VMware vSAN Reviews

The solution is relevant for organizations with legacy setups. They’re running a single application in their infrastructure and utilizing physical servers. Customers can leverage their existing resources efficiently. They maximize their utilization through virtualization. Both platforms offer similar functionality, with the main difference being vSAN's integration with VMware's ecosystem. Recent technology trends emphasize the consolidation of components, extending to both network and storage resources. You no longer require third-party storage solutions; instead, software-defined technology enables efficient resource utilization. This approach focuses on consolidation rather than introducing additional standalone components. It offers the same level of personalization while advantageously consolidating network, storage, and other resources.

VMware vSAN is using its perpetual capability. All orchestration and monitoring are routed to the cloud. There are some features like vSAN Plus available for monitoring. You can utilize this web-based solution, which operates on a subscription basis. This allows for easier budgeting compared to always making capital expenditures. New managers must budget to manage infrastructure efficiently. Everything comes at a cost.

VMware vSAN is for simple consolidation. The hard drive itself is defined through VMware's software-defined technology. You need to buy hardware compatible with nodes from different brands. You can use vSAN with HPE or other brands. Compared to third-party solutions, vSAN reduces the baseline. It's already enabled in the system, making it faster in terms of performance. Using protocols like Fibre Channel and iSCSI is a more efficient way. You can configure many VMs with vSAN, depending on the supported capacity. Then, you just enable vSAN through VMware, purchase the software, and it will work right away.

There's already a concern with VMware with ransomware and security issues. VMware could focus on improving security.

I have been using VMware vSAN for 10 years.

The product is stable.

There is no problem with the stability since it has been in the market for 20 years.

The solution is scalable.

VMware vSAN offers a robust architecture with various scaling capabilities, enabling organizations to scale up their storage infrastructure efficiently. It provides both capability and performance for different workloads, automatically increasing IOPS based on workload requirements. Scalability is crucial when it comes to allocating resources, and vSAN supports future-proofing up to 64 clusters.

Deploying VMware vSAN is seamless. You simply need to add nodes or increase the capacity of existing ones. Migration processes may vary, but configuring full capacity per node simplifies the addition of nodes, ensuring a seamless experience.

VMware doesn’t have Windows 10 support. Dell has the number-one support in the industry. I've worked with other brands, and their support sucks. VMware’s support is very great for technical support.

Positive

The initial setup for VMware vSAN involves two key components. Firstly, we offer our flagship product which utilizes VMware's leading vSAN technology. The major components are included in the package upon purchase, making it a straightforward setup compared to building it from scratch, such as with vSphere 7. We provide pre-configured vSAN ReadyNodes for convenience, although they may lack specific branding. This option allows for a more DIY approach based on ReadyNode servers.

Deploying vSAN ReadyNodes is automated, requiring minimal manual intervention. Setting up a custom solution can be more complex. The process remains relatively straightforward with some necessary intervention. It's also possible to integrate vSAN ReadyNodes with Azure setups on a large scale.

Customers opting for the automated setup merely need to ensure they meet the prerequisites, including switches, and various other requirements such as NTP configuration. Once these prerequisites are met, deploying vSAN becomes relatively easy, as VMware handles most of the configuration automatically.

Deployment is very easy and takes less than an hour.

If you're willing to have good infrastructure, you need to invest first. Ensuring a stable network and meeting computing requirements ensures proper workload distribution to end users. VMware vSAN offers peace of mind by utilizing applications despite its higher price compared to free or cheaper alternatives. It is expensive but its reliability and technological advancements justify the investment.

There are pros and cons. As long as there's VMware vSAN active in the business, the support team along with the hardware and the software services, are good. We've recently implemented vSAN in our Hypervisor. It's already proven on the infrastructure.

The con is that VMware vSAN is no longer perpetual. You need to manage your budget on how everything is going to the cloud, and everything is paid for. If you're using proxmox or Hyper-V or other free redundancies when using VMware. VMware vSAN is the most wonderful hypervisor platform. It is the industry standard and is very prominent in the market.

For advanced users, I recommend using Big Data with VMware. I suggest using vSAN because for automation for startup users. We can provide support for customers with lower budgets who are willing to get support from the system developer. VMware vSAN requires some human intervention.

Overall, I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

Our clients primarily use vSAN for general-purpose workloads, such as web servers and application servers, though not as much for databases.

We have a customer who is successfully running VDI on vSAN.

Our customers also use vSAN for storage consolidation. 

We have customers who previously relied on separate servers and storage solutions but wanted to transition to Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI). 

We proposed vSAN for this purpose and utilized its standard features to migrate their existing infrastructure to vSAN.

vSAN Health is a good feature. It is a vCentre portal. 

vSAN Health is a feature designed to monitor the health and performance of the vSAN environment. It's crucial for us and our customers to frequently check on this to ensure everything is operating smoothly.

A more user-friendly GUI for troubleshooting and resolving issues would be beneficial. 

Now, addressing problems often requires opening support tickets and command-line interventions, which can be cumbersome for customers and partners alike.

For example, a server might disconnect from vSAN because we didn't realize we needed the command line to check certain things. Ideally, they should develop a web portal that allows users to diagnose and fix errors on their own.

So, I would like to see a tool in the web portal to address vSAN issues. A tool to fix recent issues.

There are some additional features I would like to see but it's not directly related to vSAN, but I'd like to touch on the vCLS feature. In the past, there was no such feature, but they're planning to develop this feature and integrate it. 

This creates challenges for our sales team and sometimes even difficulties in maintaining service on other servers. Ideally, they could develop something that allows authorized users to check out a server, essentially take it offline for maintenance, before doing so and notifying others.

The VCLS feature is confusing for your customers. It would be better to develop a feature that helps authorized users check out and disable this feature before taking a server offline for maintenance.

I have been using it for five years now.

I would rate the stability a six out of ten because sometimes everything looks all green, and healthy. 

But the next day, vSAN shows something red, and the host just disconnects from the cluster with a recent issue. We have to open a ticket to resolve it.

So the stability can be inconsistent.

Scaling vSAN is manageable; however, upgrading the entire cluster to a new version can take a lot of time and challenging for our customers.

It is easy, but it takes time to upgrade the cluster.

I would rate the scalability capabilities a seven out of ten. It should be improved.

We have small and medium-sized businesses as our customers. 

The quality of the customer service and support depends on the vSAN case. For example, if I open ten cases, maybe two or three get resolved quickly. But the other cases have a slow response. 

Maybe they end their shift and don't transfer it to the next, and no one picks it up. I have to wait until the original owner comes back to work.

Neutral

For successful business continuity, we have to use Site Recovery Manager. However, customers are pushing for more options. They'd like to see other solutions that might be a better fit for their specific needs. So, they use different third-party tools for disaster recovery.

I would rate my experience with the initial setup an eight out of ten, with ten being very easy.

Deployment can be done within three hours if we prepare all the information beforehand. We can set it up in two to three hours.

With the new pricing model, it's expensive for the customer. The old cost model was X, and the new model might be 50% more.

Comparing vSAN to traditional infrastructure solutions like those from VMware or SolarWinds, I don't see a distinct advantage.

For now, I wouldn't recommend it because of the price. There are other products on the market that work well like Nutanix. 

In your opinion, these are better options. 

Overall, I would rate the solution a six out of ten. 

Our primary use case for vSAN is server virtualization. We've used it to virtualize close to 500 servers which would normally have been on physical hardware. We have virtualized and consolidated it down to run on nine nodes of vSAN. That workload primarily consist of web servers running Linux or Windows Servers to support the Windows Active Directory that we have for the environment onsite.

It's improved the organization overall primarily because the storage is local on the boxes. Before we were with vSAN, we were with another iSCSI product which was a clustered product that went across the network. We had multiple instances where we would have either a network hiccup (caused by us) or a network hiccup (caused by the device). This took a whole bunch of VMs down with a lot of repercussions. It took a long time to recover. By eliminating dependency on that back-end storage, we now depend on everything that's in the VMkernel with vSAN. So, we eliminate the middleman.

We like that it is a hyperconverged solution. Everything is in a box. You got the compute, memory, and storage. So, we can scale out by adding nodes as we go and eliminate the back-end storage, whether that's a NAS or iSCSI device. 

You get the benefit of local storage, but you have the protection of shared storage.

I see room for improvement with vSAN in particularly in the reporting realm. Now, with vSAN 6.7, they're starting to include vRealize Operations components in the vSphere Client, even if you're not a vRealize Operations customer. So, that's really good. It exposes some really low-level reporting. I would like to see more of that. However, you have to be a vRealize Operations customer to obtain that. I would like to see more include of this included in the vSAN licensing.

The vSAN licensing is not an inexpensive product. It does cost more than hypervisor. I would like to see more basic reporting, or even expert reporting. I think with our licensing that we've paid our dues, and we should get the information.

Stability is working very well. vSAN is very dependent upon your network. If your network is stable, vSAN will most likely be stable. 

Our network is very stable. Therefore, we have not had issues.

We started with a three-node cluster. We are now at a nine-node cluster. We can just add nodes piecemeal as needed to add capacity. It's been very transparent. Users have never noticed when we've had to do that. So, scalability has worked real well for us.

We've been with vSAN since the early days of ESX 5.5, when it first went general availability. In those early days, we used support quite a bit. They were very good. The vSAN team that VMware has are top-notch. I think they pick the best of their support people and make them vSAN representatives. In the early days, I used them a lot. Not so much lately, because the product has gotten so much better. 

I was involved with the initial deployment of vSAN at our site. The most complex thing is you have to live and die by the vSAN HCL list. You can't put a product or a component into a vSAN node that is not on the host compatibility list, particularly the SSDs and their firmware which is specified on the HCL. You have to match that explicitly to receive good results.

I see ROI on vSAN because we have gotten out of the business of depending on the back-end NAS device or the back-end iSCSI device. We get the return on investment by decreased administrators' time, decrease exposure to network issues and stuff that would take a lot of VMs down. That's where we see our ROI.

We looked at Nutanix before we went with vSAN. For budgeting reasons, we weren't able to pursue Nutanix after a pilot.

The product is at least an eight to eight and a half out of ten. Because the feature growth that I've seen them put into the product since we've been with them since 5.5, they are innovating with each release. They're adding more features and all that adds up to a better ROI on our investment.

As we were consolidating so many servers, we had a really high consolidation ratio. We wanted to have something that was close to being local disk. However, we also needed to have redundancy so we could take a node down for maintenance or if a node would crash. All the same standard reasons of why you would want high availability.

What I look to see in a vendor is good customer support. I want to talk technical with someone. I don't want a lot of marketing PowerPoint stuff. I want to talk to people that know the product very well. Because if I start using the product, I will need that support on the back-end. I don't want to be flailing by myself in the wind. I want to have good expertise that I can call on to help.

We use the platform for virtualization and data capacity management.

VMware vSAN's most valuable features are the capability to consolidate standalone physical infrastructure into virtualization and the ease of management.

The platform's cost affects the business. This particular area needs improvement.

We have been using VMware vSAN for six years.

It is a stable platform. I rate the stability as ten out of ten.

We have seven to eight VMware vSAN users in our organization. It is a highly scalable product. I rate the scalability a ten out of ten.

The technical support services are far better than other vendors.

Positive

It has a user-friendly configuration process. The deployment typically takes approximately one to two hours. For instance, if we consider deploying a three-node vSphere operating system, it usually takes about two to three minutes to deploy. However, when factoring in the configuration of logical networking aspects, the overall deployment time extends to one to two hours. Once completed, the product is ready for usage.

We have a team of 12 engineers in our technical team working on the implementation.

We've encountered challenges, particularly with the recent policy changes after Broadcom acquired VMware. The current pricing needs to meet the customers' expectations, posing significant issues. It is difficult to explain the cost implications of upgrades to the customers.

I rate the pricing a three out of ten.

We are exploring other vendors. One consideration is Microsoft Hyper-V clusters, and we are also looking into Microsoft Azure Stack HCI. Additionally, we are evaluating Red Hat solutions as potential alternatives. The decision-making process involves assessing the pricing factor.

We've been utilizing VMware vSAN internally within our organization for the past three years and offering it as a solution to our customers. It helps eliminate the need for external storage and leverage the latest technology provided by VMware.

It significantly improved our storage efficiency by supporting disk groups. However, there were limitations as it only allowed for five disks. To enhance efficiency further, we needed the capacity to increase to at least seven disks per group. Additionally, for better tiering capabilities, it would be advantageous if it could support 12 disks per tier.

The recent integration with VMware's ecosystem has improved our operations by simplifying deployment and management tasks. With internal integration, deploying and managing the repository from a single dashboard has become easier.

The scalability has supported our business growth effectively. As an organization, we utilize it in various customer roles, which proves advantageous for our organization and clients.

I recommend the product to customers looking for better and more efficient storage capacity. It is a good solution. I rate it a ten out of ten.

The product’s most valuable features are performance and expandability.

The platform’s pricing needs improvement. Additionally, there should be an appliance module included in it.

We have been using VMware vSAN for seven out of years.

The product is stable.

It is a scalable product. It is suitable for enterprises.

Since we are an advanced partner, we receive on-time and adequate support services. However, their response time needs improvement for critical cases.

Neutral

It is an easy-to-install and maintain product. It requires one or two executives, depending on the environment, to conduct implementation.

VMware vSAN is an expensive platform. We purchase its yearly license.

I recommend VMware vSAN and rate it an eight out of ten. The product’s support team’s response time and pricing could be better.

Primary use is just for VMDK storage. We're running an all-flash array with NVME caching tier. The performance is really good, we're using SATA drives. We're about to do a complete rebuild with 12-gig SATA drives as the capacity tier, and bigger, newer, faster NVME for the caching tier.

vSAN has improved our organization by giving us yet another high-speed data store. Previously, we were using VNX that had some Nearline-SAS drives with some SSD caching on it. But the all-flash vSAN is obviously much, much faster. We also use a Pure Storage array that we just got in a few months ago.

The most valuable feature would be: You own the hardware already. Why not just throw some drives into it and have a software-defined network storage system?

I know they're working on this: better support for an all-NVME array. Better metrics.

vSAN itself is a great storage platform, but one of the issues with it is that you have to be fully locked into the VMware package to use it. We're going to be deploying 72 Kubernetes nodes, and we're not going to buy VMware licenses for 72 of them, just so they can access vSAN. That's what we're using the Pure for. Opening it up so you could have vSAN as a data store, use it as a data lake, hit it with an NFS, S3 from outside the VMware ecosystem, would be great.

Stability is okay. We do see weird things crop up every now and again. It will say that a drive gets kicked off even though it's fine, and we have to re-add it. So a few gremlins here and there, but for the most part, it's pretty good.

So far, for scalability, we've just been running it on five nodes at our primary data center, and we're building out a second data center. It's going to be running on five nodes there. We haven't really scaled it up since we built it.

I've had to use tech support once or twice. It went okay, as with any tech support.

When we started with VMware, it was a three-node package with the VSA, virtual storage appliance, which was sort of the precursor to vSAN. And it just came as a package, so we said, "Okay, great. We have our storage and our compute tied together."

I'd say vSAN, on a scale of one to 10, would be a seven or an eight now. (If I have to choose it's a) seven. But with what I've heard while I've been at VMworld, I'd say that they'll probably go up to an eight.

It runs our core virtualization, both in our data centers and our edge or remote-site data centers. The performance has exceeded our expectations and exceeded our traditional converged infrastructure.

• Scalability 
• Standardization - one size fits all

It's also intuitive and easy to use because one size fits all. Obviously, it scales out, but it's the same solution at every physical location I manage.

After hearing more today, here at VMworld 2018, about what's coming, it seems that what's coming covers us: It's the Snapshotting and the DR and the replication. Historically, we've had to leverage third-parties. They were third-party solutions we were happy with, but all-in-one would be better.

It has been stable.

It scales out.

I haven't used the technical support but my team has. No issues have been escalated to me, so that's a good sign.

We were using traditional converged infrastructure with storage, network, and compute tiers. We had a mandate from a U.S. government entity that required physical separation of a lot of our infrastructure. Thus, we had we had an urgent need to duplicate everything we had. So it was a technology refresh.

There were a handful of important criteria when selecting a vendor: 

• ease of use
• scalability
• price.

We didn't calculate a formal ROI on it because it was a technology refresh, but, "seat-of-the-pants," it's less expensive than traditional infrastructure.

We looked at Nutanix, we looked at Cisco, and we looked at Dell in the hyperconverged space. On the flip side, we were looking at the traditional SAN vendors and the traditional compute and networking vendors. We selected vSAN because it met the three criteria that I called out.

I would tell a colleague to highly consider it. Do your research and test it. If it fits, it fits.

We've been live about nine months so I would rate it at eight out of ten right now, just because I haven't used it long enough to be confident to say ten. To get it to a ten it will need to be stable for 12 months.

The primary use case is that we're getting ready to deploy a VDI solution across the campus and our healthcare network.

The opportunity gained with the relationship we have now is limitless, as new features and products roll out, especially with today's announcements: the news about microsegmentation, the RDS in the cloud with AWS, as well as some security features. It's a constant evolution for us. That's really why we're with vSAN.

The most valuable feature for us, long-term, is the integration with VMware that we're going to be using. We're currently using AirWatch, we're working in Workspace ONE. We want to make sure that our VDIs, with the integration of the Windows 10 solution - as well as any-device, anywhere, anytime mobility - work, yet still offer them the ability to gain access to that VDI. That is huge for us.

If you want to get down to the nuts and bolts of room for improvement, we would really like them to look at what Nutanix did for day-one/day-two operations deployment: Bringing in the equipment, getting it deployed, getting it setup, and ease of use of one-click for deploying our 30-node solution. With vSAN we had to go into each one individually and set it up.

The stability is there.

It absolutely scales, that's the beauty of it.

We actually involved VMware from the beginning. We brought in Nutanix, Simplivity, and vSAN technicians, as well as integration with our hardware platforms. But the true key was bringing those guys in, helping us set up the best environment, and seeing exactly what our endpoint was going to look like with our business integration. That was better than, "Yay, we can deploy 40 VDIs in 10 seconds." What does that do for the environment we're currently existing in? So for them to help us set up as a true test in our actual environment, that was a huge help, from all three that we tested. It was really impressive.

I am the manager of the guys who will be implementing the product. We recently received our client from Dell and we have installed it. My two main CI guys are here with me at VMWorld 2018 this week, so we're on a temporary hiatus, but we did get one full rack installed so far, and we're getting ready to deploy the vSAN to it.

The solution is only as good as the technicians you have and the investment put into proof of concept testing. My two technicians are some of the smartest people. You always hire someone smarter than you and I definitely did with these two guys. They've already got it worked out. We had the tasks laid out, what we were going to do day-one, day-two, rolling it into a test environment, and then production. We already had that done before we had the equipment on site.

We're just wrapping up year-two of our five-year ROI plan and this VDI solution, with vSAN, is part of it.

We purchased a VMware Enterprise agreement so vSAN was already included with what we had. It was just a smart choice, given where we were heading eventually, to go with vSAN. That was one of the deciding factors.

We just wrapped up proofs of concept for both hardware and software. We did vSAN, we did Nutanix, and we did Simplivity. We looked at HPE hardware and we looked at Dell EMC hardware, among others.

We actually decided to go with Dell with a vSAN solution, even though Nutanix had better day-one/day-two operations, straight out of the box for us. Long-term, we felt that the vSAN solution itself was going to serve us in terms of to utilizing and leveraging the power of VMware, either going to a private and hybrid-cloud solution or public and hybrid cloud solution.

As far as the hardware goes, we didn't really have that much of a preference among the three, but we did see that Dell EMC's OpenManage solution for managing the hardware, the bare metal itself, was much more productive than the other two.

You'd want to give it a 10 out of 10 based on what they're doing in the future, but if you always give a company a 10 they'll feel like they're already there. I would actually rate vSAN one below Nutanix, as far as maturity of the model goes.

I would give vSAN a very solid eight. There is room for improvement to catch up to Nutanix. Nutanix is definitely a nine. Again I don't like giving anybody a 10 because we always want to see what the next evolution or innovation is that they're bringing to the table. The way vSAN would get to a 10 depends on how they get me to "tomorrow".