VMware vSAN Reviews

We don't have any specific use cases, however, we do have a variety of workloads running on vSAN.

It's a massive shift now to have it in the portfolio and to have a complete software-defined data center.

The policies the solution has been very good. We use them a lot.

The deduplication and compression are excellent. 

There are a couple of features which we are using right now that we really like.

It's the kind of solution that is very easy to use, which may be its most valuable aspect for our organization.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The solution overall is very easy to manage and configure.

There's a lot that can be done to segregate. That may be available now in vSAN 7, I suppose, however, the deduplication and compression can be segregated. 

Increasing the classifiers to maybe more than 64 could be done in future releases.

The file service is something that can be integrated.

Something more could be done to integrate from a monitoring perspective right in the console itself so that we have deeper monitoring capabilities.

I've been using the solution for about three years, however, I suspect it's been even longer than that.

We haven't had any issues I can recall in terms of stability. It's pretty reliable. It doesn't crash or freeze. There aren't bugs or glitches.

In our organization's case, we started with a number of nodes and I scaled it up from there. I didn't find any issues expanding the product. Scalability was not a problem.

This is a pretty recent deployment. While I've been working with the solution for three or four years, it's new to the company for the most part.

We plan to increase usage in the coming year. New workloads will get deployed and we'll begin to expand it more.

The technical support has been very good. They're quite knowledgable and responsive. We're satisfied with the level of support we get.

My organization didn't previously use a different hyper-converged solution. This product is their first in this particular area.

There's no complexity in the original setup of the solution. The implementation is very straightforward.

Deployment was pretty quick. Just testing it out and finally rolling it out we managed to do in a couple of days. I would say within a week we were able to be up and running. 

My company was involved directly with a reseller. The other nitty-gritty elements were something that I took care of it.

I was not directly involved from a pricing perspective. I suppose it was competitive and that's why the company went ahead and with vSAN, therefore I assume the pricing is okay.

We did look at other options. We ended up choosing vSAN mostly due to the price. However, we also liked how easy it was to set up, configure, and manage compared to other options.

We're a partner with VMware.

Overall, I would rate them eight out of ten. They still have room for improvement. However, overall, we've been pleased with the results. It's easy to use, manage, and monitor.

The solution is best suited for small to medium-sized organizations.

If the solution is ideal for a company depends on the workloads and what they're trying to do right now. If a company would like to make a choice between the All-Flash or the Hybrid, I would definitely go for All-Flash. It may be a bit expensive as compared to Hybrid, however, definitely from a feature perspective and a performance perspective, All-Flash is the way to go.

We recently adopted vSAN. We adopted VDI for our desktop solution about ten years ago and we have a single KPI for delivery which is clinical data accessed in five seconds.

Throughout the last decade, as new back-end technologies have come to market, we have always been investing in the hosting end of VDI. Five years ago, we went to an all-flash array, and two years ago, we went to the vSAN hyperconverged. 

When we went to vSAN, at that point in time, we doubled the density of our desktops per host and, for the first time ever, I could demonstrate a significantly lower TCO for a VDI desktop versus a rich or fat client.

For my organization, the most valuable features of vSAN are as follows:

1. The most important to me, in my role, is cost. In the renewal cycle for storage, it was about a 40 percent saving compared to going to an all-flash array, which is what we first looked at doing.
2. Performance: our clinical data access in five seconds; we need to do everything we can to retain that metric.
3. I was really pleasantly surprised during the data migration across to vSAN, that it happened almost instantly. Whereas, in the past, migrating from array to array was an arduous and fraught process.

Room for improvement could be in the planning stage of going to hyperconverged. And this is a big ask: some modeling tools or guidance on how to work out the optimal TCO. For example, core size - the amount of RAM that you're running - versus the licensing cost you're up for with, say, Mircrosoft data center, versus the number of hosts you're going to run and have to license for the vSAN. It's quite a complex equation and it's really difficult to work out, in advance of implementing the solution, that you've got it right. That creates some uncertainty around the total cost of ownership.

Stability on the vSAN has been 100 percent. As part of the implementation process, the VMware customer success team for vSAN assisted us. We actually retrofitted hard disk into our own existing hosts and they went through a process of review and remediation to get all the "green ticks". We went through that process in advance of putting it into production for our data center, which we did this year. So, there have been absolutely no problems from that perspective.

When talking about scalability, the real value is that, for the first time, I can just build it out one host a time. Over the years, I'm sure everyone has experienced hitting the wall on their array where it's too old or the technology has changed, and they're up for a large sum of money in one hit. The actual, repeatable, non-quantity of the cost to increase the storage, is very valuable.

On a scale of one to ten, I am giving it a nine. It's probably because I can't bring myself to give a ten for anything, in case it could be improved.

We use it to virtualize SAN so that you don't have to have a separate storage area network and can have your computer and storage on the same box or computer.

It's stable and scalable. 

Also, you can virtualize SAN so that you don't have to have a separate storage area network and can have your computer and storage on the same box or computer.

Because of virtual storage, the system reaches reserve storage for its functions. It also consumes a certain amount of storage, which then results in the creation of a fault tolerance for the system. All of this adds to a lot of capacity being consumed in terms of storage for each drive for vSan. I find this to be one drawback of using vSan.

The pricing for licensing could be cheaper.

I've been using this solution for about three years.

I find it to be a stable solution.

I think VMware vSAN is a scalable solution.

I was satisfied with the customer service and technical support I received.

The initial setup was straightforward and took less than two weeks.

We used a consultant for the installation project.

The licensing cost is high and should be taken into account.

You need to pay attention to the calculation metrics in terms of sizing. Depending on your design, you need to be sure that you actually factor in enough storage capacity to be able to achieve whatever you want to achieve in terms of looking at your growth rate.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would rate this product at eight.

We deliver the only end-to-end enterprise technology platform exclusively designed for quick service and food service communities. Our primary use case for this solution is for customer use in our internal labs. As partners with the vendor VMware vSAN, we leverage their tech to build customer-specific simulated environments, to provide unique, controlled individual environments to gain insightful perspectives and capture helpful data.

As a function of our core business, it's a sought after tool that helps us provide analytical support across a wide spectrum of client needs. It's allowed us to test out in our connected restaurant - "TheWorks" - a fully-functional restaurant experience center that allows our clients to discover the value of our connected solutions firsthand. We deploy vSAN in this customer-like environment within a hyperconvergent infrastructure (HCI) to give our clients a better understanding and help optimize data and the end-users' experience.

The feature I've been most pleased with is the import management functionality. 

I would like to see the availability of more template based VMware systems. Combined with the ability to check and measure multiple and converging data segments. Another issue I've seen is that the tool seems to be slow when first starting up. 

Stability is and was always good with VMware. I've never had any issues.

I've only contacted technical support once. My experience with them from what I can remember was good. I was on the call for something like five minutes.

The initial setup was straightforward, not complex at all.

I would suggest that anyone looking to deploy this solution do their due diligence and try out other competitive products first, like Nutanix. I've used Nutanix in the past. I found it to be a more agile tool compared to VMware. VMware has only just recently started offering this HCI solution.

If I was to rate vSAN from one to ten, 10 being best, I would give it an 8. Not a ten primarily because I haven't tested some aspects of the arrays at this point.

We are using vSAN as a product in vSphere. Recently, we signed up for the 6.7 version of vSAN. We use it on all-flash and VME. All the discs that we use are NVMe disks.

We provide and manufacture our own local storage. With our own storage, we can path that with the host. So, it's beneficial for us to have a local storage attached to a host which vSAN is awesome for that.

With vSAN coming in, we have stability within the cluster of resources which has been grouped together in a local storage. This is a wonderful feature in vSAN.

We are finding vSAN is going down the right path, but vSAN has specific profiles which supports vSAN disk. However, our company has our own storage. So, we have different profiles of configuration. Some of those profiles and motherboards, vSAN doesn't support. We have challenges and work with VMware to work with other providers to get into the VMware list and drivers. Since it's customizable, we are looking for drivers from other vendors as well from VMware for compatibility. There is a room for improvement on the latest version of compatibility with the VMware product, especially for vSAN and with other vendors, like Intel and AMD, on their motherboards and driver configurations.

It is stable for me. We are getting good amount of IOS (the expected amount). The configuration of vSAN is pretty simple. It's just on a cluster level which is pretty simple.

The stability is very much required. vSAN provides default HA configurations, where if any host goes down, the VM moves around within the host. Even though the disks are local, the VMs moves around with the vSAN disk and vSAN provides a high availability on its own.

vSAN is scalable for us. If any additional capacity needs to be included, we just add to the host and configure the vSAN cluster.

Currently, we are working with one tech support as a partner with VMware. We are receiving a good amount of support with troubleshooting. It's on email, as well on tickets. However, it's going well.

We had out-of-the-box solutions. When vSAN came in, all the local storage became attached. The solution has improved a lot considering the local storage for vSAN configuration.

We are involved in the beta phase of the vSphere product, as well vSAN and newer product versions of VMware.

One of the best features of the configuration is vSAN at the cluster level is pretty simple. People have a lot of issues in configuration of different storages, but vSAN brings in a flexibility. Where as a vSphere admin, people can go and just configure the storage. So, VI admins don't want to have a storage knowledge when they are working with a vSAN. It is simple for us to use.

With vSAN, we didn't find the market that competitive. VMware is doing well with the local storage piling up in cluster configuration. vSAN is doing great with it.

As a vSAN, we didn't find that competitive market. VMware is doing good with the local storage piling up with the cluster configuration. vSAN is doing great on that.

We give it nine out of ten. They are going down the right path. When they started, we saw a lot of improvements with a lot of focus on the product, even in VM World. There were announcements in the features for improvement with vSAN. We continue to see VMware keeping up-to-date with vSAN, not putting the product aside.

The most important feature for us is the converged infrastructure, which is all this tool is about. There is no need to manage separate storage areas in SAN/NAS environments. Storage management comes built-in with the vSAN tool. Storage is managed via policies. Define a policy and apply it to the datastore/virtual machine and the software-defined storage does the rest. These are valuable features.

Scalability and future upgrades are a piece of cake. If you want more IOPS, then add disk groups and/or nodes on the fly. If you want to upgrade the hardware, then add new servers and retire the old ones. No service breaks at all.

The feature that we have not yet implemented but are looking at, is the ability to extend the cluster to our other site in order to handle DR situations.

Provisioning virtual machines has been simplified, as there is no provisioning/management of the separate storage layer and it is no more in question.

The management client, i.e., the Flash-based client, is just not up to the mark. I’m really waiting for the HTML5 client to be fully ready and all the features are implemented to it. This, of course, is not a vSAN issue but a vSphere issue.

Of course as vSAN is tightly embedded into vSphere, it is also managed by the same tool. vSphere management is done via browser, and currently the only supported client is the flash-based one. VMware is rolling out a new HTML5 –based client, but that is a slow process. It began as a Fling and since then, there has been quite a number of releases as new features are added. It is today quite usable, but still not complete yet.

There is also the C# -client, also known as the fat-client, which is to be installed onto a management system. Recent versions of vSphere do not support the C#-client anymore. Thus the browser is the only possibility with current versions.

So, my criticism is aimed towards the current Flash-based client, which is utterly slow, and Flash itself being deprecated technology. The sooner we can get rid of it, the happier we all will be.

I have used this solution for around a year.

Stability has not been an issue for us. We have not run into any serious software faults. VMware ESXi is a mature product with very few problems and today, vSAN is also getting there.

The scalability of the product is way beyond our needs.

L1 technical support, which I have mostly been dealing with, has been pretty solid, especially the guys in Ireland, who do handle it pretty well, both technically and in reference to the customer service aspect.

We did not have any comparable solution previously. We did previously use traditional SAN / NAS environments from where the storage areas were provisioned for the VMware clusters.

The initial setup was quite straightforward. All in all, it took three days to complete the entire process; that included installation of the hardware itself, installation of ESXi onto the hardware, creating the data center and the cluster, configuring the networks and multicasting on the surrounding network infrastructure, defining all the disk groups and networks at the cluster, and finally turning the vSAN on. vSAN was the simplest part of the whole process.

As VMware products are licensed per number of sockets, you need to think this fully through. However, don’t go cheap on the number of hosts. You’ll thank me later.

We got presentations both from SimpliVity and Nutanix. No serious evaluation of other products was made. We did evaluate vSAN a couple months before the purchase, so as to get familiar with it, and we do have a lab environment now to play with.

In hindsight, we could have carried out a more-thorough evaluation of vSAN to get a really good feel about it; maybe even run a part of your actual production there for an extended period of time to see all the pros and cons.

Study the VMware Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) carefully with your server hardware provider and make sure all the components/firmware versions are on the HCL; either that or buy predefined hardware, a.k.a. vSAN-ready nodes, from a certified vendor. Always make sure that the hardware and firmware levels are on par with the HCL. You may have to upgrade; for example, you may need to upgrade the disk controller firmware when the updates to ESXi are installed. VMware does a pretty good job here and vCenter tells you that there are inconsistencies. However, you should still be prepared for that in advance, before actually installing the updates.

Don’t go with the minimum number of (storage) nodes, as that won’t give you enough room for a hardware failure during a scheduled maintenance break. For a minimum setup, without advanced options in vSAN 6.5 such as deduplication, compression and when Failures to Tolerate (FTT) = 1, the required number of nodes is three. VMware recommends in best practices a minimum number of four nodes. Do yourself a favour and go with at least that or even five would be good.

When disk groups are designed, it is always better to have more smaller disk groups than a few larger disk groups. This increases your availability, decreases time to heal from disk troubles and gives you an improved performance, as there are more cache devices.

If your budget allows it, then go with the all-flash storage. If not, go with even more disk groups. Our cluster has pretty good performance; although we have spinning disks, the read latency usually stays below 1ms and write latency stays below 2ms.

Plan your network infrastructure carefully, especially that part which handles the vSAN traffic. Go with separate 10G switches and dual interfaces for each server just for vSAN. Handle the virtual machine traffic, migration traffic and management traffic elsewhere. Go with 10G or faster, if you need that. Don’t use 1G for vSAN traffic, unless your environment is really small or is a lab.

Plan your backup / restore strategy really well and test it through. Test restore periodically for both full virtual machines and single files inside virtual machines. To carry out test restore is always important, but with vSAN it is even more so, as all your eggs are in the same basket and there are no more traditional .vmdk files that you can fiddle with. A separate test / lab vSAN cluster would be really good to test various things such as installing updates, restoring backups etc.

Simplified datacenter failover in the VMware environment is the most valuable feature of this product.

Previously, when using SRM (VMware Site Recovery Manager) we’d have to configure VMware objects (VMs) for failover. With vSAN, all objects in the datastore are replicated and can be failed over using the built-in high availability feature.

vSAN significantly reduced the complexity of our data center failover along with the data center design requirements.

vSAN health reporting needs some work. There were a few instances where the vSAN would report health issues with disks, even though it was functioning correctly. I believe VMware stated this would be corrected in future versions.

We also had some issues with reinstalling hosts that had vSAN enabled. JBOD disks would retain the vSAN configuration information and would need to be manually cleared to allow for the new vSAN instance to be enabled.

I tested it over a period of five months.

We didn’t have any stability problems. Once configured, vSAN operated without issue.

We didn’t have any scalability problems. vSAN scaled quite well.

Technical support is excellent. VMware provides top notch support.

This was our first time moving to a HCI storage solution.

Setup was straightforward. With ESXi as the base, it was quite easy to then enable vSAN. We used the just a bunch of disks (JBOD) configuration and vSAN consumes those disks easily through the vCenter web GUI.

vSAN is not cheap. Weigh the benefits of a reduction in complexity against the cost.

We did not evaluate any other options.

Use the GUI scripting vSAN implementation, at least for ESXi 6.0. We found that it was much quicker (and still fairly simple) to implement via the GUI. I’ve heard this may have gotten better in ESXi 6.5.

It's not a storage array which is a very valuable feature of it and it's maintenance structure isn't paid like a traditional storage array. For me, that's the biggest leap with it is there's a compelling cost with reason to step in to it. You don't have to make a snap decision and get away from where I am. I can keep what I have and dip my toe in VSAN without risking an all-or-nothing decision.

VSAN is really simple to manage. Its GUI is part of the eco-system so it looks and feels like the rest of VMware. So a VMware engineer or a VMware operations guy's is going to be able to manage the provision storage without having to touch an array, which is generally higher profile so there's a cost reduction through headcount.

VSAN manageability is much easier because it's in and part of the vSphere world, so it looks and feels like any other object that people are used to seeing metrics on and there have been great improvement in management. In 655, there's a little bit of lack information. In the newer system, there's a lot more data about what's going on in that system, in the GUI, easily consumable.

The features I'd like to see in future releases of VSAN are around back-up and recovery. There is a great way to replicate data now, but I'd like to see them focus on making recovery from snap shots, off-site, part of the core product.

It's very stable. Once you get it built and you take the time to build the system correctly, do your research, once it's in place it's been very stable and it performs as it says.

I'm looking at two different ways of scaling that system. One is for speed and one is for mass. It scales into mass based on what size of disc you choose and it scales in to speed based on solid-state drive size. Both of those are two different avenues that work well for us.

I haven't had a technical support case open but we do look at the forums and try to avoid issues and problems based on what's in a publicly available space which has always been something that VMware has done really well, which is making issues public so we can avoid them.

We chose it from a cost perspective. In media we are always looking to save money. It's a publicly traded company so the money I give back is smiled on. We saw a way not to pay maintenance for expensive systems and to run it in a system that performs on parallel with what we already own.

So with a traditional storage array you pay maintenance based on the purchase price for the array plus any software you bought with it so that residual number is high, so if you paid a million dollars for the machine, you may have to pay $200,000 for maintenance at some point in time. With VSAN I'm paying server-based maintenance and that's a much lower number.

The top criteria we looked at when considering VSAN was performance and cost. We were going to make sure that we could deliver the performance that people are used to and used the system that costs less than a traditional array model. We did not look at other vendors because there really isn't another vendor that's doing this. There are people that are close but with a traditional hyper-converged box, there's a bunch of things I don't need. With VSAN I have the technical backing from VMware to back-stop the product and is doing what I need and no more so there is a cost-savings for not buying features-compute that I don't need.

I would certainly give it an 8 and I would split in to two parts. The initial configuration of VSAN, once the systems in place, it manages and runs without much attention and that's where it's really shining at the moment, is once it's in production, it doesn't require a lot of care and feeding.

My recommendation is make sure you've got a hardware vendor who's promising you that this equipment that you get is on the HCL, so the compatibility list of what VMware supports and VSAN is important to having a successful deployment. Taking the time to do that and install and build the system correctly first will give you years of good results. Not doing that is a headache.

When looking at any new technology, having peer review and having information available about what it's doing, how many people have adopted it and whether or not it's a good technology is critically important. It's good to be on the edge but you don't want to be the first guy to take the blind leap so having that out and having the forms available has been very important.