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.

There could be more features with the automatic backup.

The product's high price is an area of concern where improvements are required.

Compatibility with the previous version, stability, performance, and upgradeability of the solution with the previous version all need to be improved. 

In future releases of the solution, I would like to see more HCL compatibility lists, less hardware requirements, better performance, and the ability to upgrade from the previous version.

The solution must provide better customization.

There are certain shortcomings in the stability of the product where improvements are required.

When the drive fails, I have heard that the degradation of disk groups happens. The rebuild time is not fast in VMware vSAN. I heard that vSAN ESA will provide better rebuild time. The previous version of VMware vSAN had some performance issues when the drive went down. With vSAN ESA, performance can be made faster. The performance offered by VMware vSAN OSA is not fast, making it in areas where improvements are required. If a drive fails in VMware vSAN OSA, the rebuild time is high.

There is room for improvement in vSAN's ability to debug. When it's not working well, debugging becomes quite challenging. Identifying issues when it's lagging or not functioning properly can be difficult.

In future releases, I would like to see the ability to debug as a solution.

Other areas of improvement include pricing and support. 

Some areas where this product can be improved are:

• If we could create multiple datastores rather than a single one, it would be helpful.
• There could be improvements in the hardware failure and data recovery methods.
• There should be an option to create more than one datastore like other SDS vendors have in order to allow the features to support Storage DRS & Storage I/O Control (SIOC).
• A control panel for VMs is absent. Although, other vendors are deploying this for each host to provide better storage control.
• A typical data center for installation of systems requires more storage growth than servers. This limits the scalable features of vSAN.

The product is not user-friendly. From an improvement perspective, the product needs to be made more user-friendly. Lately, I have noticed that there is a possibility of data leakage by hackers in the product. Hackers are able to manage to leak information or data from the product using some corrupt files, making it an area of major concern where improvements are required. From a security perspective, leakage happens when some of the company's internal information is exposed to outsiders. VMware vSAN should release a version that is faster than the current ones offered.

Currently, one of the available features is shareable VMBKs. You can create the VMBK disc and you can make them shareable between the ends. But as soon as you start using this feature, you lose the ability to create snapshots.

There is a significant limitation with this feature as it prevents VMs using shared VMDKs from creating snapshots, which is a crucial functionality. This limitation greatly reduces the practicality of using shared VMDKs despite their benefits in cluster environments. Integrating shared VMDKs with snapshot functionality, even if it means excluding them from snapshots, would greatly enhance the usability of this feature and make it more valuable for many users.

There needs to be an increase in the supported memory and hard disk space, as it is an area where the product currently has certain shortcomings. Only 32 TB RAM is supported in vSAN Ready Node R740 and vSAN Ready Node R750.

A more user-friendly GUI for troubleshooting and resolving issues would be beneficial. 

Now, addressing problems often requires opening support tickets and command-line interventions, which can be cumbersome for customers and partners alike.

For example, a server might disconnect from vSAN because we didn't realize we needed the command line to check certain things. Ideally, they should develop a web portal that allows users to diagnose and fix errors on their own.

So, I would like to see a tool in the web portal to address vSAN issues. A tool to fix recent issues.

There are some additional features I would like to see but it's not directly related to vSAN, but I'd like to touch on the vCLS feature. In the past, there was no such feature, but they're planning to develop this feature and integrate it. 

This creates challenges for our sales team and sometimes even difficulties in maintaining service on other servers. Ideally, they could develop something that allows authorized users to check out a server, essentially take it offline for maintenance, before doing so and notifying others.

The VCLS feature is confusing for your customers. It would be better to develop a feature that helps authorized users check out and disable this feature before taking a server offline for maintenance.

The platform's cost affects the business. This particular area needs improvement.

There's already a concern with VMware with ransomware and security issues. VMware could focus on improving security.

If we have some complicated issues, you have to use the command lines interface. Not everything is possible to be fixed in the GUI. This is a drawback, that some things have to be fixed via command-line interface and should be able to be done in the GUI.

One area that could be improved is the management feature. The link between the virtualization layer and the application layer can be improved as well.

An additional feature I would like to see in the next release is integration between virtualization with vSAN and network virtualization.

I know it's coming, but I'm really excited for the encryption. I know it's on the all-flash, which is fine, because we're migrating to that anyways. Nonetheless, the encryption would be great for at-rest data, because I don't want to rely on a third party. I don't want to get some self-encrypting drives or anything like that; drives me nuts. That would be very good to get.

I'm looking forward to being able to do VSAN shares with other clusters; sharing the VSAN storage outside of its existing cluster so that we can actually move data a little bit easier between them, or allocate VMs across the entire frame and all the different VSAN storage. I want to try to make more use of the VSAN storage and do some better vMotions across hosts and clusters. That, I think, would be the best.

The platform’s pricing needs improvement. Additionally, there should be an appliance module included in it.

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.

The product's complex setup phase is an area of concern where improvements are required.

I want the solution to be made available at a lower price since it is currently expensive.

The main improvement in VMware vSAN is its licensing mode. Its acquisition prioritizes doubling the EBITA rather than focusing on technological advancement. This is a common issue in the IT market, where companies may be acquired by financial entities, potentially leading to stagnation in technological innovation. The technology is mature and stable, with no significant improvements currently evident.
The new feature allows for the use of only two nodes in an active-active setup.

Enterprise customers get discounts on the solution's licensing pricing, but it is too expensive for SMB customers. Maintenance-wise, when the capacity is utilized beyond 60% to 70%, then the time of the upgrade is a little higher compared to the standard SAN storage.

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. 

We faced some latency issues but it's been a little better lately. I'd like to see a single dashboard product and an improvement in reporting which currently depends on third party applications. 

It can be very expensive.

This solution should be easier to support and upgrade.

As a software-based product, it requires a lot of system resources.

When you upgrade the vSAN, there are some issues like lost data and problems with the log. The log disappears. When you upgrade the solution, you must have several logs, so if you have some problems, you can check the log server to find them. But this solution has some improvements, like its snapshot feature. When you have to upgrade the version, vSAN makes a snapshot, and if there is a problem, you can revert to the old version.

I am looking for more of a software-defined storage platform that uses different protocols, such as iSCSI, NFS, and CIS, and maybe also has an object as part of that. They should 100% make it more of a storage-based product where it is not linked just to VMware, and it also has NFS and iSCSI built-in at a scalable level. They should turn it more into a dedicated storage-as-a-service platform instead of just being built into the VMware kernel.

Their level one and level two support is not at all good, and it should be improved.

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.

The solution could be improved by having more filtered and multiple view volumes instead of a single view.

In the next release, I would like to see a more user-friendly dashboard with the potential to display issues. It should be capable of detecting the issues faster. For example, if something is wrong with your LAN, controller, or storage volumes.

If the support could be provided more quickly, it would be very helpful.

The Snapshots feature looks pretty cool, so that will be nice to have. External storage would be a good thing to have in the next release, something other than iSCZI, something a little more, not HA, a little more production-oriented, than iSCZI.

After hearing more today, here at VMworld 2018, about what's coming, it seems that what's coming covers us: It's the Snapshotting and the DR and the replication. Historically, we've had to leverage third-parties. They were third-party solutions we were happy with, but all-in-one would be better.

I haven't utilized it enough to even know all the features available, much less what might be needed still. It's hitting all of our points pretty well.

The ability to access SAN environments via fiber channel (or even NVMe) would be a good addition.

Because of virtual storage, the system reaches reserve storage for its functions. It also consumes a certain amount of storage, which then results in the creation of a fault tolerance for the system. All of this adds to a lot of capacity being consumed in terms of storage for each drive for vSan. I find this to be one drawback of using vSan.

The pricing for licensing could be cheaper.

The price can be reduced. Small businesses cannot afford this solution.

There are limitations with Kubernetes and vSAN.

In the next release, I would like to have a hybrid flash available with this product.

I think the vSAN product uses vSphere to monitor the system. It is sometimes difficult to manage the PCs within the system. VMware is currently working towards moving things to the cloud network. This is a great new addition to the VMware product.

I know they're working on this: better support for an all-NVME array. Better metrics.

vSAN itself is a great storage platform, but one of the issues with it is that you have to be fully locked into the VMware package to use it. We're going to be deploying 72 Kubernetes nodes, and we're not going to buy VMware licenses for 72 of them, just so they can access vSAN. That's what we're using the Pure for. Opening it up so you could have vSAN as a data store, use it as a data lake, hit it with an NFS, S3 from outside the VMware ecosystem, would be 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. 

VMware vSAN could improve by having faster reload time and a single point of failure. Resynchronization of many hardware could be better. If you have an outage of a disc or a full system, the replication time is too slow. This has room for improvement.

The cost of the product is very high. The price for the hard drive, for vSAN, is very expensive.

Its integration with a hybrid cloud can be improved. Its scalability can also be improved so that it can be integrated with more than 32 nodes. The maximum number of nodes is okay, but our use cases could probably do with more nodes, probably up to 64.

In terms of new features, it should probably have the basic support for high-speed networking spaces.

Room for improvement could be in the planning stage of going to hyperconverged. And this is a big ask: some modeling tools or guidance on how to work out the optimal TCO. For example, core size - the amount of RAM that you're running - versus the licensing cost you're up for with, say, Mircrosoft data center, versus the number of hosts you're going to run and have to license for the vSAN. It's quite a complex equation and it's really difficult to work out, in advance of implementing the solution, that you've got it right. That creates some uncertainty around the total cost of ownership.

There are features that I would love to see added to VSAN and I think they're being worked on. One of the major limitations is its inability to provide storage to things outside the hyper-converged world. Any traditional SAN we have left over in our institution will be for that function. Ultimately, if we can remove that by simply extending VSAN's access outside of its little virtual bubble, so to speak, that's the key. And as I said I think that's going to be added.

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.

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.

Currently, there aren't any shortcomings to discuss or missing features that we worry about. 

This product is very expensive. 

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.

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.

I'd like to see better integration with the Update Manager, in terms of firmware updates for hardware.

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.

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.

We have been talking to VMware about things we'd like to see and I think they have done them in their 6.6 release. I don't think we need any more enhancements at this time.

It could be cheaper.

The interface is a little complicated, it could be simplified with more graphical gadgets. We have many servers, and the built-in functions, such as rate configuration, are a bit complex.

We are finding vSAN is going down the right path, but vSAN has specific profiles which supports vSAN disk. However, our company has our own storage. So, we have different profiles of configuration. Some of those profiles and motherboards, vSAN doesn't support. We have challenges and work with VMware to work with other providers to get into the VMware list and drivers. Since it's customizable, we are looking for drivers from other vendors as well from VMware for compatibility. There is a room for improvement on the latest version of compatibility with the VMware product, especially for vSAN and with other vendors, like Intel and AMD, on their motherboards and driver configurations.

I see room for improvement with vSAN in particularly in the reporting realm. Now, with vSAN 6.7, they're starting to include vRealize Operations components in the vSphere Client, even if you're not a vRealize Operations customer. So, that's really good. It exposes some really low-level reporting. I would like to see more of that. However, you have to be a vRealize Operations customer to obtain that. I would like to see more include of this included in the vSAN licensing.

The vSAN licensing is not an inexpensive product. It does cost more than hypervisor. I would like to see more basic reporting, or even expert reporting. I think with our licensing that we've paid our dues, and we should get the information.

The product can be improved in a couple of ways. One of those would be that they have a lot of hidden features, that are through the CLI, that would be great to have in the GUI, or just be more open about those features. It's something called RVC. It's a tool in the back end. It's a really great tool, but I had to find it through Reddit. So more information on stuff like that would be great. 

Also, in the user interface, giving us more features and more reporting that we can do from vSphere itself would be helpful.

A bit more information on the upgrade path, upgrade availability, how to upgrade, that would be very useful.

I would love to see vSAN integrate Persistent Memory and NVDIMMs. I know they're supposed to be working on an elastic tier so that we don't have the issues with destaging from the cache to the capacity. Those are the things that I'm interested in.

I'm not an end-user, I'm a partner, we put together proofs of concept for end-users. So my biggest desire is for the VMware/vSAN team to perfect the single tier or what they're calling the elastic tier so that you can pool SSDs as well as NVDIMMs.

I would like to see a little bit more documentation on the initial setup, and a little bit more explanation on the expandability: How to extend out your vSAN much more simply through the console because, a lot of the time, you have to do it through the command line.

I would like to software-based disk-level encryption in the next release. We deal a lot with the Department of Defense, and arms and munitions government-regulated stuff, so we would like to see more. From their roadmap, I see its coming but it has been an impediment.

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.

We are facing some problems with updates with the VMware vSAN. When we upgraded from version 6.5 to 7, we have been faced with many problems. They have been deploying many hotfixes for this version, and they need to continue to improve this version.

I would like to see the availability of more template based VMware systems. Combined with the ability to check and measure multiple and converging data segments. Another issue I've seen is that the tool seems to be slow when first starting up. 

vSAN health reporting needs some work. There were a few instances where the vSAN would report health issues with disks, even though it was functioning correctly. I believe VMware stated this would be corrected in future versions.

We also had some issues with reinstalling hosts that had vSAN enabled. JBOD disks would retain the vSAN configuration information and would need to be manually cleared to allow for the new vSAN instance to be enabled.

There's some features in the future releases that we would really like to see: encryption as part of the offering. The application and compression would be nice to have those features available in the next Virtual SAN releases and also the capability to serve storage through other protocols. Like NSF or iSCSI for other vendors, for other applications that are not VMware. We have some solutions now that we use like Nexenta, in order to do that but it would be nice if Virtual SAN support of this natively. So we have one vendor to deal with.

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.

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

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

The only thing that can be improved is the cost.

Customers who are using Essentials Plus or even Essentials have to pay for technical support. However, they should not have to pay for support.

In a future release, they could add micro-segmentation or security level features integrated into vSAN.

We are looking for more load balancing at an application level.

For the hardware level, we're looking at some other solutions. For example, we're checking out Nutanix and Sangfor. 

We've had issues with load balancing. Suppose, for example, if the physical ESXi host is down, the virtual machine you have handle manually. We need to have load balancing and RAM and processor balancing also.

Hardware load balancing is available on the enterprise version of the solution, however, it's extremely expensive and therefore out of our budget.

In general, we're looking for more features. This solution doesn't really offer us that much.

There are features that we could use that are coming out: File Services, data backup, and a better way to do Maintenance Mode with vSAN, which takes a while.

The dedupe is awesome. The stretch clustering is crazy, in my opinion. It's really cool. We've been talking about it internally and have lot of school districts and it actually makes a lot of sense for a school district because they have the fiber runs between the buildings so they can hit the five millisecond, ten, twenty, forty, a gig, requirements of the network and it would be a good use case for them I feel like. We have to look at the reality of it, of course, cause it got announced like yesterday, but it's really exciting to see some of this stuff and especially dedupe. Dedupe for root would be really cool. It's really kind of taking that mindset that I see a lot of people have that VSAN isn't, you know enterprise ready and putting it to rest.

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.

VMware vSAN needs to improve its features because other solutions have more advanced features.

The solution isn't as scalable as we would like it to be.

The stability needs to be improved.

The installation process is difficult.

The solution could use more integration with respect to the DR solution. If there was more integration with respect to the backup solutions, that will definitely help us.

On the DevOps side, if there could be more automation it would be more helpful. Specifically, we would like to know how to integrate and extend it towards the cloud. Either it is JCP or GCP or AWS.

Data services like remote replication.

I would like to see more ease of use, more compatibility with different areas.

If you want to get down to the nuts and bolts of room for improvement, we would really like them to look at what Nutanix did for day-one/day-two operations deployment: Bringing in the equipment, getting it deployed, getting it setup, and ease of use of one-click for deploying our 30-node solution. With vSAN we had to go into each one individually and set it up.

I would like to see the following:

• Fixing the resync function. This needs to be addressed ASAP.
• A better UI showing actual space used and disk space available. The current output is very deceiving. It shows a total that should actually be divided in half, minus the headroom.

When disks are getting full or near 70%, there’s a potential for receiving out-of-sync nodes. One node may have more content than the other, and the re-sync button starts a process that never ends. This is a known issue.

When looking at space details, the available free space depicts the sum of the two nodes. In reality, that should only show half and even more. I would like to see a gauge that marks a safe zone, or under 70%.

The reality is that once you go over 70%, the sync issue comes into play, performance hits are unavoidable, and the rebuild could take a long time.

I would love to see VSAN transform into an EVO:RAIL-type of technology, but EVO:RAIL has a separate use-case. I think it's not meant for all companies either. VSAN does serve that purpose, and kind of addresses the primary need there. At the same time, EVO:RAIL is limited to certain hardware manufacturers and some providers who are kind of combining everything into one package and selling it off. Whereas, customers like to use commodity hardware, like to use regular software, and do things their own way. So, if VSAN continues to offer that flexibility, which it does today, I think there's great significance for it. If it integrates with replication and SRM, that takes it in a really good fashion, right to the area where it can be heavily adopted.

The management platforms have some gaps. It's difficult to see what’s going on with the hardware at times. The only platform available doesn’t run full time, and there is a management pack but it requires a product that not many people have (vRealize Operations). So it could use more work in management areas.

Also, it lacks deduplication, so we're using a lot more storage than you necessarily need to.

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.

This solution could be improved by having more than one controller for the environment. VMware depends on one controller for the whole environment, whereas Nutanix has one controller for each node. Because there is only one controller with VMware, if there was any drop, then the whole environment would stop working. In Nutanix, I have five nodes—there is one controller for each node and it depends on a virtual controller—so if the controller of any node is down, the whole environment will still work. 

We would like to see additional backup and recovery options added. In particular, integration with popular applications like databases.

We would like to see even more storage capacity. 

Technical support could be more knowledgeable.

More modularity in terms of how nodes are provisioned (all nodes having to be the same size when deployed).

I would like to be able to limit IOPS.

One thing I would have said I'm looking for is vSAN in the cloud but, obviously, they announced that here today at VMworld 2018. That is something that I'm looking forward to.

The hardware compatibility list (HCL) is a sore point for vSAN. You need to thoroughly check and re-check the list with multiple vendors, like VMware in the first instance, and the manufacturer (like Dell, IBM, HPE, etc.), as the compatibility list is very narrow. I would definitely be happy if there were significant additional support for more models of servers from Dell, IBM, HPE, etc.

Currently, vSAN supports stretched cluster. You need to have the exact same number of nodes in each room and only the RAID 1 resiliency is supported. I hope in the future that vSAN supports also the RAID 5 and RAID 6 resiliency mode for stretched cluster.

The vSAN Hardware Compatibility List Checker needs to improve, since currently it is a sore point for vSAN. You need to thoroughly check and re-check the HCL with multiple vendors like VMware, in the first instance, and manufacturers like Dell, IBM, HPE, etc., as the compatibility list is very narrow. I would definitely be happy if there is significant additional support for more models of servers from Dell, IBM, HPE, etc.

I think that the product is evolving in the right direction, most of the improvements and suggestions we had in mind are already available in 6.5. Obviously, there is always room for improvement.

For example, in our case, we had to go with vSAN Advanced license in order to have all flash. I remember attending the vSAN summit at VMworld 2015, and this licensing issue came up during the discussions; so did the request to present vSAN via iSCSI and the 2-node direct connect for ROBOs. In 6.5, all-flash is now supported by all vSAN editions, and ROBO sites can be deployed with a 2-node crossover cable, so it looks like VMware are taking on-board the suggestions we are making, as always J.

I'm part of the Beta program, so I know what's going to come up in the next version.
Room for improvement would be support for more NVMe-based devices and especially firmware combinations; that's sometimes a problem. Also, support for special SAS controllers. We have some special customer settings where we solved the customer’s special configuration nearly two years ago, and now it's no longer supported officially for the newest release. There’s room for improvement there.

If you don't have vRealize Operations, it would detract from usability of VSAN. It allows our customers to see more granularly than other storage solutions.

The architecture of vSAN is not good. vSAN works with objects, such as disks, and it causes problems with availability. When we send users caches we lose the total cache disk of the group. It's really a red line for using vSAN. We don't lose all the data because it is replicated in other groups, but when the object is lost in one group, we only have one remaining and this creates a higher risk of losing data.

Another is the restrictions of using deduplication and compression, it requires all-flash for it meaning that deduplication is on for all clusters and you can't control it for specific ones. I would like VMware vSAN to give hybrid configurations more caches and to add deduplication and compression for hybrid configurations.

Many VMware products are specialized, where one solution does one thing and another does something else. It would be better if VMware consolidated these products and offered modules or add-ons instead of selling 10 different solutions.

Also, a vSAN cluster must have compression and deduplication to be an all-flash array, but it's not supported with a hybrid array. Deduplication and compression work better with an all-flash array, so I think that VMware should give customers the option to activate and support this feature for hybrid arrays. Other products like Nutanix support this.

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.

So far, the solution is okay with me. 

It would be ideal if the solution offered some intelligent monitoring. Right now, most of these features are in another subscription such as Log Insight.

The scaling could be a bit better.

The monitoring capabilities could be improved. It would be ideal if clients didn't need to monitor the solution on a daily basis.

They should provide Deduplication and Compression over the hybrid drives. The Deduplication and Compression are locally only on all flash drives.

When you compare with Nutanix, you will find the performance in the Deduplication and Compression is over hybrid and on the flash drives. This feature is needed in vSan.

It is quite an expensive solution for us and I would like to see some improvements on the backup side of the solution. 

They can package it in a way that is specific to the hardware infrastructure and the hardware platform. It should stay fairly up to date with the drivers and the manufacturer issues.

The problem with uncoupling the proprietary technology and component capabilities is that by uncoupling them, you run into some concerns or challenges over the poor performance model. These concerns really come when you start talking about high performance, high bandwidth, and high availability types of environments. While vSAN is a leader, in a critical view, it is not about being cost-effective. It is more about the immediate impact of money loss to the business in critical applications where we want to maintain a continuous operational 59 model. It is, however, good for QA/QC tasks. I don't necessarily know how it works in regards to VDI or virtual desktop infrastructure.

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 see room for improvement for vSAN just around general hardware compatibility and expanding that sort of matrix. It's pretty wide already, but everything else within vSAN seems to work really well. It is very well-integrated. 

I don't see a lot to complain about at this point.

I would like a better Hardware Certification List (HCL). The HCL should a little easier to deal with.

Making the hardware compatibility not as much of an issue would be a good thing. 

Support for iSCSI access would be great, but this may be supported in the latest versions of vSAN.

We have a few physical servers in our environment and it would be great, if these servers could also access the storage in vSAN. With vSAN iSCSI support, we would be able to connect our physical servers to vSAN as well.

Expand the hardware compatibility list – it's pretty short. Definitely also the diagnostic and monitoring could be improved. That stuff is still very new.

I'd like to see support for iSCI. Right now it’s all internal protocols, and they promise it in the next version. They need to support more types of hardware – the list is too narrow.

We plan to switch products since the hardware nowadays is a little bit outdated and we need to scale up a bit. We are looking for better performance and storage. This is why we are examining other solutions, including VxRail. 

More focus has to be put on deduplication and compression with a hybrid architecture. The reason is that some customers need to have a more cost-effective solution so they don't want to implement all-flash. As such, they need to use a hybrid environment.

I would like to see more comprehensive lifecycle management. The current path and process for upgrading or updating the firmware, as well as the storage controller software to interact with that firmware, is fairly manual and not very well documented. A little more time and effort spent on the documentation of the lifecycle management for vSan would be really great.

The only thing I can think of at this time is to improve the performance monitoring and performance visibility within the GUI. They have already made several improvements in vSAN 6.2, but there's always room for improvement when it comes to monitoring performance.

The worst part of vSAN, as with most VMware products, is that you need to use the vSphere Web Client to interact with it. The vSphere Web Client is slow and clunky, making interacting with the system difficult and often times painful. I have been told that the new version of the web client will be significantly better, but do not have personal experience with it. Other than being difficult to work with, it can cause outage scenarios to take significantly longer to troubleshoot because you waste a lot of time waiting for the client to load information, or just load in general. It is a huge drawback for an otherwise very good product.

From my experience testing it, VSAN could be more stable.

It's currently doing everything we've ask of it and it meets all our needs right now. To be honest, I don’t think too much about the future of the product or what we might need it to do as our requirements change.

I think it needs to be more cost-effective if customers already have existing SAN to compare with.

Its price could be improved. It is too expensive for our clients.

Disaster recovery needs to be improved, when there is a crisis, there is a problem with what is the quickest way to get out of it. This should be done automatically, not manually.

If we have a power failure then you have to find your way manually. There 's no way to automatically fix it. So there should be an automatic way to repair such crises from disaster recovery.

In the next release, I would like to see more clarity on where the files are. the details of the files, for example, where the owners of the files are, and more audits.

This solution would benefit from better collaboration with Cisco for driver updates.

Everything that has been mentioned as part of Update 1 solves part of the HCL list issue. They're handling the firmware version but, at the moment, they're only handling the storage IO. They're not handling the rest, which would be firmware, the BIOS, the fNIC, and so forth. After speaking with them, they said they're looking at that for a future update.

Perhaps they could provide encryption without having to use an encryption manager.

The usability is pretty good but it could use a little tweaking on the UI, with a clearer definition of exactly what some of the things do. For example, sometimes when sticking hosts into maintenance mode, you have to re-read the definition a couple of times. I have to say to myself, "Okay. I actually want to evacuate the data off of this host. Or no, I actually don't. I want to keep it there but I still put the host into maintenance mode." So a little bit more clear and concise definition of what some of the options do would help.

I need some additional features, and to learn more, to develop best practices for the Brazilian federal government.

I would like to see machine-learning. This is the biggest problem because, in Brazil, our federal government doesn't know about moving to the cloud. We have city, state, and federal governments to move to the cloud. Dataprev is beginning the work towards a private cloud and machine-learning would be an important feature, one I really need.

When it was implemented, we were one of the first to jump into using vSAN for production use. The main problem we had was hardware compatibility, finding the right hardware that was certified. This caused further problems because the hardware reseller had little knowledge of the requirements and we even had issues with firmware from the hardware vendor. This delayed the implementation time by a few months. This should not be a issue today, but still be cautious when choosing the hardware.

vSAN health monitoring has room for improvement because they have many known and unknown bugs which may be resolved in a future release version.

The management client, i.e., the Flash-based client, is just not up to the mark. I’m really waiting for the HTML5 client to be fully ready and all the features are implemented to it. This, of course, is not a vSAN issue but a vSphere issue.

Of course as vSAN is tightly embedded into vSphere, it is also managed by the same tool. vSphere management is done via browser, and currently the only supported client is the flash-based one. VMware is rolling out a new HTML5 –based client, but that is a slow process. It began as a Fling and since then, there has been quite a number of releases as new features are added. It is today quite usable, but still not complete yet.

There is also the C# -client, also known as the fat-client, which is to be installed onto a management system. Recent versions of vSphere do not support the C#-client anymore. Thus the browser is the only possibility with current versions.

So, my criticism is aimed towards the current Flash-based client, which is utterly slow, and Flash itself being deprecated technology. The sooner we can get rid of it, the happier we all will be.

Hardware compatibility needs to be increased to be able to use more RAID controllers available on the market.

From the implementer side, the solution is very comparable to Nutanix. The only difference is that VMware requires more initial nodes.

I would like to see better performance graphs, maybe something that you can export outside to a different console, and maybe a little bit longer time period. The 18-hour maximum, or 24-hour maximum, is kind of short.

Also, the hardware compatibility limitations are a little frustrating sometimes, but as everybody's starting to adopt vSAN more, you get more options for hardware.

I would like to see it be more hardware-agnostic.

Other than that, the only other complication is - and it has gotten better with the newer versions - that lately, once you're running an all-flash, if you need to grow or scale down your infrastructure, it's a long process. You need to evacuate all the data and make sure you have enough space on the host, then add more hosts or take out hosts. That process is a little bit complex. You cannot scale as needed or shrink as needed. 

I would like to see some of the more traditional SAN functions that are out there now. I can list them: being able to Snapshot on the back-end, better de-dupe, and better compression. Those are the major ones.

Dedupe in non flash drives can be improved. The raw capacity for PFTT two is only able to use 67% of the raw capacity.

Some storage tiering options can be included, like other mature storage systems. Some intelligence can be added to the newest version to provide more flexibility between storage tiers, like Nutanix, to make this product a true software defined storage product.

I’m often asked for a vSAN stretched cluster in combination with erasure coding. Currently with vSAN 6.5, you can use one of them but not both at the same time. It is kind of a German behaviour to have two datacenters with active/active architecture and syncronized mirror. But for this type of customer, it’s pretty important to get a vSAN stretched cluster with erasure coding.

We did plan on using deduplication in our original specification, but during the planning of the configuration, we were advised against it by VMware.

It was a brand new feature, so it was, at the time, perhaps, too early to use it. I am expecting that we will use it in the future when it has matured.

I would like to see improvement in monitoring and performance statistics. When installing the product, it has limited statistics. The default vCenter statistics are available, but deep IOPS/latency and block sizing is absent. You can connect vRealize Operations to vSAN, giving much more information, but this is not available by default.

I would like to see faster re-sync and recovery times after a host failure. It’s so difficult to restore a normal situation after a failure. There is a large amount of data to re-sync after a host failure. We have a 1Gb vSAN network, and the restore process can last several hours or days.

I would also like to see a granular sync system, rather than the current “all data” transfer.

The areas of improvement are:

• The performance reports should be improved when customers are using third-party SSL certificates. This service doesn't work if you use it.
• In a hybrid configuration, it would be good if you could mirror the SSD instead of only having access to one DISK for caching.

We are seeing some improvements coming up, but at the moment you have to store every object on multiple disks to protect it, and they should be better distributed over disks to help parity.

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

As no product is 100% perfect, the price for VMware vSAN could still be improved, though it is good when compared to some of its competitors.

I would like to see more support for applications. I think currently it only supports applications between two vSAN clusters. I heard that VMware is planning to have applications using vSAN at the hypervisor layer. I'm not sure whether it's available or it's being planned for the next release. I would prefer it to be on the storage layer than on the hypervisor layer.

The solution could maybe improve failure protection. The failure protection for vSAN is very expensive sometimes within the clients. The customers want to be able to tolerate two or three nodes in failure. However, sometimes, the budget is limited. Implementing hyper-converged solutions sometimes are very expensive with the dozens of tolerance of failure.

I'd like to see improvement in the troubleshooting tools, specifically the troubleshooting mechanism. We like the product, but once in a while there are problems that require us to reboot the host to fix things, and that creates an impact on production. 

For additional features, I'd like to see a better monitoring tool. 

It should be easier to use. Only trained people can properly use it. For untrained, system administrators, it's tough to get a firm understanding of the basics, that's why I'm still studying it.

It would be much improved if we could somehow integrate a better backup with it. Right now, we're using Veeam and it's okay, but I would like more of a VDP vSAN solution. That would be excellent. The VDP, at least the last time we looked at, it was just not quite there.

What I would like to see,  for the really small customers, is the ability to have two nodes.

Only the stretched cluster requires a minor improvement.  

This product is usable in many cases. It can be used for a wide range of applications.

It is also possible, for example, to parameterize a stretch cluster at the very least without going to a costly solution based on conventional storage, such as MetroCluster, or another solution of the same level.

The features I am most looking forward to are the performance monitoring capabilities of VSAN Observer being transitioned into the web client. That's what I'm really looking forward to.

UPDATE: Capacity and performance monitoring is now available in the web client and works well in 6.2. I am looking forward to DARE(data at rest encryption) in the next version.

VSAN currently has no data deduplication, and having such a feature would both be an improvement and provide a feature that Nutanix has.

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.

An integrated backup solution within the vSAN platform would improve the product. Competitors like SimpliVity, UCS, and Cisco Hyperconverged all have a backup feature in their hyper converged infrastructure, it's something that a lot of people use now.

VMware vSAN could improve by adding NAS and object storage.

I would like to see lowered cost. vSAN is very expensive.

If vSAN developed a "unified system" (that can support block + file + object), it would help users a lot in facing hybrid cloud environments.

I would prefer to use a complete and deep dashboard so I can give a supervisor a way to easily monitor the status of all drives and pool tiers. I think that would be a powerful feature for the future.

The integration could be improved. I would like to see integration with other platforms.

Traditional infrastructure, Private cloud and the hybrid cloud

There is always a challenge with their firmware. There is different hardware and they are always looking for different firmware that is compatible with vSAN. It is very difficult to find the compatibility matrix.

They need to do some kind of automation in terms of hardware, firmware, and compatibility with the vSAN. They need to do some sort of upgrade for the customer.

I would like to see the upgraded mechanism, and improvements on the hardware so that we can create a VPN.

The only thing I care about is that the solution is stable, reliable. They need to improve on those factors. I don't want to have to wake up at night to deal with problems.

The UI could certainly be better. The inside into what's actually going on with vSAN would be nice to know.

I would like to see replication as part of it. I would also like to see direct file access, being able to run SIF shares and NFS and the like. I think that would be critical to continuing the use of it, going forward.

One of the things that we've had challenges with is when we place hosts into maintenance mode. Sometimes doing so triggers large re-sync processes which can be time-consuming and which have, at times, pushed the capacity to the threshold. I definitely think making some changes in that area would provide some big improvements.

• I would like more integration with the hardware when it comes to disc types and supporting the newer types of storage. 
• I would like compression and deduplication to be offered for offloading hardware, instead of doing it with software. That would be nice.

Raw disk and block disk.

Hardware supported by VMware vSAN: The list of hardware supported should be increased in the future. I would improve these areas by increasing the number of partners to support as many as possible.

Snapshot management is something that continues to improve with each release of vSAN. Earlier versions experienced performance degradation, but each version gets more and more efficient with snapshots. The new snapshot format known as “vsanSparse” was introduced in vSAN 6.0, which replaced the traditional “VMFSsparse” formats which involved redo logs.

• The daily maintenance can be high, especially due to the lack of documentation and reporting in vCenter, and only on the vSAN health page.
• If the vSAN cluster can’t self-heal due to an internal error, we can’t repair the vSAN cluster ourselves.
• A case with VMware is always needed to fix the issue, resulting in an increased time to resolve. This can be very time-consuming.
• I would like to see more documentation on the errors, impact, and solutions. This could improve the product knowledge.
• Some essential storage features (deduplication/compression) are only available on all-flash vSAN clusters. These limitations need to be taken into account when sizing and designing your environment.

The web console, VMware vSphere Web Client, is not based on HTML5, which makes it difficult to manage. It slows down and page refresh is not fast; time is wasted. I know that vSphere 6.5 is already based on HTML5.

VMware is currently working on quite a lot of improvements and they're coming out with lots of novel features in their new releases. There's only one improvement area, and that is it needs a little bit more software and hardware to make it similar to Nutanix.

The pricing could be better when it comes to renewing the licenses. 

Technical support could have a faster response time.

It's hard to come up with an exact feature that might be good to include in a future release, as each customer is different and each customer likely has different feature needs.

The UI falls short compared to other solutions. It needs some development to make it more user-friendly. 

Perhaps a bundle, like Essentials, would allow more businesses to make the leap to the product.

• Online dedupe
• VM disk size limitations

vSAN does not have online dedup. When opening the inline dedupe, the performance will be lower than off inline.

Virtual machines disk size cannot cap more than a single node. For a VDI user, it may not save enough to hold a file server or exchange server on a single node storage space.

• Good job integrating with vRealize, vCOPS, etc.
• Needs complete integration with vRealize for GUI for drill down analysis
• Would be nice to see features like dedupe because it wastes a lot of mass when striping across multiple nodes and vSphere hosts.

On the troubleshooting front, it was occasionally difficult for me to perform some troubleshooting. We are currently working in a demo environment, so we are not encountering many issues. However, when you reach production with a heavy load, troubleshooting the vSAN may become difficult. 

Troubleshooting with vSAN is an area that needs improvement.

Based on my testing, I would like to expand deduplication to include hybrid deployments and not just for all-flash deployments.

In a future release, they can bring in the object storage capabilities to this solution. Currently, there is not any compatibility.

The biggest room for improvement I see in vSAN is the lack of SAN connectivity. I've kind of joked around that there is no "SAN" in vSAN. And it's something that we've worked to try and introduce some options for, and we're going to continue to work towards that. But it looks like the door is starting to open and there may be some options, with some of the announcements that came out of VMworld 2018.

Compared to other vendors, vSAN is compatible with more expensive hardware, and Nutanix is available on multiple hardware platforms, like Supermicro, Dell and Lenovo.

Its installation should be easier, and its price should be cheaper. 

It would be good for the product if they can include the data locality feature.

There are bugs in the SAN Health Check utility. It misreports latency issues when the hosts are actual within the correct tolerances. I have been on the phone with VMware about this and they have said it’s a bug.

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

VMware vSAN could improve by having better integration with other vendors and the storage is limited, I prefer it to the traditional storage.

This solution is not great for large file shares/object/rich media repository.

Deduplication and compression usage data display is not real-time and is not that accurate.

It needs to allow for more customizations and individualization specific to each user.

It needs to be more malleable and adjustable to changing requirements. There are too many hard-set limitations.

The user-friendliness could be better. 

The solution is quite pricey in comparison with other products, such as HP or Cisco. 

While I like the replication and compression features, there is a problem with them running too slowly. This is not of benefit to the customers, but it is important when it comes to migrating. 

vSAN is very complex inside. For example, you need to have a plan for any emergency situation, beginning from the PoC stage; how you monitor SSD and HDD; how you change them. It looks simple, but you cannot just remove a broken component and an install new one. Under the vSAN layer, you need many accurate steps to make these simple actions.

And when you operate a big environment, you need to have more tools to control the health of the solution, to troubleshoot issues and so on. VMware has improved this side from 5.5 to 6.5, and there’s still room for it.

vSAN is not a hardware-agnostic product. We would like to have more compatible SAS controllers and other components in the market. There is room for improvement for both hardware vendors and for VMware.

On the other hand, vSAN is a production-ready solution and all these possible improvements are cosmetic issues.

• Better integration with VMware DOS
• vBackup with vSAN is not so easy, because it's distributed storage so must be careful not to make host unavailable.

Ease of administration is one area where vSAN could be improved. 

I would love for this product to be cheaper and easier to configure.

We want see a better monitoring tool in vSAN. Monitoring is not that great as of now because it shows us false alarms in the Health status. We would like that to be improved.

There is not much improvement needed. If you work with the HC Platform, vSAN is not directly touched, i.e., once the HC appliance takes care of it.

I have worked with VxRail, which is a Hyper converged Platform, as it has vSAN embedded as well as it is fully automated the vSAN configuration.

As I did not work with the implementation, but the analyses of functionalities of VxRAIL, would be unfair tell how vSAN would be improved.

Although the product is very scalable, it is not scalable in a way that the different host sizes can effectively be added to an existing cluster. All the hosts/disk configuration have to be consistent, for a consistent performance experience.

During some intensive I/O workloads, and on a configuration that had SSDs sub-sized, we reached the limit of the system. When our SSDs became full (due to having too much I/O to manage), performance went down.

The management of vSAN (dashboard, alerts, monitoring) has a significant amount of growth potential.

Improvements can be made with respect to scalability.

It would help if the cost of the solution was reduced for smaller sized companies. 

It could be more robust. The latency is also an issue for us, and the reliability. I would like it to be faster and a little more flexible.

It is a memory intensive app, which should be improved. Also, the server files are larger than before.

Deduplication feature is needed, and I'm thinking maybe it needs a lot of nodes to store all redundant data. This will be addressed in their next beta version.

Integration could be better. It should be easier to integrate vSAN with the dashboard you have, with Google, and the others. Better integration is very important because the customers need to put the solution inside their company. It's the same dashboard for AWS, the same dashboard on GCP. It's good to see this inside a dashboard. It's very important.

I have used the VMware Replication but I can't get it to work properly. The process should be simplified.