VMware vSAN Reviews

From what I saw, you can create the SAN in a small environment, and then grow. That’s a valuable feature of VSAN and makes it cost effective.

It's cost effective because you can start small and grow as needed.

From my experience testing it, VSAN could be more stable.

We tested it for about three months.

I was not sure about its stability because we have a big SAN shop and I got the impression that it’s good for small offices and not the larger ones.

The scalability seems ok – I would give it 6/10 because in a traditional SAN you can go up to a few terabytes. However with VSAN, it seems you can only get a couple hundred terabytes, and I expected more.

We haven’t had a chance to use it for VSAN, but in general we've had pretty good support from VMware, so I think VSAN tech support will also be good.

We haven’t fully implemented, but it should be simple and straightforward.

We will implement it by ourselves without a vendor team.

We looked into Dell and Nutanix, and chose VSAN because of ease of setup.

Customer support, the actual technology, how robust or stable it is and the ease of deployment are the criteria too look for when selecting a vendor.

I would say that if you’re a medium IT organization and looking for a cost effective solution, VSAN is worthwhile; but, if you’re a bigger environment, I would go with a bigger SAN like EMC, NetApp, and IBM.

• Easy to set up
• Very Fast
• Good investment
• Surprised at beta ration
• Works very well

• Price
• We don’t need special network or hardware, just add a new network card
• If you have 10GB, you can just go with vSAN
• All-flash gives improved performance over hybrid, and competes with other solutions
• If combined with Horizon, it lowers the price of solution

• Better integration with VMware DOS
• vBackup with vSAN is not so easy, because it's distributed storage so must be careful not to make host unavailable.

I tried to install it on one cluster and the host got stuck.

Awesome stability.

• Awesome scalability, especially when combined with vSphere 6
• With vSphere 5.5, limited scalability

• In beta, no technical support
• Great fourm support

Very easy, just a few clicks. You don’t need special knowledge of storage .because it can be fully automated or you can set it manually if you want

There are a few products on the market. vSAN has lots of competitors, but if you want to play with a single software provider, go with vSAN. However, if you want more hardware, maybe go with Nutanix.

They lose points because its tricky to fully understand.

The ability to scale as you need – we can start with a very small footprint as opposed to a monolithic storage solution where you buy the entire solution up front. We use everything – Hitachi, NetApp, but we're using it more and more because we can start small and scale as you need. Cost saving essentially.

I would like to software-based disk-level encryption in the next release. We deal a lot with the Department of Defense, and arms and munitions government-regulated stuff, so we would like to see more. From their roadmap, I see its coming but it has been an impediment.

It's not quite there yet. We've had a few outages that were addressed. It's not 100% there yet -- give it another six months.

Scalability is why were using it – especially with v6. Any scalability issues we had, were addressed.

It was excellent. The response time was great, and as we're a large customer so we had no issues.

Initial setup was not difficult to do at all.

We implemented on our own.

We have played with Nutanix but it wasn’t there yet – VSAN is more attractive because it operates kernel level, as opposed to Nutanix.

Picking a vendor also depends on which segment is looking – I run most of the IT stuff and to me peer reviews are very important. Others within our company look to Gartner.

I would say that the main reason its attractive is that you can grow as you need. The other thing that makes it especially attractive is that from an IO perspective, VSAN has the better ability to perform more efficiently because it operates within the hypervisor. It's VMWare specific so that can be a downside. But for pure VMWare shops, VSAN is the best option in my opinion.

• The integration with other VMware solutions, such as vSphere, is valuable for us.
• It's also fast -- faster than hybrid and all-flash setups.
• Three-host configuration provides security.

I think that it brings speed and security as we have patient-sensitive data that we need to store.

N/A

I love VMware – it’s allowed us to virtualize our server infrastructure, but I haven’t tested the stability of VSAN extensively yet.

From what I’ve seen it’s extremely scalable.

VMware is top notch, but I can’t evaluate yet for VSAN.

You should look at scalability and integration withing the vSphere environment.

• It's very simple to use.
• It work on commoditized hardware.
• It provides centralized storage.

It's lowered our storage costs while still maintaining High Availability and with easy installation.

Expand the hardware compatibility list – it's pretty short. Definitely also the diagnostic and monitoring could be improved. That stuff is still very new.

We have been using it since it came out in March 2015.

So far so good.

Unsure – all I know is what I read, if it does what it says it does I'm very impressed.

Very good – quality support.

We have three hosts in a cluster, and it was surprisingly easy.

Try it out – that’s the best way to know whether it's right for your organization.

It's fast – it’s really blazing fast.

It saves us the expense of an all-flash array. All-flash would work for us, but VSAN is cheaper. I think that this solution is really new, but it has real benefits over all-flash arrays.

We are seeing some improvements coming up, but at the moment you have to store every object on multiple disks to protect it, and they should be better distributed over disks to help parity.

It's very stable – we have had no failures.

It’s really scalable in terms of both capacity and performance, at least for our needs.

We haven’t had to use it – the product is really stable.

We were using a traditional storage array from Dell and we will see more VSAN usage in the future.

The initial setup was a little bit complicated because we have to do everything from scratch. It’s a new world, and much easier in the newer releases.

We looked at other vendors – classic storage vendors – but we thought this direction was faster as things are moving towards a software designed storage.

I think you should try it – its really stable and valuable and help to drill your costs down.

The ability to scale out incrementally instead of doing a big five year capital expense purchase that hurts the budget. Vith vSAN, you buy x86 servers and you're done, and you can scale up.

The cost. VSAN allows us to do storage cheaper and better than before.

Deduplication feature is needed, and I'm thinking maybe it needs a lot of nodes to store all redundant data. This will be addressed in their next beta version.

Assuming we get policies set up where they need to be, it's a stable technology. It's distributed architecture is slick, and will hold up.

First and foremost, it offers a different way to scale, it’s smaller and easier to digest in smaller bites. As older ESXi hosts are phased out, you can replace with VSAN and add more nodes. Very incremental approach.

I've never had to use it.

It feels forward thinking and I can see this as big game changer, which is exciting, but it's only one-and-a-half-years old -- a toddler. There are some minor things wrong, but it's potential value could far overshadow it curent weaknesses, Currently we don’t have NSX, and that could be a pivotal thing, but we don’t have that licensing yet.

The ability to scale out incrementally instead of doing a big five year capital expense purchase that hurts the budget.

In the storage world, when it's time to buy an array, you buy half that are to be populated, and you buy more disk shelves, but it's not cost effective. Or, you buy it all and don’t use some. But with VSAN, you buy x86 servers as needed and you're done, and you can scale up.

The cost. We had a directive from the CIO to check out and play with VSAN and then to do storage cheaper and better than before, which we have achieved.

The management platforms have some gaps. It's difficult to see what’s going on with the hardware at times. The only platform available doesn’t run full time, and there is a management pack but it requires a product that not many people have (vRealize Operations). So it could use more work in management areas.

Also, it lacks deduplication, so we're using a lot more storage than you necessarily need to.

Prior to deployment, make sure you check your hardware compatibility prior, along with the drivers and firmware, because any one of those three things can cause an outage.

It's very stable, but we ran into some early issues with drivers and firmware, but this is resolved now. You must be careful to be coverd in that respect, otherwise you will have issues.

We’re scaling in a very phased process, running dev test environment with just a small three node cluster, but gradually shifting.

I've never had to use it.

It was pretty straightforward, but we had some issues with drivers, although nothing in the setup. After some time, we were losing some disks that was because of driver issues.

Previously, we couldn’t consolidate more workloads on different types of storage. Now with VSAN, we have the ability to virtualize across multiple data centers.

It's currently doing everything we've ask of it and it meets all our needs right now. To be honest, I don’t think too much about the future of the product or what we might need it to do as our requirements change.

It's got good stability - 10/10.

It's got good scalability - 10/10.

N/A

They are good – the response time is quick. You pay for it, but they are good.

No previous solution was used.

It was simple and straightforward.

We've implemented it both on our own and with a vendor team, and it's straightforward with both.

No other options were looked, but peer reviews are important. My peer reviews are usually on social media channels, but it's important.

Product knowledge is the most important criteria we look for when selecting a vendor.

Try it and evaluate it – it's not a fit for every company, but you should at least do an evaluation to see if it is a fit.

Simple to set up, manage, and integrate it with tools you’re already familiar (vCenter, vClient) with.

It also gives us a policy-based storage on a per-VM level.

Also if you can apply redundancies to machines, they’re all different.

• All built within hypervisor
• Easily stood up with hardware you already have
• Truly virtualized storage
• Get rid of all hardware, and you get a much smaller footprint
• Nodes can be in different datacenter, and so can stretch cluster

• Good job integrating with vRealize, vCOPS, etc.
• Needs complete integration with vRealize for GUI for drill down analysis
• Would be nice to see features like dedupe because it wastes a lot of mass when striping across multiple nodes and vSphere hosts.

Some difficulty finding compatible hardware, but if you follow the HCL provided by VMware. and make sure you're buying the correct nodes, storage devices, and SSD’s that are all supported, then it’s a stable product. Even if you have problems, it's still only one phonecall.

It supports up to 64 nodes so huge scalability.

As a VMware customer for many years, sometimes it takes a few calls, but they have some brilliant people who can solve difficult technical problems.

• Setup just a few clicks after hardware all connected, “pretty stupid easy”.
• Customers can test and validate without going out and buying vSAN ready nodes.

It loses points because it lacks lots of performance and deduplication abilities that competitors have.