VMware vSAN Reviews

Our primary use case is to host our hyperconverged solutions. I'm a project manager and team leader and we are implementers of this solution. We carry out everything from implementation to rollout. We are customers of VMware vSAN.

The VCG notification feature is key for me. 

We faced some latency issues but it's been a little better lately. I'd like to see a single dashboard product and an improvement in reporting which currently depends on third party applications. 

I've been using this solution for almost seven years. 

It's relatively stable now although we had some issues in the past. 

The solution is scalable, we have around 5,000 users. I think there are about 15 people in the company who deal with monitoring, management, and implementation.

We had a very good team early on so we were not dependent on Microsoft or VMware to help mitigate issues.

We previously used Nutanix and I was very happy using Prism. We ended up with vSAN following a bidding process.

The initial setup took around 15 months. It was reasonably simple but there were some issues. We migrated around 150 VMs with applications on them.

We have a deal with them so we don't pay for individual licenses, it's a complete solution with an overall license. 

There are many similar solutions on the market. With VMware you get ease of integration because any new product they bring to the market has VMware. 

I rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

It has a single pane of glass for management and operational control, which is the most valuable feature. The integrated storage is also valuable.

Its integration with a hybrid cloud can be improved. Its scalability can also be improved so that it can be integrated with more than 32 nodes. The maximum number of nodes is okay, but our use cases could probably do with more nodes, probably up to 64.

In terms of new features, it should probably have the basic support for high-speed networking spaces.

My experience with it has been for about 12 months.

It has good stability. It is better than the non-hyper-converged one that we had previously.

Its scalability can be improved so that it can be integrated with more than 32 nodes.

Their support is good. If you are a big enough user, you get enough support. 

This is the first one that we used.

For us, it was fairly straightforward. You need to have knowledge of vCenter. The deployment took about two to three days in total.

It is expensive, but you get what you pay for.

I would recommend this solution, but you have to be careful about the license cost. It can get quite expensive.

I would rate VMware vSAN a nine out of ten.

We are providing virtual machines for our niche area of accounting firms. For virtualization, we are using VMware vSphere, and for storing these virtualizations, we are using VMware vSAN. 

We have co-located servers in different data centers. That's where we have installed the VMware vSAN for our use.

vSAN is software-defined networking. The advantage of vSAN is that if one of the servers goes down, nothing happens. In traditional SAN, if the SAN goes down, everything goes down, and your business will come to a halt. That's why we decided to go for vSAN because you have a number of servers in vSAN. 

Each server participates in creating the virtual SAN. In case one server goes down, the other servers continue to work, and the workload gets realigned to the nodes that are up. Your work doesn't get interrupted. That's why a lot of companies are moving to software-defined storage, where the storage is created through software. vSAN is also software-defined storage.

It is very easy to set up and very easy to use. It is very useful.

If one node out of your ten nodes fails, it takes a lot of time to replicate and rebalance VMware vSAN. This time can be reduced. When a node fails and the data is not accessible, vSAN has to be rebalanced to make the redundancy level of two again. However, if it is taking a lot of time and any other hardware fails during that time, then we have a problem. Two disk failures mean that all data will be lost, and we may have to recover it from the backup. So, the number of threads that run to do the rebalancing could be more so that the time taken to make it fully redundant again is not so much.

I have been using VMware vSAN for almost five to six years.

Initially, there were a lot of problems because it was a new product from VMware. There were a lot of hiccups, but now, it is a very stable product.

It is quite scalable. We are using it ourselves, and we are providing virtual machines to other customers. 

We are using 16 nodes. For creating this storage, we have about 600 terabytes of storage in VMware vSAN in each cluster. If you have to make it several petabytes, then I don't know whether it will work or not, but up to one petabyte, I don't see any challenge in VMware vSAN. I have no idea about the scalability larger than that.

I would rate VMware support a seven out of ten. I won't give them more than that because some of their engineers don't have so much in-depth understanding of the product. Sometimes, a lot of time gets wasted than getting support from them. Their support team needs to be trained for faster IT support.

It is very easy to set up. You don't have to really make any effort to set it up. One or two days are enough to deploy VMware vSAN. It takes around 24 to 48 hours.

We do it ourselves because we have about five to six clusters in different data centers in the US at different geographic locations. It is easy to deploy, and you don't need a very strong technical knowledge to deploy. 

The number of people required to maintain this solution depends upon the size of the infrastructure. If you have 15 nodes, you can have a team of about two to three experienced people.

If they could reduce the cost, it would be better. Licensing costs are something that they could take care of. If you are a smaller and strong IT team, then VMware vSAN is a very good product. If you want to expand in the service provider space, then you will have to go for an open-source solution like OpenStack.

We are now looking at OpenStack because we sell licensing costs. We are a service provider, so the IT component data is a substantial component in our overall costing. We feel that OpenStack might help us to cut down the licensing cost. Therefore, we are looking at SAS storage instead of vSAN. SAS is open source, but it is not wise to have open source without having the backend support. We are using RedHat SAS, and it is an open-source solution. You can also have a free version, but we are using it with support from RedHat so that we have somebody to back us up in case we have a problem. 

If you do normal business, then IT expense is 1% or 2% of the total turnover. The higher licensing costs sometimes don't make difference to the big companies who are not service providers and are using it only for their internal use. For them, the IT cost is 1% or 2%, but for an IT service provider, the IT costs will go up to 15% to 16% of the total cost of the operations. This is where the licensing costs become irrelevant. For example, the licensing cost of using VMware, VC, and vSAN is 8% of my monthly revenue. Every month, I pay about $35,000, and, with the revised plan, it will be something like $50,000 or revenue of $600K per month, which means almost 8% of the revenue is going into VMware licensing. In a very competitive world, 8% as a cost element is huge. So, if I can bring it down to 2%, I save 6% in revenue expenditure. In terms of profit, 6% of 30% is something like another 25% increase in my profit. My profit can be almost 25%. It would be 20% to 25% in case I am able to handle the licensing costs and bring them to a very low level. Because these IT costs are substantial for us, that is why we are going with OpenStack. 

OpenStack has a limitation that it requires more hardware. There will be some increase in the hardware cost, but overall, we will save 5% to 6% of our licensing cost by using OpenStack.

If you want a very simple structure, VMware vSAN is a good idea. If you have a larger and strong IT team and the cost is a factor for you, you can go for OpenStack.

I would rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten.

I use VMware vSAN for storage management, particularly for managing our data center and virtual machines (VMs). It significantly reduces downtime, especially during maintenance, allowing seamless machine movement.

The platform's most valuable features are centralized management capability and vMotion. These features provide a central management point and allow seamless VM movement during maintenance.

We have encountered some challenges related to administrative tasks and licensing issues for the product. 

I suggest improvements in processing speed, user-friendliness, and resource utilization for the next release. Additionally, making the system more user-friendly and easier to manage would be beneficial.

I have been working with VMware vSAN for approximately four years.

I rate the product stability a six and a half. We encountered issues related to hardware and vulnerability patches. 

The product is highly scalable and significantly supports our organization's needs. Our company has approximately seven to eight users who manage and work with VMware vSAN. We plan to increase the usage in the future.

I rate the scalability an eight out of ten.

The technical support team takes time to respond to queries. 

Neutral

We have had experience with Hyper-V. We decided to switch to VMware vSAN due to its advantages in management, scalability, and overall performance compared to other solutions like Hyper-V.

I rate the initial setup process an eight out of ten, as it is relatively straightforward. The deployment typically takes up to 30 minutes.

The solution is relatively expensive compared to similar products.

The product has simplified our storage management by reducing downtime during maintenance and allowing for seamless VM migration without disrupting ongoing work.

It was most beneficial during our migration phase when we transitioned from a third-party storage solution to VMware vSAN. The seamless process helped resolve the challenges we faced with the previous solution.

Integrating VMware vSAN into our existing vSphere environment has been smooth. It works seamlessly with our existing hardware platforms, such as those from HP and IBM, thereby increasing operational efficiency and reducing hardware costs.

I recommend it to others and rate it an eight. 

We use this solution for our entire architecture. They have removed the storage part. We used to use IBM and NetApp for storage solutions.

Data management and recovery processes are the most valuable features.

Unless there is some network issue, everything is fine. 

Improvements are also needed as per the customer's requirements.

I have been using VMware vSAN for six years. 

The initial setup is easy. 

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

The purpose of vSAN is to cluster nodes and distribute storage usage. Like, if a server has ten hard disks, for example, and the main server also has ten hard disks, and the two other nodes or servers each have ten hard disks as well, then it will combine them all. Once combined, it becomes clustered. That's the reason why most clients want to use vSAN - to save on external storage and use the internal storage for the VMware environment.

vSAN that has been most effective in streamlining storage operations.

For data recovery alerts, it uses tools like snapshots and vMotion.

Overall, the features I find most valuable are related to the reliability and availability of the servers.

vSAN is the fastest in regards to creating VMs and connecting them to virtual networks. It compresses data, and if you have a physical server form factor, it fits only on one cluster node. That's why we use vSAN.

Better options would be clustered nodes, or even cloud configuration.

There is room for improvement in cloud configuration, we typically do web browsing for management. So, when we configure or manage VMs or vSAN, we usually open a browser and use VMware credentials. That's what we call cloud configuration.

We have been dealing with it since 2016. And since that year, we've been a distributor.

Stability depends on the network. Some clients use networks with slow switches. Here, we're using ten gig to twenty-five gig. So, more often, it's the fastest network connectivity. But if the client is using one gig or ten Mbps. Some smaller companies face issues with a slow network.

When it comes to scale up or scale out, it means that the servers or the clustered nodes can be added, or another cluster can be installed to increase the resources of the clustered nodes.

The customer service and support are quite good. 

Positive

The deployment process is complex because it's a GUI infrastructure. There are two-ways configurations for the nodes or vSAN setup. You can do it on a GUI management interface or by console or CRM recommendation.

So, it could take half a day or a whole day.

It is sort of difficult to maintain without any training. If you don't have any ideas on maintaining, then it could be difficult. But if you're a master of VMware, you know how to handle it. You're already a professional and can easily handle it.

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

We primarily use vSAN for cloud automation, so we provide test workloads for specific test use cases for customers who want to do software testing. In these specific cases, we also use vSAN because it gives us flexibility from a profile perspective on how we roll out specific workloads and specific test scenarios, making it easier for us to actually deploy things in comparison to legacy storage platforms.

vSAN improved our organization by allowing us to deploy scenarios or workloads more easily because, from a vSAN perspective, we don't need to reconfigure underlying storage or anything else. We can actually adjust for each individual machine and individual workload characteristics. We don't have to deal with different types of disk shelves, rate groups, etc. We can directly take that off.

vSAN gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources. We have an overall larger host infrastructure, and we split that up for specific customer tests and use cases. In that specific scenario, we can easily add more hosts or reduce the number of hosts in the environment. This is an advantage when we use vSAN.

We have pretty constant performance results, which are sometimes, on a normal three-tier storage architecture, harder for us to achieve because the customer doesn't want us to verify that the performance of a specific device works. What we typically have to test is that we have a constant scenario across different versions, platforms, and similar things. Here, vSAN gives us an advantage that we can actually work with it. 

We can also create test cases, which is maybe not something in other customer scenarios, but for us, it's important. We can even throttle down performance or release more performance. So, we can run more precise test scenarios. If someone says, "We need to run this later on a relatively small or lower-scale edge device," we can actually configure vSAN in a way that reduces the number of resources.

When we do more scaled load testing, we can run more dense workloads and still have the same results across all specific nodes. Otherwise, we could have that noisy neighbor effect when we work with legacy output.

Stability can be improved. Adding all these new features is nice, but we are now at the level where most of the features you need in production are there. The stability is not from a day-to-day operations perspective, but more from a supportability perspective, because currently some of the support scenarios require you to completely evacuate hosts or the complete cluster. That sometimes can be a stretch. This would clearly be an improvement if the support teams were given additional tools to make that easier.

Upgradability could be a bit easier sometimes. We are now where vSAN can be updated without ESXi, but there is still enough dependency. So that would be good if that actually would be uncoupled even more.

Dashboards are there, and we use vROps as well. So, we have all the beauty of capacity planning and everything over there. That's not really something where we need a lot of other things. 

I have been using this solution for six years.

We had some issues in very early releases, and it has become much better over time. Stability with vSAN has come it's way. When we look at 5.5, then 6.0, 6.2, 6.6, 6.7 it has moved ahead every time. Clearly, 5.5 and 6.0 have their issues, but the product is constantly improving. 

We need to keep in mind that we are talking about relatively new technology. Whenever you are adopting something early on, you need to accept not everything runs as smoothly as you would expect it to. However, we can see the progress with vSAN, and that's one of the reasons why we built our platforms on it.

Scalability for us is an important part of the product because we resize clusters all the time in our environment. We clean them out and actually start from scratch. With vSAN, it's easier for us to add nodes. If in a test scenario that we are building, we currently might have only four or five nodes in the beginning. If we add more, it's an easy add-on for us. It's easier for us to manage it this way than with legacy storage, where we would have to add additional disk shelves.

Tech support with vSAN is a mixed relationship. We have had issues with tech support because sometimes VMware comes out of the software-defined space. 

In the software-defined space, you start off with the approach that you can basically tell the customer to change everything. However, vSAN needs a different approach. It's a storage platform. I cannot actually say, "You need to upgrade everything or replace everything." That sometimes has been a bit of a challenge with the support teams, explaining to them, "No, it's not an option that we completely upgrade the stack. We need to get a different fix for it." 

However, over the last few years, it has improved. I think VMware gets the story now that doing support on the storage side is different than for a lot of the other software programs. So, I think we are getting there, but it could definitely improve.

We previously used Legacy 3-tier storage architecture with a multi-tier disk approach.

From a setup perspective with vSAN, I was involved in the original architecture and design of our specific platform. It was pretty straightforward. It's more or less point-and-click. The most challenging part is choosing the correct hardware and platform behind it. It's not so much about the fact of how to deploy vSAN. 

Once the physical hardware is there, the ESXi is installed, and configuring vSAN is pretty straightforward. It's just a few clicks. It's much easier than most other storage platforms, but the challenge is to identify the correct hardware for the use case. There are ReadyNotes and all types of other solutions, but sometimes the ReadyNote configuration doesn't match exactly what you need.

You need to be careful with some of these vendors because they might upgrade individual devices. That was one case that we had, and all of a sudden that version was no longer supported. So, we had to fight the battle of whether it is now the fault of the hardware vendor versus VMware. Those are scenarios where I can always only warn people. It's like sticking very strictly with what's in the HCL because it's nice that vSAN tells you in the UI that you are in an unsupported state, but at that point, you have the hardware already in your environment, cabled up, and in production. So, you should identify that early on. However, I think that's going to get better as well.

ROI is difficult for us to deal with because of our approach and what we do in our business with test and demo cases. It's hard for us to judge because some of the hardware and stuff we get during tests is actually provided by vendors. 

Therefore, I don't necessarily have what an online customer would pay for it. We still pay for the stuff. But it's a different story.

ROI from an administrative perspective is clearly much better because I only have to deal with one user interface. I can go into one place and be on top of it for some scenarios, even using vCloud Director. So, it's much easier to use vSAN from that perspective because it's all in the vSphere Client. I can configure my profiles and use them on all the other tools. Whereas, in the legacy storage approach, I still have to deal with all these additional details on each individual storage, which can be challenging, even though some of these vendors provide integration into the vSphere Client. In many ways, that's just the HTML UI of their storage device in the vSphere Client. That's not really integration. It's still a different UI. It's still a different training effort.

Setup cost, pricing, and licensing should be secondary factors. We talk about primary system storage, which if not performing well or if the storing is reliable, can have a massive business impact.

We evaluated different 3-tier approaches, 2-tier and HCI approaches.

I would rate the solution somewhere around an eight out of ten. It is in the perfect place. There is room for improvement, but with the current versions, we are in a good stage.

The use case is mainly for greenfields deployment. I'm a senior solutions architect and we are system integrators. Our company is a partner with VMware.

Very easy to implement in any existing environment.

I'd like to see more storage terabytes available after excluding the management. 

I've been using this solution for two years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

The technical support is very good. 

The initial setup is straightforward and it's very easy to implement in any X86 server so anyone can use it in their existing environment. 

I rate this solution nine out of 10.