VMware vSAN Reviews

The vSAN technology is clearly the big game changer here. VMware's software-defined storage finally enables us to build a private cloud solution that scales much easier than we are used to.

We wanted to be able to grow much more dynamically than what we have been able to until now. Instead of big investments and complex storage installations, we now have an infrastructure where expansion is a lot easier because we can just buy four more new servers, plug them in and add them to the pool of resources.

We are moving faster every day and are developing new systems and services all the time. We expect the amount of projects this year to be 4-5 times as many as last year and we will be able to support that growth with this solution.

We did plan on using deduplication in our original specification, but during the planning of the configuration, we were advised against it by VMware.

It was a brand new feature, so it was, at the time, perhaps, too early to use it. I am expecting that we will use it in the future when it has matured.

I have used vSphere for seven months for the latest installation, but we have been running VMware for the last 10 years.

We haven't had stability issues that have affected our running servers. However, that is partly because we pay attention to new releases and what they contain, and we don't update just because a new version is available.

Some updates that we chose not to install had bugs that could have caused instability. Also, because we run such a wide range of products from VMware, one has to look at the support matrix before updating/upgrading software, as it may take some time before all products support each other.

We have had a few alarms and alerts in the system, but they have been resolved without any downtime.

Scalability is one of the major advantages of this new installation.

Technical support is no better or worse than what we have seen from other vendors. Usually it works well, but once in a while there are cases that seem to run in circles where you need to get in touch with your account manager and have them escalate the case to get progress.

We have used VMware for virtualization and NetApp for storage for about 10 years.

We stayed with VMware and decided to switch to vSAN because they have had a good track record here with stable products and we could save money (and grow more gradually) by running vSAN instead of a traditional storage system.

I would say initial setup is complex. But we decided to go with best practices and we had consultants from VMware designing and planning the configuration for us, so it wasn't an issue.

Make sure your designs are complete so you can buy all the licenses and products you need as one purchase to get the best deal.

We did not look into alternative solutions for the virtualization part. But for storage, we looked at other vendors. For example: NetApp, Tintri, and Nimble.

Start from scratch. Reject all your old dogmas about how things should be and what is right and embrace the functionality that is available.

We designed our system so we can use NSX and all the other features VMware has to offer, even though we didn't plan on using it in the beginning.

If you are putting constraints on your design because of ties to old legacy systems and designs, then you will never get the full benefits.

We had several servers we used in our VMware cluster, as well as a storage device. The implementation of vSAN reduced the rack space, since we no longer required several slots in the cabinet to rack a storage device. vSAN also made it very easy for us to scale out. Power consumption was also reduced within our datacentre.

I like the scalability and the fact that it reduces your total cost for storage over several years.

The only thing I can think of at this time is to improve the performance monitoring and performance visibility within the GUI. They have already made several improvements in vSAN 6.2, but there's always room for improvement when it comes to monitoring performance.

We had no stability issues.

We had no scalability issues.

VMware technical support provides a great service.

We switched to move towards a software-defined datacentre.

It is very easy to configure and setup. vSAN is already part of vSphere ESXi. You simple need to apply a license and do minor configuration to get it to work.

The first 1-2 years of purchasing vSAN will be expensive. Thereafter, the longer you are running it, the more cost savings you will have.

We looked into several other products, such as Pure Storage and Dell solutions.

Keep it simple, and don’t try and over-complicate things. Make sure to follow VMware best practices when it comes to implementing your vSAN solution. Read those whitepapers and make sure you understand how you want to implement it in your environment.

There was a significant increase in the IOPS and the cost. VMware, on paper, guarantees you up to 3 million IOPS on vSAN. The more efficient hard disk drives (HDDs) you have, the better the IOPS speed. Since this works on the local storage cluster, there is very little loss of IOPS compared to the traditional SAN boxes, where you need FC connectivity.

There was a significant reduction in the total cost of ownership. Due to the local storage architecture involved in vSAN, the prices 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.

Since I am working in the banking and finance industry, speed is of paramount importance to us since we deal 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 vSAN Hardware Compatibility List Checker needs to improve, since currently it is a sore point for vSAN. You need to thoroughly check and re-check the HCL with multiple vendors like VMware, in the first instance, and manufacturers like Dell, IBM, HPE, etc., as the compatibility list is very narrow. I would definitely be happy if there is significant additional support for more models of servers from Dell, IBM, HPE, etc.

I have used this solution for a year and a half.

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

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

I would give the technical support a 8/10 rating.

We were using traditional SAN technology before moving over to vSAN.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

Make sure that you verify and again verify the HCL, before you place an order for the hardware.

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.

I find that vSAN allows for very easy administration. The fact that you don't have LUNs to set up and assign is great. The ability to set up storage policies and assign them at the disk level is also a great part of this product. You can allow for different setups for different workload requirements.

vSAN allowed for the expansion of our Public Library Patron computer environment into a three-node VMware cluster using commodity servers. This eliminated the need for expensive disk arrays and controllers while providing greater reliability and performance.

We have been using vSAN in one environment for about eight months and 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 for addition to disk groups.

We have had no issues with stability.

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

We have a Nutanix environment running in production as well. We chose VMware vSAN for several reasons. First, the vSAN solution is part of the ESXi kernel. This allows for the product to be very fast with little overhead. Secondly, vSAN is included in the Enterprise Plus version of ESXi which, compared to competing products, provides a great cost savings.

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 purchase. Our cost savings is in buying commodity server hardware with local hard drives instead of investing in large SAN hardware.

In our model, the price of vSAN storage space is a bit lower than SATA-based storage space from other storages, and vSAN usually has better characteristics (IOPS + latency).

We can easily scale up our vSAN cluster horizontally. All we need is to buy the same hardware nodes and put them in racks.

vSAN has better integration with virtualization than any other datastore.

Stretched All Flash vSAN is the leading product to build a disaster recovery solution. We have a plan to build it in near future.

It’s simple: We are service provider and if a solution can give us new opportunities, it is a good solution. We can build economically effective IaaS clusters on top of vSAN.

vSAN is very complex inside. For example, you need to have a plan for any emergency situation, beginning from the PoC stage; how you monitor SSD and HDD; how you change them. It looks simple, but you cannot just remove a broken component and an install new one. Under the vSAN layer, you need many accurate steps to make these simple actions.

And when you operate a big environment, you need to have more tools to control the health of the solution, to troubleshoot issues and so on. VMware has improved this side from 5.5 to 6.5, and there’s still room for it.

vSAN is not a hardware-agnostic product. We would like to have more compatible SAS controllers and other components in the market. There is room for improvement for both hardware vendors and for VMware.

On the other hand, vSAN is a production-ready solution and all these possible improvements are cosmetic issues.

We have used it from the vSAN 5.5 release date, more than two years.

We use VMware vSAN 5.5 with the latest updates in our products.
The first product is a B2B sector solution, CloudLine, and we sell space on vSAN as one of the storage tiers.
The second one is our B2C solution, CloudLite.ru. It looks like Digital Ocean – we sell IaaS to retail customers in the mass market.
We have plans to build new clusters using vSAN 6.5.

We have encountered stability issues. We had run many tests with vSAN before production. To avoid any issues with vSAN stability, one needs HCL hardware and compatible BIOS drivers for each of the components. The crucial part is that you need HBA without RAID and with disk pass-through, which is important. Finally, you need strong network expertise and a solid network.

We have not encountered any scalability issues; you can scale vSAN horizontally without any issues. But you need to start from 5 (!) nodes; not 3 or 4. It’s a long story – why? :)

Rating technical support is not a simple question. VMware has great technical experts at level 2 and 3, and they are always available if you have severity 1 issue. Technical support is not so good for minor issues.

Previously we use traditional datastores - NetApp, EMC, IBM. And we continue to use it.

Initially, you need to have enough expertise. You need to read some popular bloggers and select hardware from “recommended nodes”. And then you can start a PoC.

We are part of the VMware vCAN program, so our licensing is different from the retail model and it’s comfortable for us.

We keep an eye on all solutions that come to the market. We have tested SimpliVity and Nutanix. We use MS Storage Spaces in our production. All these products have their pros and cons.

You need to use it for the reason of economical efficiency. It’s one of VMware’s great products.

vSAN is a great product, and we see improvement from 5.5 to 6 and 6.5.

The reduction in cost of storage: In my most recent deployment, we reduced cost from around $20,000 per TB (CapEx) to less than $1,000 per TB (CapEx). This is not taking into account deduplication/compression or the ability to add disks and scale vertically, not incurring licensing costs, which would drive the cost down further.

Traditional SANs require large up-front costs, and with "forklift" upgrades, you end up spending a very large amount of money initially and then expect to recoup the costs over the lifetime of the array. This is not how vSAN – or any other HCI (hyperconverged infrastructure) product – works. The idea is to have a small initial investment and, with horizontal/vertical scaling, you can grow into the needs of your environment. This can be accomplished several ways, by either adding more disks to each host (vertical scaling) or by adding more nodes to the cluster (horizontal scaling). This allows for much greater flexibility with your storage. Before HCI, you were required to guess how much storage you were going to need, and were stuck with what you guessed at.

Upgrades are also much simpler. Because the system is software-defined, you simply upgrade the software rather than the entire hardware stack. If you want to upgrade the hardware, you would then simply add nodes in, and remove older nodes. It is also possible to create a new cluster and do a swing migration; however, this is similar to older-style upgrades. The point is that there are a lot of options available with HCI systems.

Management of the environments is overall simpler, allowing for during-hours patching with no downtime and little risk; also allowing us to stay more current with patching, reducing the overall risk of the environments.

The worst part of vSAN, as with most VMware products, is that you need to use the vSphere Web Client to interact with it. The vSphere Web Client is slow and clunky, making interacting with the system difficult and often times painful. I have been told that the new version of the web client will be significantly better, but do not have personal experience with it. Other than being difficult to work with, it can cause outage scenarios to take significantly longer to troubleshoot because you waste a lot of time waiting for the client to load information, or just load in general. It is a huge drawback for an otherwise very good product.

I have used it in various deployment scenarios since 2015, or about 1.5 years.

I have observed no stability issues when the product is deployed as instructed. It can and will have stability issues if you do not follow the hardware compatibility list (HCL) or the vSAN Deployment and Sizing Guide.

The product scales easily, up easier than down, due to the need to remove the disks and migrate the data from the nodes you wish to remove from the cluster.

Actual support engineers are excellent; however, opening cases is often difficult/frustrating.

In my current project, the customer previously used EMC VMAX arrays. As detailed elsewhere, the CapEx savings were incredible.

During my current project, initial setup was very complex, though this was by our own choosing and was needlessly complex. In the past, setups were often very straightforward, though you need to verify your design properly, as mentioned.

VMware licensing is per socket for VSAN, like everything else. The platform is very flexible, so be sure to look at all your options.

I was not part of the evaluation process but cost was a major factor, as well as high availability.

Discuss the deployment with VMware sales; I've met several of them and they are generally smart people looking to help get you the best deployment possible.

Currently, we are on version 6.2. Having all flash, I would say that the most valuable feature for us is deduplication, as it gives us better utilization of the space available. In the latest release, there are already features that we have been waiting for. iSCSI presentation, for example, is something we were waiting for. With iSCSI presentation, we will be able to present the vSAN datastore to our other blade servers; therefore better utilising our investment.

We face the same challenges most organisations do; probably the most common one being that of keeping up with growth and expansion, while keeping within the budgets. vSAN is very scalable, so we can plan our costs well in advance, knowing that additional nodes will be expanding both our compute and storage resources.

I think that the product is evolving in the right direction, most of the improvements and suggestions we had in mind are already available in 6.5. Obviously, there is always room for improvement.

For example, in our case, we had to go with vSAN Advanced license in order to have all flash. I remember attending the vSAN summit at VMworld 2015, and this licensing issue came up during the discussions; so did the request to present vSAN via iSCSI and the 2-node direct connect for ROBOs. In 6.5, all-flash is now supported by all vSAN editions, and ROBO sites can be deployed with a 2-node crossover cable, so it looks like VMware are taking on-board the suggestions we are making, as always J.

We have been using vSAN for the last two years, now. Initially, we decided to try vSAN in our test and dev environment. We started with the hybrid solution using some hardware that we already had in-house. Our development team had already noticed faster build and deployment time frames, so we explored the vSAN option further. Today, we moved to an all-flash solution, which we are now using both for dev and production.

The only issue that I recall having was with a controller driver that did not pass the HCL check; this happened following an update to 6.2, but a patch was released soon after. We did not experience any service interruption or downtime.

Customer support for vSAN was very good; response time was very fast and within the agreed support time frames. The technical guys where very knowledgeable and helped out to address our queries and issues right away.

In most of our environments, we still have "traditional" storage, some of which is becoming end of life and will be decommissioned. Others are relatively still recent and are being used as a secondary storage together with vSAN. It’s like having the best of both worlds in a way. We have been using and implementing most of the VMware products for several years now; vSAN keeps consolidating our infrastructure under one vendor.

When we were setting it up the very first time, we had to start over a few times, but again it was just a learning curve. I think during the first setup, especially if it’s in a testing environment, it’s the best time to hammer it and experiment a little.

We do implementations as service vendors and obviously implemented our own. My advice to whoever is considering vSAN is to try it out, even if it’s just on some hardware you already have. If you don’t have any hardware, most service vendors will be willing to give you a remotely accessible demo. My advice when it comes to production, in regards of hardware, is definitely to go for vSAN-Ready nodes (“VMware-approved hardware”).

In some of our environments, introducing vSAN helped reduce our datacentre hosting costs. In one case, we were able to completely remove a cabinet that had a legacy blade chassis and a legacy SAN. We only had two cabinets in this environment; by consolidating storage and compute in a few servers, we reduced the hosting costs by half. As for pricing and licensing, I think this is something which needs to be discussed on a case-by-case basis; I do not think it’s a “one size fits all”.

I think vSAN together with other alternatives is the future. Actually, it has already been here with us for a while; network, compute and storage are merging in one box. It’s just a matter of time for it to become the norm.

My rating is for this point in time. However, there have been improvements and new features in the latest release, which will probably make me increase my rating in the coming days.

Deduplication and compression: Software-based deduplication and compression optimizes the all-flash storage capacity.

Compared to other vendors, vSAN is compatible with more expensive hardware, and Nutanix is available on multiple hardware platforms, like Supermicro, Dell and Lenovo.

I have used it for two months; just for test purposes.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 10/10.

We did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup was straightforward; I had the KB from VMware to help me deploy the solution.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated OpenStack Object Storage.

It is a good solution for customers that are looking for performance, storage efficiency, and scalability.

• Converged solution for shared storage

When configuring a HA vSphere cluster, you need shared storage. Traditionally, one would need a SAN or NAS to provide this kind of HA. Using vSAN, you can use the same servers as the hypervisor uses for the vSAN storage. No SAN or NAS is needed and much less hardware is needed to provide the same HA solution.

• No need for additional storage
• Hypervisor can provide storage as well
• Integration in a virtualization stack

I would like to see improvement in monitoring and performance statistics. When installing the product, it has limited statistics. The default vCenter statistics are available, but deep IOPS/latency and block sizing is absent. You can connect vRealize Operations to vSAN, giving much more information, but this is not available by default.

We have been using this solution for two years.

I did not encounter any issues with stability.

I did not encounter any issues with scalability. I suggest starting with a four-node cluster.

I would give technical support a rating of 7/10.

We use this solution along with another solution, so there was no hard switch.

It is easy for a VMware administrator to install.

We use it in a cloud-provider model based on usage. The end user pricing is not known.

Start with a four-node cluster.

The storage policies allow the administrator to define which VMs have specific storage requirements. For example: Our critical VMs have an increased flash read cache percentage enabled. This improves the overall performance of these machines. The ability to specify policies for every kind of VM in your data center improves storage efficiency, as well as improving performance, redundancy, and so on for specific VMs. With traditional SANs, configuring this was only possible on a LUN level. With vSAN, we can do this on the VM objects themselves.

One of the things that surprised me was the way vSAN handles a disk failure. It auto-rebuilds the vSAN objects when a failure has been detected. (Note: There are two kinds of failures, and this has a different effect on the rebuild timer.) But, in the end, the cluster is self-healing without any user input needed. The only thing that is affected is purely the raw storage that is lost with the drive.

The ease of managing and configuring vSAN. This means that all our VMware administrators are now able to do the daily maintenance and operations. Previously, only a couple of IT administrators were responsible for maintaining our previous storage solution and the complex tasks that came with it.

• The daily maintenance can be high, especially due to the lack of documentation and reporting in vCenter, and only on the vSAN health page.
• If the vSAN cluster can’t self-heal due to an internal error, we can’t repair the vSAN cluster ourselves.
• A case with VMware is always needed to fix the issue, resulting in an increased time to resolve. This can be very time-consuming.
• I would like to see more documentation on the errors, impact, and solutions. This could improve the product knowledge.
• Some essential storage features (deduplication/compression) are only available on all-flash vSAN clusters. These limitations need to be taken into account when sizing and designing your environment.

We have been using this solution for a year.

Keep a close eye on the vSAN HCL. As vSAN is continuously in development, the HCL changes as well and so the HCL gets updates.

When you are planning to upgrade the vSAN version, all other components (ESX version, server firmware, server BIOS) need to be checked to see if they are all on that version’s HCL.

Scalability on vSAN is extremely easy. If the host is compliant with the prerequisites (one SSD and one spinning disk), it will be accepted by the cluster instantaneously. All raw storage will be committed to the vSAN data store and directly available for usage.

In terms of sizing the cluster, as deduplication and compression are only available on all-flash arrays, this can heavily impact the storage capacity of the vSAN cluster.

Since we chose a hybrid-configuration, the lack of deduplication and compression caused a storage growth that exceeded the limits quite rapidly. We had to scale up and address the issue in other ways.

Technical support is good. When encountering issues with vSAN, 99% of the time a VMware support case needs to be opened. All of the standard steps of a support case are run through. In the end, a VMware engineer will solve the issue with you and bring the cluster back to a fully healthy state.

Our previous hyper-converged system broke down due to a power failure. A new system was needed. vSAN was the logical choice, as we are a VMware Partner.

The way VMware integrated the vSAN hyper-converged storage functionalities in their vSphere Kernel is really revolutionary.

It allows the environment to scale out on storage resources when the business needs it. You no longer have to buy those expensive traditional SAN setups scaled for the “future requirements” that you had in mind at the time.

Even an IT administrator with some basic VMware experience would be able to set up vSAN in just a couple of minutes. This is one of the easiest setups I have had in a while.

We had previous solutions, but vSAN was the logical choice.

I would definitely recommend vSAN to others. The old, cumbersome, and traditional storage environments are done and belong to the past. Hyper-converged is the next big thing. It is more cost effective, easier to manage, and scaling up can be done almost on the fly.

I recommend going for an all-flash vSAN setup, if the budget allows it. Some vSAN features like deduplication/compression are only available on an all-flash configuration.

With the falling GB/$, an all-flash is becoming the evident choice. The benefits are there (more features and all-flash performance for all VMs).