VMware vSAN Reviews

We use it as a primary storage for our Horizon View environment. 

The product is great. It runs well. 

It helped us survive power outages in one of our data centers, then continued to function without a hitch.

• Its redundancy
• Its uptime capabilities
• The performance is great.

I would like a better Hardware Certification List (HCL). The HCL should a little easier to deal with.

Making the hardware compatibility not as much of an issue would be a good thing. 

It scales well. We have plenty of room to grow. It should be a good long term solution for us.

Technical support has been fantastic. We always get answers quickly whenever we call.

We wanted to give more redundant access to the users' desktops than they previously had. Before, we were on a single SAN which was causing us issues if we had either an issue with the SAN or an issue with our environment when the SAN would go down. By using vSAN, it would allow us to spread our data across multiple data centers on our campus and be more fault tolerant.

It was really straightforward. 

We had some help from Venture Technologies, who helped us get it going. They didn't really have to do too much. We figured it out.

We have increased our user productivity. However, being in Higher Education, we don't really measure it.

Give it a look. It will save you time and money.

Our primary use of vSAN is to set up a deployment of a small subset of clusters that we have out in our gas and oil prepossessing plants, in remote areas.

Performance-wise, it has gone above and beyond what we originally spec'ed it for. From that respect, for us, it's like the "golden gun".

It gave us the ability to get the storage-processing and CPU power that we needed in remote areas. It's something like "the big bullet in a small gun", where it actually works and does what it needs to do. It's very useful for what we need it to do.

The most valuable feature is that we're not spending any additional money on an external storage solution for it. It gives us the all-in-one, Swiss Army knife kind of solution.

The usability is pretty good but it could use a little tweaking on the UI, with a clearer definition of exactly what some of the things do. For example, sometimes when sticking hosts into maintenance mode, you have to re-read the definition a couple of times. I have to say to myself, "Okay. I actually want to evacuate the data off of this host. Or no, I actually don't. I want to keep it there but I still put the host into maintenance mode." So a little bit more clear and concise definition of what some of the options do would help.

The first impressions of its stability were really good. After using it a little bit more and going through some issues with it, it still shows that it's a very robust tool. From that point of view, I'm going to keep on using it.

Scalability is very easy. We've already run into one scenario where we've needed some more storage. We were able to provision the drives, slide them into our current hosts in that cluster, and expand it. It was very easy.

I have used technical support and it leaves a little bit to be desired. I've gone through a few people to get to the person who actually has all the knowledge, who can actually solve the problem.

There was a lot of Hyper-V deployed out in this environment, and things of that nature. Hardware was coming to a service-contract end, so the next step for us was to get rid of a lot of one-on-one virtualization that was happening with the Hyper-V environment and start consolidating and bringing it down into something that was a little bit more manageable.

If you're coming from a small enough environment, where you have to provision out a stand-alone datastore for this, and you don't have the resources to do it, I would definitely say go look at vSAN for that, because you can definitely combine your compute and resources into one environment.

We use it for storage and redundancy.

It has changed the way we design our infrastructure. We're looking at a new infrastructure.

Also, it allows us to put our infrastructure in remote locations and still get the same performance we get from our onsite SAN solutions.

I like the availability aspects of it.

The stability has been very good. I don't think we've had any real issues from what we have been setting up so far.

It's very scalable. That is a really good feature of the product.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward.

I rate it at 10 out of 10 because it is just a really good product. I've used other products like it and it seems to be the most stable and easiest to configure.

We use it for our compute clusters, for running our virtual machines. We use it for our vROps clusters. Our customers use it for their compute workloads.

It is scalable, overall. If you need to add storage, it makes it easy to scale by adding additional hard drives into the existing servers or you can add storage by just adding more servers.

I would like to see replication as part of it. I would also like to see direct file access, being able to run SIF shares and NFS and the like. I think that would be critical to continuing the use of it, going forward.

One of the things that we've had challenges with is when we place hosts into maintenance mode. Sometimes doing so triggers large re-sync processes which can be time-consuming and which have, at times, pushed the capacity to the threshold. I definitely think making some changes in that area would provide some big improvements.

Overall, it's stable. When it's designed properly for the proper workloads, it's a very stable product. We had some challenges, initially, with getting the workloads aligned to the proper storage policies and configurations, but since we worked through that it has been very stable.

Technical support is getting better. We've been using vSAN for a couple of years now. Initially, it was a little more challenging, but it seems like GSS is scaling up as well and, perhaps, learning the product along with us, at times. But overall, they do a great job in giving us support when we need it.

The initial setup is pretty easy. I would like to have some additional automation wrapped around it. In the earlier versions, PowerCLI was very limited, but as the versions have progressed the modules have progressed as well. It's getting better. I consider it to still be a fairly new product and, over time, it's continually getting better and better.

Properly align your workloads to the storage policies and make sure you know what your workloads are before you leverage vSAN. Have a good understanding of the size of your VMs, the amount of change that they have, and how you are going to be doing maintenance in your cluster. Understand the workload and what you're going to be doing with it before you jump in.

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.

Dataprev has a strategic partnership with VMware and the federal government of Brazil. We're developing a new public cloud and private cloud for the whole government of Brazil.

There are so many valuable features.

I need some additional features, and to learn more, to develop best practices for the Brazilian federal government.

I would like to see machine-learning. This is the biggest problem because, in Brazil, our federal government doesn't know about moving to the cloud. We have city, state, and federal governments to move to the cloud. Dataprev is beginning the work towards a private cloud and machine-learning would be an important feature, one I really need.

I'm really impressed with the stability of vSAN.

My team is starting to develop and make use of the scalability. The team in Brazil is very big in cloud performance but we are just beginning to move into a cloud program.

The technical account team works with my team in Brazil, together, whether in London, China, India - many teams working with us in Brazil. I would rate technical support as very good.

In Brazil, our strategy is that we need to move to the cloud. But there are federal rules and, connected to the government's strategy, there are some questions with many of the solutions. All governments have a problem moving to AWS, to Google, or to Microsoft. Dataprev's strategy, in the employment of the federal government, is to apply the new features while staying within the principles set by the federal government. All governments have a big problem with many data centers, a lot of code, with auditors, etc. I can't go into our strategy in depth here.

The government decided to move to the cloud but there are many problems with regulations, with agencies' sensitive information. VMware provides primary and strategic development features, in working with us in the federal government.

When looking at vendors the most important criterion for us is trust. We need to be able to trust the vendor, the solution, the whole technical development team, because the technical account manager and other teams work with my team inside my data centers.

I can't comment on the initial setup.

I rate vSAN a 10 out of 10 because the VMware team works with my team to develop a better, more timely response. We have made improvements for the federal government. We have been working with VMware for almost 15 years

We use it for our management cluster. All of our network services are on this cluster, on vSAN. That way, it's off the production network, it's off by itself. We have four nodes in case there is an issue with it, it has the failover capabilities.

The performance is very good. We have NVMe performance in it so it's very fast.

The most valuable features are being able to keep it off by itself and the ease of use.

We have been talking to VMware about things we'd like to see and I think they have done them in their 6.6 release. I don't think we need any more enhancements at this time.

The stability is very good. We have some HCI solutions like this in our environment and this one is on par with those solutions.

The scalability is very good. If we know that we need more CPU, more memory, we can add more nodes to it. We don't need to do that today but we know, tomorrow, that we have that capability.

We have a VMware TAM and they have helped us out with technical support. We haven't needed to call support. Things have been very smooth, no issues whatsoever.

We knew from doing the DR project and from having some issues with our production vSphere that we needed some type of solution to help us out, to keep it off the production network. But we did not have a product before this one. This is a new product for us.

For us, the most important criteria when selecting a new vendor are

• ease of use, because we have an operations group that we need to worry about
• cost is always up there
• the future of it - making sure it has a future because we hate to get something and then, after a year or so, it goes out-of-support and no one is using it anymore and there are no upgrades.

The initial setup was a little complex. We did it a couple of years ago and we've heard that it is so much easier now. I know that they are working on that capability right now.

I don't see this solution as an ROI type of thing. We tried to do it as a DR solution, or for making sure that it's a solution that is off by itself. At this point, cost was not a major factor for this.

We were using Dell and then we had a Dell EMC box, a hybrid. But it was a lot more money and it seemed we would always be a version behind. But with this one, the vSAN that we chose, we can upgrade it as needed. We can always be at the latest and greatest.

Make sure you use a solution that is supported. There are a lot of companies out there that are new and sometimes they don't have a life. We have been in that situation before where we have bought something and then it has gone end-of-life or no more support. Make sure you get a solution that is going to be supported for five to seven years, such as vSAN.

I would rate it at nine out of 10. I know it's very young and that they're growing it or doing a lot of updates to it, so I'm thinking it will be a 10. It's just very new to us. To make it a 10 will take some time.

Virtual Desktop.

Easy to use.

Horizon VDI

Raw disk and block disk.