VMware vSAN Reviews

If we are looking for a valuable prospective, then we can go with the All-Flash vSAN cluster which will provide data compression and deduplication (i.e. actual used storage 30TB; in that case deduplication will be stored in 10TB and save 20TB storage).

Firstly, I want to offer an example in terms of the deployment process and manageability of the vSAN storage environment. vSphere admins can handle all infra tasks and, due to policy based storage, we can manage the I/O performance as well.

vSAN health monitoring has room for improvement because they have many known and unknown bugs which may be resolved in a future release version.

We are using it for the last two and a half years, and started working with vSAN 5.5 and drives file system 1 and in the last six months it has been upgraded to vSAN version 6.2 and drive file system 3.

Yes, in some of cases after I have built a big vSAN cluster of 64 nodes, all hosts start showing different network partition groups. In that case, without correction, you can’t go further on next level.

In scalability I didn’t face any issues.

I can give them an 8 out of ten because it is a game-changing technology so we need to add more vSAN engineers to our team.

In my past experience, I didn’t use policy based storage; I always worked with standard storage.

Initial setup is straightforward but somehow we need to understand the high level topology and way of working with it.

In terms of pricing and licensing, we need to understand the requirements of the project and the cost model as well, because that has a very important effect on our project delivery.

Nutanix and VxRail because these also serve the same function.

The feature that is most valuable is the simplicity of implementation, as you only have to enable the feature on the already existing cluster(s).

For a PaaS platform which I’ve developed, the scalability of VMware vSAN was a necessary feature enabling us to grow with the onboard customers.

Although the product is very scalable, it is not scalable in a way that the different host sizes can effectively be added to an existing cluster. All the hosts/disk configuration have to be consistent, for a consistent performance experience.

I’ve been using VMware vSAN for about two years, i.e., since VMware vSAN 6.0 was released.

The stability of VMware vSAN 6.0 is good. You sometimes have to resynchronize the data over the cluster (which is a single button task).

As stated earlier, all the hosts have to be exactly the same for a consistent performance experience, which limits the scalability of the product. Also, the computer and storage components within the HCI solution are linked to each other, it’s not possible to add only storage nodes.

The documentation of VMware vSAN is good. I’ve had no experience with VMware support regarding vSAN.

I haven’t used a different HCI solution before.

The initial setup is really straightforward, you only have to enable it on the VMware cluster. But, before the initial setup you will have to check the HCL of vSAN for the compatibility of the different components. With VMware vSAN-ready nodes, this process is made simple, but it still is something you have to take into consideration.

VMware vSAN is licensed per CPU and the cost is to the other VMware (and Microsoft) products. VMware vSAN is reasonably priced, but with the addition of more nodes to the cluster, the needed CPU licenses (for VMware/Microsoft/etc.) are increasing rapidly, which makes it an expensive solution.

I’ve looked at HPE SimpliVity, but it has a special hardware requirement whereby it failed in terms of the project requirements.

Use VMware vSAN for special use-cases only and don’t use it as an all-purpose storage solution.

Use VMware vSAN for VDI, small VSI, and dev-test environments. Don’t use it for messaging/database solutions as the licensing costs are huge.

VNF apps.

Storage policies are used to perform operations in the VMs. This feature allows you to create storage policies for VMs to get performance, high availability, I/O policies, etc.

Hardware supported by VMware vSAN: The list of hardware supported should be increased in the future. I would improve these areas by increasing the number of partners to support as many as possible.

We have not had stability issues.

We have not had scalability issues.

Technical support is perfect. VMware provides some of the best support in the market.

We had no previous solution.

With a good hardware design, the setup is straightforward.

I have no advice about pricing.

We evaluated Cisco vSAN.

It is easy to design and deploy to react to a changing environment.

• HA
• No physical SAN overhead

Having high availability without the need for a full vCentre/host license is a plus that, along with not needing a physical SAN, makes this solution great when you need functionality without the extra overhead of additional hardware and licences.

It accelerated our P2V plan.

There are bugs in the SAN Health Check utility. It misreports latency issues when the hosts are actual within the correct tolerances. I have been on the phone with VMware about this and they have said it’s a bug.

I have used it for 10 months.

I have not encountered any stability issues yet.

We have not crossed this bridge yet.

So far, technical support is 8/10.

We did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup was straightforward.

Licensing is fairly straightforward.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

Take a look at the network requirements and use 10GbE.

• Allows for very easy administration
• You don't have LUNs to set up and assign
• The ability to set up storage policies and assign them at the disk level
• Allows for different setups for different workload requirements

• Allows for the expansion of our public library patron computer environment into a three-node VMware cluster using commodity servers
• Eliminates the need for expensive disk arrays and controllers
• Provides greater reliability and performance

We have been using vSAN in one environment for about eight months and in another environment for about four months.

The only issue I encountered during deployment was with the hardware and not with vSAN itself.

The disks in the new servers were installed at the factory as RAID disks. I had to mark them as non-RAID disks so that vSAN would be able to see them correctly in order to add them to disk groups.

There have been no issues with stability.

We have had no issues with scalability.

Fortunately, I have not had to contact support for any issues with my implementations.

We chose VMware vSAN for these reasons:

• It is part of the ESXi kernel. This allows for the product to be very fast with little overhead.
• It is included in the Enterprise Plus version of ESXi. Compared with competing products, it provides great cost savings.

We have a Nutanix environment running in production as well.

The initial setup was straightforward as was learning the vSAN environment.

The complexity comes in setting up and managing the storage policies. These can be simple or complex depending on the environment.

When using VMware Horizon View, there are several storage policies that are auto-created and managed. Creating and managing your own policies and rule sets depend on your needs and workloads.

VMware vSAN is included in the enterprise plus level of software that we purchased. Our cost savings were due to buying commodity server hardware with local hard drives instead of investing in large SAN hardware.

If you really want to squeeze all of the value out of this solution, it should deployed in an all-flash configuration. The all-flash vSAN solution allows customers to take advantage of newer features such as erasure coding, deduplication and compression, greater swap file efficiency and other enhanced management capabilities.

The erasure coding (aka RAID-5/6) feature increases storage capacity efficiency compared to the default RAID-1 fault tolerance method that consumes more space but provides the best performance. Some virtual workloads do not require all of the performance provided by RAID-1. An administrator simply defines a capacity-based storage policy configured for RAID-5/6, which is then quickly applied to the VMs that would require it.

vSAN is a very cost-effective solution for just about any data center. It is very easy to deploy, scale and manage. The entire solution is built on commodity hardware, so customers do not have to break the bank (or budget) to invest in this technology compared to a much more costly centralized storage array.

Snapshot management is something that continues to improve with each release of vSAN. Earlier versions experienced performance degradation, but each version gets more and more efficient with snapshots. The new snapshot format known as “vsanSparse” was introduced in vSAN 6.0, which replaced the traditional “VMFSsparse” formats which involved redo logs.

I have been working with VMware vSAN for quite some time now, dating back to the old vSphere Storage Appliance and then vSAN in vSphere 5.5. It has come a long way in a short period of time with many improvements.

Anytime I have encountered issues with stability, it usually was the result of a poor design or poor implementation. If you are looking to deploy VMware vSAN properly aligned to your business needs, you should consider a vSAN assessment before anything else. Properly sizing and spec’ing the solution will ensure stability.

Scalability is not a major issue with vSAN. The latest version can scale up to 64 nodes per vSAN-enabled cluster. The nodes can be configured to be very dense when it comes to CPU, memory and local disk configurations. A majority of the 2U servers out there contain up to 24 slots (SSD or HDD). All-flash configurations provide more disk capacity thus making the solution more dense. Scaling the solution is also very easy. Scale up or scale out; it all depends on how the solution was initially sized during the design phase.

The stability of the solution has limited the number of times that I have been on a support call for vSAN. The handful of times that I have had to call VMware for support on vSAN, the support experience was phenomenal. The support staff responded swiftly and were very knowledgeable.

I did not previously use a different solution but there are various solutions out there in the hyper-converged market that work very well.

The actual implementation of vSAN is very easy to do. Once the equipment is racked, stacked, powered on and installed with ESXi, the vSAN cluster can be up and running very quickly. To avoid any hiccups, it should be properly sized and designed.

Review all of the options available with each vSAN version (Standard, Advanced, Enterprise, ROBO) and look at the solution from a “long-term” perspective. One example would be a vSAN solution that will eventually span multiple sites. The primary site is ready now but the second and third sites are a year or so away from being production ready. In this case, I would recommend to my customer the Enterprise Edition, so they can take advantage of the stretched cluster feature. Once the other sites are ready, the stretched cluster vSAN can be quickly deployed because the proper licensing is already in place.

I would certainly consider other options, but I apply that logic to any solution. Always weigh the pros and cons of the solution that you are looking for. Does it satisfy your solution requirements? Does it fit with the long term goals? What type of workloads are being deployed? Cloud integration or some type of automation required? Many factors can and will come into play with choosing the proper hyper-converged solution. Look very closely at each one and do a comparison to determine which solution aligns with your needs the most. Once you have narrowed things down to two or three solutions you can then use the results of the assessment to assist with the final decision.

Invest the time and resources to properly design and size vSAN early on, long before hardware is purchased. It is very important to ensuring stability and its overall functionality. Contact a trusted solution provider or expert and evaluate the existing infrastructure or environment to determine the correct hardware and software configuration. Lastly, VMware is very consistent with releasing up-to-date ready node configurations that are certified and tested for vSAN functionality. Adhere to those guidelines and the solution will be successful.

Significant increase in IOPS: VMware, on paper, guarantees you up to 3 million IOPS on vSAN. The more efficient HDDs you have, the better is the IOP speed. And since this works on the local storage cluster, there is very little loss of IOPS compared to the traditional SAN boxes, where you need fiber channel connectivity.

Significant reduction in total cost of ownership: Because of local storage architecture involved in vSAN, the price of these are significantly cheaper if compared to the SAN disks that you have in the SAN boxes. The price difference is anywhere between 20% to 40%, which is a significant amount.

Working in the banking and finance industry, speed is of paramount importance to us since we deal in with millions of records fetching data everyday. vSAN helped us to leverage this and speed up the response time from our applications to the end-users.

The hardware compatibility list (HCL) is a sore point for vSAN. You need to thoroughly check and re-check the list with multiple vendors, like VMware in the first instance, and the manufacturer (like Dell, IBM, HPE, etc.), as the compatibility list is very narrow. I would definitely be happy if there were significant additional support for more models of servers from Dell, IBM, HPE, etc.

I have been using vSAN for 1.5 years.

We did have some stability issues. Initially, we faced issues due to lack of visibility of the HCL from VMware and the hardware vendor (Dell). But once the issue was sorted out, the product gave us rock-solid stability.

We did have some scalability issues. Similarly, when we added a new host in the existing cluster, we faced a similar issue with the HCL, but that was resolved soon.

I rate technical support 4/5.

We used traditional SAN technology before using vSAN.

Initial setup was pretty straightforward.

Verify, and again verify, the hardware compatibility list before you place an order for the hardware.

We didn’t look at alternatives.

This will definitely reduce your TCO by at least 50%. Hence, if you are planning to go with this product, just go ahead. But again, as I have said previously, please MAKE SURE that you take a look at the HCL up to the micro level.

The most valuable features of vSAN are:

• Instead of having a separate SAN storage, VMware uses all the local storage of the servers to combine its virtualized storage.
• Hyper-converged, an infrastructure system that is software defined: It integrates the computing, storage, and networking into a single platform.
• vMotion: This is one of the best features in this setup. From the name itself, vMotion allows migration without downtime. Others call it live migration. Planed server downtime is dramatically reduced by this feature.
• High availability (HA): This is my favorite. vSAN requires you to have at least three servers. Those three servers are being combined into one platform; that's vSAN. HA actually works during server failure. The server will automatically distribute to other servers in the environment.
• SSD tiering: You can combine a magnetic disk and solid-state drives to have a hybrid drive. This is actually fast because the SSD will be used for caching and the magnetic disk will store the actual data.

The most valuable feature of ESXi is that it is free. I strongly recommend this for those who have a huge development environment. ESXi is the best no-cost virtualization platform in the market right now, where you can consolidate your server into one platform.

The virtualization itself really helped me as a network and system administrator with a lot of servers to maintain. That's a pain. A virtualized environment is really easy to manage. Almost everything is in one dashboard. This really gives us more time in our research and innovation, and less time for maintenance or upgrades.

The minimal downtime alone is a winning blow for both the management and the ITs. Unexpected downtime is inevitable. It's been part any organization. Addressing that pitfall really gives an edge (from a business perspective).

Long-term savings in both buying more server in the future and absolutely the power consumption, not to mention the data center space it released or freed.

The mobility, flexibility, and scalability are really amazing and astonishing features.

I would like to see lowered cost. vSAN is very expensive.

I have used vSAN for two or three months. ESXi has been with us for around three years.

We are using vSAN 6.2, ESXi 5.5 and 6.0, and vSphere 6.0.

We have not had any stability issues so far.

Scalability is one of its strengths.

We haven't called technical support so far. But the web (Google) actually has plenty of good articles and forums and discussions. The website has also one of the best FAQ and DIY sections; 90% level of technical support.

We did not have a chance to try other virtualization platforms because the first one we tried really gave us a strong enough reason to stay loyal.

Initial setup was straightforward. You'll only have what you want.

Hopefully, over the next few years the pricing will be dramatically lower.

We are biased from the start to use VMware products only.

Study and evaluate your current setup. Conduct a case study to see if the advantages really outweigh the disadvantages. Virtualization really is the future. Especially here in my corner, almost all or most of the data centers are still in bare-metal setup. Because of the big price (CAPEX), most of the time, management will disapprove this project. But, if you help them see the big picture, I'm sure they are going to promote you for providing this project.

The most important feature for us is the converged infrastructure, which is all this tool is about. There is no need to manage separate storage areas in SAN/NAS environments. Storage management comes built-in with the vSAN tool. Storage is managed via policies. Define a policy and apply it to the datastore/virtual machine and the software-defined storage does the rest. These are valuable features.

Scalability and future upgrades are a piece of cake. If you want more IOPS, then add disk groups and/or nodes on the fly. If you want to upgrade the hardware, then add new servers and retire the old ones. No service breaks at all.

The feature that we have not yet implemented but are looking at, is the ability to extend the cluster to our other site in order to handle DR situations.

Provisioning virtual machines has been simplified, as there is no provisioning/management of the separate storage layer and it is no more in question.

The management client, i.e., the Flash-based client, is just not up to the mark. I’m really waiting for the HTML5 client to be fully ready and all the features are implemented to it. This, of course, is not a vSAN issue but a vSphere issue.

Of course as vSAN is tightly embedded into vSphere, it is also managed by the same tool. vSphere management is done via browser, and currently the only supported client is the flash-based one. VMware is rolling out a new HTML5 –based client, but that is a slow process. It began as a Fling and since then, there has been quite a number of releases as new features are added. It is today quite usable, but still not complete yet.

There is also the C# -client, also known as the fat-client, which is to be installed onto a management system. Recent versions of vSphere do not support the C#-client anymore. Thus the browser is the only possibility with current versions.

So, my criticism is aimed towards the current Flash-based client, which is utterly slow, and Flash itself being deprecated technology. The sooner we can get rid of it, the happier we all will be.

I have used this solution for around a year.

Stability has not been an issue for us. We have not run into any serious software faults. VMware ESXi is a mature product with very few problems and today, vSAN is also getting there.

The scalability of the product is way beyond our needs.

L1 technical support, which I have mostly been dealing with, has been pretty solid, especially the guys in Ireland, who do handle it pretty well, both technically and in reference to the customer service aspect.

We did not have any comparable solution previously. We did previously use traditional SAN / NAS environments from where the storage areas were provisioned for the VMware clusters.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. All in all, it took three days to complete the entire process; that included installation of the hardware itself, installation of ESXi onto the hardware, creating the data center and the cluster, configuring the networks and multicasting on the surrounding network infrastructure, defining all the disk groups and networks at the cluster, and finally turning the vSAN on. vSAN was the simplest part of the whole process.

As VMware products are licensed per number of sockets, you need to think this fully through. However, don’t go cheap on the number of hosts. You’ll thank me later.

We got presentations both from SimpliVity and Nutanix. No serious evaluation of other products was made. We did evaluate vSAN a couple months before the purchase, so as to get familiar with it, and we do have a lab environment now to play with.

In hindsight, we could have carried out a more-thorough evaluation of vSAN to get a really good feel about it; maybe even run a part of your actual production there for an extended period of time to see all the pros and cons.

Study the VMware Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) carefully with your server hardware provider and make sure all the components/firmware versions are on the HCL; either that or buy predefined hardware, a.k.a. vSAN-ready nodes, from a certified vendor. Always make sure that the hardware and firmware levels are on par with the HCL. You may have to upgrade; for example, you may need to upgrade the disk controller firmware when the updates to ESXi are installed. VMware does a pretty good job here and vCenter tells you that there are inconsistencies. However, you should still be prepared for that in advance, before actually installing the updates.

Don’t go with the minimum number of (storage) nodes, as that won’t give you enough room for a hardware failure during a scheduled maintenance break. For a minimum setup, without advanced options in vSAN 6.5 such as deduplication, compression and when Failures to Tolerate (FTT) = 1, the required number of nodes is three. VMware recommends in best practices a minimum number of four nodes. Do yourself a favour and go with at least that or even five would be good.

When disk groups are designed, it is always better to have more smaller disk groups than a few larger disk groups. This increases your availability, decreases time to heal from disk troubles and gives you an improved performance, as there are more cache devices.

If your budget allows it, then go with the all-flash storage. If not, go with even more disk groups. Our cluster has pretty good performance; although we have spinning disks, the read latency usually stays below 1ms and write latency stays below 2ms.

Plan your network infrastructure carefully, especially that part which handles the vSAN traffic. Go with separate 10G switches and dual interfaces for each server just for vSAN. Handle the virtual machine traffic, migration traffic and management traffic elsewhere. Go with 10G or faster, if you need that. Don’t use 1G for vSAN traffic, unless your environment is really small or is a lab.

Plan your backup / restore strategy really well and test it through. Test restore periodically for both full virtual machines and single files inside virtual machines. To carry out test restore is always important, but with vSAN it is even more so, as all your eggs are in the same basket and there are no more traditional .vmdk files that you can fiddle with. A separate test / lab vSAN cluster would be really good to test various things such as installing updates, restoring backups etc.

I like this solution because policies (such as resiliency) are applied per virtual disk instead of applied on an entire volume.

In a standard SAN solution, and in almost all software-defined storage solutions, the resiliency is applied to an entire volume. For example, you create a volume (or LUN) and you choose RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10 and so on. With vSAN, the notion of volume that we know with SAN doesn’t exist. Instead we have VVOL. Thanks to this, we can apply specific settings like the resiliency per virtual disk. It is more flexible because we don’t need to dedicate an entire volume for a specific resiliency.

I’m a consultant, so I don’t have vSAN in my organization. But customers take this solution to increase efficiency, scalability and ease of management.

Currently, vSAN supports stretched cluster. You need to have the exact same number of nodes in each room and only the RAID 1 resiliency is supported. I hope in the future that vSAN supports also the RAID 5 and RAID 6 resiliency mode for stretched cluster.

I have been working with this solution for seven months.

Some customers report that resync doesn’t work very well.

We have not had scalability issues.

I rate technical support 3.5/5.

As a consultant, I use different solutions, such as Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct, and Nutanix.

The initial setup is straightforward because a wizard helps you to enable vSAN.

The license price is too expensive compared to other market actors.

I will evaluate alternatives depending on customer’s needs, but I compare it with Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct and Nutanix.

Be careful about the chosen hardware, especially HBA, storage devices and CPU depending on deduplication or not.