VMware vSAN is a good hyper-converged solution in the market right now where we can leverage VMware vSphere features. There are multiple features like HA, vMotion, and storage vMotion. The Distributed Switch is again a good feature to deliverables. Hot add features are available by default in vSphere, allowing us to immediately increase memory, CPU, and hard drive without any downtime.

It's easy to use. Users can add compute and storage nodes directly. It has role-based access, provides easy administration, and integration is built into the system. The updates can be performed without downtime, which is quite efficient.

Integration is one of the best things. The product’s ecosystem is better than Nutanix’s. It is one of the best things I have seen in VMware vSAN. The interface is easy to use. Compared to legacy systems, the tool is easy to implement. Replication and securing data is easier in vSAN. The main objective of vSAN is scalability. The product is highly available within our 3-node cluster.

The most valuable features of the solution stem from the storage policies that are set and the fact that it serves as a tool that you can retire if you want. The product offers a single disk group, making it possible for the computer and storage, which is a really good feature.

A one-stack solution from one vendor is the main benefit here. 

Additionally, improvements to the organization are not available at this time.

vSAN is integrated into VMware. So you can manage and configure it within the VMware console. That's good. 

The most valuable feature of the solution is vROps, along with the monitoring part.

The main advantage is that it's all in the box, with VMware vCenter Server product.

The solution's most valuable feature stems from its ability to add a lot of servers and the fact that it allows users to use different operating systems. Sometimes, I can use the product on Windows XP. There are certain products for which I might need to use Windows XP. I load different operating systems on VMware vSAN, and sometimes, I even use iOS on it.

While we haven't made major changes to our disaster recovery and business continuity processes yet, moving towards stretch vSAN across sites will simplify and expedite our DR processes in the future.                 

VMware vSAN is for simple consolidation. The hard drive itself is defined through VMware's software-defined technology. You need to buy hardware compatible with nodes from different brands. You can use vSAN with HPE or other brands. Compared to third-party solutions, vSAN reduces the baseline. It's already enabled in the system, making it faster in terms of performance. Using protocols like Fibre Channel and iSCSI is a more efficient way. You can configure many VMs with vSAN, depending on the supported capacity. Then, you just enable vSAN through VMware, purchase the software, and it will work right away.

vSAN Health is a good feature. It is a vCentre portal. 

vSAN Health is a feature designed to monitor the health and performance of the vSAN environment. It's crucial for us and our customers to frequently check on this to ensure everything is operating smoothly.

VMware vSAN's most valuable features are the capability to consolidate standalone physical infrastructure into virtualization and the ease of management.

The product’s most valuable features are performance and expandability.

Instead of going for SAN storage, customers can use the scale-up and scale-out features of VMware vSAN.

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.

The vSAN storage cluster is the most interesting feature.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the simplicity to implement and to maintain.

VMware vSAN is a highly scalable solution. We can start with as few nodes as possible and scale up according to our needs. Another advantage is deploying a stretched solution across two sites, with data synchronization between the two data centers. Setting up a stretch cluster is made easy with vSAN.

VMware vSAN provides seamless integration within the hypervisor core, providing stability and eliminating the need for additional VM gateways per node, as required by solutions like Nutanix. This integration simplifies the ecosystem, making it easier to adopt and manage.

The most valuable feature is the fast performance.

The licensing includes all of the recent features.

The most valuable feature of VMware vSAN is the ease of management. VMware vSAN it's a part of VMware ESXi and when you do patching for VMware ESXi, VMware vSAN receives the patches too.

It is easy to use. It is easy to implement for us, and it is also easy to maintain for the customers. It is not necessary to buy some extra devices and talk with other vendors.

The most valuable feature of VMware vSAN is you do not have to use additional hardware for storage. The operation of VMware vSAN does not take a lot of effort. If you have VMware technology on your site, then it's easy for the operational support of the system.

The orchestration is well integrated into the stack of the VMware management suite.

It is very well known in the industry, and there are a lot of technical resources around it. This is a big thing for me because, at the end of the day, when you implement it, you need to support it.

It is easy to use and easy to implement.

The backup features and monitoring features are good.

VMware vSAN is a global solution, so we can manage all the storage solutions in one place. It's embedded in VCI solutions. 

It's well documented.

We find it easy to deliver this solution.

When we started using vSAN, the speed (performance) of the solution was dramatically higher than the speed of our production systems. 

The integration with the rest of the DVM suite is great as always. The look and feel for the administrators is like a classic virtualization environment and it cannot be better. 

The solution is very easy to set up. 

The stability is good.

We had very good access to technical support.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Its ease of use is most valuable. It is easy to configure, and there is a unified interface, which makes things slightly easier.

The vSAN features we've found most helpful are live application migrations and storage policies. It has storage, policies, application, and DRS policies. Automation is there. 

Also, if a customer wants to go for a VMware stack, vSAN has flexible, completely integrated solutions for two clouds. Stretched Cluster, vMotion, VXLAN—there are so many features. 

The ease of use is great.

The initial setup and upgrade process was pretty straightforward. 

Technical support is great.

We use it on three hosts, and we find it very easy to administer.

It is user-friendly, and its performance is good.

VMware vSAN is easy to configure, with basic functionality and the customer can maintain the solution.

The most valuable features of VMware vSAN are that it receives updates frequently, has good compression, optimized storage, and they provide webinars on what is new. Additionally, the integration with third-party products is good and it is easy to manage.

The most valuable feature for our customers is vMotion. It allows them to shut down virtual machines and migrate them to others servers.

One of the most valuable features of this solution is that it is stable. 

The migration capabilities are a very useful aspect of the solution. 

The way it handles failovers is very good. 

The imaging is helpful.

Right now, VMware is number one in the virtual space.

The initial setup is very easy.

The management is very straightforward. It's an extremely user-friendly product.

It integrates very well with other products. 

The scalability is very good and the solution is stable and reliable.

So far, everything is okay.

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.

The scalability of the solution is most valuable.

The solution is simple to use compared to other solutions, such as Cisco Hyperflex, Dell VxRail, and Nutanix

One of the valuable features of vSAN is it has a universal type of technology that allows you to deploy it on any server or hardware. Competitors, such as Nutanix, provides the AOS and can be deployed only on certified hardware. For vSAN, it does not require any kind of certified hardware.

Additionally, the dashboards and user interface provide a lot of details.

The solution makes management very easy.

We've found the solution to be scalable.

The stability of the solution is very good.

The installation process is very simple and straightforward.

It's stable and scalable. 

Also, you can virtualize SAN so that you don't have to have a separate storage area network and can have your computer and storage on the same box or computer.

We're largely happy with the solution overall. 

The performance has been good in general.

The initial setup is simple.

Technical support is very helpful and very good at resolving issues.

The pricing is decent.

Stretched Cluster is one of the big features that we use across multiple data centers.

This solution has a dashboard that you can log into and control if you need too while the VM is getting created.

The VCG notification feature is key for me. 

It has a single pane of glass for management and operational control, which is the most valuable feature. The integrated storage is also valuable.

The most valuable features are secure IOPs and LAN security.

Also, we can provide VMware with IOPs assurity from the vSAN policy, vSAN cluster, which is an expensive solution from the storage.

It has the iSCSI feature.

It uncoupled the idea of proprietary technology and component capabilities. It is basically a proprietary technology for a cost-effective infrastructure. 

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.

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

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

Very easy to implement in any existing environment.

The performance of VMware vSAN is very good.

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

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

The most valuable thing about vSAN is that all of its features have been working well for us for the past two years. We haven't had an issue with them.

The most valuable feature of VMware vSAN is that it's easy to manage and it's also comfortable to use. Another unique feature is its hardware upgrade, but I'm unsure if this is also present in other players in the market. Upgrade and authorization for this product is very easy. Deployment of VMware vSAN is also easy. Everything in this product is perfect.

It is simple to manage without the need for configuration which is the feature that I like the most. The simplicity, as well as the integration with virtualization.

VMware vSAN is easy to implement in a VMware environment and it is not expensive.

High availability is a valuable aspect of this solution.

VMware vSAN is compatible with the legacy hypervisor solutions and most of the features are good.

The valuable feature of the solution is the total hyperconverged facility. And that either it's hyperconverged, or it's standalone with storage arrays.

The solution is very stable.

The scalability has been quite good.

The initial setup is pretty quick and easy.

VMware comes with different stacks like VMware Cloud Foundation, which is integrated with different VMware modules. There's interoperability between VMware products. 

Another good feature is that you can create profiles for each VM. You can mirror one set of VMs according to another set of VMs. You can also define the quality of service for that profile.

The solution is easy to manage due to the fact that it uses the same dashboard as Center.

vSAN is okay for HCI.

The solution fits well with my requirements. 

The stability is good.

The product can scale.

I have always found the technical support to be helpful and responsive. 

I like the tolerance of VMware vSAN.

The solution has high performance.

The single console for management is the most valuable aspect of the solution. 

The initial setup is very simple. 

The solution has been quite stable.

I have found the solution to be scalable.

The solution is quite stable.

We have found the solution to be very scalable. 

For VMware, it's almost perfect.

The installation is straightforward.

The high availability is very good.

It's a good place to store our applications.

You can install the solution yourself.

The solution is very stable.

The installation is very easy. The deployment is fast and only takes, at a maximum, 2 days.

This product has very good performance when it comes to virtualization storage and works well with solutions such as SAP HANA, Exadata, Hadoop, and Big Data Analytics.

The most valuable feature is the integration with vSphere.

The deduplication and compression work well. 

One of the benefits of using this solution is that when you need additional storage, you just add it.

The solution is easy to use.

The most important thing is the simplicity of the product. It is a well-established product with good stability.

Manage both of virtual machines (VM), containers and cloud ready solution

The most valuable features are Erasure Coding, Deduplication, and Compression, and the advancement in stretching regarding replication.

Being able to deploy multiple applications with virtual servers is the most valuable for us. 

I like the orchestration feature. The biggest problem with the hyper-convergence solutions is storage. This is because there's often a problem with the big size of the database. The other problem is how to use and balance VM in storage and CPU memory. When you use vSAN, you have a very good orchestration part. It's the main selling point of vSAN compared to other solutions.

We have found many of the features to be valuable.

It is easy to work with, easy to handle, and easy to manage.

The most valuable features are productivity and data storage.

I like the reliability of this product because we can lose more than one host, more than one disk, and everything still works okay. It's also good on performance and agility. You can change and add things without any issues. 

The solutions best feature is that it is easy to use. The integration between different operating system is easy. It is reliable. 

The solution's unified administration is its most valuable aspect.

Our customers like the HCI functionality, and tiering. My customers enjoy the portion of the solution that can improve the performance of virtual machines

There isn't too much learning involved when picking up the system.

This is a fantastic product, it is easy to deploy and to manage, and it suits our requirements. 

This solution has provided us with good performance, something we were looking for as well as integration with deployment tools. One of our main aims is to be able to deploy lab environments in an automated fashion and the product enables us to do that, providing more agility in regards to a virtual machine. We can respond to different needs, but every virtual machine will use the same storage.

It's completely hyper-converged, so it's very convenient. We get everything in a bundle.

The most valuable feature is stability.

The most valuable features are the reduced rack space, reduced power consumption, reduced cooling, and reduced support costs.

The most valuable feature of this solution is that it is cheap storage.

The feature I've been most pleased with is the import management functionality. 

Ease of use and implementation.

Straightforward and easy to use.

The most valuable feature is the ability to continue our business needs and have higher visibility. It has definitely increased our business productivity levels. 

The most valuable feature that VSAN offers is reliability. In my mind, as long as their storage is up and running, we can always access what we need when we need it, that's what's important. It's super important to have reliability, particularly for internal operations: for employee data, payroll management; and then as well for the customer side of the equation with customer information and customer databases.

With vSAN coming in, we have stability within the cluster of resources which has been grouped together in a local storage. This is a wonderful feature in vSAN.

The most valuable features for us are the ability to scale out the nodes independently, and the flexibility of the nodes. We can put almost any type of server in there with our connectivity and everything works great. 

The most valuable features of vSAN are its simplicity to deploy and that we can use commodity disks in our servers without complexity or need for external storage arrays or storage specialists on our teams. It's part of our vSphere admin's duties as opposed to storage experts.

The features of vSAN allow us to reduce our operational complexity to a large degree. It's a single pane of glass for the administrator, and we're able to somewhat reduce costs, other than the fact that vSAN is somewhat expensive to license.

We like that it is a hyperconverged solution. Everything is in a box. You got the compute, memory, and storage. So, we can scale out by adding nodes as we go and eliminate the back-end storage, whether that's a NAS or iSCSI device. 

You get the benefit of local storage, but you have the protection of shared storage.

The most valuable feature would be: You own the hardware already. Why not just throw some drives into it and have a software-defined network storage system?

The valuable features of vSAN are that

• you can get it up and running quickly
• you get redundancy built-in
• it's pretty much the perfect solution for a cluster.

Flexibility, growth, and expansion are probably the more important features for us.

As our environment grows, the more users come on, the more VDI workstations that we need, we can easily expand either horizontally or vertically with the environment. We're very happy with that.

• Cost was big for us.
• Speed
• Scalability

We can scale it very easily for a test environment. We were able to segment our DMZ so it wasn't connected to anything, which we really liked.

For my organization, the most valuable features of vSAN are as follows:

1. The most important to me, in my role, is cost. In the renewal cycle for storage, it was about a 40 percent saving compared to going to an all-flash array, which is what we first looked at doing.
2. Performance: our clinical data access in five seconds; we need to do everything we can to retain that metric.
3. I was really pleasantly surprised during the data migration across to vSAN, that it happened almost instantly. Whereas, in the past, migrating from array to array was an arduous and fraught process.

• It's easy to scale.
• It's easy to predict IOPS needs.
• You can design for low latency using all-flash.
• The whole hyperconverged notion is pretty neat.

Also, for setting up new clusters for VDI quickly, it's nice. You don't have to wait on an order for a storage vendor to ship you a system and help you configure it, you do it all yourself. It's kind of convenient that way. And the sizing guides are pretty straightforward.

• Hyperconverged storage
• Computing

• Scalability
• Cost

I like the fact that I've got some degree of redundancy built in and, of course, the performance is great.

• Performance
• Simplicity
• Synchronicity with vSphere

The most valuable feature is the simplification of storage. We no longer need to deal with Fibre Channel and the external storage arrays.

The most valuable feature is the simplicity of its scalability: being able to grow it without having to make sure you get the right disks and the right nodes.

The solution is also easy to manage. It's all right there in the vSphere Client. You're not going through multiple things. You don't have to know, once you've created the vSAN node. You add storage, it sees it, and you create your data storage from there. Everything is right there for you.

Software-defined storage.

The most valuable feature is the flexibility, the ability to move the machines around without hesitation.

Performance and the ability to use all-flash.

• Cost
• Being hyperconverged, it simplifies what equipment we have to buy

The most valuable features are ease of deployment and ease of management. If you compare it to other software-defined storage products, it's much easier. It's a checkbox. It's lot easier to manage.

• The non-complexity
• The cost

• Scalability 
• Standardization - one size fits all

It's also intuitive and easy to use because one size fits all. Obviously, it scales out, but it's the same solution at every physical location I manage.

The most valuable features are

• price point
• you can use existing storage; no specific storage requirements are needed.

• Encryption
• Deduplication
• Compression
• The ability to manage all of your storage within your server rack

• The ease of implementation
• The ease of expandability

The most valuable feature for us, long-term, is the integration with VMware that we're going to be using. We're currently using AirWatch, we're working in Workspace ONE. We want to make sure that our VDIs, with the integration of the Windows 10 solution - as well as any-device, anywhere, anytime mobility - work, yet still offer them the ability to gain access to that VDI. That is huge for us.

One of the valuable features for us is the ability to restrict the performance capacity per client. Other solutions don't have this feature.

The ability to have a disaster recovery option for our end-users by being able to use VDI and the vSANs, and the ability to do replication across multiple data centers, are valuable to us.

• Its redundancy
• Its uptime capabilities
• The performance is great.

The most valuable feature is that we're not spending any additional money on an external storage solution for it. It gives us the all-in-one, Swiss Army knife kind of solution.

I like the availability aspects of it.

It is scalable, overall. If you need to add storage, it makes it easy to scale by adding additional hard drives into the existing servers or you can add storage by just adding more servers.

There are so many valuable features.

The most valuable features are being able to keep it off by itself and the ease of use.

Horizon VDI

The migration of servers feature makes server rack maintenance easy.

Based on my findings, it seems easier to deploy than the traditional SAN. I was told vSAN can be deployed in a few minutes.

All the features are working great.

The ability to have an HA cluster in the absence of a shared storage device or SAN. Not having to retain SAN expertise and the cost of a storage area network (SAN) warranty are big pluses, too.

Simple manager with only one datastore. vSAN has just one datastore. so customers do not need to think where to put their VMs, how to design the physical disk RAID, the LUN size, the LUN mapping, etc. when they use NetApp/EMC/HDS or other storage systems.

• Hot add
• Upgrades
• Ease of management

Any VMware engineer can easily manage vSAN, troubleshoot issues, and perform an upgrade on the vSAN without any downtime. Since the storage space is local to the hosts, it reduces the overall response time and improves the performance.

The simplicity of everything, even though it was a new technology at the time with some quirks. The lower skill cost of maintaining it meant that we could do more with the people that we had.

• vSAN ROBO with two physical nodes

The solution is easy to deploy and manage. It offers stable performance.

The most important functionality is the ability to extend cluster storage and cluster computing power securely without loss of data. Also, the ability to set up an extended cluster on multiple sites in a much simpler and easier way than with a traditional storage solution.

The most valuable features are:

• Automation
• RecoverPoint for VMware
• Self-healing capability

In a production environment, these features ramp up the provisioning, security and provides faster deployment.

Easy to configure vSAN. I have configured with in 30 minutes. IOPS is comparatively best to run VDI solution. Policy based profiling is a best advantage. Recently VMware launched iscsi support for vSAN is an added advantage.

If we are looking for a valuable prospective, then we can go with the All-Flash vSAN cluster which will provide data compression and deduplication (i.e. actual used storage 30TB; in that case deduplication will be stored in 10TB and save 20TB storage).

The feature that is most valuable is the simplicity of implementation, as you only have to enable the feature on the already existing cluster(s).

Storage policies are used to perform operations in the VMs. This feature allows you to create storage policies for VMs to get performance, high availability, I/O policies, etc.

• HA
• No physical SAN overhead

Having high availability without the need for a full vCentre/host license is a plus that, along with not needing a physical SAN, makes this solution great when you need functionality without the extra overhead of additional hardware and licences.

• Allows for very easy administration
• You don't have LUNs to set up and assign
• The ability to set up storage policies and assign them at the disk level
• Allows for different setups for different workload requirements

If you really want to squeeze all of the value out of this solution, it should deployed in an all-flash configuration. The all-flash vSAN solution allows customers to take advantage of newer features such as erasure coding, deduplication and compression, greater swap file efficiency and other enhanced management capabilities.

The erasure coding (aka RAID-5/6) feature increases storage capacity efficiency compared to the default RAID-1 fault tolerance method that consumes more space but provides the best performance. Some virtual workloads do not require all of the performance provided by RAID-1. An administrator simply defines a capacity-based storage policy configured for RAID-5/6, which is then quickly applied to the VMs that would require it.

Significant increase in IOPS: VMware, on paper, guarantees you up to 3 million IOPS on vSAN. The more efficient HDDs you have, the better is the IOP speed. And since this works on the local storage cluster, there is very little loss of IOPS compared to the traditional SAN boxes, where you need fiber channel connectivity.

Significant reduction in total cost of ownership: Because of local storage architecture involved in vSAN, the price of these are significantly cheaper if compared to the SAN disks that you have in the SAN boxes. The price difference is anywhere between 20% to 40%, which is a significant amount.

The most valuable features of vSAN are:

• Instead of having a separate SAN storage, VMware uses all the local storage of the servers to combine its virtualized storage.
• Hyper-converged, an infrastructure system that is software defined: It integrates the computing, storage, and networking into a single platform.
• vMotion: This is one of the best features in this setup. From the name itself, vMotion allows migration without downtime. Others call it live migration. Planed server downtime is dramatically reduced by this feature.
• High availability (HA): This is my favorite. vSAN requires you to have at least three servers. Those three servers are being combined into one platform; that's vSAN. HA actually works during server failure. The server will automatically distribute to other servers in the environment.
• SSD tiering: You can combine a magnetic disk and solid-state drives to have a hybrid drive. This is actually fast because the SSD will be used for caching and the magnetic disk will store the actual data.

The most valuable feature of ESXi is that it is free. I strongly recommend this for those who have a huge development environment. ESXi is the best no-cost virtualization platform in the market right now, where you can consolidate your server into one platform.

The most important feature for us is the converged infrastructure, which is all this tool is about. There is no need to manage separate storage areas in SAN/NAS environments. Storage management comes built-in with the vSAN tool. Storage is managed via policies. Define a policy and apply it to the datastore/virtual machine and the software-defined storage does the rest. These are valuable features.

Scalability and future upgrades are a piece of cake. If you want more IOPS, then add disk groups and/or nodes on the fly. If you want to upgrade the hardware, then add new servers and retire the old ones. No service breaks at all.

The feature that we have not yet implemented but are looking at, is the ability to extend the cluster to our other site in order to handle DR situations.

I like this solution because policies (such as resiliency) are applied per virtual disk instead of applied on an entire volume.

In a standard SAN solution, and in almost all software-defined storage solutions, the resiliency is applied to an entire volume. For example, you create a volume (or LUN) and you choose RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10 and so on. With vSAN, the notion of volume that we know with SAN doesn’t exist. Instead we have VVOL. Thanks to this, we can apply specific settings like the resiliency per virtual disk. It is more flexible because we don’t need to dedicate an entire volume for a specific resiliency.

The vSAN technology is clearly the big game changer here. VMware's software-defined storage finally enables us to build a private cloud solution that scales much easier than we are used to.

We wanted to be able to grow much more dynamically than what we have been able to until now. Instead of big investments and complex storage installations, we now have an infrastructure where expansion is a lot easier because we can just buy four more new servers, plug them in and add them to the pool of resources.

I like the scalability and the fact that it reduces your total cost for storage over several years.

There was a significant increase in the IOPS and the cost. VMware, on paper, guarantees you up to 3 million IOPS on vSAN. The more efficient hard disk drives (HDDs) you have, the better the IOPS speed. Since this works on the local storage cluster, there is very little loss of IOPS compared to the traditional SAN boxes, where you need FC connectivity.

There was a significant reduction in the total cost of ownership. Due to the local storage architecture involved in vSAN, the prices are significantly cheaper if compared to the SAN disks that you have in the SAN boxes. The price difference is anywhere between 20% to 40%, which is a significant amount.

I find that vSAN allows for very easy administration. The fact that you don't have LUNs to set up and assign is great. The ability to set up storage policies and assign them at the disk level is also a great part of this product. You can allow for different setups for different workload requirements.

In our model, the price of vSAN storage space is a bit lower than SATA-based storage space from other storages, and vSAN usually has better characteristics (IOPS + latency).

We can easily scale up our vSAN cluster horizontally. All we need is to buy the same hardware nodes and put them in racks.

vSAN has better integration with virtualization than any other datastore.

Stretched All Flash vSAN is the leading product to build a disaster recovery solution. We have a plan to build it in near future.

The reduction in cost of storage: In my most recent deployment, we reduced cost from around $20,000 per TB (CapEx) to less than $1,000 per TB (CapEx). This is not taking into account deduplication/compression or the ability to add disks and scale vertically, not incurring licensing costs, which would drive the cost down further.

Traditional SANs require large up-front costs, and with "forklift" upgrades, you end up spending a very large amount of money initially and then expect to recoup the costs over the lifetime of the array. This is not how vSAN – or any other HCI (hyperconverged infrastructure) product – works. The idea is to have a small initial investment and, with horizontal/vertical scaling, you can grow into the needs of your environment. This can be accomplished several ways, by either adding more disks to each host (vertical scaling) or by adding more nodes to the cluster (horizontal scaling). This allows for much greater flexibility with your storage. Before HCI, you were required to guess how much storage you were going to need, and were stuck with what you guessed at.

Upgrades are also much simpler. Because the system is software-defined, you simply upgrade the software rather than the entire hardware stack. If you want to upgrade the hardware, you would then simply add nodes in, and remove older nodes. It is also possible to create a new cluster and do a swing migration; however, this is similar to older-style upgrades. The point is that there are a lot of options available with HCI systems.

Currently, we are on version 6.2. Having all flash, I would say that the most valuable feature for us is deduplication, as it gives us better utilization of the space available. In the latest release, there are already features that we have been waiting for. iSCSI presentation, for example, is something we were waiting for. With iSCSI presentation, we will be able to present the vSAN datastore to our other blade servers; therefore better utilising our investment.

Deduplication and compression: Software-based deduplication and compression optimizes the all-flash storage capacity.

• Converged solution for shared storage

When configuring a HA vSphere cluster, you need shared storage. Traditionally, one would need a SAN or NAS to provide this kind of HA. Using vSAN, you can use the same servers as the hypervisor uses for the vSAN storage. No SAN or NAS is needed and much less hardware is needed to provide the same HA solution.

The storage policies allow the administrator to define which VMs have specific storage requirements. For example: Our critical VMs have an increased flash read cache percentage enabled. This improves the overall performance of these machines. The ability to specify policies for every kind of VM in your data center improves storage efficiency, as well as improving performance, redundancy, and so on for specific VMs. With traditional SANs, configuring this was only possible on a LUN level. With vSAN, we can do this on the VM objects themselves.

One of the things that surprised me was the way vSAN handles a disk failure. It auto-rebuilds the vSAN objects when a failure has been detected. (Note: There are two kinds of failures, and this has a different effect on the rebuild timer.) But, in the end, the cluster is self-healing without any user input needed. The only thing that is affected is purely the raw storage that is lost with the drive.

Snapshot: You know, that is amazing.

In our routine work, there is repeatable testing and validation. With the snapshot feature, we are able to keep our system in a specific status, including application parameters and network settings.

That has totally reduced our valuable time.

The valuable features are:

• Easily provided storage
• Easy setup
• No need to be a “storage engineer”
• No need to have FC switches

The most valuable features are scalability and speed.

The ability to throw in extra disks on the fly and extend storage with no limits is very useful. I already had to do this twice.

I think performance of my vSAN is better than that of a SAN, even though I am only working with 10 VMs per site. I don’t know how many performance hits we would get if I had more VMs.

Typically when you get a SAN, there’s a size limit or cap, adding more storage means buying an extra shelf.

In our environment we use Dell 530’s (8 bays), the original setup was only 4TB of usable storage from a pair, but later just added 2 extra disks per esx to make a 12TB volume, I still have 4 open bays and could easily add 8TB drives there if I needed to and on-the-fly.

In terms of performance, it beats going through the wire, since the disks are on the bus and with caching, iops are a plenty.

Furthermore, we have a power limitation at our communities, and adding one more box (SAN) would require an extra 8amps of juice.

No single point of failure, although SANs are very reliable these days, there’s connections and switches to content, with vSAN you can now connect 2 ESX servers directly not needing a 10GB switch

Refresh cycles: my storage follows my ESX servers, so no more extra new hardware to purchase.

vSAN Robo’s are inexpensive to own and maintain, the enterprise version is a tad more.

Simplified datacenter failover in the VMware environment is the most valuable feature of this product.

Previously, when using SRM (VMware Site Recovery Manager) we’d have to configure VMware objects (VMs) for failover. With vSAN, all objects in the datastore are replicated and can be failed over using the built-in high availability feature.

The valuable features are:

• It concentrates all our virtual platforms into a really small number of servers.
• It gets rid of dependencies of expensive SAN storage units which decrease our electricity and cooling expenses in a very drastic way.
• It gives us an extra layer of comfort by providing different levels of high availability.

The valuable features are:

• The integration into the web client (health, component compatibility checks such as controller drivers and re-sync)
• Integration with storage profiles
• Simple patching process
• Integration into the VMkernel

The most valuable vSAN features are:

• Ability to scale easy: Adding additional storage is so easy. You just populate an empty HDD slot on the host with a disk and vSAN will automatically add the additional storage to the storage pool. No specialized skills are required.
• Performance and cost/storage efficiency: With vSAN, you get SSD-like performance with a mix of spinning and solid-state disks at a fraction of the cost. We use a ratio of 30/70 SSDs to spinning disks, respectively, for a high-performance SAN that is within our budget.
• Resilience: We tried to break our vSAN PoC instance to test its robustness. We pulled out hard drives while they were being written to and we unplugged server nodes, and we never lost a VM.
• Ease of use: We set up vSAN with a few mouse clicks in vCenter. We couldn’t believe how simple it was to setup and configure.

Some of the valuable features of this product are:

• Software-defined class which is one of the building blocks for SDDC.
• Flexible – It scales as and when needed.
• Simple – It is easy to manage.
• Performance – The local server can access data at full speed and have low-latency in SSD.
• Since there are no network-attached storage appliances, the infrastructure cost is lower.

Storage policies and I/O are the most valuable features. The storage policies are useful in my job to create my own policies and prioritize some apps over others, and create high availability for some virtual machines.

Centered on the VMs, it provides simple and centralized management from a single console. VMware vSAN is focused on the virtual machine and not on a datastore or mon. This allows it to adapt to the workload faster with specific storage policies for virtual machines, without needing to change the storage as in a traditional environment.

The most valuable features of the product are its basic functionality and that it's all so simple to implement. The performance is also another very useful feature :-)

I think performance and cost are the most valuable features of VMware Virtual SAN. We're stringing up an entire virtualization environment for VDI and RDSH through Horizon View. When we compared the cost of a traditional SAN versus VSAN, that’s what actually made it all possible for us. We're actually able to deploy Virtual SAN for a fraction, like 1/5th, of the cost, of what we're paying for our SAN. It was crazy. The reduced cost made it very palatable and then the actual performance of it made it even that much more functional.

The most valuable features of VSAN are consistent and increased performance with a linear cost which helped us in our data center.

Using VSAN Observer, we were able to see exactly what the VSAN environment is doing on a day to day basis, so we've gotten to really enjoy that interface.

We have a private cloud that we host in our data center. All of our servers are on VSAN and we have customer servers that we host in our data center on our hardware that is on top of VSAN.

Data store: you don't have to carve out ones and ones and ones and then map from the data stores and data stores and data stores. Good performance.

It makes it really modular too so we can grow as needed, that's actually the case that I submitted to do this talk was about another customer that we host in our rack at our data center wanted to do small entry, have a small entry footprint but then grow as their business acquired other business.

Some of the most valuable features of VSAN include the ability to be able to provision and grow your storage as you need to without a very large upfront cost. Also the ability to be able to carry along the licenses as part of a refresh as opposed to traditional storage systems, you end up losing that investment after every single refresh which usually occurs every three to five years.

It's not a storage array which is a very valuable feature of it and it's maintenance structure isn't paid like a traditional storage array. For me, that's the biggest leap with it is there's a compelling cost with reason to step in to it. You don't have to make a snap decision and get away from where I am. I can keep what I have and dip my toe in VSAN without risking an all-or-nothing decision.

The main thing is the comprehensive data center management type of features. The overall management dashboard, capability to have multiple clusters, link clones, distributed computing, where you have vCenters in different geographies. Site Recovery Manager for failover, VSAN for storage, and again the EVO:RAIL mechanism combining with the type of VSAN architecture that is out there, and previously, the automation capabilities of vCloud Automation Center. Previously, I had experience with vCloud Director, but obviously everything's being transported onto vCloud Automation Center now.

The value that VSAN brings to our organization, really there are two major areas. One is the ability to replace very expensive proprietary SANs. The other is the need to replicate and keep data available at all times across three separate data centers. Those two elements are really where VSAN plays.

With Virtual SAN we did like the performance, the simplicity, the fact that it’s very easy to manage and upgrade and the integration with all of the VMware technologies that we are very familiar with. Also the fact that it's completely different from the old paradigm of provisioning storage and different storage systems and it's also saving rack space. We use less physical space for the deployment of storage systems.

When we first were shown Virtual SAN, we compared our traditional storage system what we had with the Virtual SAN performance in one of our labs and we showed that the performance was impressive with Virtual SAN. So, we started adding more applications to it and expanded this Virtual SAN Proof of Concept that we had. So, we realized that our performance is comparable to old flash, disk carriage at a much better core structure that we get as cloud providers. So, the fact that it is very fast, very simple and the fact that it's also easy to consume as a cloud provider, this made it a no brainer for us.

Performance is the most valuable feature because you are moving the storage closer to the CPU. It’s also cheap. We also evaluated an all-flash array, but even a low-end flash is much more expensive. This is much cheaper.

From what I saw, you can create the SAN in a small environment, and then grow. That’s a valuable feature of VSAN and makes it cost effective.

• Easy to set up
• Very Fast
• Good investment
• Surprised at beta ration
• Works very well

The ability to scale as you need – we can start with a very small footprint as opposed to a monolithic storage solution where you buy the entire solution up front. We use everything – Hitachi, NetApp, but we're using it more and more because we can start small and scale as you need. Cost saving essentially.

• The integration with other VMware solutions, such as vSphere, is valuable for us.
• It's also fast -- faster than hybrid and all-flash setups.
• Three-host configuration provides security.

• It's very simple to use.
• It work on commoditized hardware.
• It provides centralized storage.

It's fast – it’s really blazing fast.

The ability to scale out incrementally instead of doing a big five year capital expense purchase that hurts the budget. Vith vSAN, you buy x86 servers and you're done, and you can scale up.

The ability to scale out incrementally instead of doing a big five year capital expense purchase that hurts the budget.

In the storage world, when it's time to buy an array, you buy half that are to be populated, and you buy more disk shelves, but it's not cost effective. Or, you buy it all and don’t use some. But with VSAN, you buy x86 servers as needed and you're done, and you can scale up.

Simple to set up, manage, and integrate it with tools you’re already familiar (vCenter, vClient) with.

It also gives us a policy-based storage on a per-VM level.

Also if you can apply redundancies to machines, they’re all different.

• It's easy to implement.
• It performs very well.

• Performance
• High Availability

• Integration with VMware vSphere
• It’s simple to manage
• It’s a relatively inexpensive for a SAN solution
• Good performance based on testing

We just started implementation, so it's hard to give our perspective as we're still doing our evaluation. We purchased the product, and we have ten-fold service on it.

Scalability, and flexibility.

My conversations, now, have to do with trying to help customers on how to grow with VSAN.

• It's consistent in that our team is able to stand it up on a regular basis.
• Our system now has continuity.
• It provides uniform performance.

Getting rid of sharing storage, especially VSAN 6. That would be even better than having an all-flash array.

vMotion and the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) load-balancing resources are the most valuable features.

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

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

The integration with other VMware products is good.

I have found that the multi-homing feature is very valuable in VMware vSAN. It is an easy-to-use solution.

Overall the solution is very good.

vSAN is very integrated.

Data management and recovery processes are the most valuable features.