VMware vSAN Reviews

It's going to be employed for our VDI infrastructure and, potentially, we will move it into our VSI infrastructure.

Considering that we have many storage arrays, this seems to keep us a little bit more contained and it's easier to manage versus some of the legacy storage where we don't have manageability, or we're losing manageability for it.

We have greater uptimes, we're not down nearly as much, and we can identify and deal with solutions to problems that we're encountering in those environments.

• Scalability
• Cost

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

The stability is good. 

We have a couple of problems but we're working through them. In the deployments we have in our Dev environment, it's more about how the hardware is interacting. We have them on Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes and we're just working through some of the driver issues and some random rebooting that we're having to deal with. But we have support contracts. Everything seems to be doing fine.

Our experience working with technical support has been good.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor for us are the stability of the product, as much uptime as we can get, and service contracts so that we can get people to react more quickly to cases that we open and get things escalated properly.

I rate vSAN at nine out of ten. What would help make it a ten would be if we didn't have so much inconsistency in the information around how to deploy it. That that would be a little bit better.

The primary use case is for VDI. In fact, we have created what's called a virtual research desktop with VDI, which is insulated because we're dealing with HIPAA data. I think it has performed pretty well.

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

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

I was a little bit worried about the stability initially, because I had an experience about three years ago and I wasn't very happy. But so far, it looks pretty good. I'm actually very surprised that its stability has been improved significantly. So far, so good.

I would have liked it to have been more scalable. It's scalable but not as much as, for example, the ScaleIO systems were or the Kaminario. We looked at Kaminario but that was a risky technology, so we didn't want to go there. I think vSAN is okay. It could use a bit more work on the scalability. I think that's key.

I have not had to use technical support myself but my team has. One of the things that I've heard from my team is that, even when they run into significant issues, they have to go through the whole order of support, and they get frustrated. They get a level-one guy or girl, and that person knows less than my team members do, so that's frustrating. When they get to a level-two or level-three, it's okay.

We were using Compellent. I was okay with it, but it wasn't performing as well as I would've liked and, certainly, the expense and scaling the thing was just too expensive. The other issue was that the natural redundancy you can build with vSAN, you can't really build that with Compellent, unless you have at least two of them. With two you can replicate between them, but, again, they are expensive systems.

When selecting a vendor, what's important to me is a partnership. That sums it up. To me, a vendor has to go in with us for the long haul. We can help the vendor and the vendor can help us. We can help each other out. To me, a partnership is key.

So far, we've been able to replace two Compellents which have cost an arm and a leg. And they're just not as performant as the vSAN. So the ROI has been good.

Let's put it this way: I think the VDI/vSAN has replaced quite a few of our desktops or laptops. Over the course of time, give us another year or two, I think the ROI will be very significant.

While vSAN performs pretty well, when we were doing all the performance tests, ScaleIO did pretty well. In fact, it did better than vSAN, but we liked vSAN better because it was more integrated with our VMware environment, obviously. We chose it and we're happy with it.

The hybrid storage strategy is not the best thing you can do; for example, when you're mixing standard drives and flash drives, SSDs. Do all SSDs if you can afford it. 

I give vSAN an eight out of ten. It can stand some improvement, but it's much better than it was three years ago when I looked at it.

Because our company is an architecting company, we require a lot of IOPS going from the server side to the clients who are using the models. They require faster transactions and that's the reason we thought of having a type of HCI solution. That's why we went with the vSAN solution.

Previously, we were going to use traditional systems, so when vSAN was launched it gave us a lot of value. The admins have been able to relax a bit, they don't have as many outages to deal with.

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

It's pretty much stable for us now, apart from some of the issues which can be tackled. But 80 percent of the time it's stable. The issues are probably on our end, network issues. That's what we have figure out.

We don't scale that much because we have a three-year refresh time. We tend to acquire for how much we predict we will scale up in the next three years.

We have used technical support quite a few times but not frequently. We have had a good experience with them. We usually get good engineers on our calls.

Initially, it was quite difficult to understand the solution because we tend to do a PoC. Later on we got used to it. Now it's quite easy for us, but at first it was not easy. We now have about 48 locations where we have deployed vSAN.

When vSAN was introduced we were quite excited about it. We were looking for something that was not traditional and we wanted something hyperconverged. vSAN was a perfect fit for us.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. To get to a ten it would need improvement in the Health status checkup.

We do reference architectures using our SSDs so we're all about All-Flash vSAN. It's part of our portfolio.

• Performance
• Simplicity
• Synchronicity with vSphere

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

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

The stability is fine, it's as stable as the vSphere, and vSphere has been around for a long time.

We've documented that it scales out per node. The more disk groups, the more nodes, the better the performance.

We have a team of engineers who do the performance evaluation so we don't normally use technical support. We only occasionally use it.

We published the first All-Flash vSAN in 2015. It wasn't straightforward but we got it done.

The primary use case is all of our VMware workloads. In terms of performance, it does alright with the general workloads. I've had some issues with the dupe clusters, but that's just the right-sizing overwriting the cache.

It has helped break down the silos, and we have not needed a separate storage team since the introduction of vSAN.

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

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

So far, except for a couple glitches in past revisions, the stability has been alright. We had some issues with dedupe and compression in 6.2, where we had to delete all the storage off of it and recreate the storage groups. But besides that, it's been working well.

It scales really well. However, we're going to be in need of some, not external storage, but ways to expand storage without adding additional nodes to the cluster.

We're an MCS customer with VMware so we get great support.

For HCI, we didn't have anything else in place. For servers, this was our introduction to HCI. We have other products for VDI, but not for server workloads.

The initial setup was very straightforward.

If you're going to run vSAN, make sure that you stick to the HCL and that your firmware and your drivers match what's on the HCL before you implement it or go live with it.

When selecting a vendor, for us, support is number one, the support that we can get from them. The other factor would be the forward-looking direction of the company.

In a lot of cases, the primary use case for vSAN is in small to medium businesses, where they may not have the space or the funds for an actual storage array to provide a shared storage medium for their virtual environment. And even if they do, they may not have the expertise to maintain that and a separate network. vSAN gives them the ability to make use of storage they already own, across their host. As they add more, more storage, more compute, they'll add more memory. It makes their environment simpler to manage and keeps it moving smoothly for them.

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.

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

I find it to be incredibly stable.

I've seen it scale up to large databases. I've got some customers who utilize a small vSAN cluster for their Exchange environments because it keeps it encapsulated for them.

The initial setup is very straightforward.

I would definitely go with the vSAN solution. A lot of times, it's less expensive than third-party software, and it's not managed via third-party plugins. It's there, it's native to the ecosystem, and it works.

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 if for our primary infrastructure. In terms of performance, vSAN is fine.

Being able to do maintenance on the fly is a real benefit: migrating off, updating, and then moving the guest back on to the nodes.

Software-defined storage.

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

Because of the vendor, we are very neutral on the stability at this moment. The main issue is drivers. Every time we move to a new vSAN version, we're having problems finding the correct drivers for the vendor.

The scalability is fine. Adding new nodes is very simple.

Our experience with technical support has been excellent. Every single time we've had an issue so far, they've been able to find the issue with the vendor.

Because of the time that we've had to spend dealing with the vendor, we haven't seen a return on investment yet.

Go with the full managed support, something like VxRail or, if you go with Cisco, get their full central management system.

vSAN alone, with the current features and version we're at, rates an eight out of ten. The vendor would be a definite one out of ten.

To make the solution a ten, it needs to be vanilla. There shouldn't be any custom drivers, any custom anything. It should just be, "Hey, you know what? These drivers are going to work for this version, the next version, and the version after that." That's the difficulty in this. It takes too much upkeep.

The primary use case is bringing redundancy into our plants for failover. It has been performing great.

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

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

There have been a few issues, but VWware support has been tremendous in resolving them, so it's been good.

Scalability is easy to do. It's just drop-and-add and you're good.

The process with technical support is pretty good. Escalation up to the top-tier engineers is really good. We have a direct path there. There are no problems with tech support.

We probably already reached our ROI aftertwo and a half years.

Make sure your storage network is strong. But I would recommend vSAN.

It's a pretty solid product now that's it's at 6.5 Update 2. I know that it's going to get better, but right now I'm pretty happy with where we're at. I would rate it at seven out of ten. Nothing's perfect. There's always room for improvement.

The primary use of the product is for storage for VDI plus some other storage for file servers and the like. The performance is great. We use it on all-flash.

Performance and the ability to use all-flash.

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

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

Right now, the stability is pretty good. It's getting a lot better.

It has its quirks but the scalability is good. Given that you have to have the hardware, the right driver, the right framework, and so on, it's not easy to put it together, it's not a plug-and-play solution. But once you get all of that done, it becomes a good product.

I have used the technical support, but most of the time it comes down to the manufacturer of the hardware; Cisco or whoever we're using for it. It's a compatibility type of thing. But tech support is okay.

Our previous solution was SAN-based. I wanted to bring in something new and not only stay with the market, where it's going with the trends, but also to bring in something that is stable enough for production.

Once we got all of the driver configurations done, etc., it was easy enough.

We have definitely seen value, especially in performance.

Give it a try.