VMware vSAN Reviews

We recently adopted vSAN. We adopted VDI for our desktop solution about ten years ago and we have a single KPI for delivery which is clinical data accessed in five seconds.

Throughout the last decade, as new back-end technologies have come to market, we have always been investing in the hosting end of VDI. Five years ago, we went to an all-flash array, and two years ago, we went to the vSAN hyperconverged. 

When we went to vSAN, at that point in time, we doubled the density of our desktops per host and, for the first time ever, I could demonstrate a significantly lower TCO for a VDI desktop versus a rich or fat client.

For my organization, the most valuable features of vSAN are as follows:

1. The most important to me, in my role, is cost. In the renewal cycle for storage, it was about a 40 percent saving compared to going to an all-flash array, which is what we first looked at doing.
2. Performance: our clinical data access in five seconds; we need to do everything we can to retain that metric.
3. I was really pleasantly surprised during the data migration across to vSAN, that it happened almost instantly. Whereas, in the past, migrating from array to array was an arduous and fraught process.

Room for improvement could be in the planning stage of going to hyperconverged. And this is a big ask: some modeling tools or guidance on how to work out the optimal TCO. For example, core size - the amount of RAM that you're running - versus the licensing cost you're up for with, say, Mircrosoft data center, versus the number of hosts you're going to run and have to license for the vSAN. It's quite a complex equation and it's really difficult to work out, in advance of implementing the solution, that you've got it right. That creates some uncertainty around the total cost of ownership.

Stability on the vSAN has been 100 percent. As part of the implementation process, the VMware customer success team for vSAN assisted us. We actually retrofitted hard disk into our own existing hosts and they went through a process of review and remediation to get all the "green ticks". We went through that process in advance of putting it into production for our data center, which we did this year. So, there have been absolutely no problems from that perspective.

When talking about scalability, the real value is that, for the first time, I can just build it out one host a time. Over the years, I'm sure everyone has experienced hitting the wall on their array where it's too old or the technology has changed, and they're up for a large sum of money in one hit. The actual, repeatable, non-quantity of the cost to increase the storage, is very valuable.

On a scale of one to ten, I am giving it a nine. It's probably because I can't bring myself to give a ten for anything, in case it could be improved.

We use it for all our virtual desktop storage.

It's definitely cheaper to buy it piece by piece, instead of an entire shelf at a time.

• It's easy to scale.
• It's easy to predict IOPS needs.
• You can design for low latency using all-flash.
• The whole hyperconverged notion is pretty neat.

Also, for setting up new clusters for VDI quickly, it's nice. You don't have to wait on an order for a storage vendor to ship you a system and help you configure it, you do it all yourself. It's kind of convenient that way. And the sizing guides are pretty straightforward.

I would like to see better performance graphs, maybe something that you can export outside to a different console, and maybe a little bit longer time period. The 18-hour maximum, or 24-hour maximum, is kind of short.

Also, the hardware compatibility limitations are a little frustrating sometimes, but as everybody's starting to adopt vSAN more, you get more options for hardware.

It's stable. We haven't had any major issues.

Scalability is easy. You just buy a node and go.

The vSAN technical support guys are great.

We chose it because of cost considerations. We already had an enterprise agreement with VMware, so vSAN licensing was included.

There was a small learning curve, but it's pretty straightforward once you understand the basics of how everything works.

We did evaluate other vendors initially but this was our second hyperconverged solution. We went with it because of the cost.

Do your homework. Make sure you know what kind of IOPS and latency requirements you need to meet. Picking hardware is not hard anymore. Everybody has an HCL. vSAN has a great list. Just pick what you want and go, it's not that hard.

I rate it at eight out of 10 because nothing is perfect. I'm hard to please. I'm not saying there are growing pains, but vSAN was still new at the time. They didn't have dedupe and compression yet. The performance was pretty good. Most of it was hybrid in the beginning, but now with all-flash, it's speedy, when it needs to be. It's a young product and nobody gets a 10 out of the gate.

We use it for VDI.

It's supposed to provide low-cost for storage arrays to do VDI. We're on the fence with it. We're still looking at other solutions. We're not sold on it.

It has provided some value when it's working. Instead of hitting our production SAN array, it has its own array, storage-wise. It keeps workload off production.

It could be more robust. The latency is also an issue for us, and the reliability. I would like it to be faster and a little more flexible.

On a scale of one to ten I would give the stability a six.

Scalability should be pretty good, but we're not getting the performance we want out of it right now, so we're not going to scale it unless something changes.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.

We have seen value in it but, since it's not performing the way we think it should. We're probably not going to move forward with it.

We went with it because of the cost. It's definitely cheaper than buying a storage array.

We use it for hosting all our business products on virtual machines.

It's cost-effective.

• Hyperconverged storage
• Computing

The only thing I care about is that the solution is stable, reliable. They need to improve on those factors. I don't want to have to wake up at night to deal with problems.

It's pretty stable now. We had some challenges when we deployed them. There were software bugs.

The scalability is pretty good. I'm pretty satisfied with it.

Technical support, at times, has not been very good, but we are okay with it now. The problem was that they were not taking care of our issues promptly. They would average a couple of days to get back to us. But if there was a tough question, it would take them days or weeks.

The initial setup was straightforward.

We probably reduced our hardware footprint by 50 percent, which is a lot.

We looked at other vendors but we chose VMware because it has a good reputation and because the underlying technology is pretty solid.

The solution is an eight out of ten. To get to a ten it would need to be more stable and easier to upgrade.

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.