VMware vSAN Reviews

VMware vSAN is a global solution, so we can manage all the storage solutions in one place. It's embedded in VCI solutions. 

When you upgrade the vSAN, there are some issues like lost data and problems with the log. The log disappears. When you upgrade the solution, you must have several logs, so if you have some problems, you can check the log server to find them. But this solution has some improvements, like its snapshot feature. When you have to upgrade the version, vSAN makes a snapshot, and if there is a problem, you can revert to the old version.

The company has been using vSAN for about 18 or 19 months. 

vSAN isn't very stable. 

It's easy to manage and scale vSAN. We can increase the volume as necessary for the VM or the user. We have around 2,000 users. Right now, we're not planning to increase usage yet, but maybe we will take another look in six months to see if we need to scale the solution or not.

I'm satisfied with VMware support. 

If you have some networking skills, it's straightforward to install, deploy, and manage vSAN. 
We have three engineers maintaining all the VSI and vSAN solutions as well as all the features and management components.

We're looking for another solution like Nutanix to use concurrently with vSAN. Nutanix is more efficient but also more expensive. Nutanix is a little more stable, efficient, and simple to manage. However, I expect VMware and EMC will improve soon. I think in the next year, VMware's solution will become more stable and easier to manage.

This solution has improved our organization by allowing us to implement more quickly, and to ease the maintenance. However, it doesn't change the internal organization much.

The most valuable feature of the solution is the simplicity to implement and to maintain.

One area that could be improved is the management feature. The link between the virtualization layer and the application layer can be improved as well.

An additional feature I would like to see in the next release is integration between virtualization with vSAN and network virtualization.

I've been using the solution for the last three years.

My impression of the stability is that it's a very good solution for our usage.

For the product cloud, scalability is okay. However, when we try to use a larger cloud, we can add more new nodes into the same vSAN configuration.

Every year, our number of users increases.

The customer support is very good, depending on the contract support that you supply. We are using a premium support and the quality is quite good.

The complexity of the initial setup is not really on the VMware, but only the hyper-layer because we need to check if the hyper-layer, underlying VMware are strictly compatible.

For the first implementation, it took more or less one year, but now it takes much less time to add new material and new configuration.

In the beginning, we saw a huge return on investment from VMware, from 10 years ago to five years ago, but now we are used to the product. So the ROI doesn't make much enough for us because we only use vSAN. Now VMware is the baseline.

The product is quite expensive, regarding the open-source solution.

The cost of the solution is a mixture of monthly user and licenses purchasing. So for the internal user, we use licenses purchasing. For an external customer, we use the Pay-Per-View model.

Before choosing VMware, we evaluated Microsoft Nutanix and Cisco HyperFlex. VMware design is more mature than the other solutions, generally.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

We usually use it for any workload virtualization, data center virtualization, and storage. We use it for our software-defined storage and when a customer needs scalable storage. Data center modernization is also a use case for it.

I am using its latest version.

The scalability of the solution is most valuable.

They can improve the manageability of the solution to make it more simple. It is not that complicated, but it will be good if they can make it more simple.

I have been using this solution for almost three years.

It is stable, and its performance is very good.

It is really scalable. We have five to six administrators and implementers who work with this solution.

They are supportive. They are good in their support.

In my previous company, I worked with Nutanix. In my current company, I'm working with vSAN. Nutanix is much simpler from an interface point of view. vSAN, as a part of VMware, has more maturity in terms of features and software-defined data center journey. VMware is more mature than Nutanix in this area.

It is straightforward. It took two to three days.

In terms of maintenance, it requires the usual day-to-day maintenance. It sometimes requires some kind of support.

We installed it ourselves.

It is not that expensive, and it is not even cheap. If it is designed in a proper way, it has good pricing, but if you do oversizing, the price will be high. There are different licensing models.

I would advise others to do proper sizing and look at the features that they want to include or not include. They need to first understand their business needs and then do the sizing. This way they will get a good solution.

I would rate VMware vSAN a nine out of 10.

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.

We primarily used the solution for development, tests and UAT proposals. We did initially run it without backup and later added Commvault.

introducing vSAN dramatically increased the speed for deployment and decomissioning VMs for developers without the requierement to involve storage team

When we started using vSAN, the speed (performance) of the solution was dramatically higher than the speed of our production systems. 

The integration with the rest of the DVM suite is great as always. The look and feel for the administrators is like a classic virtualization environment and it cannot be better. 

The solution is very easy to set up. 

The stability is good.

We had very good access to technical support.

The ability to access SAN environments via fiber channel (or even NVMe) would be a good addition.

While I do not currently use the product in my new company, I used the solution up until I left my former company. I had used it for nearly six years up until then.

The stability is excellent. There are no bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable 

In my former company, we had a direct technical account manager. We were very satisfied with the level of assistance we were able to get when we needed it. 

But you have to consider the level of support you purchase and the amount of systems covered by this support - of course a TAM isn't effordable for each and every company.

It was easy to set up. 

If I would have introduce vSAN in an environment without any existing VMWare virtualization deployment and with the intention to expand to cloud based resoruces as a next step, I would not choose the product itself, I would do it with Dell and would implement the VxRail, what is actually vSAN based, it's the same product, however, in the end, you have better services. If you cover hardware and software management as well underneath one GUI, it's better for the administrators.

In the past deployment, it took us about a week to set everything up and to get everything up and running. We did need this week to bring up two 6 node clusters and today, these original six node clusters both expanded to 16 nodes on both sides.

We had a vSAN at my last company. I started my employment here at this new company one month ago and we do not have VMware products at all. Previously, I worked with vSAN simply as a customer and an end-user.

I've used many versions of the solution. We started shortly before the 6.0 came out. We may have started with vSAN 5.5. That was the first version we ever used, and then we upgraded again and again over the years.

I'd advise those considering the solution to think and plan before you simply do. You should do an accounting of what capacities, what performance, which backup you require or have. Do you need redundancy? Do you need network isolation? All the steps that normal people do afterwards should be done before you do it. Everything is about planning.

I'd give the solution a perfect ten out of ten rating. 

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.

We have a lab setup using VMware vSAN which is on Nutanix. We are using the vSAN for testing purposes and attempting to answer some questions. For example, how will the application be supported, how will the exit configuration be, and what would happen in terms of failures.

One of the valuable features of vSAN is it has a universal type of technology that allows you to deploy it on any server or hardware. Competitors, such as Nutanix, provides the AOS and can be deployed only on certified hardware. For vSAN, it does not require any kind of certified hardware.

Additionally, the dashboards and user interface provide a lot of details.

In a future release, they could add micro-segmentation or security level features integrated into vSAN.

I have been using this solution within the last 12 months.

We have never had any kind of hardware issues or problems. The solution is stable.

The technical was responsive and was helpful. There is a lot of documentation online if we need assistance.

The initial setup was complex.

We had assistance doing the implementation from the vSAN engineers.

This solution is expensive.

Nutanix provides us with Acropolis Operating System (AOS) along with its hardware, while VMware provides vSAN, vCenter, and vSphere which all have separate licenses and costs.

We have evaluated Nuranix and HPE.

If you have storage, separate servers, or any kind of traditional architecture you can convert it to FCI with vSAN. It is a very simple and easy-to-use solution.

I rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten.

Basically, we wanted to do more automation. That was the primary reason for us to move to it. Specifically, with respect to the finance part, we wanted to ensure that more automation can happen there in order to give more control to the end-user. It's also used for managing some of the application stack as well as storage management.

The solution makes management very easy.

We've found the solution to be scalable.

The stability of the solution is very good.

The installation process is very simple and straightforward.

The solution could use more integration with respect to the DR solution. If there was more integration with respect to the backup solutions, that will definitely help us.

On the DevOps side, if there could be more automation it would be more helpful. Specifically, we would like to know how to integrate and extend it towards the cloud. Either it is JCP or GCP or AWS.

I've been using the solution for one and a half years.

We have found the solution to be stable and reliable. We haven't really had to deal with bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze either.

The solution is very scalable. If a company wants to expand the solution it can. It's not a problem.

We have about 500 users on the solution currently. We do plan to continue to use it.

We've only really had two incidents that required support, and therefore my experience with technical support is rather limited. Dell EMC tends to handle the support, and we've never had issues getting any help. Overall, it's been fine, and in general, we are satisfied with the level of technical support we can get when we need it.

I didn't really use a different version of the solution. Most of the time I had been using ESX environment, and that was one of the reasons for going ahead with vSAN.

The initial setup is not difficult or complex. It's very simple, very straightforward. A company should find it very easy to set up.

We handled the implementation ourselves, in-house. We did not need the help of a consultant or implementor.

We are a customer and an end-user.

We are not on the latest version. We are using the latest version minus one. 

I'd recommend this solution to others.

I'd rate the product at an eight out of ten.