cluster.

Networking requirements

Network Interface Cards (NIC)

In hybrid architectures Virtual SAN, each vSphere host must have at least one network adapter 1Gb or 10Gb. VMware's recommendation is 10 Gb.

The All-flash architectures only support 10Gb Ethernet NICs. For redundancy and high availability, you can configure NIC Teaming per host. NIC Teaming is not supported for link aggregation (performance).

Virtual Switches

Virtual SAN 6.0 is supported by both VMware vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) and the vSphere Standard Switch (VSS). Other virtual switches are not supported in this release.

VMkernel network

You must create a VMkernel port on each host for communicating and labelled for Virtual SAN Virtual SAN traffic. This new interface is used for intracluster communications as well as for read and write operations when a vSphere cluster host is the owner of a particular VM but the current data blocks are housed in a remote cluster host.

In this case, the operations of I / O network must travel through the cluster hosts. If this network interface on a vDS is created, you can use the Network feature I / O control to configure shares or reservations for Virtual SAN traffic.

Conclusion

This new second generation Virtual SAN is a storage solution enterprise-class hypervisor level that combines computing resources and storage from the hosts. With its two supported architectures (hybrid and All-Flash) Virtual SAN 6.0 meets the demands of all virtualized applications, including business-critical applications.

Without doubt Virtual SAN 6.0 is a storage solution that realizes the VMWare defined storage software or SDS (Software Defined Storage) offering great benefits to both customers and the vSphere administrators who every day we face new challenges and complexities. It certainly is an architecture that will change the vision of storage systems from now on.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user280782

Cloud consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Jul 30, 2015

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It gives us the ability to manage capacity and performance in a linear fashion, but management (dashboard, alerts, monitoring) needs improvement.

What is most valuable?

vMotion and the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) load-balancing resources are the most valuable features.

How has it helped my organization?

We can manage capacity and performance in linear fashion.

We get better performance with a better cost efficiency.

What needs improvement?

The management of vSAN (dashboard, alerts, monitoring) has a significant amount of growth potential.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

No issues encountered.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

The stability is dependent on how we scale and stabilize I/O across the host(s). We have encountered issues, but have worked through them.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

There are no issues because it is linear.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Prior to VSAN, we used SAN Storage, and we switched because we needed a more cost-effective solution for our cloud environment, coupled with easy scalability. Currently, SAN Storage has risks and bottlenecks, due to having only two storage processors which are not enough to handle our needs.

How was the initial setup?

It was straightforward.

What about the implementation team?

We implemented in-house.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

NetApp
Nutanix

What other advice do I have?

Make sure you size correctly when you do the initial implementation.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.

it_user234747

Practice Manager - Cloud, Automation & DevOps at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

May 17, 2015

VMware I/O Analyser Fling vs. Iometer

Originally posted at vcdx133.com.

I previously posted about my “Baby Dragon Triplets” VSAN Home Lab that I recently built. One of the design requirements was to meet 5,000 IOPS @ 4K 50/50 R/W, 100% Random, which from the performance testing below has been met.

The performance testing was executed with two tools:

VMware I/O Analyser Fling – Excellent tool that collects esxtop data as well; if you need fast and easy storage performance testing, keep this in your toolkit.
Iometer configured as per the VMware 2M IOPS with VSAN announcement

Iometer – Test configuration

Iometer – Results

VMware I/O Analyser – Test configuration

VMware I/O Analyser – Results

Observations

The realistic Iometer results were significantly lower compared to the same settings with the VMware I/O Analyser results. This is because the Iometer config was with 8 x 8GB disks and the VMware I/O Analyser was testing with the default 100MB disk. If you use VMware I/O Analyser, make sure you extend the 100MB disk to 8GB (as per User Manual that comes with the Fling). You can see the lower latency due to less parallel I/O over the smaller address space.
Due to the small size of workloads, all storage tested was SSD and not SATA. Switching from VSS to VDS with LBT had no improvement on performance. Network Throughput was around 20MB/s for the VSAN VMkernel. The Corsair SSD drive is rated at 85,000 IOPS @ 4K 100% Write 100% Random, so with VM config, CPU, RAM, SSD and Network not being the bottleneck, I suspect it is the Z87 Serial ATA controller (or its ESXi driver) that is the limiting factor (even though it is supposed to support 6Gb/s).
I am considering scrapping my ESXi environment to test a single host with Windows Server 2012 and Iometer and then ESXi with SSD (DAS) and Iometer again, just to see if not having VSAN makes a difference.

Disclosure: My company does not have a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer.