VMware vSAN Reviews

VMware vSAN is easy to implement in a VMware environment and it is not expensive.

The architecture of vSAN is not good. vSAN works with objects, such as disks, and it causes problems with availability. When we send users caches we lose the total cache disk of the group. It's really a red line for using vSAN. We don't lose all the data because it is replicated in other groups, but when the object is lost in one group, we only have one remaining and this creates a higher risk of losing data.

Another is the restrictions of using deduplication and compression, it requires all-flash for it meaning that deduplication is on for all clusters and you can't control it for specific ones. I would like VMware vSAN to give hybrid configurations more caches and to add deduplication and compression for hybrid configurations.

I have been using VMware vSAN for a year.

The architecture of VMware vSAN is a major issue with stability. 

There have been no problems with scalability of this solution.

The initial set up of VMware vSAN is easy. The implementation requires just one click and VMware will take care of the rest.

VMware vSAN is not expensive. We compare it with Nutanix and the discounts from VMware are really good for vSAN.

If you want vSAN it is important that you understand all sides of the solution and have the right hardware solution. For example, you should consider if you need reliable disks for cache and split it into more clusters or groups.

I would give this solution a five out of 10.

We primarily use the solution for virtualization for our organization.

The solution is easy to manage due to the fact that it uses the same dashboard as Center.

vSAN is okay for HCI.

The solution fits well with my requirements. 

The stability is good.

The product can scale.

I have always found the technical support to be helpful and responsive. 

So far, the solution is okay with me. 

It would be ideal if the solution offered some intelligent monitoring. Right now, most of these features are in another subscription such as Log Insight.

I've used the solution for three years. 

The stability has been very good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

We currently have ten people that directly use the solution in our organization. 

The scalability is simple. It's very easy to scale the HCI node.

We rarely use technical support. We might use them for consulting purposes sometimes if, for example, we have a new system and then we are concerned that it might or might not be running on vSAN. We might need them to probe it first. So far, we have been satisfied with the level of support we get.

I was not a part of the implementation process and therefore cannot speak to how easy or difficult it may be. 

The solution has very few maintenance requirements. Occasionally, they may recommend a fix or patch by updating it, and we do so. However, other than that, it's pretty simple to maintain.

Normally we use a local system integrator or distributor to do the setup for us.

The pricing is competitive with other vendors. It's mid-range in terms of pricing. It's not cheap and it's not overly expensive.

We are a customer and an end-user.

We are using the latest version of the solution at this time. 

I'd recommend the solution to other users. It's easy to deploy and great for virtualization. 

I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

It is inside the data center as software-defined storage for the infrastructure.

The most important thing is the simplicity of the product. It is a well-established product with good stability.

Its installation should be easier, and its price should be cheaper. 

It would be good for the product if they can include the data locality feature.

It has good stability.

It is scalable. We have around ten customers of this solution.

Their technical support is fine.

It is neither easy nor complicated. It is in-between. The deployment took one to two days. You need one to two engineers for its deployment and maintenance.

It is expensive. It should be cheaper.

It has a perpetual license as well as a subscription-based license, but they are moving towards subscription-based licenses.

I would rate VMware vSAN a seven out of ten.

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.

We use it for all of our Production and it has been very effective.

It's more scalable and faster than what we had, and it's easier to support.

• The non-complexity
• The cost

I would like to see some of the more traditional SAN functions that are out there now. I can list them: being able to Snapshot on the back-end, better de-dupe, and better compression. Those are the major ones.

We haven't had any issues with the stability.

The scalability is very good. You plug it in and it goes.

We have not had to use technical support for vSAN yet.

We knew we needed a new solution. The other one was too complex and too costly and was never really maintained properly. Too many teams had too many hands in it. With the new ACI solution with the Vx Rack, and SDDC, everything is a lot more easily managed.

The most important criterion when selecting a vendor is reputation.

The initial setup was straightforward.

It's a liitle hard to say what our ROI is because we bought it to replace an old, traditional setup. It was either pay for maintenance and the like, refresh it, or go to an ACI. We went to an ACI. I don't know what the cost to refresh the other environment was, so I don't know exact numbers for return on investment.

Our shortlist was really just EMC. That decision was made before I took over the project. We were always an EMC shop, so we moved away from Cisco and went to Dell EMC for it. I don't know why, exactly, but they said to me, "Here, make it work."

Be careful of your FTT policies.

I rate it a nine out of ten. It would be a ten if it had better deduping, compression, and the ability to Snapshot volumes on the back-end.

• 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.

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).

• Performance
• High Availability

It's relatively low-cost for a high-performance solution. By using VSAN, we've been able to simplify our infrastructure considerably.

VSAN currently has no data deduplication, and having such a feature would both be an improvement and provide a feature that Nutanix has.

N/A

The stability is very good.

Having now deployed it, it's actually difficult to have any downtime or to even lose data.

Considering I've only done one VSAN cluster, I'd say that the scalability is good. We haven't yet tried to add more clusters.

Our company currently has 20,000 users and we expect further growth, so we'll likely have to scale down the road. That said, I don't anticipate really any issues with scalability at that point.

N/A

Tech support is very good as they're responsive.

We have the Technical Account Manager service, which is very helpful.

N/A

Setup was not complex at all, was very straightforward, and was easily implemented by everyone on the team.

We implemented it with out in-house team.

We chose VSAN based on a POC. We looked at Nutanix, but VSAN was more robust for our needs and less expensive.

We normally use Gartner as a source, as well as some testing and a POC. The POC was the most important criteria, so my advice would be to do that before committing the resources.