VMware vSAN Reviews

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.

Management of the environments is overall simpler, allowing for during-hours patching with no downtime and little risk; also allowing us to stay more current with patching, reducing the overall risk of the environments.

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.

I have used it in various deployment scenarios since 2015, or about 1.5 years.

I have observed no stability issues when the product is deployed as instructed. It can and will have stability issues if you do not follow the hardware compatibility list (HCL) or the vSAN Deployment and Sizing Guide.

The product scales easily, up easier than down, due to the need to remove the disks and migrate the data from the nodes you wish to remove from the cluster.

Actual support engineers are excellent; however, opening cases is often difficult/frustrating.

In my current project, the customer previously used EMC VMAX arrays. As detailed elsewhere, the CapEx savings were incredible.

During my current project, initial setup was very complex, though this was by our own choosing and was needlessly complex. In the past, setups were often very straightforward, though you need to verify your design properly, as mentioned.

VMware licensing is per socket for VSAN, like everything else. The platform is very flexible, so be sure to look at all your options.

I was not part of the evaluation process but cost was a major factor, as well as high availability.

Discuss the deployment with VMware sales; I've met several of them and they are generally smart people looking to help get you the best deployment possible.

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.

The great thing about VSAN in terms of resiliency and recoverability is the fact that with policy-based storage, you can actual decide what level of recoverability you want, what level of redundancy you want. This no longer the case of trying to figure out complex RAID-systems or anything like that. You set the policy, and you will get the level of redundancy and resiliency that you want. Something that has been in the enterprise space for quite sometime, with some of the more expensive arrays, now you can bring it down into the commercial even the mid-market space. That's pretty amazing.

For scalability of VSAN, I mean, you've seen the blog post out there. They've taken up to four million IOPS. In terms of scalability, we haven't seen any roof, any limit, any ceiling to the scalability there. We are extremely surprised that VSAN has been able to keep up with solutions that are four or five times more expensive.

The technical support for VSAN has been really surprising in a good way. In our experience, there are very few vendors that take full ownership of a problem when it occurs. What VMware has done is that whenever there is a VSAN issue or a question, as long as the hardware is on the hardware compatibility list, they took full ownership. They escalate with the hardware vendor. It's really one throat to choke. Where else can you say that?

We've been a VMware partner for quite sometime. When VSAN was announced, we were actually working with the beta. We decided that this is really the track that we want to follow because we believe in the software-defined data center. Everything is becoming software-defined. For us to not do the same thing with storage when we're doing it with networking and with compute, it just really doesn't make sense. The same kind of savings had been brought by server virtualization, the same kind of flexibility, agility, that can also be applied to storage. So, it just seems like the next natural place to go. For us as a VMware-focused partner, it made sense to get on board with VSAN right from the get-go.

Previously before VSAN, we're using a whole host of different technologies because there were a lot of corner cases where we would have to use an enterprise array. Other times we would end up using something that's a little bit smaller. What VSAN has done is, not only bridge some of the gaps that we had in storage before, but it's allowed us to replace a lot of solutions that didn't really meet the needs perfectly. Here we've got a more custom-fit that we can provide our customers and be able to address about 80% of customer's needs.

From a cost-benefit perspective, especially in regards to TCO, total cost of ownership, CFOs, CEOs that are looking to really cut down the cost of their storage systems because that's becoming a larger part of their overall IT budget. This uncontrolled cost is running along the same lines with the uncontrolled growth and data. So, you know, when more and more of that IT budget is going to storage, you have CFOs, CEOs looking to try to control those costs. What VSAN allows us to do is give them an enterprise-class array, enterprise-class solution at usually half the cost of the traditional arrays.

I would easily give it a 9, because 10 would be perfect and nothing is perfect. After the next few releases, who knows? Maybe that 10 will happen.

For people who are evaluating bringing VSAN into their environment, one of the most important things to do is really get an idea of what the performance the requirements are and what workloads are going to go into that environment. That's best done with an assessment. Right now, VMware partners are providing a assessment service for VSAN. That's a great jumping off point to make sure that the VSAN implementation is going to go as expected and have an immediate win.

Virtual environment.

It helped to reduce storage costs.

Straightforward and easy to use.

Data services like remote replication.

We are using it for management of all the data that we collect from our customer bases and from our 500-plus locations. There is also the data that we use to manage employee systems, so it's both ends of the business. It's the actual retail side of the business, as well as the internal operations.

vSAN has improved the organization just based on the overall speed. It's a lot faster than what we what we've used in the past. The old-school storage systems were kind of slow and cumbersome. This is much faster. It's much more reliable.

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

Areas of improvement could be the UIs. I've seen them. I've worked with them a little bit. The UIs are kind of cumbersome.

There could be an easier way than having the UUIDs associated to the LUNs. That could be simplified to make life a little easier to search and naming conventions and being able to search them down and for overall utilization; ease of utilization.

The stability of vSAN has been pretty much flawless for us.

Scalability: pretty simple. You just add more and away you go.

The data sets are constantly growing, so we have internal needs, new VMs are getting spun up all the time. They're gobbling up all kinds of storage space. We try not to over-commit too much, but everybody does, right? But it's constantly growing and we're constantly adding to it.

I have personally not contacted tech support at VMware for vSAN.

The company has been around for quite a while, so we go back to some of the earliest days of spinning disks and a local, small data center at the corporate office, to the point now where we've grown to have our own data center and racks upon racks upon racks of storage.

I was not involved in the setup on that side, either. That's a different team that does that.

The primary ROI for this is its stability. That's the key. I can't really speak to the cost side of the equation, but I can speak to the stability side, and I know that it's critically important to us to have our data available to us when we need it. Since we've gone over to the vSAN solution, it's been very stable.

When we're choosing a vendor, there are two factors involved, and the lowest price isn't always the most important. We need a vendor who provides really good support and products that really meet our needs well. 

I'm going to rate it as a ten out of ten, because it just works. It's always solid.

We use it for all our virtual desktop storage.

It's definitely cheaper to buy it piece by piece, instead of an entire shelf at a time.

• 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.

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.

It's stable. We haven't had any major issues.

Scalability is easy. You just buy a node and go.

The vSAN technical support guys are great.

We chose it because of cost considerations. We already had an enterprise agreement with VMware, so vSAN licensing was included.

There was a small learning curve, but it's pretty straightforward once you understand the basics of how everything works.

We did evaluate other vendors initially but this was our second hyperconverged solution. We went with it because of the cost.

Do your homework. Make sure you know what kind of IOPS and latency requirements you need to meet. Picking hardware is not hard anymore. Everybody has an HCL. vSAN has a great list. Just pick what you want and go, it's not that hard.

I rate it at eight out of 10 because nothing is perfect. I'm hard to please. I'm not saying there are growing pains, but vSAN was still new at the time. They didn't have dedupe and compression yet. The performance was pretty good. Most of it was hybrid in the beginning, but now with all-flash, it's speedy, when it needs to be. It's a young product and nobody gets a 10 out of the gate.

Our vSAN setup is used in our development system, not our production system, for ease of use and ease of access.

The benefit is easier deployment of storage. We don't have to order a storage system, we can just use whatever we have on hand and roll it into our virtualization system.

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.

So far, the stability has been very good.

We haven't tested the scalability as much, but the small amount we have done has been very good.

We have not had to use technical support. 

We use in-place storage systems, but I wanted to be able to spin something up quickly, for the development side, for our clusters. Since it's not a permanent thing, it's much easier to go in and re-do it without having to re-blow-out a whole storage system. It works well.

When selecting a vendor, what's important for me are support and value. The support is especially important. When I have a problem I need solutions. And return on investment is very big for me. I want to make sure that when we buy something, it's going to return the investment very quickly.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. I had a couple of Knowledge Bases I followed, but it was straightforward, once I read all of them.

It has provided good value on the development side. Once I'm comfortable with it, we'll start looking at moving towards a production setup. But for now, just development.

I would definitely tell colleagues to move towards this solution. I've had a lot of people wanting to go to Hyper-V, not VMware. I have told them VMware is much more mature, it's got the feature list, it has a lot of good qualities.

We use it as a primary storage for our Horizon View environment. 

The product is great. It runs well. 

It helped us survive power outages in one of our data centers, then continued to function without a hitch.

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

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. 

It scales well. We have plenty of room to grow. It should be a good long term solution for us.

Technical support has been fantastic. We always get answers quickly whenever we call.

We wanted to give more redundant access to the users' desktops than they previously had. Before, we were on a single SAN which was causing us issues if we had either an issue with the SAN or an issue with our environment when the SAN would go down. By using vSAN, it would allow us to spread our data across multiple data centers on our campus and be more fault tolerant.

It was really straightforward. 

We had some help from Venture Technologies, who helped us get it going. They didn't really have to do too much. We figured it out.

We have increased our user productivity. However, being in Higher Education, we don't really measure it.

Give it a look. It will save you time and money.

We use it for storage and redundancy.

It has changed the way we design our infrastructure. We're looking at a new infrastructure.

Also, it allows us to put our infrastructure in remote locations and still get the same performance we get from our onsite SAN solutions.

I like the availability aspects of it.

The stability has been very good. I don't think we've had any real issues from what we have been setting up so far.

It's very scalable. That is a really good feature of the product.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

I rate it at 10 out of 10 because it is just a really good product. I've used other products like it and it seems to be the most stable and easiest to configure.