VMware vSAN Reviews

The primary use of the product is for storage for VDI plus some other storage for file servers and the like. The performance is great. We use it on all-flash.

Performance and the ability to use all-flash.

I would like to see it be more hardware-agnostic.

Other than that, the only other complication is - and it has gotten better with the newer versions - that lately, once you're running an all-flash, if you need to grow or scale down your infrastructure, it's a long process. You need to evacuate all the data and make sure you have enough space on the host, then add more hosts or take out hosts. That process is a little bit complex. You cannot scale as needed or shrink as needed. 

Right now, the stability is pretty good. It's getting a lot better.

It has its quirks but the scalability is good. Given that you have to have the hardware, the right driver, the right framework, and so on, it's not easy to put it together, it's not a plug-and-play solution. But once you get all of that done, it becomes a good product.

I have used the technical support, but most of the time it comes down to the manufacturer of the hardware; Cisco or whoever we're using for it. It's a compatibility type of thing. But tech support is okay.

Our previous solution was SAN-based. I wanted to bring in something new and not only stay with the market, where it's going with the trends, but also to bring in something that is stable enough for production.

Once we got all of the driver configurations done, etc., it was easy enough.

We have definitely seen value, especially in performance.

Give it a try.

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.

Centered on the VMs, it provides simple and centralized management from a single console. VMware vSAN is focused on the virtual machine and not on a datastore or mon. This allows it to adapt to the workload faster with specific storage policies for virtual machines, without needing to change the storage as in a traditional environment.

Having a single data store for virtual machines, the production of IT administrators has improved because they do not need to work with many LUNs and storage.

The web console, VMware vSphere Web Client, is not based on HTML5, which makes it difficult to manage. It slows down and page refresh is not fast; time is wasted. I know that vSphere 6.5 is already based on HTML5.

I have used it for one year.

I did not encounter any stability issues, as long as it complies with the compatibility matrix.

I have not encountered any scalability issues; very easy to scale.

I have not encountered any problems; no calls to support, but support is very good.

We previously used a traditional environment. We switched because the hyperconverged systems is very easy to deploy, it can scale and provides performance.

If you do not know about this technology, you cannot put it into production easily, but I know about vSAN, so it was very easy to deploy a vSAN environment.

It's a bit pricey. Indeed, there is hardly any price difference with a traditional setting, but it makes that up with the management and ease of use.

Before choosing this product, we also evaluated HPE VSA, Nutanix, and DataCore.

Both vSAN and Nutanix give very good performance, but the support when the infrastructure works with VMware is a simple support; with Nutanix, you have two support vendors if the hypervisor is VMware. Nutanix has a proprietary hypervisor based on KVM.

• 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.

The use case is mainly for greenfields deployment. I'm a senior solutions architect and we are system integrators. Our company is a partner with VMware.

Very easy to implement in any existing environment.

I'd like to see more storage terabytes available after excluding the management. 

I've been using this solution for two years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

The technical support is very good. 

The initial setup is straightforward and it's very easy to implement in any X86 server so anyone can use it in their existing environment. 

I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

The valuable feature of the solution is the total hyperconverged facility. And that either it's hyperconverged, or it's standalone with storage arrays.

From the implementer side, the solution is very comparable to Nutanix. The only difference is that VMware requires more initial nodes.

I've been working with VMware for fifteen years.

Regarding the scalability of the solution, you've got 64 nodes into a stretched cluster for VMware. Nutanix goes a little bit above. The only problem is that due to licensing things, such as when you have Oracle and other things, what you tend to do is multiple clusters in order to avoid licensing costs.

The biggest network I have implemented was 16 nodes.

My advice to others looking into implementing VMware vSAN is to stick to the rules. That's where the problem is. If you don't stick to the rules and prerequisites, you end up having a nightmare.

People have a tendency to take hyper-converged solutions for granted. They function as the marketing says, as long as you follow certain rules. If those rules are not followed, you end up with a slower infrastructure than you ever had before.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten because it lacks flexibility. Those rules I'm talking to you about, how you have to follow the prerequisites, that is well hidden, is that you can't do what you want. You don't have total freedom. You have to respect the rules and that's why respecting the rules sometimes is a burden.

They always recommend that nodes are the same type, have the same disk structure, and if you change some disk structures, you have to change them on all the nodes. Although somewhere it's understandable, it's a burden. It should not happen.

VMware comes with different stacks like VMware Cloud Foundation, which is integrated with different VMware modules. There's interoperability between VMware products. 

Another good feature is that you can create profiles for each VM. You can mirror one set of VMs according to another set of VMs. You can also define the quality of service for that profile.

I would like to see more support for applications. I think currently it only supports applications between two vSAN clusters. I heard that VMware is planning to have applications using vSAN at the hypervisor layer. I'm not sure whether it's available or it's being planned for the next release. I would prefer it to be on the storage layer than on the hypervisor layer.

I've been working with VMware vSAN for two years.

I haven't had any issues with the stability of VMware vSAN.

I haven't had any issues with scalability, but I think historically it supports only 64 nodes. It's a VMware limitation, but in our deployment in Sri Lanka, hardly any customers use that many nodes. If you consider that aspect, then scalability is okay. The largest customer we have here uses two nodes.

For Nutanix, there is no such limit as far as I know.

I'm not happy with the VMware support. There are so many delays attributed to different reasons, like when you transfer the case from one engineer to the other, the second engineer is not aware of what the first engineer has done, so we need to update the second engineer from the beginning. 

Their response is also not that fast. We have seen that sometimes the competency of the backend engineers is not that high, and because of that VMware support is a bit of a concern for us. Apart from that, I don't have many issues with the product.

Setup is not that difficult. We have had a few issues with the implementation. Initial setup is not as straightforward as Nutanix.

Compared to Nutanix, the design of VMware vSAN is probably the highest in the marketplace in terms of market penetration. I think it's number one, and Nutanix is not that far behind.

From an upgrade perspective, it's not as straightforward compared to a Nutanix. You need to do a lot of checks and balances before you do the upgrade. With Nutanix, you don't need to worry about it at all, probably because those nodes are coming from Nutanix itself. Because of that, they kind of keep everything to a single file where all these checks will be done initially when you run it. With vSAN, the server could be coming from different vendors like HP or Huawei. So it won't be that easy to come up with a single package to check all of these formula licenses because the upgrade is not that smooth compared to Nutanix.

I would rate this solution 7 out of 10.

My advice is to plan well which workload you're going to use for VMware vSAN. Not all workloads are suitable for VMware vSAN. Before using VMware vSAN, you should consider implementation planning, network sites, and group layout.