VMware vSAN Reviews

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.

We are VMware and Nutanix partners. I'm more into the architecting role. I propose solutions to the customers. I'm not using it as an end-user.

Our customers use it for their core business applications. They use it for production and non-production workloads.

We are mostly working with its latest version.

There are definitely cost benefits. There is also no OEM dependency. I can reach out to any OEM and deploy VMware vSAN. 

Its ease of use is most valuable. It is easy to configure, and there is a unified interface, which makes things slightly easier.

They can be more competitive in terms of pricing.

They should make the software updates easier. We should be able to upgrade it more easily.

If we can have a unified dashboard for managing the public cloud environment, it would be good.

I have been working with this product for more than five years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. We had a maximum of around 10,000 users.

Our delivery team contacts them. Their response time was good enough.

It is not really difficult, but you need a skilled resource to manage that. The deployment duration varies. It usually takes a week or so.

We set it up for our customers. We have around four to five people for deployment and maintenance.

It is slightly expensive. They can be more competitive in terms of pricing.

I would definitely recommend it to others. vSAN is not suitable for all environments. It is better to do the assessment before going ahead with vSAN.

I would rate it a seven out of 10.

We mainly use vSAN for two purposes. One is to improve application performance with the HCI. The second is to migrate customers from legacy storage to high-speed SSD-based infrastructure. They are moving the computer network and storage capacity together. 

The vSAN features we've found most helpful are live application migrations and storage policies. It has storage, policies, application, and DRS policies. Automation is there. 

Also, if a customer wants to go for a VMware stack, vSAN has flexible, completely integrated solutions for two clouds. Stretched Cluster, vMotion, VXLAN—there are so many features. 

We are an IT solution provider, and we've been using VMware for 15 years. 

I would say vSAN is stable. 

Once you develop all three of your stacks, you can plug in the rack servers and all. If you are increasing in parallel, vSAN automatically increases the overall computing capacity of the IT infrastructure in terms of network storage and what you can compute.

Technical support is also good. I would rate VMware support eight out of 10 because nobody is perfect.

Setting up vSAN isn't too tricky. All HCI providers—Microsoft, Cisco, and VMware—have very smooth implementation except for Microsoft storage, which is complex. 

Maintenance is required. Sometimes hard disks crash, but thanks to the mobility and abstraction of the software from the hardware, we can migrate the entire infrastructure layer to some spare PC's main server and perform maintenance. This is the standard patching practice in the industry.

The pricing model is sometimes a challenge for us because their licenses are very costly.

I rate VMware vSAN nine out of 10. I am a VMware fanatic. As a solution architect, I've designed solutions for many customers. Clients have personal preferences, and they're generally swayed by what the vendors tell them, but my perspective is purely technical. If you are going for features, scalability, and performance, VMware is the best solution. 

It's not dependent on any vendor. The VMware layer is there, and VMware is required, but it saves a lot of costs and provides flexibility. Let's say I bought around 10 or 15 servers, and I'm not satisfied with the performance. I can change my server and migrate all my workloads to the new servers in the future.

VMware has an edge in terms of computing and networking because if we are going for a VMware infrastructure solution, there's a storage layer, so it can work with any kind of server or vendor. Suppose I buy some of my servers from Dell, some from HP, and a few from various companies. VMware gives you the flexibility to work with any vendor, networking, switches, and storage. They can come together in a complete software layer. I can have five servers from five different vendors. If I don't like one, I can plug in a server from any vendor in the stack, and it'll work. 

We primarily use the solution on Microsoft Windows Active Directory and loads of applications. Most of our stuff, over 90% of our servers, are on VMware.

The ease of use is great.

The initial setup and upgrade process was pretty straightforward. 

Technical support is great.

The updating process could be easier. It's just a bit more complex. I don't update very often. It's something I do infrequently, and therefore, we haven't got that much experience with it. That said, this Lifecycle looks better. There's a new feature called Lifecycle, which is dealing with the issue sI mainly have.

I haven't done an update yet with the new system. My understanding is it's an improvement from what I can see. 

Guests that are pinned to hosts for various reasons, for antivirus or the backups should be able to be reported that they are being pinned, and also reported if things have snapshots. When you're doing certain things, they don't work so well if you've got snapshots on or if you've got things that are pinned. They can't move. When you're doing things, if there was something that was going to stop it from working that's within VMware, these should automatically be checked. 

The stability of the product is very good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable and the performance is good.

The scalability is quite good. I don't know any others, to be honest. I've never used Hyper-V or any of the others. It's quite a de facto standard so I'm happy enough. I'm not informed as to how difficult or easy it is compared to others.

We'd like to expand in the future. We've tried to utilize it for everything. We can't do that at the moment due to licensing. Not the VMware licensing. It's more due to Oracle.

Technical support is very good. We have two places to get assistance. We have this vendor who supplied the new VMware and installed it and converted it, and we got another supplier who maintains everything and they're both very good. I'd recommend both of them.

The last setup was an upgrade. It's not so complex as we had to upgrade an existing system. It's not overly complex. I'd rate the process at a four out of five. 

The issues we had were mainly due to other things like the backup and data transfer. It wasn't actually to do so much with VMware itself and the other things. It was the transfer of data from one storage device to another and VMware wouldn't let us do it.

The deployment took about two weeks. 

We had a third party do it. They are a lot more experienced than us so we paid them for all the new hardware and we paid for them for the engineering to fit it and install it. We paid for them to convert from the old system to the new system - from the old VMware to the new VMware.

Our experience with them was very good. They were extremely helpful.

I don't deal with the licensing. I can't speak to the costs involved.

I work for the portrait gallery and we just serve our own people. We don't sell to the outside. I don't use it for outside organizations.

I'd advise potential new users to ask around for different suppliers who do it, just do a proper tender on supplying, and just to watch out for, if you're upgrading, how your backup treats the upgrade. That's a problem we had. We have Veeam, which is VMware, however, we made a mistake on using a new machine and trying to move stuff across and Veeam made it more complicated, which we didn't realize would happen. It's caused some issues.

Our experience was good, however, I haven't got enough experience with the outside vendors who do this as I only work for this company and we only do the upgrade once every three years or so. That said, I'd advise users to go with someone who's got a good background or reputation. 

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

We are an implementation partner for VMware vSAN and we use it alongside our hyperconverged infrastructure solutions with products such as Nutanix, HyperFlex, and SimpliVity. It is currently implemented in key areas off-site for over seven customers.

The most valuable thing about vSAN is that all of its features have been working well for us for the past two years. We haven't had an issue with them.

When designing the implementation for vSAN, I have noticed that it requires a minimum of six nodes, and this creates a problem when it comes to maintenance. If, out of the six nodes, I put one node in maintenance mode, then vSAN does not create other VM components. I think the reason for this is that the minimum configuration is a six node arrangement. If any one of the six nodes is put into maintenance mode, we're simply unable to create a VM, but if there are seven nodes in that cluster, then we are able to put one under maintenance. That's one thing that should be looked at.

More generally, the features of vSAN as we see them are dependent on the quality of the storage, since each different storage technology has its own separate features that go along with it.

I have been working with VMware vSAN for at least two years. 

It is a stable product, especially now that we have it fully implemented. However, if any two or three of the nodes go away, vSAN goes down. I think we've had a few VMs where the data has been lost for this reason. I guess that the way it works would be similar to other technologies, but that's what we have observed.

You can increase the compute capability as well as the disk storage, so it is scalable.

I've already escalated the issue regarding the six nodes, which I've mentioned. This has been escalated to VMware and they know that it is a limitation, because apparently it is normal behavior for any nodes that are put in maintenance mode.

The setup is easy.

We have been working with vSAN for the last two years, and we haven't seen too many issues overall, but because of the troubles we have faced with the fact that vSAN doesn't let you put a node in maintenance mode unless you have six or more nodes, I would rate VMware vSAN a six out of ten.

We use it for our whole infrastructure. We use it for about 50 servers.

We are using its latest version.

We use it on three hosts, and we find it very easy to administer.

It is user-friendly, and its performance is good.

It could be cheaper.

We have been using it for two years.

Its stability is good. Its performance is good. We haven't had any breakdown in the last two years. We are very satisfied with the solution.

At the moment, we have a limit because we host 50 servers. We could have a bit more memory, and we have to buy it.

There are 60 users who are using all the servers. Its usage is moderate.

Normally, when we have a problem, we contact the consultant who had set up the system. He can usually fix the problem, but there haven't been many problems since we set up the system.

We used VMware but not vSAN.

Its setup was done by a consultant. It took about one or two days, but I don't remember exactly.

In terms of maintenance, it doesn't require much. We have to update it once in a while. It takes about two or three days a month.

We don't look at these figures. We buy a system and use it. We don't look at the figures like ROI.

It could be cheaper.

We are very satisfied with this solution. I would advise others to go ahead and just use it.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. It is a good product.

All of our customers are either doing virtual storage on the cloud, or they're trying to extend their on-prem storage solution into the cloud. Our typical use case is providing features in the cloud that are typically on-premise, and that includes storage as well. For example, we might have vSAN on-prem storage that the workloads are accessing, and we want to extend it to the cloud to start spanning workloads out there. 

Most customers have a hybrid setup, with some of their infrastructure on-prem and some on the cloud. Other customers are getting out of the data center business altogether and moving everything into the cloud.

There is a lot that VMware could improve from a marketing perspective. The cloud is still new for many people, so extending storage should be effortless. It shouldn't be so complicated to extend the storage so workloads can access it no matter where they go. 

When you're moving a workload, you don't want to worry about whether the storage will be there or not. Ideally, that should be easily replicated and extended to a cloud environment. We have a lot of vendors trying to extend their on-prem infrastructure seamlessly. That could be workloads. It could be extending the virtual hardware to on-prem storage or the physical storage to virtual storage in the cloud. Everything should be easy for customers to consume and configure, but some of this stuff is still pretty complex because it's so new.

I've been using vSAN for about five years.

I think vSAN's stability is good. It's an underlying solution for both on-prem and in the cloud, especially the VMC on AWS stuff too. VMware has been around for a long time, so it's pretty stable.

All the vendors are working on making the setup more straightforward. Things are becoming a little more scripted. More automation and installations where you don't have to check every box are always good.

I rate VMware vSAN nine 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.