VMware vSAN Reviews

The feature that I have found most valuable is that it is easy to deploy.

It is also easy to configure with the vCenter and the other solutions that we have. It is easy to create and delete virtual servers. It is easy to create the load balancing and the clustering, and the new version includes different features that allow us to quickly see what happened if we shut down a virtual server. It is an arrays of disks. It works like a RAID file. You shut down one server and you can start the two others that work together.

VMware vSAN is better than SimpliVity. We once tried to run SimpliVity, but it was difficult for us, because the people from HP were not easy to work with, the costs of their white papers where higher, and it was not as easy to deploy as VMware. VMware vSAN also costs for licensing, but it costs less than HPE SimpliVity and I'm not depending on the HP team. I can run it myself with my engineers.

The only negative point relates to the licensing. If you want multiple, different servers, it costs money, but you have all the capacity for vSAN. You do not reach the data, but the processor arrays and the current architecture.

I have been using VMware vSAN for two and a half years.

We are using version 6.7 and we are processing now to switch to 7.0 because we are testing the new version.

VMware vSAN is a stable solution.

We have made many tests, we have also shut down the servers and made an extraction of the disk and everything, and vSAN was very good.

VMware vSAN is scalable, if you choose good servers at the beginning with many slots for disks, you can then add disks and extend the storage. You can add memory if you have good servers, and then you can enable your construction. But you have to choose good servers for production from the beginning.

VMware has very good support. They have technical support which is divided into three areas. In each area you always have the one who can reply to you and they are really good at the technical support.

We previously worked with Nutanix, which HP bought. At the beginning, we were also working with a free solution called KVM. There was no licensing cost with them, but there was also no real support and the customers were afraid of that. They wanted something that is known in the market. We also worked with Dell in the past.

If you already work with vCenter and VMware, the initial setup is easy. The process is easy to understand and easy to configure. You just have to be sure that when you connect the servers with the LAN that everything is in 10 giga, then it will be easy to configure. You have to configure the root storage of the LAN and give it a switch.

You have to configure everything from the beginning to make everything work, so you must have an expert on vSAN from your side and an expert for LAN on the other side.

I do think that VMware vSAN's cost could be lower.

We pay for the license every year.

The cost depends on your contract. The pricing for the government is not the best, but for each licensing, because its arrays are in your servers, it can cost $4,000 for each of the servers for a simple solution and up to $20,000 per server for vSAN solutions. It's very, very expensive.

I am also working with Microsoft and Safe Key, another solution for the clustering, and I tried HPE SimpliVity for simple cluster and for multi-cluster. When I saw the costs of HPE SimpliVity for multi-cluster, there were two points that made me not feel good about it: the price and that when we needed more than 20 or 40 terabytes of data, the HP license was such that I could not use this solution alone. We had to use the HP team at the beginning.

On a scale of one to ten I would give VMware vSAN an eight for the technology, eight for scalability, and a six for the price. Overall, I give it an eight.

We are providing virtual machines for our niche area of accounting firms. For virtualization, we are using VMware vSphere, and for storing these virtualizations, we are using VMware vSAN. 

We have co-located servers in different data centers. That's where we have installed the VMware vSAN for our use.

vSAN is software-defined networking. The advantage of vSAN is that if one of the servers goes down, nothing happens. In traditional SAN, if the SAN goes down, everything goes down, and your business will come to a halt. That's why we decided to go for vSAN because you have a number of servers in vSAN. 

Each server participates in creating the virtual SAN. In case one server goes down, the other servers continue to work, and the workload gets realigned to the nodes that are up. Your work doesn't get interrupted. That's why a lot of companies are moving to software-defined storage, where the storage is created through software. vSAN is also software-defined storage.

It is very easy to set up and very easy to use. It is very useful.

If one node out of your ten nodes fails, it takes a lot of time to replicate and rebalance VMware vSAN. This time can be reduced. When a node fails and the data is not accessible, vSAN has to be rebalanced to make the redundancy level of two again. However, if it is taking a lot of time and any other hardware fails during that time, then we have a problem. Two disk failures mean that all data will be lost, and we may have to recover it from the backup. So, the number of threads that run to do the rebalancing could be more so that the time taken to make it fully redundant again is not so much.

I have been using VMware vSAN for almost five to six years.

Initially, there were a lot of problems because it was a new product from VMware. There were a lot of hiccups, but now, it is a very stable product.

It is quite scalable. We are using it ourselves, and we are providing virtual machines to other customers. 

We are using 16 nodes. For creating this storage, we have about 600 terabytes of storage in VMware vSAN in each cluster. If you have to make it several petabytes, then I don't know whether it will work or not, but up to one petabyte, I don't see any challenge in VMware vSAN. I have no idea about the scalability larger than that.

I would rate VMware support a seven out of ten. I won't give them more than that because some of their engineers don't have so much in-depth understanding of the product. Sometimes, a lot of time gets wasted than getting support from them. Their support team needs to be trained for faster IT support.

It is very easy to set up. You don't have to really make any effort to set it up. One or two days are enough to deploy VMware vSAN. It takes around 24 to 48 hours.

We do it ourselves because we have about five to six clusters in different data centers in the US at different geographic locations. It is easy to deploy, and you don't need a very strong technical knowledge to deploy. 

The number of people required to maintain this solution depends upon the size of the infrastructure. If you have 15 nodes, you can have a team of about two to three experienced people.

If they could reduce the cost, it would be better. Licensing costs are something that they could take care of. If you are a smaller and strong IT team, then VMware vSAN is a very good product. If you want to expand in the service provider space, then you will have to go for an open-source solution like OpenStack.

We are now looking at OpenStack because we sell licensing costs. We are a service provider, so the IT component data is a substantial component in our overall costing. We feel that OpenStack might help us to cut down the licensing cost. Therefore, we are looking at SAS storage instead of vSAN. SAS is open source, but it is not wise to have open source without having the backend support. We are using RedHat SAS, and it is an open-source solution. You can also have a free version, but we are using it with support from RedHat so that we have somebody to back us up in case we have a problem. 

If you do normal business, then IT expense is 1% or 2% of the total turnover. The higher licensing costs sometimes don't make difference to the big companies who are not service providers and are using it only for their internal use. For them, the IT cost is 1% or 2%, but for an IT service provider, the IT costs will go up to 15% to 16% of the total cost of the operations. This is where the licensing costs become irrelevant. For example, the licensing cost of using VMware, VC, and vSAN is 8% of my monthly revenue. Every month, I pay about $35,000, and, with the revised plan, it will be something like $50,000 or revenue of $600K per month, which means almost 8% of the revenue is going into VMware licensing. In a very competitive world, 8% as a cost element is huge. So, if I can bring it down to 2%, I save 6% in revenue expenditure. In terms of profit, 6% of 30% is something like another 25% increase in my profit. My profit can be almost 25%. It would be 20% to 25% in case I am able to handle the licensing costs and bring them to a very low level. Because these IT costs are substantial for us, that is why we are going with OpenStack. 

OpenStack has a limitation that it requires more hardware. There will be some increase in the hardware cost, but overall, we will save 5% to 6% of our licensing cost by using OpenStack.

If you want a very simple structure, VMware vSAN is a good idea. If you have a larger and strong IT team and the cost is a factor for you, you can go for OpenStack.

I would rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten.

I use VMware vSAN for storage management, particularly for managing our data center and virtual machines (VMs). It significantly reduces downtime, especially during maintenance, allowing seamless machine movement.

The platform's most valuable features are centralized management capability and vMotion. These features provide a central management point and allow seamless VM movement during maintenance.

We have encountered some challenges related to administrative tasks and licensing issues for the product. 

I suggest improvements in processing speed, user-friendliness, and resource utilization for the next release. Additionally, making the system more user-friendly and easier to manage would be beneficial.

I have been working with VMware vSAN for approximately four years.

I rate the product stability a six and a half. We encountered issues related to hardware and vulnerability patches. 

The product is highly scalable and significantly supports our organization's needs. Our company has approximately seven to eight users who manage and work with VMware vSAN. We plan to increase the usage in the future.

I rate the scalability an eight out of ten.

The technical support team takes time to respond to queries. 

Neutral

We have had experience with Hyper-V. We decided to switch to VMware vSAN due to its advantages in management, scalability, and overall performance compared to other solutions like Hyper-V.

I rate the initial setup process an eight out of ten, as it is relatively straightforward. The deployment typically takes up to 30 minutes.

The solution is relatively expensive compared to similar products.

The product has simplified our storage management by reducing downtime during maintenance and allowing for seamless VM migration without disrupting ongoing work.

It was most beneficial during our migration phase when we transitioned from a third-party storage solution to VMware vSAN. The seamless process helped resolve the challenges we faced with the previous solution.

Integrating VMware vSAN into our existing vSphere environment has been smooth. It works seamlessly with our existing hardware platforms, such as those from HP and IBM, thereby increasing operational efficiency and reducing hardware costs.

I recommend it to others and rate it an eight. 

We primarily use vSAN for cloud automation, so we provide test workloads for specific test use cases for customers who want to do software testing. In these specific cases, we also use vSAN because it gives us flexibility from a profile perspective on how we roll out specific workloads and specific test scenarios, making it easier for us to actually deploy things in comparison to legacy storage platforms.

vSAN improved our organization by allowing us to deploy scenarios or workloads more easily because, from a vSAN perspective, we don't need to reconfigure underlying storage or anything else. We can actually adjust for each individual machine and individual workload characteristics. We don't have to deal with different types of disk shelves, rate groups, etc. We can directly take that off.

vSAN gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources. We have an overall larger host infrastructure, and we split that up for specific customer tests and use cases. In that specific scenario, we can easily add more hosts or reduce the number of hosts in the environment. This is an advantage when we use vSAN.

We have pretty constant performance results, which are sometimes, on a normal three-tier storage architecture, harder for us to achieve because the customer doesn't want us to verify that the performance of a specific device works. What we typically have to test is that we have a constant scenario across different versions, platforms, and similar things. Here, vSAN gives us an advantage that we can actually work with it. 

We can also create test cases, which is maybe not something in other customer scenarios, but for us, it's important. We can even throttle down performance or release more performance. So, we can run more precise test scenarios. If someone says, "We need to run this later on a relatively small or lower-scale edge device," we can actually configure vSAN in a way that reduces the number of resources.

When we do more scaled load testing, we can run more dense workloads and still have the same results across all specific nodes. Otherwise, we could have that noisy neighbor effect when we work with legacy output.

Stability can be improved. Adding all these new features is nice, but we are now at the level where most of the features you need in production are there. The stability is not from a day-to-day operations perspective, but more from a supportability perspective, because currently some of the support scenarios require you to completely evacuate hosts or the complete cluster. That sometimes can be a stretch. This would clearly be an improvement if the support teams were given additional tools to make that easier.

Upgradability could be a bit easier sometimes. We are now where vSAN can be updated without ESXi, but there is still enough dependency. So that would be good if that actually would be uncoupled even more.

Dashboards are there, and we use vROps as well. So, we have all the beauty of capacity planning and everything over there. That's not really something where we need a lot of other things. 

I have been using this solution for six years.

We had some issues in very early releases, and it has become much better over time. Stability with vSAN has come it's way. When we look at 5.5, then 6.0, 6.2, 6.6, 6.7 it has moved ahead every time. Clearly, 5.5 and 6.0 have their issues, but the product is constantly improving. 

We need to keep in mind that we are talking about relatively new technology. Whenever you are adopting something early on, you need to accept not everything runs as smoothly as you would expect it to. However, we can see the progress with vSAN, and that's one of the reasons why we built our platforms on it.

Scalability for us is an important part of the product because we resize clusters all the time in our environment. We clean them out and actually start from scratch. With vSAN, it's easier for us to add nodes. If in a test scenario that we are building, we currently might have only four or five nodes in the beginning. If we add more, it's an easy add-on for us. It's easier for us to manage it this way than with legacy storage, where we would have to add additional disk shelves.

Tech support with vSAN is a mixed relationship. We have had issues with tech support because sometimes VMware comes out of the software-defined space. 

In the software-defined space, you start off with the approach that you can basically tell the customer to change everything. However, vSAN needs a different approach. It's a storage platform. I cannot actually say, "You need to upgrade everything or replace everything." That sometimes has been a bit of a challenge with the support teams, explaining to them, "No, it's not an option that we completely upgrade the stack. We need to get a different fix for it." 

However, over the last few years, it has improved. I think VMware gets the story now that doing support on the storage side is different than for a lot of the other software programs. So, I think we are getting there, but it could definitely improve.

We previously used Legacy 3-tier storage architecture with a multi-tier disk approach.

From a setup perspective with vSAN, I was involved in the original architecture and design of our specific platform. It was pretty straightforward. It's more or less point-and-click. The most challenging part is choosing the correct hardware and platform behind it. It's not so much about the fact of how to deploy vSAN. 

Once the physical hardware is there, the ESXi is installed, and configuring vSAN is pretty straightforward. It's just a few clicks. It's much easier than most other storage platforms, but the challenge is to identify the correct hardware for the use case. There are ReadyNotes and all types of other solutions, but sometimes the ReadyNote configuration doesn't match exactly what you need.

You need to be careful with some of these vendors because they might upgrade individual devices. That was one case that we had, and all of a sudden that version was no longer supported. So, we had to fight the battle of whether it is now the fault of the hardware vendor versus VMware. Those are scenarios where I can always only warn people. It's like sticking very strictly with what's in the HCL because it's nice that vSAN tells you in the UI that you are in an unsupported state, but at that point, you have the hardware already in your environment, cabled up, and in production. So, you should identify that early on. However, I think that's going to get better as well.

ROI is difficult for us to deal with because of our approach and what we do in our business with test and demo cases. It's hard for us to judge because some of the hardware and stuff we get during tests is actually provided by vendors. 

Therefore, I don't necessarily have what an online customer would pay for it. We still pay for the stuff. But it's a different story.

ROI from an administrative perspective is clearly much better because I only have to deal with one user interface. I can go into one place and be on top of it for some scenarios, even using vCloud Director. So, it's much easier to use vSAN from that perspective because it's all in the vSphere Client. I can configure my profiles and use them on all the other tools. Whereas, in the legacy storage approach, I still have to deal with all these additional details on each individual storage, which can be challenging, even though some of these vendors provide integration into the vSphere Client. In many ways, that's just the HTML UI of their storage device in the vSphere Client. That's not really integration. It's still a different UI. It's still a different training effort.

Setup cost, pricing, and licensing should be secondary factors. We talk about primary system storage, which if not performing well or if the storing is reliable, can have a massive business impact.

We evaluated different 3-tier approaches, 2-tier and HCI approaches.

I would rate the solution somewhere around an eight out of ten. It is in the perfect place. There is room for improvement, but with the current versions, we are in a good stage.

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 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.