VMware vSAN Reviews

We are using it for the consolidation of compute, network, and storage.

For VMware, we're mostly using on-premises deployment.

It is very well known in the industry, and there are a lot of technical resources around it. This is a big thing for me because, at the end of the day, when you implement it, you need to support it.

It is easy to use and easy to implement.

The big thing is pricing, and the rest of it is mostly good. From a scalability point of view, scaling the storage from network or compute should be easier. It is again all around the cost, and it would be good if it was easier to scale your storage separately from your compute. One of the things that I have observed is that when you start off, you've got too much storage, and over time, you've got less storage, and you have to build new clusters to scale. So, if you can scale compute and storage, it would be good. I know it is scalable separately, but it is a complex process.

I have been using this solution for more than 10 years.

It is pretty scalable. 

Currently, we've deployed VxRail, and it comes with everything. So, support is good.

We used Nutanix with VMware for about a year, and then we switched over to the packaged solution with VMware. 

Dell has got a product called VxRail, which incorporates vSAN. So, it's a packaged solution. We've now implemented VxRail, and it is a new experience with them. VxRail is an all-in solution, but there might be an additional cost that you have to pay to get the support at the vSAN level.

It is easy to implement, but for big organizations with multiple products, it becomes complicated. If you're going to have different clusters for your databases and workload, then setting up and deploying it could become complex. 

Its price could be improved. 

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

Our company works in a multi-cloud model, hybrid environment using both the hyperscalers AWS and Azure with a combination of public and private clouds. Our organization is an integrator so VMware vSAN is used for our end customer.

VMware vSAN is used for VM workloads. We show our customers that they do not need to keep everything on-premises and that they can move not critical data to minimize data compliance security. We move them to a public cloud with the two hyperscalers. For workloads that they are not comfortable keeping in a public cloud, we recommend using a hybrid model. My use cases deal with virtual workloads, retailing and manufacturing solutions.

VMware vSAN is easy to configure, with basic functionality and the customer can maintain the solution.

The only thing that can be improved is the cost.

I have been using VMware vSAN for more than two years.

VMware vSAN is stable. We would not recommend it to so many of our partners if it were not. It is foolproof; it's on multiple workloads.

The solution is scalable. Our customers have varying workloads, so we use the combination of on-premises and hybrid cloud, moving from private to public, and public to private so the scalability is always there. 

We have in-house support for normal operational transactions. We also have a contract with VMware vSAN. Even our end customers have direct support contracts for the solution. Normally escalations to VMware support have to do with product bugs, a defect, or an engineering issue. 

Our team deploys the solution in the customer's environment. We use VMware administrators to manage the storage. They have a combination of storage and VMware background. Our virtualization administrator is VMware certified and cross-trained with the storage administrator to increase productivity. 

VMware vSAN is less expensive than having a traditional three-tier solution or a full virtual VFX using a hyper-converged soluton. The cost is still too high and should be lower.

VMware vSAN is not right for all types of use cases. It is specific to an opportunity if the customer is looking at an interim solution and wants to keep the costs low. This environment is more to do with development testing.

VMware vSAN is a good fit if you are looking at security and scale. In an environment that is more productive and needs better performance, this solution may not be the right fit.

I would rate this solution a 9 out of 10.

The majority of our customers already vSphere in their infrastructure, so we usually upgrade the infrastructure by adding new hardware, or we migrate to a hyperconverged solution with vSAN ReadyNode and VxRail in some cases.

The vSAN storage cluster is the most interesting feature.

Many VMware products are specialized, where one solution does one thing and another does something else. It would be better if VMware consolidated these products and offered modules or add-ons instead of selling 10 different solutions.

Also, a vSAN cluster must have compression and deduplication to be an all-flash array, but it's not supported with a hybrid array. Deduplication and compression work better with an all-flash array, so I think that VMware should give customers the option to activate and support this feature for hybrid arrays. Other products like Nutanix support this.

We first implemented vSAN about three or four years ago.

We had some complaints about the recent firmware update. 

I think vSAN is more scalable than some solutions we've tried. We don't have the same issues as we do with VxRail. It's less of a concern because the software is more independent of the hardware.

I've never had to contact support. 

Our engineers have a lot of experience with vSAN, so we think it's easy to implement. One person is usually enough to set up the solution and apply updates. 

I rate VMware vSAN eight out of 10. In my opinion, vSAN is the most natural way to migrate to a fully hyperconverged solution. If a customer needs a more scalable solution with consolidated management, vSAN is excellent. It causes fewer disruptions from changing the administration. You need about the same amount of knowledge and expertise as vSphere.

We are a university and we initially designed our data center such that it would be centralized, between branch offices and headquarters. There is a small data center in each branch but we're not interested in having local storage in every one of the branches.

Our plan is to purchase three physical hosts and deploy them with VMware, using vSAN to create virtual storage using each physical host's internal storage. 

The backup features and monitoring features are good.

We would like to see additional backup and recovery options added. In particular, integration with popular applications like databases.

We evaluated and deployed VMware vSAN but have not yet deployed it for production. We will be doing so within the next six months.

This is a stable product. We have been testing it extensively.

Scalability is based on your hardware. We can scale the hardware and then it only requires extending the license.

At this point, we have not had a very heavy workload. We plan to increase our usage once it goes into production.

There is approximately 50 IT staff that have access to it. Our users will include between 30,000 and 35,000 students, and approximately 3,000 staff made up of instructors and doctors. 

The technical support is good. The Ministry of Education has established contracts with all of our vendors including VMware, Microsoft, Oracle, and others. They provide us with 24/7 premium support.

We expect to rely on support for our migration to production. As part of our implementation, we have to redesign the centralized servers for a distributed environment. This includes Active Directory, Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager, and others. We don't have experience in this area. We can handle the daily operations but we lack design experience.

We implemented a PoC for Nutanix but did not test it in a production environment. I have done a little bit of work with Hyper-V but otherwise, I have only worked on traditional architectures.

There is not a lot of maintenance required.

We pay a yearly licensing fee. There are no costs in addition to the standard licensing fees because they are standardized and negotiated by the Ministry of Education.

We provided the sizing and after that, the Ministry arranged for the correct licensing.

We evaluated Nutanix and other hyper-converged solutions, but we choose VMware vSAN.

This is a product that I recommend. My advice for anybody who is implementing it is to use a hybrid or private cloud. It's scalable, robust, and secure. Do not go back to the old technologies. Instead, focus on security and a good design. Having a good design will save in terms of cost.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

VMware vSAN is our hypervisor and we are using it for all our applications.

We are facing some problems with updates with the VMware vSAN. When we upgraded from version 6.5 to 7, we have been faced with many problems. They have been deploying many hotfixes for this version, and they need to continue to improve this version.

I have been using VMware vSAN for approximately three years.

VMware vSAN is a stable solution.

The solution is scalable.

We have approximately 1,000 users using this solution.

VMware is the host of all of our servers. We have many kinds of servers, such as application, service, call manager, and mail servers. Many users use these servers from all the titles in the company. We use this solution every day in our company.

When we faced some problems, we opened support tickets with VMware, and their support was very fast. They were able to fix the problems we had.

We were previously using Microsoft Hyper-V.

VMware vSAN is more professional than Microsoft Hyper-V for this kind of application. The scalability for VMware is better than  Microsoft. There are limitations in Microsoft Hyper-V. and many applications support VMware vSAN, such as Oracle, Cisco, and Linux.

The implementation is simple, it was very straightforward. It took us approximately three weeks because it was installed in four locations.

We used a consultants company called Adaptive here in Cairo, Egypt for the installation.

The consultant was very good, and their information was perfect. They were very helpful to us.

We have a two-person technical team that supports this solution.

There is a license to use this solution and we pay approximately $30,000 annually. There were not any additional fees required other than the license. The solution is expensive.

I can recommend VMware vSAN if there are problems that they face, such as limitations for their applications. It would be good to use VMware vSAN. If they have not found limitations in their operating system while working with Windows, they can use Microsoft Hyper-V instead.

I rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten.

VMware vSAN is a global solution, so we can manage all the storage solutions in one place. It's embedded in VCI solutions. 

When you upgrade the vSAN, there are some issues like lost data and problems with the log. The log disappears. When you upgrade the solution, you must have several logs, so if you have some problems, you can check the log server to find them. But this solution has some improvements, like its snapshot feature. When you have to upgrade the version, vSAN makes a snapshot, and if there is a problem, you can revert to the old version.

The company has been using vSAN for about 18 or 19 months. 

vSAN isn't very stable. 

It's easy to manage and scale vSAN. We can increase the volume as necessary for the VM or the user. We have around 2,000 users. Right now, we're not planning to increase usage yet, but maybe we will take another look in six months to see if we need to scale the solution or not.

I'm satisfied with VMware support. 

If you have some networking skills, it's straightforward to install, deploy, and manage vSAN. 
We have three engineers maintaining all the VSI and vSAN solutions as well as all the features and management components.

We're looking for another solution like Nutanix to use concurrently with vSAN. Nutanix is more efficient but also more expensive. Nutanix is a little more stable, efficient, and simple to manage. However, I expect VMware and EMC will improve soon. I think in the next year, VMware's solution will become more stable and easier to manage.

This solution has improved our organization by allowing us to implement more quickly, and to ease the maintenance. However, it doesn't change the internal organization much.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the simplicity to implement and to maintain.

One area that could be improved is the management feature. The link between the virtualization layer and the application layer can be improved as well.

An additional feature I would like to see in the next release is integration between virtualization with vSAN and network virtualization.

I've been using the solution for the last three years.

My impression of the stability is that it's a very good solution for our usage.

For the product cloud, scalability is okay. However, when we try to use a larger cloud, we can add more new nodes into the same vSAN configuration.

Every year, our number of users increases.

The customer support is very good, depending on the contract support that you supply. We are using a premium support and the quality is quite good.

The complexity of the initial setup is not really on the VMware, but only the hyper-layer because we need to check if the hyper-layer, underlying VMware are strictly compatible.

For the first implementation, it took more or less one year, but now it takes much less time to add new material and new configuration.

In the beginning, we saw a huge return on investment from VMware, from 10 years ago to five years ago, but now we are used to the product. So the ROI doesn't make much enough for us because we only use vSAN. Now VMware is the baseline.

The product is quite expensive, regarding the open-source solution.

The cost of the solution is a mixture of monthly user and licenses purchasing. So for the internal user, we use licenses purchasing. For an external customer, we use the Pay-Per-View model.

Before choosing VMware, we evaluated Microsoft Nutanix and Cisco HyperFlex. VMware design is more mature than the other solutions, generally.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We use VMware vSAN to manage our resources. It has secured our resources, such as power and server management. We needed one console that can manage all the servers.

The interface is a little complicated, it could be simplified with more graphical gadgets. We have many servers, and the built-in functions, such as rate configuration, are a bit complex.

I have been using VMware vSAN for approximately 11 years.

VMware vSAN is stable.

I have found VMware vSAN to be scalable.

We have approximately 50 people using this solution in my organization.

The technical support is good. We are always thankful for the technical support from VMware. They are very supportive when we have a technical problem.

The initial setup is easy because our architecture is simple.

Our architecture is very simple to understand a new version. We only need to document all the configurations of the servers with all the maps that are designed. Any new person can understand fully within a day. However, we need more simplified versions of VMware vSAN in the future.

VMware vSAN is a little bit expensive and we pay annually. We have an educational institute where we receive discount prices from VMware. We do receive a reasonable discount but it's still expensive.

I advise those people that have a large amount of data and they need very fast retrievals, they must use the scalable feature of VMware vSAN.

I am fully satisfied with VMware vSAN.

I rate VMware vSAN a nine out of ten.

We usually use it for any workload virtualization, data center virtualization, and storage. We use it for our software-defined storage and when a customer needs scalable storage. Data center modernization is also a use case for it.

I am using its latest version.

The scalability of the solution is most valuable.

They can improve the manageability of the solution to make it more simple. It is not that complicated, but it will be good if they can make it more simple.

I have been using this solution for almost three years.

It is stable, and its performance is very good.

It is really scalable. We have five to six administrators and implementers who work with this solution.

They are supportive. They are good in their support.

In my previous company, I worked with Nutanix. In my current company, I'm working with vSAN. Nutanix is much simpler from an interface point of view. vSAN, as a part of VMware, has more maturity in terms of features and software-defined data center journey. VMware is more mature than Nutanix in this area.

It is straightforward. It took two to three days.

In terms of maintenance, it requires the usual day-to-day maintenance. It sometimes requires some kind of support.

We installed it ourselves.

It is not that expensive, and it is not even cheap. If it is designed in a proper way, it has good pricing, but if you do oversizing, the price will be high. There are different licensing models.

I would advise others to do proper sizing and look at the features that they want to include or not include. They need to first understand their business needs and then do the sizing. This way they will get a good solution.

I would rate VMware vSAN a nine out of 10.

We're primarily using this solution for VDI.

Previously, we were using three-tier architecture. Therefore, we would have three different consoles. However, after adopting a CA solution, we are only on a single console and we have cut down the EU engineers we needed as we didn't require multiple engineers for managing multiple layers. Now, we have a single engineer who can manage everything from the top layer from a single console.

The single console for management is the most valuable aspect of the solution. 

The initial setup is very simple. 

The solution has been quite stable.

I have found the solution to be scalable.

VMware is currently working on quite a lot of improvements and they're coming out with lots of novel features in their new releases. There's only one improvement area, and that is it needs a little bit more software and hardware to make it similar to Nutanix.

The pricing could be better when it comes to renewing the licenses. 

Technical support could have a faster response time.

It's hard to come up with an exact feature that might be good to include in a future release, as each customer is different and each customer likely has different feature needs.

I've been using the solution for almost four years at this point. It's been a while now. 

The solution is very stable. We have been using VMware for almost more than 10 years and there have been no issues regarding VMware products. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable.

The solution is scalable. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so. 

Technical support is quite good. Occasionally, it could be faster sometimes, however, largely, I have been pleased with the level of response I get. 

The product's initial setup is not overly complex or difficult. I found it to be straightforward and relatively easy. A company shouldn't have any issues with the setup process. 

When it comes to the renewal of the license, it's a very expensive solution.

We require price protection. VMware doesn't provide price protection. Many other products provide that, however, it's not something that VMware does.

We're a VMware partner. 

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

If you are using VMware for a long time, there is no need to change your platform, and you can easily add vSAN as a solution. On top of that, there are multiple tools available to be able to have a hybrid cloud solution available for vSAN. If you go with the VMware Cloud, you've got the SCA as well as a hybrid cloud solution in a single product. If you are not willing to use VMware, then you can definitely choose either Nutanix or maybe a Microsoft option or any number of other solutions that may be available in the market.