VMware vSAN Reviews

We have a lab setup using VMware vSAN which is on Nutanix. We are using the vSAN for testing purposes and attempting to answer some questions. For example, how will the application be supported, how will the exit configuration be, and what would happen in terms of failures.

One of the valuable features of vSAN is it has a universal type of technology that allows you to deploy it on any server or hardware. Competitors, such as Nutanix, provides the AOS and can be deployed only on certified hardware. For vSAN, it does not require any kind of certified hardware.

Additionally, the dashboards and user interface provide a lot of details.

In a future release, they could add micro-segmentation or security level features integrated into vSAN.

I have been using this solution within the last 12 months.

We have never had any kind of hardware issues or problems. The solution is stable.

The technical was responsive and was helpful. There is a lot of documentation online if we need assistance.

The initial setup was complex.

We had assistance doing the implementation from the vSAN engineers.

This solution is expensive.

Nutanix provides us with Acropolis Operating System (AOS) along with its hardware, while VMware provides vSAN, vCenter, and vSphere which all have separate licenses and costs.

We have evaluated Nuranix and HPE.

If you have storage, separate servers, or any kind of traditional architecture you can convert it to FCI with vSAN. It is a very simple and easy-to-use solution.

I rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for our applications and its high availability.

The high availability is very good.

It's a good place to store our applications.

You can install the solution yourself.

The solution isn't as scalable as we would like it to be.

The stability needs to be improved.

The installation process is difficult.

I've used the solution for about three months. I installed it around a year or so ago.

The stability could be better. We're not really happy with the reliability or performance.

The scalability isn't ideal. A company might have trouble with this aspect of the solution.

We have about 500 users still using the solution.

The installation process isn't easy. It's not straightforward. It's a bit difficult, actually. They could work to make it easier.

We have about 17 people on staff that can handle maintenance tasks.

I handled the installation myself. I did not get help from a consultant or integrator. It was all handled in-house.

We do not currently pay a license fee. I cannot speak to any costs related to having this product in the company.

We're using version seven of the solution. I'm not sure if it is the latest version or not.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of then.

I would recommend the solution to other users.

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.

It is used as a remote/branch office solution for a new site that we acquired.

It consolidated our workload and brought the cost down over a long.

Ease of use and implementation.

More modularity in terms of how nodes are provisioned (all nodes having to be the same size when deployed).

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.

We use our vSan primarily for our VCF deployment. We run our production workloads on it, mostly for Microsoft SQL databases and various WebSphere and web-based front-end applications.

It performs pretty well for the most part. The older versions had some issues, specifically regarding upgrade paths and the robustness of the product, but in the last two or three versions they've really addressed those issues and brought it up to speed and made it a real enterprise solution.

• Encryption
• Deduplication
• Compression
• The ability to manage all of your storage within your server rack

I would like to see more comprehensive lifecycle management. The current path and process for upgrading or updating the firmware, as well as the storage controller software to interact with that firmware, is fairly manual and not very well documented. A little more time and effort spent on the documentation of the lifecycle management for vSan would be really great.

Currently, it's very stable. Previous versions, which are still active and out there online: upgrade to the new version.

Scalability is slightly limited in that you're pinned by the physical disks in your hosts, but provided that your solution doesn't require you to have specific disk technology, you can get the size you need and expand it out as much as you need to.

I give technical support an A-plus, from my experience. It was perfect, it was awesome. They helped us recover from a very major outage and we would have been down for much longer had they not been involved.

We were on old hardware and we needed to move to a new solution.

It completely removes the need for a storage network and for a storage administrator and all of that infrastructure and the costs that are involved with them. That, right there, is a huge return.

It's great for DevTest and, as long as you're not going to be consuming data at huge rates, it's great for Prod too.

I would rate vSAN as six-and-a-half or seven out of ten, but only because of the major problems we experienced with them a few months ago that led to some big outages. From what I understand, the current version alleviates those issues. If we're evaluating the current version, I would give it an eight.

It would be a ten if there were more robust lifecycle management and a better-documented implementation within vSphere.

We use it for our developer clusters.

It's a little too early to tell what the benefits are. We've only implemented it over the past three to six months.

• The ease of implementation
• The ease of expandability

Perhaps they could provide encryption without having to use an encryption manager.

No issues so far. It's been pretty stable.

The scalability has been pretty good for us so far.

We are primarily NetApp. The decision to invest in a new solution was a C-level-down recommendation.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

Go for it. As long as you don't have a very high IOPS-oriented application, it's a great way to go.

I rate it eight out of 10. While it's a little too early to tell, it doesn't seem like it gives the performance that an actual SAN would give for heavy IOPS, read/writes.

We use vSAN because it's a VMware product which integrates with all the other virtualization, and it simplifies hyper-converged environments.

• I would like more integration with the hardware when it comes to disc types and supporting the newer types of storage. 
• I would like compression and deduplication to be offered for offloading hardware, instead of doing it with software. That would be nice.

The latest version is very stable. It had a couple of hiccups in the earlier versions. The deployment and integration were simple, but we did have some bugs that we hit on, which have since been fixed.

Adding new nodes and expanding vSAN forward is simple and non-disruptive for a lot of our customers. It makes it simpler so we are not doing late night deployments, and we can answer the needs of the business immediately.

It is easy to find information out there, not only from searching the web, but even the times I have engaged VMware support. We were able to get an engineer within minutes of opening a case who understood vSAN, and they were able to help us out.

The initial setup for vSAN is simple. A couple clicks, we were up and running. 

It does takes more time to rack it than to actually configure it.

As far as a software-based, storage control product, it is great. They are staying ahead of a lot of the competition out there. vSan is what a lot of the competition is using.