VMware vSAN Reviews

We are using vSAN as a product in vSphere. Recently, we signed up for the 6.7 version of vSAN. We use it on all-flash and VME. All the discs that we use are NVMe disks.

We provide and manufacture our own local storage. With our own storage, we can path that with the host. So, it's beneficial for us to have a local storage attached to a host which vSAN is awesome for that.

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.

We are finding vSAN is going down the right path, but vSAN has specific profiles which supports vSAN disk. However, our company has our own storage. So, we have different profiles of configuration. Some of those profiles and motherboards, vSAN doesn't support. We have challenges and work with VMware to work with other providers to get into the VMware list and drivers. Since it's customizable, we are looking for drivers from other vendors as well from VMware for compatibility. There is a room for improvement on the latest version of compatibility with the VMware product, especially for vSAN and with other vendors, like Intel and AMD, on their motherboards and driver configurations.

It is stable for me. We are getting good amount of IOS (the expected amount). The configuration of vSAN is pretty simple. It's just on a cluster level which is pretty simple.

The stability is very much required. vSAN provides default HA configurations, where if any host goes down, the VM moves around within the host. Even though the disks are local, the VMs moves around with the vSAN disk and vSAN provides a high availability on its own.

vSAN is scalable for us. If any additional capacity needs to be included, we just add to the host and configure the vSAN cluster.

Currently, we are working with one tech support as a partner with VMware. We are receiving a good amount of support with troubleshooting. It's on email, as well on tickets. However, it's going well.

We had out-of-the-box solutions. When vSAN came in, all the local storage became attached. The solution has improved a lot considering the local storage for vSAN configuration.

We are involved in the beta phase of the vSphere product, as well vSAN and newer product versions of VMware.

One of the best features of the configuration is vSAN at the cluster level is pretty simple. People have a lot of issues in configuration of different storages, but vSAN brings in a flexibility. Where as a vSphere admin, people can go and just configure the storage. So, VI admins don't want to have a storage knowledge when they are working with a vSAN. It is simple for us to use.

With vSAN, we didn't find the market that competitive. VMware is doing well with the local storage piling up in cluster configuration. vSAN is doing great with it.

As a vSAN, we didn't find that competitive market. VMware is doing good with the local storage piling up with the cluster configuration. vSAN is doing great on that.

We give it nine out of ten. They are going down the right path. When they started, we saw a lot of improvements with a lot of focus on the product, even in VM World. There were announcements in the features for improvement with vSAN. We continue to see VMware keeping up-to-date with vSAN, not putting the product aside.

We use vSAN primarily as an R&D tool to test our products and see how they work on it, and it is absolutely phenomenal. It is one of the best hyperconverged solutions I've been able to get my hands on.

vSAN has improved our organization by allowing us to perform faster workflows, get better overall performance, and create some really new solutions.

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 biggest room for improvement I see in vSAN is the lack of SAN connectivity. I've kind of joked around that there is no "SAN" in vSAN. And it's something that we've worked to try and introduce some options for, and we're going to continue to work towards that. But it looks like the door is starting to open and there may be some options, with some of the announcements that came out of VMworld 2018.

vSAN has been very stable for us. Once we get it up and settled in and the workflows going, usually we don't have to intervene at all. Things just keep working. Stability is important for us with vSAN because it becomes the rock that we depend on. When we need an application to stay up and maintain that ability to bounce between hosts, to work in a true hyperconverged manner, it's the only choice for us.

Scalability in vSAN has been really good. It's very easy to add nodes in, to automatically generate the drives and the disk groups. It has been a piece of cake, surprisingly so.

We have not needed to use vSAN tech support, believe it or not. We have not had any kind of an instance where we couldn't resolve it on our own, or it didn't fix itself.

We had no hyperconverged solution beforehand. We knew that we needed to do some testing with them. It started off as a compatibility (test) and just kept ballooning from there until we went and implemented it.

When choosing a vendor, our most important criteria are reputation and stability. You can't go into something without understanding just how good it is, and if you roll the dice, sometimes you get burned. We're a risk-averse company.

I was involved in the initial vSAN setup. The experience was really wonderful, it was really easy, it was very intuitive. There were some learning curves for us because we had never done it before but, overall, the wizard and the experience with the online tutorials that we were able to find solved every concern or question that we had, very quickly.

ROI for us comes in uptime, keeping applications up and running. That's important to us because that's directly attributable to our revenue stream.

Do your research, dig, find out what your particular needs are, what would the overall cost be to - sometimes it's a forklift, sometimes it's a migration. But look at all the factors, look at the requirements of vSAN, look at the requirements of other hyperconverged solutions, and then make the decision.

I would rate vSAN as a solid nine. To get it to a ten it would need: the ability to support a SAN and a little bit of a larger scale. Those would be the two things that I would request.

Our primary use case for vSAN has been our branch locations and multiple different office locations. We are running vSAN as an alternative to external storage arrays, and it's working really well to provide us with data storage at these branch sites.

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.

I see room for improvement for vSAN just around general hardware compatibility and expanding that sort of matrix. It's pretty wide already, but everything else within vSAN seems to work really well. It is very well-integrated. 

I don't see a lot to complain about at this point.

Stability with vSAN has been really good. We've had very few issues. When we have had maintenance issues, the vSAN has come back and healed them automatically for us. I don't think that we've had to actually engage support a single time in the six months that we've been running vSAN in our corporate office.

I can't really speak to scalability. We have a fairly limited deployment at this point with three nodes, so it's a bare minimum sort of configuration.

We have not had to engage technical support for vSAN. At this point, we've been able to solve all the problems or basically work through the GUI intuitively to be able to resolve anything that has happened.

The decision to switch away from standard array to vSAN was a fairly simple one for us. We had been decreasing the amount of operations that we do inside of our branch sites. For the sites which remain, vSAN is a good fit versus the legacy Dell EMC VNX arrays that we had been deploying. 

We are finding that vSAN is a lot more scalable and adaptable, because we can go in with hybrid arrays for our lower-end storage needs or with all-flash versions of vSAN for places where we need more performance, and it's coming in at a lower cost point than an actual traditional array.

The initial setup for vSAN was extremely simple. There are some concepts that you need to understand before you go in, install, and click the buttons, but once you have your drives configured and inside of the individual nodes, the configuration takes just a few minutes. Everything gets done and orchestrated for you directly from the vSphere or vCenter consoles.

If I had to rate vSAN, I would give it a nine out of ten.

When we're choosing a vendor, we're looking at the ability for the vendor to be in business:

• The viability of the vendor
• Its reputation in the marketplace
• The technical solution.

These have a lot to do with our decision to work with a particular vendor. We typically seek out the best-of-breed solutions and try to adhere to those. At the same time, we try to work with the same vendors over and over, because we have existing relationships to leverage and existing expertise around the solutions that are adjacent to what we may be evaluating.

Our primary use case for vSAN is server virtualization. We've used it to virtualize close to 500 servers which would normally have been on physical hardware. We have virtualized and consolidated it down to run on nine nodes of vSAN. That workload primarily consist of web servers running Linux or Windows Servers to support the Windows Active Directory that we have for the environment onsite.

It's improved the organization overall primarily because the storage is local on the boxes. Before we were with vSAN, we were with another iSCSI product which was a clustered product that went across the network. We had multiple instances where we would have either a network hiccup (caused by us) or a network hiccup (caused by the device). This took a whole bunch of VMs down with a lot of repercussions. It took a long time to recover. By eliminating dependency on that back-end storage, we now depend on everything that's in the VMkernel with vSAN. So, we eliminate the middleman.

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.

I see room for improvement with vSAN in particularly in the reporting realm. Now, with vSAN 6.7, they're starting to include vRealize Operations components in the vSphere Client, even if you're not a vRealize Operations customer. So, that's really good. It exposes some really low-level reporting. I would like to see more of that. However, you have to be a vRealize Operations customer to obtain that. I would like to see more include of this included in the vSAN licensing.

The vSAN licensing is not an inexpensive product. It does cost more than hypervisor. I would like to see more basic reporting, or even expert reporting. I think with our licensing that we've paid our dues, and we should get the information.

Stability is working very well. vSAN is very dependent upon your network. If your network is stable, vSAN will most likely be stable. 

Our network is very stable. Therefore, we have not had issues.

We started with a three-node cluster. We are now at a nine-node cluster. We can just add nodes piecemeal as needed to add capacity. It's been very transparent. Users have never noticed when we've had to do that. So, scalability has worked real well for us.

We've been with vSAN since the early days of ESX 5.5, when it first went general availability. In those early days, we used support quite a bit. They were very good. The vSAN team that VMware has are top-notch. I think they pick the best of their support people and make them vSAN representatives. In the early days, I used them a lot. Not so much lately, because the product has gotten so much better. 

I was involved with the initial deployment of vSAN at our site. The most complex thing is you have to live and die by the vSAN HCL list. You can't put a product or a component into a vSAN node that is not on the host compatibility list, particularly the SSDs and their firmware which is specified on the HCL. You have to match that explicitly to receive good results.

I see ROI on vSAN because we have gotten out of the business of depending on the back-end NAS device or the back-end iSCSI device. We get the return on investment by decreased administrators' time, decrease exposure to network issues and stuff that would take a lot of VMs down. That's where we see our ROI.

We looked at Nutanix before we went with vSAN. For budgeting reasons, we weren't able to pursue Nutanix after a pilot.

The product is at least an eight to eight and a half out of ten. Because the feature growth that I've seen them put into the product since we've been with them since 5.5, they are innovating with each release. They're adding more features and all that adds up to a better ROI on our investment.

As we were consolidating so many servers, we had a really high consolidation ratio. We wanted to have something that was close to being local disk. However, we also needed to have redundancy so we could take a node down for maintenance or if a node would crash. All the same standard reasons of why you would want high availability.

What I look to see in a vendor is good customer support. I want to talk technical with someone. I don't want a lot of marketing PowerPoint stuff. I want to talk to people that know the product very well. Because if I start using the product, I will need that support on the back-end. I don't want to be flailing by myself in the wind. I want to have good expertise that I can call on to help.

Primary use is just for VMDK storage. We're running an all-flash array with NVME caching tier. The performance is really good, we're using SATA drives. We're about to do a complete rebuild with 12-gig SATA drives as the capacity tier, and bigger, newer, faster NVME for the caching tier.

vSAN has improved our organization by giving us yet another high-speed data store. Previously, we were using VNX that had some Nearline-SAS drives with some SSD caching on it. But the all-flash vSAN is obviously much, much faster. We also use a Pure Storage array that we just got in a few months ago.

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?

I know they're working on this: better support for an all-NVME array. Better metrics.

vSAN itself is a great storage platform, but one of the issues with it is that you have to be fully locked into the VMware package to use it. We're going to be deploying 72 Kubernetes nodes, and we're not going to buy VMware licenses for 72 of them, just so they can access vSAN. That's what we're using the Pure for. Opening it up so you could have vSAN as a data store, use it as a data lake, hit it with an NFS, S3 from outside the VMware ecosystem, would be great.

Stability is okay. We do see weird things crop up every now and again. It will say that a drive gets kicked off even though it's fine, and we have to re-add it. So a few gremlins here and there, but for the most part, it's pretty good.

So far, for scalability, we've just been running it on five nodes at our primary data center, and we're building out a second data center. It's going to be running on five nodes there. We haven't really scaled it up since we built it.

I've had to use tech support once or twice. It went okay, as with any tech support.

When we started with VMware, it was a three-node package with the VSA, virtual storage appliance, which was sort of the precursor to vSAN. And it just came as a package, so we said, "Okay, great. We have our storage and our compute tied together."

I'd say vSAN, on a scale of one to 10, would be a seven or an eight now. (If I have to choose it's a) seven. But with what I've heard while I've been at VMworld, I'd say that they'll probably go up to an eight.

Our primary use case for vSAN is for our corporate cluster, and we have many different use cases using vSAN. It was a perfect solution for us. We were there for the beginning of vSAN. We created our own vSAN environment with their early installers and now we have a professional one. It's a great solution.

vSAN improved our organization by taking a whole bunch of servers that we had that were depreciated and letting us remove all of those workloads and put them on one, centralized solution, and have great storage in the back end. It's really helped us consolidate a lot of workloads that were in different silos, and now we're back to managing everything from one place.

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.

The product can be improved in a couple of ways. One of those would be that they have a lot of hidden features, that are through the CLI, that would be great to have in the GUI, or just be more open about those features. It's something called RVC. It's a tool in the back end. It's a really great tool, but I had to find it through Reddit. So more information on stuff like that would be great. 

Also, in the user interface, giving us more features and more reporting that we can do from vSphere itself would be helpful.

Now it's great. The stability of vSAN is getting better every day. We had some hiccups in the past, but we worked through it with some great techs. They were there with us the whole way, and we got through most of our hiccups. 

There are definitely some things you need to know about vSAN going into it, like don't over-commit your storage, that we didn't know. We hit every problem you can probably hit with vSAN, but we're good. We're still up and running.

We started with three nodes, added a fourth. It was easy to do, gave us more storage, very scalable. You can just keep on growing and growing.

I was involved with the initial setup. It was fairly easy to get up and running, at first. We had some networking hiccups here and there but, overall, it took about a day to get us ready to go.

The ROI data on vSAN: I would definitely say it's my staff cutting their time by something like 90 percent. They're only dealing with one stack of servers right now. All of them are able to perform the storage tasks needed. Everyone can manage it. We don't have to wait for that one guy to come in and do what he has to do. My entire staff is trained on vSAN. We usually spend no time in it. Before, we were dealing with a lot of different solutions that took up a lot of our time, so time saved is a good reason for our ROI.

If I had a colleague in the field, what I would tell him is that vSAN is great. I would do four nodes instead of three. Make sure that you're safe. Four or five will get you right where you need to be. You won't have any problems. That would be a tip I would give: Go for four nodes. vSAN is definitely worth the money.

I would say it's a nine out of ten. It's not perfect, but it's almost there, and it's great.

We're primarily using it in a VDI environment, a four-node VDI environment. Performance is very good. We're very happy with it. Networking setup was a little bit of a challenge, but we got around that.

Reduced complexity. We don't have to worry about the physical SAN anymore. That makes it easier. The learning curve as well, when people learn vSAN, they find it very easy to manage compared to a physical SAN.

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.

A bit more information on the upgrade path, upgrade availability, how to upgrade, that would be very useful.

We find the stability very good. It really reduces our overall operations.

We find the scalability very good. We've been able to upgrade very easily as users come on, as we need to create more VDI workstations. Adding the extra drives gives us the capacity we need.

We haven't needed to use technical support so far; nothing at all.

Up until about a year-and-a-half ago, we were using physical SANs. Space is a problem in our environments that we deploy, so we knew we had to get rid of the physical SAN and go toward the more virtual environment. The number of nodes we deploy, we need them. By integrating the vSAN, we're able to get the space requirements we need.

I was involved in the initial setup. In fact, I was involved with the selection of vSAN compared to other products, as well as physical SANs, and I was involved in some of the design and configuration.

It was fairly straightforward, actually. After we got around the networking issues, we found that the vSAN setup was very good.

In terms of return on investment, we don't have any kind of requirement there.

We considered EMC as well. We considered HPE LeftHand, which we had used in the past, so we were familiar with the virtualized SAN. We like the vSAN a lot.

The advice I would give is to properly analyze your host infrastructure. Make sure that your network cards are sufficient for the environment you're trying to deploy in, whether it be all-flash. There are already some Ready Nodes available. Go with the Ready Nodes when it comes to vSAN. Don't try and buy your own parts - something we looked at originally that we scrapped. That would be my main advice. Go with Ready Nodes when it comes to virtual SAN.

In terms of improving the product, we're very familiar with the new features in 6.7, which we're going to be upgrading to. Data encryption, we would like to deploy, as well as compression and deduplication. Those features are already available in the new version. We just have to take the time to deploy them.

Out of ten, I'd give it an eight. We're very happy with the product. To bring it to a ten we'd rather not upgrade as often. Right now, we're at 6.2 and that wasn't long ago. They're already going to 6.8 now. We'd like to have a little bit of a normalization period before we get to the next product. I understand it's a focus for VMware. We're very happy they're focusing on it.

We use it for our DMZ and any test environments that we put into our industry.

It's performing pretty well. We have no issues with vSAN at all.

It has improved our organization in a way of scaling it. 

• 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.

One thing in vSAN that I would like to improve is using vSAN as a repository for files or other things. For example, with Horizon, maybe we can save profiles with UEM on there. That would be a good feature that I would like.

The stability has been great with vSAN. We have not yet seen downtime.

We scale it with our test environment. We are looking to do it with Horizon. We are able to scale it to see how many VMs that we can host and how long it will take us to add new hosts, if needed.

Technical support has been very good. They respond pretty fast, especially if we have a critical issue. Their responses have been great.

vSAN is one of the easiest implementations of any VMware product. It's almost like click it to enable it, then you're almost done. So, vSAN is very easy to set up.

We did consider other hyperconverged solutions. It usually came down to price. vSan was the most cost effective thing. That's why we went with it. Also, we didn't have to get a connected array. We can put it in small places, remote sites, etc.

Nutanix, Cisco HyperFlex Edge, and VxRail were on our shortlist.

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. To make it a ten, it needs to be able to scale the amount of data that we can hold so we can put bigger, more data-intensive apps on it.

My advice to a person looking at vSAN is get your hands dirty in the labs. Show how easy it is to set up, because it's not very complicated. It's an easy solution that you can implement at your company.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Since we're a hospital, we have multiple hospitals in the area. We look at local site resiliency, so we're looking to see if we can put it in each of our hospitals.