VMware vSAN Reviews

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 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.

We are thinking of using vSAN instead of the traditional SAN. We are just starting to explore how vSAN can benefit us.

This is not yet deployed, we are just starting to explore how vSAN can benefit us. it seems very expensive to obtain a vSAN license.

Based on my findings, it seems easier to deploy than the traditional SAN. I was told vSAN can be deployed in a few minutes.

Dedupe in non flash drives can be improved. The raw capacity for PFTT two is only able to use 67% of the raw capacity.

The valuable features are:

• It concentrates all our virtual platforms into a really small number of servers.
• It gets rid of dependencies of expensive SAN storage units which decrease our electricity and cooling expenses in a very drastic way.
• It gives us an extra layer of comfort by providing different levels of high availability.

We can deploy new servers faster than ever. Our capacity to grow is bigger than when we had SAN storage dependency. We are now able to deploy a pool of QA virtual machines for testing purposes in minutes rather than in hours.

I would like to see faster re-sync and recovery times after a host failure. It’s so difficult to restore a normal situation after a failure. There is a large amount of data to re-sync after a host failure. We have a 1Gb vSAN network, and the restore process can last several hours or days.

I would also like to see a granular sync system, rather than the current “all data” transfer.

I have been using this solution since 2014.

During normal activity, the vSAN’s behavior is excellent. Performance and stability are awesome.

We have only encountered some issues related to the host update process because they increase the data movement between cluster hosts and it ends up collapsing the network.

The vSAN solution has scalability inside its core. Although it has a widely supported HCL, you have to choose the new components when adding nodes to ensure that you won’t have any bottlenecks. With our vSAN installation, we didn’t encounter any issues like that.

We haven’t required help from VMware technical support yet. At the beginning, there was not much information about troubleshooting available on the internet.

This product is now more mature and there is a lot of information available, such as VMware or independent blogs and forums, that help with vSAN problems.

We used the traditional solution of a pool of hypervisor hosts with a common storage attached (iSCSI class). It did the job until we had scalability problems that were related to storage.

The cost of buying a new iSCSI storage was more expensive than rethinking our current solution. For this reason, we changed to vSAN technology.

The installation was as complex as any iSCSI scenario can be. However, it was radically simple in terms of the networking part.

In our case, we passed from our standard virtual switches to distributed ones in order to meet the vSAN’s requirements. We had to take into consideration the disks/RAID controller configuration. We chose an acceptable balance between performance and cost, creating a RAID 0 with each disk of each server on the cluster and made them available for vSAN.

We adjusted the pricing and licensing costs based primarily on the physical processors per server. We chose each node of the cluster with one physical processor since vSAN is licensed per processor. We calculated the performance requirements of our entire virtual platform to decide if one processor solution was a good decision.

We didn’t evaluate other options, except for the line of traditional iSCSI storage solutions. We wanted to continue working with the same virtualization-based system. We wanted to get a solution with the smallest possible footprint. The vSAN solution met these requirements.

This is a very good solution if you have the adequate budget to provide for the related requirements or recommendations, e.g., a 10Gb network. It has a wide catalog of uses that fulfill the highest requirements of performance at all levels. Without any doubts, I recommend this solution.

The most valuable vSAN features are:

• Ability to scale easy: Adding additional storage is so easy. You just populate an empty HDD slot on the host with a disk and vSAN will automatically add the additional storage to the storage pool. No specialized skills are required.
• Performance and cost/storage efficiency: With vSAN, you get SSD-like performance with a mix of spinning and solid-state disks at a fraction of the cost. We use a ratio of 30/70 SSDs to spinning disks, respectively, for a high-performance SAN that is within our budget.
• Resilience: We tried to break our vSAN PoC instance to test its robustness. We pulled out hard drives while they were being written to and we unplugged server nodes, and we never lost a VM.
• Ease of use: We set up vSAN with a few mouse clicks in vCenter. We couldn’t believe how simple it was to setup and configure.

We are able to deploy vSAN clusters to remote locations very easily at a fraction of the cost. This saves us time and money. We don’t have to worry about stability issues.

Support for iSCSI access would be great, but this may be supported in the latest versions of vSAN.

We have a few physical servers in our environment and it would be great, if these servers could also access the storage in vSAN. With vSAN iSCSI support, we would be able to connect our physical servers to vSAN as well.

We have been using this solution for two years.

In terms of stability, vSAN is very resilient, self-adapting, and self-healing. In the two years that I’ve worked with vSAN, I haven’t experienced any vSAN stability issues.

There haven't been any issues with scalability. Adding additional storage was as simple as inserting a hard drive into a hard drive bay or adding an additional server node to the data center cluster. That was all we had to do, and vSAN auto-configured everything.

We had a VMware vSAN engineer present to set up our very first vSAN cluster. There was nothing to it, but it was great to have an expert on-site for questions and to provide us with training. Other than that, we have never had to log a support request with VMware for vSAN.

We didn’t use a virtual SAN solution previously. We just used traditional, and very expensive, SAN storage arrays. We moved to vSAN because our budget wasn’t getting any bigger, but our storage requirements were increasing.

The setup was straightforward. It literally took a few mouse clicks to setup vSAN.

You get better value for your money with a vSAN solution than with a traditional SAN with lower TCO.

We looked briefly at alternatives, but nothing stood out like vSAN. Nutanix was another solution, but surprisingly, it would have costed us more.

Get a vSAN specialist to come out and spec your vSAN cluster according to your requirements. Have him configure it and test that it is performing properly.

The most valuable features of the product are its basic functionality and that it's all so simple to implement. The performance is also another very useful feature :-)

We are a partner and we're using Virtual SAN for nearly more than half of our customers, VMware-based customers, and we use it as the basis for DMZ environments, production environments, and DR sites. It's getting a lot better to sell VMware solutions and to make the customer happy.

I'm part of the Beta program, so I know what's going to come up in the next version.
Room for improvement would be support for more NVMe-based devices and especially firmware combinations; that's sometimes a problem. Also, support for special SAS controllers. We have some special customer settings where we solved the customer’s special configuration nearly two years ago, and now it's no longer supported officially for the newest release. There’s room for improvement there.

We have used VMware Virtual SAN since the beginning of version 5.5. It is awesome to see the evolution of the product. We implemented it at a customer site since the first version.

We had some purple screens of death at the beginning, but that was only due to hardware problems. Today, it's very stable and nearly rock solid; so, very nice.

Most of our customers are using it for up to eight hosts in a cluster. Normally, we know - and our customers know - that you can easily scale up to 64 machines, but today, up to eight is absolutely enough.

Technical support is very good. I need them only two times. There was a driver firmware issue; that's all. We extracted all the log files and prepared them for support. They were able to identify the problem within about four to six hours; so, really good.

We were pretty happy with the release before, the VSA version, but it was discontinued. We have many customers who implement the VSAN ROBO solution. We are part of the roadmap discussion and we're going to know what comes up next, so we're pretty happy with the new release.

Initial setup and implementation was pretty easy. It's all about the design and all about the thinking process at the beginning of a product; so implementation was pretty easy.

We're a VMware partner, a Nutanix partner, a SimpliVity partner and a Cisco partner. Personally, VSAN is the best solution for most customers and workloads.

I would like to give them a perfect rating if the VMware driver issues, especially with NVMEs, are going to be fixed. Then I would absolutely agree a perfect rating, because we've set up with customers using VSAN Hybrid. We have customers using VSAN All-Flash and it's so simple for the customer to implement, to troubleshoot... It's all about the design and thinking process at the beginning of a project. That's why we are there as a partner.

My advice is to definitely test it out; not listen to all the marketing stuff. Test it out on real-life environments, and especially test it out on newer systems. Don’t test it out on five- or six-year-old servers, because you won’t be able to get the best performance.

From what I saw, you can create the SAN in a small environment, and then grow. That’s a valuable feature of VSAN and makes it cost effective.

It's cost effective because you can start small and grow as needed.

From my experience testing it, VSAN could be more stable.

We tested it for about three months.

I was not sure about its stability because we have a big SAN shop and I got the impression that it’s good for small offices and not the larger ones.

The scalability seems ok – I would give it 6/10 because in a traditional SAN you can go up to a few terabytes. However with VSAN, it seems you can only get a couple hundred terabytes, and I expected more.

We haven’t had a chance to use it for VSAN, but in general we've had pretty good support from VMware, so I think VSAN tech support will also be good.

We haven’t fully implemented, but it should be simple and straightforward.

We will implement it by ourselves without a vendor team.

We looked into Dell and Nutanix, and chose VSAN because of ease of setup.

Customer support, the actual technology, how robust or stable it is and the ease of deployment are the criteria too look for when selecting a vendor.

I would say that if you’re a medium IT organization and looking for a cost effective solution, VSAN is worthwhile; but, if you’re a bigger environment, I would go with a bigger SAN like EMC, NetApp, and IBM.

We are using VMware vSAN for the transformation from the physical server to the virtual environment.

By using VMware vSAN we have limited the need to maintain multiple physical servers. Additionally, we have been able to reduce the entire cost of the IT operation and management because of the reduction of physical servers. There are fewer electricity and cooling systems needed.

The most valuable feature for our customers is vMotion. It allows them to shut down virtual machines and migrate them to others servers.

I have been using VMware vSAN for approximately six years.

The stability of the solution is very good. From customer feedback, VMware is much more stable compared to Hyper-V.

The scalability of VMware vSAN is good.

We currently have approximately 80 customers using this solution.

We plan to increase usage. Our sales team prefers this solution over other solutions.

We use online documentation and videos for support, such as YouTube. If there is a problem we cannot solve then we email the support of VMware.

We deploy many other solutions for our customers, such as Hyper-V, which some of them prefer.

The initial setup is quite simple according to our customer feedback. The time it takes for the deployment depends on many factors, such as use case and environment size.

We have a six-person technical team for maintenance.

We have received a return on investment. Our customers are happy, we do not need to employ a technician after deployment which is good. There is a decent return on investment but it also depends on the customers' use case.

The cost of the solution is high and if it could be reduced the customers would be very happy.

We have used VMware for different kinds of customers. Our target customers are SMB or SME, they normally choose VMware and their first package. We do have customers who use our own data center services, in this case, we use the VMware manage service license.

We typically propose VMware to our customers. We advise the customer to switch to virtualization. The main point is the customer would like to recover their data. If they'll use the physical server they cannot meet the requirement of fast recovery of the data. That's why we ask customers to do the server control check into the virtualization. You can save a lot of time managing the physical server and have a lower cost for the backup option. You can have a better recovery solution is the main point our customer use VMware.

I rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten.