VMware vSAN Reviews

We sell and deploy this solution for our customers in a variety of settings from small data centers to big data analytics clusters. Most recently, we have deployed vSAN for VDI solution. We are VMware partners and I'm a solutions architect.

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. 

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

We've been using this solution for two years. 

This is a stable solution. 

Scalability is good. We had a customer who bought five hosts a year ago and this year they expanded their infrastructure to 12 hosts, and everything was fine. 

I think the support is very good. They figured out what the issue was and responded very quickly. The problems we had were from a network perspective, nothing to do with the solution. 

The initial setup is very simple and doesn't take long, perhaps two to five days. 

The license is perpetual and there is an additional payment for technical support which is an annual subscription fee. I think it could be cheaper, especially for smaller companies. It's okay for big deployments with a lot of servers and high level of input-output IOPS.

I like this solution very much and I would recommend it. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

We are a non-profit and we are working on a project utilizing the solution for infrastructure.

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

I have been using the solution for more than fifteen years.

The solution is totally stable.

The customer service is good but there is a cost for it. It does not come free.

It is an expensive solution. There should be more flexible with licensing to allow small businesses the essentials of the solution's features. They should have a reduced license fee for a certain amount of memory and nodes, or some kind of restriction like this, that would allow smaller businesses a reduced price. We have had a hard time to afford the solution.

There are a lot of other companies that offer similar solutions and they are becoming more and more competitive with VMware at a fraction of the price. For example, Red Hat. 

The solution is very good but the price is its downside, this is the reason for my low rating. 

I rate VMware vSAN a seven out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for remote offices as well as medium-sized businesses.

The solution works well to help businesses simplify their administration. They unify the technology in boxes like vSAN. You see the performance improvements in the configuration with All-Flash.

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.

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've been using the solution for at least the last 12 months.

In terms of vSAN functionality for stability, I haven't had any client complaints. It seems to work as it is supposed to. There aren't bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze at all. Our customers are happy.

Sometimes our clients find the scalability to be lacking and it affects performance. They're not sure, if they scale up, how much performance they will have left afterward.

Our clients are small to medium-sized businesses typically. They aren't to big.

I'm not sure if any of our clients plan to increase usage. It's hard to predict, due to the pandemic situation. The majority of my customers don't have plans to upgrade or acquire some additional equipment.

I'm usually in pre-sales and therefore don't have any experience with VMware support. I've never personally reached out to them.

The company does, however, offer good documentation.

We also sell other solutions. We aren't exclusively using VMware. We also, for example, sell HP solutions. We also work with UHCI with Nimble and SimpliVity and with Cisco, with Nexus, Huawei, or hyper-convergence solutions like Cisco HyperFlex.

My customers typically choose VMware as it is a known platform. The main deciding factor seems to be knowledge of the product itself.

The initial setup isn't too complex. It's pretty straightforward. The entire implementation process, in fact, is very simple.

If I have an infrastructure already in place then deploy it, the configuration of vSAN will take less than an hour. If the implementation is happening from the scratch, with new equipment, then it will take four hours approximately.

We are a partner of VMware.

Customers considering the solution should be aware that the principal benefits they will get from the solution include integration with HCI, NSX, and cloud solutions.

Overall, I would rate the solution nine ut of ten. We've had a good experience overall and our clients are happy with the product.

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

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

I've been using this solution for three years. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

The price is quite expensive for us. 

Our primary use case of this solution is for performance storage and management, we are a training center. I'm the information and communication technology trainer and we have a  partnership with VMware vSan. 

The solution allows our technicians to deploy multiple lab environments for different classes at any time, without requiring any manual installation.

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.

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. 

I've been using this solution for 14 years. 

It's pretty stable most of the time, but you need to make sure your hardware is supported and is compatible.

Scalability of the solution is easy, you simply have a new host and provide a few contributions and then compute. We only have a few people using this product. 

We don't use the technical support, we troubleshoot problems ourselves.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

Make sure your hardware is up to date and make sure you test beforehand. It's a good idea to try and combine the solution with some third party products, such as products for automation.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

Within our organization, there are many people using VMware vSAN.

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

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.

I have been using this solution for two years.

VMware vSAN is both scalable and stable.

If I have an issue, their technical support team helps me.

For me personally, the initial setup was not straightforward; I struggled quite a bit.

In preparation, I had to study a lot about the documentation, etc. It took at least one week to complete that.

I would definitely recommend this solution, but be sure to study or complete part of the VMware documentation before you start implementing it.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight.

We are service providers. We offer pre-billed services anywhere from three-year or five-year contracts for our customers. We provide the maintenance of the solution during that time, and on the backend, we provide L1 and L2 support.

The primary use case of this solution is for third party storage, and to leverage the local hard disk. This avoids the cost of expensive storage, sandboxes, and SAN switches.

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.

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 have been working with this solution for more than three years.

It's a very stable product.

It is very easy to scale. It's out of the box. You can add to it at any time.

You can add any OEM or any hardware with no problem. There is no hardware lockin. For example, if you are working with HP hardware,  you can store in DELL, or you can add a fifth node from Huawei.

It's a scale-out architecture.

Our customers are medium and enterprise companies. Small companies cannot afford the services.

The initial setup is very simple.

It is less than five minutes to deploy.

We are service providers for our clients. We have a dedicated team in our organization that deploys the products, maintains, and provides support for our customers. 

The price is expensive. This solution is not an option for SBM customers because of the price.

There are limitations because of nodes. There is a minimum purchase requirement of three or four nodes along with two processors, which also increases the price.

The price will go from a small storage box to a higher storage box.

When comparing, other vendors have their own hardware with vSAN. They have hardware with HCI, for example, Hyperflex is a hardware that is OEM locked. If a customer purchased three nodes, with Hyperflex, the next time they will have to buy from Cisco. 

It's the same with HPE; if customers purchase three or four nodes from HPE, the next ones can only be purchased from HPE.

VMware vSAN has the flexibility to buy from anywhere. There is no lock key. They can purchase from any customers and any OEM.

VMware vSAN is a very good product and I would recommend it for other customers.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

We use it for commoditization and cost-effectiveness. We use it only to be able to spin up instances for monitoring and to do some application testing for other contracts. We are using the latest version.

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

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.

I have been using VMware vSAN for one and a half years.

It is fairly good.

I wouldn't really be able to comment on that because we don't really have enough of an environment to understand what the cost of scale would look like. Our customers are small to medium enterprises.

They are pretty good. I would rate them a seven out of ten. 

We didn't use any solution previously. We just had monolithic storage. We just wanted to test this solution out.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward. You just need to do a level of due diligence before you do the installation. You can run into issues depending upon the compatibility with drivers.

It is fairly cost-effective for entry to mid-level performance based on the underlying hardware components.

I would advise doing your homework and making sure that it scales according to your expectations, performance, and ownership cost.

DataCore is a company that competes against them. DataCore is more focused, whereas VMware is wide. DataCore is a little bit better in terms of due diligence and information. vSAN is one of the many products based on the VMware industry, whereas DataCore is very focused and very niche. They've been doing virtualization since 1986.

I would rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten.

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

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

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

The deduplication and compression are excellent. 

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

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

The initial setup is straightforward.

The solution overall is very easy to manage and configure.

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

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

The file service is something that can be integrated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We're a partner with VMware.

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

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

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

We use this as storage solution for specific VMware services and for backup solution.

The most valuable feature is stability.

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.

We have beeing using VSAN for the last three years. 

It is more stable now than it was before. It's not like it was in the first year.

Now it is stable, and we trust it more.

We don't want to enlarge the environment. If we have a new need, we will separate and start a new system.

We don't want to have a general-purpose infrastructure. It's not a good idea for our purposes.

We value less scalability more accurate assessment as it is not the way in our environment. We don't want to add more nodes to the same cluster, it's not a good idea. We separate it.

We get immediate response from the vendor on phone. For tasks onsite its not sufficient.

of course its a matter of service level, no complaints.

No, software solutions from VMware based on VMware platforms no migrations.

The integrator "vendor team" had good experience at the last project. level of expertise was very good.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.