VMware vSAN Reviews

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.

The way vSAN improved our organization was we could 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 machines and individual workload characteristics. We don't have to deal with different type 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 test 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 is 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 the 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 on a relatively small or lower scale edge device," we can actually configure vSAN in a way that it reduces the amount of resources.

When we do to 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 that most of the features you need in production are there. The stability, 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 uncoupled even more.

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

Since 6 years.

We had some issues in very early releases, and it has become much better over time. Stability with vSAN has come its 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 a relatively new technology. Whenever you are adopting something early on, you need to accept not everything runs as smooth 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 any easy add-on for us. It's easier for us to manage it this way, then 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.

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, 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 is it now the fault of the hardware vendor versus VMware. Those are scenarios where I can always only warn people. It's like stick very strict 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 once place and be on top of it for some scenarios, even use 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 a secondary factor. We talk about primary system storage, which if not performing well or storing reliable can have massive business impact.

Yes 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 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 work at a small company, and we have VxRail. Like Rubrik, VxRail can be upgraded brick by brick. Now we are studying considering deploying another traditional setup comprising a host and SAN Storage. VMware vSAN is a virtual SAN Storage. 

We are planning to expand the resources of our system, including CPU, RAM, and storage. Currently, we are utilizing the basic VxRail setup, which consists of only three nodes, and we're in the process of acquiring another. I'm upgrading because it's at capacity, so we have no choice but to add another node so we can expand the loads for some new applications that we need to employ under the virtual servers. Our expansion to a new data center will add some more capacity to the current setup.

In the end, we could wind up with around six nodes, SAN storage, or flash array storage. But we don't have a definite plan yet. Everything is being drafted at the moment, and we're researching some details on backup solutions and VR solutions. We also have some cloud-based and server-hosted applications from Azure and AWS. So maybe the on-premises solution could involve some VMs or a hybrid backup solution that goes back and forth between the cloud and on-premises. 

If we decide to expand, vSAN could offer us some flexibility. We are researching ways to set this up from a new data center, which is located somewhere different from the current location right now.

I would like to see better integration between the cloud and our VMware virtual environment. We only have one virtual environment, which is VMware vSAN. Right now, there is little interoperability with the cloud solution at the moment. We are currently researching to figure out if we can achieve that. 

It's possible that we'll need to acquire new infrastructure for the new data center. And for that, we need to consult some architects, whether it's a VMware architect or some AWS and Azure architects. And we could come up with a workable blueprint that to use as a guideline so we can manage our infrastructure.

I am new to this company, but I worked with different solutions at my previous company, including vSAN and the traditional VMware vSphere setup. So I've been using vSAN for two years or three years.

VMware vSAN is stable, although there's is some room for improvement. 

I've been working with VMware technical support since I had my own company. It's pretty dependable because I used to work primarily with level three infrastructure support. We are the last escalation. I am one of the contact people between the company and the VMware vendor. The final escalations would be working with the vendor itself or some VMware engineer, whether it's vSAN, vSphere, Center, or anything else within the scope of our license.

In my environment right now, we only handle a limited set of VMware products. These solutions are not perfect because we must apply patches and updates to deal with glitches and minor bugs. Byt I think vSAN will be reliable, especially if the after-sales support and engineers are excellent and could help us work seamlessly and comfortably.

Our initial vSAN setup is a backup from Rubrik being thrown up to AWS for Glacier. But in the near term, maybe we could migrate that kind of solution in a more seamless and resilient way. That's what we're considering right now.

VMware is quite expensive compared to Microsoft's Hyper-V. However, when you factor in flexibility and comparability of use, it's reasonable enough. For the high price of VMware, you get seamless operation and manageability. At the same time, I think VMware is lowering the price for its cloud-based solutions. And it's stable enough that some organizations might want to put part of their setup on the cloud and the other part on-premises. VMware's advantage is that they were already preparing for cloud solutions many years ago. 

There are several virtual solutions that I have hands-on experience with, including VMware, Hyper-V, and some open source software. I could only compare Microsoft and VMware. VMware is significantly more expensive than Microsoft, but I still prefer VMware because it's manageable and easy to set up.

As a VMware customer, it's hard to judge the value I'm getting for the price in terms of operability and manageability. Then there are other factors, such as the amount of resources used. So when we're evaluating, we're not just looking at the price. We don't want to settle for something cheaper that might cost us some headaches.

I rate VMware vSAN seven out of 10. I prefer a traditional SAN storage solution. Right now, we're only using vSAN for small solutions. At the basic level, it's good enough because it operates the same way as the traditional setup. It's suitable for companies that are starting and might expand in the near future. For those use cases, vSAN is a great choice compared to Hyper-V. It's much easier to maintain. However, I haven't deployed vSAN for a larger configuration.

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.

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 using it for a redundant, local front-end environment for our WiFi portal. We're also using it for critical backend services, our DCP instances, and our internal monitoring environments. We have instances inside that system right now.

I believe we are using its latest update.

The flexibility is most valuable. Being able to manage things quickly if something goes wrong is also valuable. Very recently, we had one node that went down due to a power problem, but there was really no major impact on the systems running on top of it. 

It is pretty straightforward. We're able to manage multiple platforms with ease. In terms of the overhead of understanding how the entire platform is being administered, it was fairly quick for our team to get the hang of it.

It could have some automation. We haven't involved ourselves in a lot of automation around the vSAN environment capabilities. We're still running it using a very traditional setup. So, there could be some plugins to automate it using third-party environments, such as Jenkins.

We were trying to explore a solution for a hybrid setup, and VMware had proposed something, but we wanted to understand a deeper setup where our existing vSAN and our HCI environment can interact better with our platforms on the cloud in AWS. So, there should be those types of interactions wherein we can better explore cost-saving opportunities from some platforms in the cloud versus the one that we have on-prem.

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

It has been a pretty stable system so far.

We had a long discussion with our vendor partner about a plan to scale up the system. They gave us several options, but we ended up with the most cost-effective one where we had to trim down some of the node requirements that we were planning to buy initially.

We had an experience with them recently, and the correspondence with the technical support from VMware was fairly quick. It was aligned with the expected SLA. There were no major issues with the support people who assisted us during that time.

It was fairly straightforward. We were surprised at how fast it was implemented. The entire implementation took about two weeks. After that, it was turned over to us, and then we planned on the migration of the platforms from our old converged environment into this new environment.

In terms of the maintenance, apart from the normal operational maintenance that we're doing, we always ensure that there is a back-to-back maintenance agreement with VMware and the vendor partner who sold us the solution. So far, there has been very low admin maintenance on the platform. There have been no major issues except the last one where one node got affected by a power problem in the data center. That's just about it.

We worked with a vendor partner for its implementation. Right now, in our team, we have around five admins who work with this solution.

Cost-wise, the Nutanix licenses were cheaper, but in terms of the hardware, there was some contention around it. So, in terms of implementation, the way Nutanix was projecting the implementation on their end was that there were a lot of open-source admin platforms. vSAN is a licensed product in VMware, and Nutanix was proposing a KVM solution, which is open source. That's why their pricing was a bit cheaper, but when we were trying to compare it with an enterprise version of their management platform, it boiled down to the VMware vSAN being most effective in the long run.

When we were exploring an HCI solution, we zoned in on the VMware vSAN, HPE solution, and Nutanix solution. 

I would recommend this solution to others. It is easy to implement, scale, and maintain. The operational work required to maintain the platform is not that difficult.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I'm running an application that's running under a virtual machine on vSAN. That vSAN environment is only for this specific application. We didn't only choose vSAN; we chose VMware because of SR-IOV, which is more on the hypervisor level and not on the vSAN storage. It's part of the whole system.

The solution is deployed on-prem.

There are seven users in my organization. They are all in IT roles.

There could be more features with the automatic backup.

I've been using this solution for a year and a half. I'm still using the solution with a bigger environment, not vSAN.

It's stable.

The solution is scalable.

Technical support is bad. They pointed me to professional services, and I had to pay someone when I already had the basic support agreement. I think we took the standard support agreement with VMware.

I'm still using a different solution. I only took two servers with vSAN to support one application that needs one feature that only VMware has. If not for that feature, I wouldn't touch VMware.

Now, I'm looking at products like Nutanix, Silver Peak, Flexione, and FortiGate. For products that I choose, I don't need a specialist of that vendor. In VMware, I need a specialist in VMware.

That's the issue I have with VMware. It's not like I can take any IT person, and they will know what to do. I need to make sure he will do the call, get the certificate and time to practice.

Initial setup was complex. I would rate the complexity a 5 on a scale of 1 to 5.

For an experienced IT person, it isn't that complex. But if I compare it to the  competition, Nutanix would be a 1, and VMware would be a 5. If you have never touched Nutanix, VMware is not that complex. But if I compare it to Nutanix, it's complex.

Deployment of VMware vSAN took four days.

We used a third party for deployment. We didn't have a good experience with them.

The person didn't have knowledge in VMware, and we had to pay someone to do the installation, and they said things like, "We need this. We need a certificate. We need another VLAN. We need another number."

The cost is expensive. I purchased two servers. The hardware cost was $19,000. The software cost for these two servers, including the vSAN, was $30,000, which is $11,000 more than the hardware. Then I had to pay another $5,000 for installation and implementation for professional services. In total, it was $54,000 for two vSAN Servers.

I would rate this solution 4 out of 10. 

For my needs on virtual machine and HCI, which is hyperconverged infrastructure, I have another solution that costs less and gives me better features. When it comes to one feature that only VMware supports, I had to pay. They have the patents, and they have things that only they can do. But I work in the telecom world, and we give services to a lot of companies. On my infrastructure, there are more than 80 million people using the infrastructure on a daily basis. Most of it is not VMware, and I'm so happy.

For the last two years, Gartner and even Nutanix have been above VMware.

My advice is to be sure you really need it, as there are other vendors in the market that give good solutions. Nutanix and Hyper-V give a solution that is good for most cases in the market. If I take the business world, 80% of the businesses in the world will be okay with other vendors and they cost less. 

My environment is 26 physical servers that aren't VMware and two physical servers that are VMware.

Previously, we had 400 servers, and only five of them were VMware. When you look in the market, you know the better solution for your needs. No one in the world has been fired or lost their job for purchasing Cisco; it's the name. It's the same with VMware; it's just too expensive.

We don't have any specific use cases, however, we do have a variety of workloads running on vSAN.

It's a massive shift now to have it in the portfolio and to have a complete software-defined data center.

The policies the solution has been very good. We use them a lot.

The deduplication and compression are excellent. 

There are a couple of features which we are using right now that we really like.

It's the kind of solution that is very easy to use, which may be its most valuable aspect for our organization.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The solution overall is very easy to manage and configure.

There's a lot that can be done to segregate. That may be available now in vSAN 7, I suppose, however, the deduplication and compression can be segregated. 

Increasing the classifiers to maybe more than 64 could be done in future releases.

The file service is something that can be integrated.

Something more could be done to integrate from a monitoring perspective right in the console itself so that we have deeper monitoring capabilities.

I've been using the solution for about three years, however, I suspect it's been even longer than that.

We haven't had any issues I can recall in terms of stability. It's pretty reliable. It doesn't crash or freeze. There aren't bugs or glitches.

In our organization's case, we started with a number of nodes and I scaled it up from there. I didn't find any issues expanding the product. Scalability was not a problem.

This is a pretty recent deployment. While I've been working with the solution for three or four years, it's new to the company for the most part.

We plan to increase usage in the coming year. New workloads will get deployed and we'll begin to expand it more.

The technical support has been very good. They're quite knowledgable and responsive. We're satisfied with the level of support we get.

My organization didn't previously use a different hyper-converged solution. This product is their first in this particular area.

There's no complexity in the original setup of the solution. The implementation is very straightforward.

Deployment was pretty quick. Just testing it out and finally rolling it out we managed to do in a couple of days. I would say within a week we were able to be up and running. 

My company was involved directly with a reseller. The other nitty-gritty elements were something that I took care of it.

I was not directly involved from a pricing perspective. I suppose it was competitive and that's why the company went ahead and with vSAN, therefore I assume the pricing is okay.

We did look at other options. We ended up choosing vSAN mostly due to the price. However, we also liked how easy it was to set up, configure, and manage compared to other options.

We're a partner with VMware.

Overall, I would rate them eight out of ten. They still have room for improvement. However, overall, we've been pleased with the results. It's easy to use, manage, and monitor.

The solution is best suited for small to medium-sized organizations.

If the solution is ideal for a company depends on the workloads and what they're trying to do right now. If a company would like to make a choice between the All-Flash or the Hybrid, I would definitely go for All-Flash. It may be a bit expensive as compared to Hybrid, however, definitely from a feature perspective and a performance perspective, All-Flash is the way to go.