VMware vSAN Reviews

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.

Our primary use case is the consolidation of compute and storage for VDI and Virtual Servers. 

VMware vSAN has greatly reduced refresh spending. 

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

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

I have been using this solution for two years.

We use this solution exclusively for our VDI.

We are running vSAN on six Cisco C240 M4 servers.

The newer versions of this solution are much more stable and easier to manage.

We had a near meltdown with 5.5, upgrading firmware and vSphere versions is a hassle.

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

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

The support from VMware is phenomenal.

We deliver the only end-to-end enterprise technology platform exclusively designed for quick service and food service communities. Our primary use case for this solution is for customer use in our internal labs. As partners with the vendor VMware vSAN, we leverage their tech to build customer-specific simulated environments, to provide unique, controlled individual environments to gain insightful perspectives and capture helpful data.

As a function of our core business, it's a sought after tool that helps us provide analytical support across a wide spectrum of client needs. It's allowed us to test out in our connected restaurant - "TheWorks" - a fully-functional restaurant experience center that allows our clients to discover the value of our connected solutions firsthand. We deploy vSAN in this customer-like environment within a hyperconvergent infrastructure (HCI) to give our clients a better understanding and help optimize data and the end-users' experience.

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

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. 

Stability is and was always good with VMware. I've never had any issues.

I've only contacted technical support once. My experience with them from what I can remember was good. I was on the call for something like five minutes.

The initial setup was straightforward, not complex at all.

I would suggest that anyone looking to deploy this solution do their due diligence and try out other competitive products first, like Nutanix. I've used Nutanix in the past. I found it to be a more agile tool compared to VMware. VMware has only just recently started offering this HCI solution.

If I was to rate vSAN from one to ten, 10 being best, I would give it an 8. Not a ten primarily because I haven't tested some aspects of the arrays at this point.