We are using it for the consolidation of compute, network, and storage.
For VMware, we're mostly using on-premises deployment.
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.
While we have some applications running on VMware, mostly we are providing and proposing these solutions to our clients.
I have one client, for example, that is running the CRM and accounts and manufacturing applications on VMware and they're using HP infrastructure for them. They have some SQL databases they're running on that and some back-office applications, and also an Extend Server as well.
The migration capabilities are a very useful aspect of the solution.
The way it handles failovers is very good.
The imaging is helpful.
Right now, VMware is number one in the virtual space.
The initial setup is very easy.
The management is very straightforward. It's an extremely user-friendly product.
It integrates very well with other products.
The scalability is very good and the solution is stable and reliable.
So far, everything is okay.
Currently, there aren't any shortcomings to discuss or missing features that we worry about.
This product is very expensive.
I've used the solution for a long time. I'd used VMware since it come out in the '90s. It's been decades.
I have found the stability to be great. There aren't bugs. It doesn't glitch. There aren't issues around it crashing or freezing. It's reliable.
The scalability has been great. If you need to expand it, you can do so.
Technical support has been great. They are helpful and responsive. I've been happy with their level of service when we've needed them. We are satisfied.
The initial setup is very straightforward and simple. There shouldn't be an issue if a company wants to set it up.
If you have, for example, 100 VMs, you only need one person to manage it. It requires very little maintenance or overhead in terms of staff.
The solution can be expensive. However, if you are a big company, such as a telco, likely you can get a good deal on pricing. That said, being so big, likely the cost won't be a deterrent.
We are partners and also a solution provider.
The solution is great. I'd rate it at a nine out of ten. I'd advise other people to give it a try.
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 are using it for management of all the data that we collect from our customer bases and from our 500-plus locations. There is also the data that we use to manage employee systems, so it's both ends of the business. It's the actual retail side of the business, as well as the internal operations.
vSAN has improved the organization just based on the overall speed. It's a lot faster than what we what we've used in the past. The old-school storage systems were kind of slow and cumbersome. This is much faster. It's much more reliable.
The most valuable feature that VSAN offers is reliability. In my mind, as long as their storage is up and running, we can always access what we need when we need it, that's what's important. It's super important to have reliability, particularly for internal operations: for employee data, payroll management; and then as well for the customer side of the equation with customer information and customer databases.
Areas of improvement could be the UIs. I've seen them. I've worked with them a little bit. The UIs are kind of cumbersome.
There could be an easier way than having the UUIDs associated to the LUNs. That could be simplified to make life a little easier to search and naming conventions and being able to search them down and for overall utilization; ease of utilization.
The stability of vSAN has been pretty much flawless for us.
Scalability: pretty simple. You just add more and away you go.
The data sets are constantly growing, so we have internal needs, new VMs are getting spun up all the time. They're gobbling up all kinds of storage space. We try not to over-commit too much, but everybody does, right? But it's constantly growing and we're constantly adding to it.
I have personally not contacted tech support at VMware for vSAN.
The company has been around for quite a while, so we go back to some of the earliest days of spinning disks and a local, small data center at the corporate office, to the point now where we've grown to have our own data center and racks upon racks upon racks of storage.
I was not involved in the setup on that side, either. That's a different team that does that.
The primary ROI for this is its stability. That's the key. I can't really speak to the cost side of the equation, but I can speak to the stability side, and I know that it's critically important to us to have our data available to us when we need it. Since we've gone over to the vSAN solution, it's been very stable.
When we're choosing a vendor, there are two factors involved, and the lowest price isn't always the most important. We need a vendor who provides really good support and products that really meet our needs well.
I'm going to rate it as a ten out of ten, because it just works. It's always solid.
Our primary use case is production data and the performance has been great.
I'd like to see better integration with the Update Manager, in terms of firmware updates for hardware.
It has been pretty stable for us.
It's very scalable. I like that. Adding a node is easy. Adding a disk group is easy.
Tech support has been very knowledgeable for the issues that we've had. They have been able to troubleshoot or determine exactly what is going on and then resolve it in a timely manner.
We were end-of-life on our previous storage and looking at replacements. It made sense to look at something that was going to integrate both the servers and the storage.
The most important criteria, for me, when selecting a vendor are
We went with vSAN because of cost and ultimate value. Ease of use and the cost, compared to some of the alternatives, were pretty compelling. I also liked that we could choose whatever hardware we wanted, rather than having to use one particular vendor.
The setup had some complexity, and some of that was figuring out newer releases. Networking, originally, was kind of a pain, with having to have everything talk Multicast. They've gone to Unicast which simplifies things.
It has simplified things for us. It was one purchase for servers and storage so that made it easier on us. It's been a good product, it's something that we'll continue to use.
For our shortlist, we looked at SimpliVity, some Dell EMC solutions, and Nutanix.
Make sure you do a proof of concept. And look at your options for hardware if you're looking at vSAN, compared to some competitors where you have just one option.
I would rate the solution at eight out of ten. To get to a ten they would have to drop the cost. That would get a point right there. Then, going forward, I'd like to see better integration with Update Manager. Some of the manual processes that you still have to do, being able to automate those, have it do them on its own, would be great.
It's not a storage array which is a very valuable feature of it and it's maintenance structure isn't paid like a traditional storage array. For me, that's the biggest leap with it is there's a compelling cost with reason to step in to it. You don't have to make a snap decision and get away from where I am. I can keep what I have and dip my toe in VSAN without risking an all-or-nothing decision.
VSAN is really simple to manage. Its GUI is part of the eco-system so it looks and feels like the rest of VMware. So a VMware engineer or a VMware operations guy's is going to be able to manage the provision storage without having to touch an array, which is generally higher profile so there's a cost reduction through headcount.
VSAN manageability is much easier because it's in and part of the vSphere world, so it looks and feels like any other object that people are used to seeing metrics on and there have been great improvement in management. In 655, there's a little bit of lack information. In the newer system, there's a lot more data about what's going on in that system, in the GUI, easily consumable.
The features I'd like to see in future releases of VSAN are around back-up and recovery. There is a great way to replicate data now, but I'd like to see them focus on making recovery from snap shots, off-site, part of the core product.
It's very stable. Once you get it built and you take the time to build the system correctly, do your research, once it's in place it's been very stable and it performs as it says.
I'm looking at two different ways of scaling that system. One is for speed and one is for mass. It scales into mass based on what size of disc you choose and it scales in to speed based on solid-state drive size. Both of those are two different avenues that work well for us.
I haven't had a technical support case open but we do look at the forums and try to avoid issues and problems based on what's in a publicly available space which has always been something that VMware has done really well, which is making issues public so we can avoid them.
We chose it from a cost perspective. In media we are always looking to save money. It's a publicly traded company so the money I give back is smiled on. We saw a way not to pay maintenance for expensive systems and to run it in a system that performs on parallel with what we already own.
So with a traditional storage array you pay maintenance based on the purchase price for the array plus any software you bought with it so that residual number is high, so if you paid a million dollars for the machine, you may have to pay $200,000 for maintenance at some point in time. With VSAN I'm paying server-based maintenance and that's a much lower number.
The top criteria we looked at when considering VSAN was performance and cost. We were going to make sure that we could deliver the performance that people are used to and used the system that costs less than a traditional array model. We did not look at other vendors because there really isn't another vendor that's doing this. There are people that are close but with a traditional hyper-converged box, there's a bunch of things I don't need. With VSAN I have the technical backing from VMware to back-stop the product and is doing what I need and no more so there is a cost-savings for not buying features-compute that I don't need.
I would certainly give it an 8 and I would split in to two parts. The initial configuration of VSAN, once the systems in place, it manages and runs without much attention and that's where it's really shining at the moment, is once it's in production, it doesn't require a lot of care and feeding.
My recommendation is make sure you've got a hardware vendor who's promising you that this equipment that you get is on the HCL, so the compatibility list of what VMware supports and VSAN is important to having a successful deployment. Taking the time to do that and install and build the system correctly first will give you years of good results. Not doing that is a headache.
When looking at any new technology, having peer review and having information available about what it's doing, how many people have adopted it and whether or not it's a good technology is critically important. It's good to be on the edge but you don't want to be the first guy to take the blind leap so having that out and having the forms available has been very important.
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.
We use it for our DMZ and any test environments that we put into our industry.
It's performing pretty well. We have no issues with vSAN at all.
It has improved our organization in a way of scaling it.
We can scale it very easily for a test environment. We were able to segment our DMZ so it wasn't connected to anything, which we really liked.
One thing in vSAN that I would like to improve is using vSAN as a repository for files or other things. For example, with Horizon, maybe we can save profiles with UEM on there. That would be a good feature that I would like.
The stability has been great with vSAN. We have not yet seen downtime.
We scale it with our test environment. We are looking to do it with Horizon. We are able to scale it to see how many VMs that we can host and how long it will take us to add new hosts, if needed.
Technical support has been very good. They respond pretty fast, especially if we have a critical issue. Their responses have been great.
vSAN is one of the easiest implementations of any VMware product. It's almost like click it to enable it, then you're almost done. So, vSAN is very easy to set up.
We did consider other hyperconverged solutions. It usually came down to price. vSan was the most cost effective thing. That's why we went with it. Also, we didn't have to get a connected array. We can put it in small places, remote sites, etc.
Nutanix, Cisco HyperFlex Edge, and VxRail were on our shortlist.
I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. To make it a ten, it needs to be able to scale the amount of data that we can hold so we can put bigger, more data-intensive apps on it.
My advice to a person looking at vSAN is get your hands dirty in the labs. Show how easy it is to set up, because it's not very complicated. It's an easy solution that you can implement at your company.
Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Since we're a hospital, we have multiple hospitals in the area. We look at local site resiliency, so we're looking to see if we can put it in each of our hospitals.