VMware vSAN Reviews

The purpose of vSAN is to cluster nodes and distribute storage usage. Like, if a server has ten hard disks, for example, and the main server also has ten hard disks, and the two other nodes or servers each have ten hard disks as well, then it will combine them all. Once combined, it becomes clustered. That's the reason why most clients want to use vSAN - to save on external storage and use the internal storage for the VMware environment.

vSAN that has been most effective in streamlining storage operations.

For data recovery alerts, it uses tools like snapshots and vMotion.

Overall, the features I find most valuable are related to the reliability and availability of the servers.

vSAN is the fastest in regards to creating VMs and connecting them to virtual networks. It compresses data, and if you have a physical server form factor, it fits only on one cluster node. That's why we use vSAN.

Better options would be clustered nodes, or even cloud configuration.

There is room for improvement in cloud configuration, we typically do web browsing for management. So, when we configure or manage VMs or vSAN, we usually open a browser and use VMware credentials. That's what we call cloud configuration.

We have been dealing with it since 2016. And since that year, we've been a distributor.

Stability depends on the network. Some clients use networks with slow switches. Here, we're using ten gig to twenty-five gig. So, more often, it's the fastest network connectivity. But if the client is using one gig or ten Mbps. Some smaller companies face issues with a slow network.

When it comes to scale up or scale out, it means that the servers or the clustered nodes can be added, or another cluster can be installed to increase the resources of the clustered nodes.

The customer service and support are quite good. 

The deployment process is complex because it's a GUI infrastructure. There are two-ways configurations for the nodes or vSAN setup. You can do it on a GUI management interface or by console or CRM recommendation.

So, it could take half a day or a whole day.

It is sort of difficult to maintain without any training. If you don't have any ideas on maintaining, then it could be difficult. But if you're a master of VMware, you know how to handle it. You're already a professional and can easily handle it.

Overall, I would rate the solution a ten out of ten. 

Our customers use this product when they don't want to deploy an expensive storage device but they're looking for good storage technology. I'm a system integrator.

This is a mature, easy-to-use, and easy-to-scale type of technology. When a customer wants network security and integration of NSX technology, vSan is a good solution.

I'd like to see a simplification of the upgrading process. For now, I have to verify each and every component before upgrading. If there were a technology to check the compatibility without the complexity, it would be helpful to users.

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

Whenever I need support from VMware, I get very good support from the team.

The initial setup is somewhat complex. It involves checking hardware compatibility before buying it and installing the VMware components. One person can deploy an entire environment in a day.

Licensing costs are more or less on par with other similar products. 

It's important to check the compatibility before deploying. This is a good solution and I rate it nine out of 10. 

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.

The use case is mainly for greenfields deployment. I'm a senior solutions architect and we are system integrators. Our company is a partner with VMware.

Very easy to implement in any existing environment.

I'd like to see more storage terabytes available after excluding the management. 

I've been using this solution for two years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

The technical support is very good. 

The initial setup is straightforward and it's very easy to implement in any X86 server so anyone can use it in their existing environment. 

I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

We use VMware vSAN as a VDI solution.

The performance of VMware vSAN is very good.

I have been using VMware vSAN for approximately two years.

VMware vSAN is a stable solution.

The support from VMware vSAN was good. When I had to contact the support for my clients everything was as expected.

The initial setup is straightforward. It took us approximately one month to implement for one of our customers but there were some delays on our customer's side. We could have done it in a shorter timeframe.

My customers have found VMware vSAN to be a little expensive.

VMware vSAN is the most trending hypervisor that most of the customers are working with.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate VMware vSAN a ten out of ten.

VMware vSAN is a storage virtualization software.

What I found most valuable in this software is its storage management feature.

I don't recall an area for improvement in VMware vSAN, because it's a concept, a brand, and a product. If the concept doesn't change, we can't improve this software that much, but VMware can probably make the monitoring feature much better.

I've been dealing with VMware vSAN for eight years now.

VMware vSAN is a stable software.

VMware vSAN is a scalable software.

Clients have to pay for VMware vSAN licensing based on the number of CPUs. Whether it'll be a yearly or a monthly subscription, you have to check with the vendor, because you can buy it for one year, two years, or three years. The purchases would be lifetime or perpetual, but you need to have support, e.g. the support is negotiated from one, two, three, or four years.

VMware vSAN is my main product, and I'm an integrator for it.

The current version we're using is the VMware vSAN 6.2 version.

The setup of VMware vSAN is the same setup as the ReadyNodes, because the ReadyNodes are built on top of vSAN technology. As for how long it takes to deploy, it depends on the number of hosts you're deploying.

We have six clients currently using this software.

For deployment and maintenance of VMware vSAN, we have two technical staff who are in charge: one for setting up the network, and the other one for setting up the physical environment.

I'm recommending this software to others who want to start using it. You can install it on any kind of ReadyNodes.

I'm rating VMware vSAN nine out of ten.

The feature we have found most valuable is the compatibility of VMware products with VCF and VMware Cloud Foundation.

We often run out of space but we have enough capacity for memory and CPU. It's difficult to find the balance between storage and memory CPU.

Overall, this is a simple solution but could be improved due to the issue with vSAN ReadyNodes. There are many compatibility requirements for storage using this solution that are difficult to meet.

We have used this solution for two years. 

The enterprise customer service and support are very good and feedback is fast. 

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward but we have experienced some setbacks with deployments. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

VMware has been around for a long time are are doing a decent job at catching up with the latest technologies i.e. bringing in kubernetes and containerization. Overall, this is a great tool for virtualization.

I would like for the next release to be a bit cheaper.

I have been using VMware vSAN for 10+ years.

VMware is not a cost effective solution, especially if you have a Microsoft shop. In this case, you would have to purchase the VMware license when there are already Hyper-V solutions that could do it for much cheaper.

If you are already using VMware, then it is great to fun your applications and carries your infrastructure to the cloud. But, I would not recommend this solution to new customers. I give this solution a seven out of ten.

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.