VMware vSAN Reviews

VMware vSAN is used for virtualization and general-purpose computing. Instead of going for the SAN (storage area network) storage, customers go for VSAN (virtual storage area network). The solution is used for general-purpose computing, production computing, and storage.

Instead of going for SAN storage, customers can use the scale-up and scale-out features of VMware vSAN.

Enterprise customers get discounts on the solution's licensing pricing, but it is too expensive for SMB customers. Maintenance-wise, when the capacity is utilized beyond 60% to 70%, then the time of the upgrade is a little higher compared to the standard SAN storage.

I have been using VMware vSAN for more than five years.

VMware vSAN is a pretty stable solution. We haven't seen any issues with the solution's stability in five to seven years. The customers would face issues if they ignore some key points.

I rate VMware vSAN a nine out of ten for stability.

In terms of scalability, we have to just add the nodes. If you require more computing or storage, you have to add the nodes to the existing cluster. Our clients for VMware vSAN are medium and enterprise businesses.

I rate the solution nine and a half out of ten for scalability.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is difficult and ten is easy, I rate the solution's initial setup an eight or eight and a half out of ten.

The solution's deployment time totally depends on the customer or the deployment guide. However, we can deploy VMware vSAN in a day.

The solution's licensing pricing could be improved. The level of discounts available on the solution's licensing price varies from customer to customer. Enterprise customers get discounts on the solution's licensing pricing, but it is too expensive for SMB customers.

On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing a seven out of ten.

Our clients are government and private customers working with VMware vSAN in the manufacturing, defense, oil and gas, and ITIS industries. The solution is generally built on top of the virtualization layer with VMware. It's a part of virtualization. The solution's performance and management are pretty easy.

VMware vSAN is tightly integrated with other VMware products because it's a part of vSphere. It is tightly integrated with the virtualization layer. We can integrate and utilize VMware vSAN for other VMware products very easily.

Using VMware vSAN is totally dependent on the customer's use case. A standard three-tier architecture is recommended for customers who want to use a tier-one application for ERP protection. VMware vSAN is recommended to customers with a use case for VDI, general-purpose computing, and test development environments.

Overall, I rate VMware vSAN a nine out of ten.

We are resellers and system integrators.

With larger companies, we can use VMware vSAN. We have small and medium-sized businesses in Italy that are customers.

We chose this solution as the domain for hyper-convergence solutions for small businesses with fewer than 200 employees for companies that wanted to increase storage without complications.

It's well documented.

We find it easy to deliver this solution.

If the support could be provided more quickly, it would be very helpful.

I have been selling VMware vSAN for five years.

The stability is standard. Many people use VMware as a virtualization solution.

VMware vSAN is a scalable solution, as are all hyper-converged solutions.

We have 30 customers using vCenter, and five using vSAN.

Technical support is good. It's not excellent, but good. The Sempre support is better.

Technical support could be faster. VMware is slow.

It takes a lot of time to get a technical engineer on the phone, we have to send several emails. It is not a fast procedure.

We are only selling Sempre Solution, and vSAN, vSphere for VMware.

We have 15 customers using Sempre.

It's simple to build a product when you know what you're doing.

Installation and deployment can take anywhere from eight to sixteen hours, depending on the infrastructure.

We have a team of three who deal with everything.

For a classical node plus storage solution, the price is higher.

You have to pay to expand this solution, which is comparable with other similar solutions.

It is not a good price for small and medium-sized businesses.

Making a server solution that includes the license for smaller businesses would be a fantastic idea. Three servers, for example, would be an ideal start-up for a small or medium-sized business.

It's a service that sells nodes. The nodes, hardware, software, and vSAN are all interconnected. It's the brick for the wall, for example, and should be a little less expensive for smaller businesses.

We offer options to our customers. We offer our customers the option of a loan where they can make monthly payments, or they can purchase the solution.

After one year, customers pay for the support.

I would recommend this solution to others, even though we are moving to another solution.

We will be moving to Sempre. The support is cheaper, and the performance is good. It's a good choice for us and for our customers.

I would rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten.

The feature that I have found most valuable is that it is easy to deploy.

It is also easy to configure with the vCenter and the other solutions that we have. It is easy to create and delete virtual servers. It is easy to create the load balancing and the clustering, and the new version includes different features that allow us to quickly see what happened if we shut down a virtual server. It is an arrays of disks. It works like a RAID file. You shut down one server and you can start the two others that work together.

VMware vSAN is better than SimpliVity. We once tried to run SimpliVity, but it was difficult for us, because the people from HP were not easy to work with, the costs of their white papers where higher, and it was not as easy to deploy as VMware. VMware vSAN also costs for licensing, but it costs less than HPE SimpliVity and I'm not depending on the HP team. I can run it myself with my engineers.

The only negative point relates to the licensing. If you want multiple, different servers, it costs money, but you have all the capacity for vSAN. You do not reach the data, but the processor arrays and the current architecture.

I have been using VMware vSAN for two and a half years.

We are using version 6.7 and we are processing now to switch to 7.0 because we are testing the new version.

VMware vSAN is a stable solution.

We have made many tests, we have also shut down the servers and made an extraction of the disk and everything, and vSAN was very good.

VMware vSAN is scalable, if you choose good servers at the beginning with many slots for disks, you can then add disks and extend the storage. You can add memory if you have good servers, and then you can enable your construction. But you have to choose good servers for production from the beginning.

VMware has very good support. They have technical support which is divided into three areas. In each area you always have the one who can reply to you and they are really good at the technical support.

We previously worked with Nutanix, which HP bought. At the beginning, we were also working with a free solution called KVM. There was no licensing cost with them, but there was also no real support and the customers were afraid of that. They wanted something that is known in the market. We also worked with Dell in the past.

If you already work with vCenter and VMware, the initial setup is easy. The process is easy to understand and easy to configure. You just have to be sure that when you connect the servers with the LAN that everything is in 10 giga, then it will be easy to configure. You have to configure the root storage of the LAN and give it a switch.

You have to configure everything from the beginning to make everything work, so you must have an expert on vSAN from your side and an expert for LAN on the other side.

I do think that VMware vSAN's cost could be lower.

We pay for the license every year.

The cost depends on your contract. The pricing for the government is not the best, but for each licensing, because its arrays are in your servers, it can cost $4,000 for each of the servers for a simple solution and up to $20,000 per server for vSAN solutions. It's very, very expensive.

I am also working with Microsoft and Safe Key, another solution for the clustering, and I tried HPE SimpliVity for simple cluster and for multi-cluster. When I saw the costs of HPE SimpliVity for multi-cluster, there were two points that made me not feel good about it: the price and that when we needed more than 20 or 40 terabytes of data, the HP license was such that I could not use this solution alone. We had to use the HP team at the beginning.

On a scale of one to ten I would give VMware vSAN an eight for the technology, eight for scalability, and a six for the price. Overall, I give it an eight.

• vSAN ROBO with two physical nodes

I'm working as a consultant, so I can’t directly say how it helped my customer. But I know that my customer started to equip some branches with our building block and it replaces NetApp filers. We are using a building block of two vSAN nodes and the wireness appliances in the main datacenter. With the next release of our building block, based on vSphere 6.5 and vSAN 6.5, we are switching to direct cabling, so no 10GbE switch is needed for vSAN traffic.

I’m often asked for a vSAN stretched cluster in combination with erasure coding. Currently with vSAN 6.5, you can use one of them but not both at the same time. It is kind of a German behaviour to have two datacenters with active/active architecture and syncronized mirror. But for this type of customer, it’s pretty important to get a vSAN stretched cluster with erasure coding.

I have been using it for three months now. I use VMware vSphere 6.0 Update 2 and vSAN 6.2 (hybrid).

We have not had stability issues. Even losing the witness appliances is no big deal. vSAN 6.2, as well as vSAN 6.5, seems to be a pretty stable and reliable platform.

We have not had scalability issues in both ways. Scaling down to two hosts with direct cabling is possible for ROBO, as well as big clusters with over 32 hosts.

I rate technical support 4.5/5.

My customer switched (or currently is switching) from NetApp filers to vSAN. The main reason is cost. You need the ESXi host hardware anyway, but you now save the costs of storage maintenance. The costs per vSAN license (and the maintenance) are usually lower than for NetApp in this case. Plus, you gain the benefit of only having one management console which is well known and built-in to the management tools used for the central datacenters.

The initial setup is straightforward, but only after deploying the vCenter service. Once the vCenter is up and running, it is pretty easy to enable vSAN. Despite the automatic selection of disks, we chose the manual selection and it was extremely easy to set up vSAN.

When you don’t have a chance to build upon an existing vCenter service, you have to think about the deployment of vCenter without having vSAN. There are several options, like deploying vCenter temporarily on a client PC and then migrating it later onto the vSAN cluster. But it’s always a bit tricky and you probably need some extra time to get the installation done. In most of my vSAN installations, the vCenter was already up and running, so the initial setup of the vSAN cluster literally takes minutes.

Licensing is pretty straightforward. Have a look at the features you need and choose the license that fits. For ROBO scenarios, there is a special ROBO license that could save you some money.

dvSwitch functionality is included in every vSAN license. You don’t have to have vSphere Enterprise Plus to use dvSwitches. You only need vSAN licenses. And despite that, vSAN comes with all flash functionality within every license.

My customer was focusing on continuing with NetApp filers and ESXi hosts or vSAN for ROBO.

Have a look at the simplicity of vSAN and how it easily integrates into the existing management tools. It’s not even the ease of implementation; it’s the ease of managing and maintaining the complete stack.

Currently, we are on version 6.2. Having all flash, I would say that the most valuable feature for us is deduplication, as it gives us better utilization of the space available. In the latest release, there are already features that we have been waiting for. iSCSI presentation, for example, is something we were waiting for. With iSCSI presentation, we will be able to present the vSAN datastore to our other blade servers; therefore better utilising our investment.

We face the same challenges most organisations do; probably the most common one being that of keeping up with growth and expansion, while keeping within the budgets. vSAN is very scalable, so we can plan our costs well in advance, knowing that additional nodes will be expanding both our compute and storage resources.

I think that the product is evolving in the right direction, most of the improvements and suggestions we had in mind are already available in 6.5. Obviously, there is always room for improvement.

For example, in our case, we had to go with vSAN Advanced license in order to have all flash. I remember attending the vSAN summit at VMworld 2015, and this licensing issue came up during the discussions; so did the request to present vSAN via iSCSI and the 2-node direct connect for ROBOs. In 6.5, all-flash is now supported by all vSAN editions, and ROBO sites can be deployed with a 2-node crossover cable, so it looks like VMware are taking on-board the suggestions we are making, as always J.

We have been using vSAN for the last two years, now. Initially, we decided to try vSAN in our test and dev environment. We started with the hybrid solution using some hardware that we already had in-house. Our development team had already noticed faster build and deployment time frames, so we explored the vSAN option further. Today, we moved to an all-flash solution, which we are now using both for dev and production.

The only issue that I recall having was with a controller driver that did not pass the HCL check; this happened following an update to 6.2, but a patch was released soon after. We did not experience any service interruption or downtime.

Customer support for vSAN was very good; response time was very fast and within the agreed support time frames. The technical guys where very knowledgeable and helped out to address our queries and issues right away.

In most of our environments, we still have "traditional" storage, some of which is becoming end of life and will be decommissioned. Others are relatively still recent and are being used as a secondary storage together with vSAN. It’s like having the best of both worlds in a way. We have been using and implementing most of the VMware products for several years now; vSAN keeps consolidating our infrastructure under one vendor.

When we were setting it up the very first time, we had to start over a few times, but again it was just a learning curve. I think during the first setup, especially if it’s in a testing environment, it’s the best time to hammer it and experiment a little.

We do implementations as service vendors and obviously implemented our own. My advice to whoever is considering vSAN is to try it out, even if it’s just on some hardware you already have. If you don’t have any hardware, most service vendors will be willing to give you a remotely accessible demo. My advice when it comes to production, in regards of hardware, is definitely to go for vSAN-Ready nodes (“VMware-approved hardware”).

In some of our environments, introducing vSAN helped reduce our datacentre hosting costs. In one case, we were able to completely remove a cabinet that had a legacy blade chassis and a legacy SAN. We only had two cabinets in this environment; by consolidating storage and compute in a few servers, we reduced the hosting costs by half. As for pricing and licensing, I think this is something which needs to be discussed on a case-by-case basis; I do not think it’s a “one size fits all”.

I think vSAN together with other alternatives is the future. Actually, it has already been here with us for a while; network, compute and storage are merging in one box. It’s just a matter of time for it to become the norm.

My rating is for this point in time. However, there have been improvements and new features in the latest release, which will probably make me increase my rating in the coming days.

Some of the valuable features of this product are:

• Software-defined class which is one of the building blocks for SDDC.
• Flexible – It scales as and when needed.
• Simple – It is easy to manage.
• Performance – The local server can access data at full speed and have low-latency in SSD.
• Since there are no network-attached storage appliances, the infrastructure cost is lower.

It has helped us in reducing the waiting time to provision new storage devices and meet customer SLAs in order to build new VMs.

Some areas where this product can be improved are:

• If we could create multiple datastores rather than a single one, it would be helpful.
• There could be improvements in the hardware failure and data recovery methods.
• There should be an option to create more than one datastore like other SDS vendors have in order to allow the features to support Storage DRS & Storage I/O Control (SIOC).
• A control panel for VMs is absent. Although, other vendors are deploying this for each host to provide better storage control.
• A typical data center for installation of systems requires more storage growth than servers. This limits the scalable features of vSAN.

I have used this solution for around 14 months.

We did see some backup failures due to .vmx lock files in the vSAN datastore.

We have encountered some scalability issues and got a couple of performance tickets.

The technical support from VMware is good.

We were not using any other solution previously. This is our first attempt at the software-defined storage system and Nimble is our product for testing purposes.

It was straightforward. There is a single checkbox if the prerequisites are met with.

The pricing policy varies as below:

• vSAN Standard is still priced at $2,495/CPU or $50/desktop.
• The Advanced Edition license is priced around $3,995/CPU or $100/desktop where as the Enterprise license is priced at $5,495/CPU or $120/desktop.

VMware brought this is as free upgrade, so we did not evaluate any other options but Nimble is the next one.

vSAN 6.2 has lot of new features which can be good for small and medium-sized servers & VDI infrastructures.

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.

VMware vSAN is our hypervisor and we are using it for all our applications.

We are facing some problems with updates with the VMware vSAN. When we upgraded from version 6.5 to 7, we have been faced with many problems. They have been deploying many hotfixes for this version, and they need to continue to improve this version.

I have been using VMware vSAN for approximately three years.

VMware vSAN is a stable solution.

The solution is scalable.

We have approximately 1,000 users using this solution.

VMware is the host of all of our servers. We have many kinds of servers, such as application, service, call manager, and mail servers. Many users use these servers from all the titles in the company. We use this solution every day in our company.

When we faced some problems, we opened support tickets with VMware, and their support was very fast. They were able to fix the problems we had.

We were previously using Microsoft Hyper-V.

VMware vSAN is more professional than Microsoft Hyper-V for this kind of application. The scalability for VMware is better than  Microsoft. There are limitations in Microsoft Hyper-V. and many applications support VMware vSAN, such as Oracle, Cisco, and Linux.

The implementation is simple, it was very straightforward. It took us approximately three weeks because it was installed in four locations.

We used a consultants company called Adaptive here in Cairo, Egypt for the installation.

The consultant was very good, and their information was perfect. They were very helpful to us.

We have a two-person technical team that supports this solution.

There is a license to use this solution and we pay approximately $30,000 annually. There were not any additional fees required other than the license. The solution is expensive.

I can recommend VMware vSAN if there are problems that they face, such as limitations for their applications. It would be good to use VMware vSAN. If they have not found limitations in their operating system while working with Windows, they can use Microsoft Hyper-V instead.

I rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten.