VMware vSAN Reviews

We are using VMware vSAN for a SCADA industrial automation system.

VMware vSAN has benefited our company mainly from the flexibility and redundancy. We have a two-node cluster, if one of the servers goes down, we will still be in operation. It provides high availability.

The most valuable feature of VMware vSAN is the ease of management. VMware vSAN it's a part of VMware ESXi and when you do patching for VMware ESXi, VMware vSAN receives the patches too.

If we have some complicated issues, you have to use the command lines interface. Not everything is possible to be fixed in the GUI. This is a drawback, that some things have to be fixed via command-line interface and should be able to be done in the GUI.

I have been using VMware vSAN for approximately one year.

The stability of VMware vSAN is excellent. We have been running for one year, and there's there has not been any downtime. The speed is not the fastest, but it's sufficient.

The scalability is excellent because we can expand with more disks if we choose. The expansion is part of the license model which is simple to adjust.

We have approximately 60 people using this solution in my organization. The solution is always running in the background, it is always being used.

I have not contacted the technical support from VMware vSAN. We have not had a need to contact them.

The initial setup of VMware vSAN is of a medium level of difficulty. Since we have a two-node cluster, they have done some very smart innovations. You first have to understand the smart solution before you can fully understand the deployment.

The time of the deployment took approximately one week, this included some experimentation and test.

I did the full implementation myself.

The maintenance of VMware vSAN can be done quarterly, and one person is only needed. It's very easy to manage, the staff required for maintenance is very limited.

We are using the VMware vSAN ROBO which allows us to have a maximum of 25 virtual machines. The approximate cost is €10,000 for a perpetual license.

We evaluated StorMagic before choosing VMware vSAN which was a better git for our use case.

I would highly recommend VMware vSAN to others.

If others want to implement VMware vSAN I have experience with the Remote Office Branch Office(ROBO) solution. It's possible to deploy a virtual center during the installation of VMware vSAN. I recommend doing some studying before deploying it because there are some very good tips on YouTube on how to deploy it. It's a special method of how to deploy it, it's important to understand this method.

I rate VMware vSAN a nine out of ten.

Our customers use the vSAN solution for many use cases. The first one is the installations for the branch office or some production use case where they have a small environment, but they need higher availability. The other use case is inside the data center where we installed a big data center solution for virtualization with VMware.

Most of the customers are using the latest version, but I have also done some vSAN installations with version 6.7.

It is easy to use. It is easy to implement for us, and it is also easy to maintain for the customers. It is not necessary to buy some extra devices and talk with other vendors.

It can be very expensive.

I have been using this solution for about four or five years.

Its stability is good.

Its scalability is quite good.

I don't know exactly how many customers are using vSAN because some of our customers install it on their own, but we probably have more than 20 customers.

I haven't had any problems with the solution, but I have heard from a few people that they are a little bit slow in answering the questions.

It is straightforward. The duration depends on the size and the use case, but it usually takes one to four days.

For its implementation, normally, you only need one engineer or admin from the storage team, but sometimes, you need a specialist from the networking/infrastructure team, which is a very important point for vSAN implementation.

It is not a subscription model. It is a purchase model, but it is very important that you also buy technical support from VMware. This is probably the only disadvantage of vSAN. It depends on the use case, but it can be very expensive.

I would recommend this solution for all use cases. It works for all users and customers. It doesn't matter if it is inside the data center or outside the data center. It also works for VDI use cases. It just works.

We have no problems with the vSAN solution, but it is very important that you use the recommended hardware from the compatibility list. If you follow the recommendations from VMware, you should have no problems.

I would rate it a nine out of 10.

We are using VMware vSAN for many purposes, such as NVI workload, edge computing, open run 5G for large customers, onsite installations, and low latency systems like mobile edge computing.

The most valuable feature of VMware vSAN is you do not have to use additional hardware for storage. The operation of VMware vSAN does not take a lot of effort. If you have VMware technology on your site, then it's easy for the operational support of the system.

The orchestration is well integrated into the stack of the VMware management suite.

VMware vSAN could improve by having faster reload time and a single point of failure. Resynchronization of many hardware could be better. If you have an outage of a disc or a full system, the replication time is too slow. This has room for improvement.

I have used VMware vSAN for approximately three years.

The stability is satisfactory, it has been working well.

VMware vSAN is scalable, it is easy to scale out.

The number of people that use the solution can be anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000,000 depending on the customer.

We are one of the largest customers on the site for this kind of usage worldwide, and the support is very good. We have direct access to the development, R&D, and third-level support, they are very good.

The cost of VMware vSAN is reasonable.

A good solution should be small and fast and at the moment VMware vSAN is the best product that can solve our use cases.

I rate VMware vSAN a five out of ten.

We are using it for the consolidation of compute, network, and storage.

For VMware, we're mostly using on-premises deployment.

It is very well known in the industry, and there are a lot of technical resources around it. This is a big thing for me because, at the end of the day, when you implement it, you need to support it.

It is easy to use and easy to implement.

The big thing is pricing, and the rest of it is mostly good. From a scalability point of view, scaling the storage from network or compute should be easier. It is again all around the cost, and it would be good if it was easier to scale your storage separately from your compute. One of the things that I have observed is that when you start off, you've got too much storage, and over time, you've got less storage, and you have to build new clusters to scale. So, if you can scale compute and storage, it would be good. I know it is scalable separately, but it is a complex process.

I have been using this solution for more than 10 years.

It is pretty scalable. 

Currently, we've deployed VxRail, and it comes with everything. So, support is good.

We used Nutanix with VMware for about a year, and then we switched over to the packaged solution with VMware. 

Dell has got a product called VxRail, which incorporates vSAN. So, it's a packaged solution. We've now implemented VxRail, and it is a new experience with them. VxRail is an all-in solution, but there might be an additional cost that you have to pay to get the support at the vSAN level.

It is easy to implement, but for big organizations with multiple products, it becomes complicated. If you're going to have different clusters for your databases and workload, then setting up and deploying it could become complex. 

Its price could be improved. 

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

We are VMware and Nutanix partners. I'm more into the architecting role. I propose solutions to the customers. I'm not using it as an end-user.

Our customers use it for their core business applications. They use it for production and non-production workloads.

We are mostly working with its latest version.

There are definitely cost benefits. There is also no OEM dependency. I can reach out to any OEM and deploy VMware vSAN. 

Its ease of use is most valuable. It is easy to configure, and there is a unified interface, which makes things slightly easier.

They can be more competitive in terms of pricing.

They should make the software updates easier. We should be able to upgrade it more easily.

If we can have a unified dashboard for managing the public cloud environment, it would be good.

I have been working with this product for more than five years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. We had a maximum of around 10,000 users.

Our delivery team contacts them. Their response time was good enough.

It is not really difficult, but you need a skilled resource to manage that. The deployment duration varies. It usually takes a week or so.

We set it up for our customers. We have around four to five people for deployment and maintenance.

It is slightly expensive. They can be more competitive in terms of pricing.

I would definitely recommend it to others. vSAN is not suitable for all environments. It is better to do the assessment before going ahead with vSAN.

I would rate it a seven out of 10.

We mainly use vSAN for two purposes. One is to improve application performance with the HCI. The second is to migrate customers from legacy storage to high-speed SSD-based infrastructure. They are moving the computer network and storage capacity together. 

The vSAN features we've found most helpful are live application migrations and storage policies. It has storage, policies, application, and DRS policies. Automation is there. 

Also, if a customer wants to go for a VMware stack, vSAN has flexible, completely integrated solutions for two clouds. Stretched Cluster, vMotion, VXLAN—there are so many features. 

We are an IT solution provider, and we've been using VMware for 15 years. 

I would say vSAN is stable. 

Once you develop all three of your stacks, you can plug in the rack servers and all. If you are increasing in parallel, vSAN automatically increases the overall computing capacity of the IT infrastructure in terms of network storage and what you can compute.

Technical support is also good. I would rate VMware support eight out of 10 because nobody is perfect.

Setting up vSAN isn't too tricky. All HCI providers—Microsoft, Cisco, and VMware—have very smooth implementation except for Microsoft storage, which is complex. 

Maintenance is required. Sometimes hard disks crash, but thanks to the mobility and abstraction of the software from the hardware, we can migrate the entire infrastructure layer to some spare PC's main server and perform maintenance. This is the standard patching practice in the industry.

The pricing model is sometimes a challenge for us because their licenses are very costly.

I rate VMware vSAN nine out of 10. I am a VMware fanatic. As a solution architect, I've designed solutions for many customers. Clients have personal preferences, and they're generally swayed by what the vendors tell them, but my perspective is purely technical. If you are going for features, scalability, and performance, VMware is the best solution. 

It's not dependent on any vendor. The VMware layer is there, and VMware is required, but it saves a lot of costs and provides flexibility. Let's say I bought around 10 or 15 servers, and I'm not satisfied with the performance. I can change my server and migrate all my workloads to the new servers in the future.

VMware has an edge in terms of computing and networking because if we are going for a VMware infrastructure solution, there's a storage layer, so it can work with any kind of server or vendor. Suppose I buy some of my servers from Dell, some from HP, and a few from various companies. VMware gives you the flexibility to work with any vendor, networking, switches, and storage. They can come together in a complete software layer. I can have five servers from five different vendors. If I don't like one, I can plug in a server from any vendor in the stack, and it'll work. 

We primarily use the solution on Microsoft Windows Active Directory and loads of applications. Most of our stuff, over 90% of our servers, are on VMware.

The ease of use is great.

The initial setup and upgrade process was pretty straightforward. 

Technical support is great.

The updating process could be easier. It's just a bit more complex. I don't update very often. It's something I do infrequently, and therefore, we haven't got that much experience with it. That said, this Lifecycle looks better. There's a new feature called Lifecycle, which is dealing with the issue sI mainly have.

I haven't done an update yet with the new system. My understanding is it's an improvement from what I can see. 

Guests that are pinned to hosts for various reasons, for antivirus or the backups should be able to be reported that they are being pinned, and also reported if things have snapshots. When you're doing certain things, they don't work so well if you've got snapshots on or if you've got things that are pinned. They can't move. When you're doing things, if there was something that was going to stop it from working that's within VMware, these should automatically be checked. 

The stability of the product is very good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable and the performance is good.

The scalability is quite good. I don't know any others, to be honest. I've never used Hyper-V or any of the others. It's quite a de facto standard so I'm happy enough. I'm not informed as to how difficult or easy it is compared to others.

We'd like to expand in the future. We've tried to utilize it for everything. We can't do that at the moment due to licensing. Not the VMware licensing. It's more due to Oracle.

Technical support is very good. We have two places to get assistance. We have this vendor who supplied the new VMware and installed it and converted it, and we got another supplier who maintains everything and they're both very good. I'd recommend both of them.

The last setup was an upgrade. It's not so complex as we had to upgrade an existing system. It's not overly complex. I'd rate the process at a four out of five. 

The issues we had were mainly due to other things like the backup and data transfer. It wasn't actually to do so much with VMware itself and the other things. It was the transfer of data from one storage device to another and VMware wouldn't let us do it.

The deployment took about two weeks. 

We had a third party do it. They are a lot more experienced than us so we paid them for all the new hardware and we paid for them for the engineering to fit it and install it. We paid for them to convert from the old system to the new system - from the old VMware to the new VMware.

Our experience with them was very good. They were extremely helpful.

I don't deal with the licensing. I can't speak to the costs involved.

I work for the portrait gallery and we just serve our own people. We don't sell to the outside. I don't use it for outside organizations.

I'd advise potential new users to ask around for different suppliers who do it, just do a proper tender on supplying, and just to watch out for, if you're upgrading, how your backup treats the upgrade. That's a problem we had. We have Veeam, which is VMware, however, we made a mistake on using a new machine and trying to move stuff across and Veeam made it more complicated, which we didn't realize would happen. It's caused some issues.

Our experience was good, however, I haven't got enough experience with the outside vendors who do this as I only work for this company and we only do the upgrade once every three years or so. That said, I'd advise users to go with someone who's got a good background or reputation. 

Overall, I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We are an implementation partner for VMware vSAN and we use it alongside our hyperconverged infrastructure solutions with products such as Nutanix, HyperFlex, and SimpliVity. It is currently implemented in key areas off-site for over seven customers.

The most valuable thing about vSAN is that all of its features have been working well for us for the past two years. We haven't had an issue with them.

When designing the implementation for vSAN, I have noticed that it requires a minimum of six nodes, and this creates a problem when it comes to maintenance. If, out of the six nodes, I put one node in maintenance mode, then vSAN does not create other VM components. I think the reason for this is that the minimum configuration is a six node arrangement. If any one of the six nodes is put into maintenance mode, we're simply unable to create a VM, but if there are seven nodes in that cluster, then we are able to put one under maintenance. That's one thing that should be looked at.

More generally, the features of vSAN as we see them are dependent on the quality of the storage, since each different storage technology has its own separate features that go along with it.

I have been working with VMware vSAN for at least two years. 

It is a stable product, especially now that we have it fully implemented. However, if any two or three of the nodes go away, vSAN goes down. I think we've had a few VMs where the data has been lost for this reason. I guess that the way it works would be similar to other technologies, but that's what we have observed.

You can increase the compute capability as well as the disk storage, so it is scalable.

I've already escalated the issue regarding the six nodes, which I've mentioned. This has been escalated to VMware and they know that it is a limitation, because apparently it is normal behavior for any nodes that are put in maintenance mode.

The setup is easy.

We have been working with vSAN for the last two years, and we haven't seen too many issues overall, but because of the troubles we have faced with the fact that vSAN doesn't let you put a node in maintenance mode unless you have six or more nodes, I would rate VMware vSAN a six out of ten.