VMware vSAN Reviews

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.

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.

We are mainly using the solution for our Windows environment. 

We're largely happy with the solution overall. 

The performance has been good in general.

The initial setup is simple.

Technical support is very helpful and very good at resolving issues.

The pricing is decent.

We are looking for more load balancing at an application level.

For the hardware level, we're looking at some other solutions. For example, we're checking out Nutanix and Sangfor. 

We've had issues with load balancing. Suppose, for example, if the physical ESXi host is down, the virtual machine you have handle manually. We need to have load balancing and RAM and processor balancing also.

Hardware load balancing is available on the enterprise version of the solution, however, it's extremely expensive and therefore out of our budget.

In general, we're looking for more features. This solution doesn't really offer us that much.

We've been using the solution for three to four years at this point.

We had some issues about a year ago with stability. We took the problem to support and they were able to resolve whatever the issue was. It's been stable since then, and we haven't had issues with bugs or glitches and it doesn't crash or freeze.

My colleague and I are the IT people, and we are managing vSAN for the most part. We haven't necessarily attempted to scale the solution at all. Therefore, it would be hard to say how easy or difficult the process is or how scalable in general the product is.

We've used technical support in the past to resolve issues, and they have been very helpful and responsive They were able to fix any problems we've had. We're quite satisfied with them. They've been very good, very helpful.

The initial setup is not complex. It's very simple and very straightforward. 

While we handle the maintenance ourselves in-house, we have the option of calling our integration partner if we run into any issues.

We had an integration partner that came in and assisted us with the initial implementation. We did not handle it completely in-house. They were very helpful.

The pricing is mid-range. It's pretty good compared to other options. Everything is included. There are no additional or hidden costs.

The enterprise version, however, is very, very high. Currently, we are using the standard version. To move to the enterprise level, there is a big price jump.

We're currently evaluating Nutanix and Sangfor as options to replace VMware in our organization. We want more load balancing and therefore are looking for a solution that could potentially offer us that.

We are just a customer and an end-user.

I'd recommend the solution to other organizations.

I would rate it at a seven out of ten. We've been happy with it for the most part, however, we are looking at other options that offer more features. The standard version just isn't giving us enough of what we need. That said, it;'s a good product.

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 service providers. We offer pre-billed services anywhere from three-year or five-year contracts for our customers. We provide the maintenance of the solution during that time, and on the backend, we provide L1 and L2 support.

The primary use case of this solution is for third party storage, and to leverage the local hard disk. This avoids the cost of expensive storage, sandboxes, and SAN switches.

The most valuable features are secure IOPs and LAN security.

Also, we can provide VMware with IOPs assurity from the vSAN policy, vSAN cluster, which is an expensive solution from the storage.

It has the iSCSI feature.

The price can be reduced. Small businesses cannot afford this solution.

There are limitations with Kubernetes and vSAN.

In the next release, I would like to have a hybrid flash available with this product.

I have been working with this solution for more than three years.

It's a very stable product.

It is very easy to scale. It's out of the box. You can add to it at any time.

You can add any OEM or any hardware with no problem. There is no hardware lockin. For example, if you are working with HP hardware,  you can store in DELL, or you can add a fifth node from Huawei.

It's a scale-out architecture.

Our customers are medium and enterprise companies. Small companies cannot afford the services.

The initial setup is very simple.

It is less than five minutes to deploy.

We are service providers for our clients. We have a dedicated team in our organization that deploys the products, maintains, and provides support for our customers. 

The price is expensive. This solution is not an option for SBM customers because of the price.

There are limitations because of nodes. There is a minimum purchase requirement of three or four nodes along with two processors, which also increases the price.

The price will go from a small storage box to a higher storage box.

When comparing, other vendors have their own hardware with vSAN. They have hardware with HCI, for example, Hyperflex is a hardware that is OEM locked. If a customer purchased three nodes, with Hyperflex, the next time they will have to buy from Cisco. 

It's the same with HPE; if customers purchase three or four nodes from HPE, the next ones can only be purchased from HPE.

VMware vSAN has the flexibility to buy from anywhere. There is no lock key. They can purchase from any customers and any OEM.

VMware vSAN is a very good product and I would recommend it for other customers.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

Our primary use case for vSAN is for our corporate cluster, and we have many different use cases using vSAN. It was a perfect solution for us. We were there for the beginning of vSAN. We created our own vSAN environment with their early installers and now we have a professional one. It's a great solution.

vSAN improved our organization by taking a whole bunch of servers that we had that were depreciated and letting us remove all of those workloads and put them on one, centralized solution, and have great storage in the back end. It's really helped us consolidate a lot of workloads that were in different silos, and now we're back to managing everything from one place.

The valuable features of vSAN are that

• you can get it up and running quickly
• you get redundancy built-in
• it's pretty much the perfect solution for a cluster.

The product can be improved in a couple of ways. One of those would be that they have a lot of hidden features, that are through the CLI, that would be great to have in the GUI, or just be more open about those features. It's something called RVC. It's a tool in the back end. It's a really great tool, but I had to find it through Reddit. So more information on stuff like that would be great. 

Also, in the user interface, giving us more features and more reporting that we can do from vSphere itself would be helpful.

Now it's great. The stability of vSAN is getting better every day. We had some hiccups in the past, but we worked through it with some great techs. They were there with us the whole way, and we got through most of our hiccups. 

There are definitely some things you need to know about vSAN going into it, like don't over-commit your storage, that we didn't know. We hit every problem you can probably hit with vSAN, but we're good. We're still up and running.

We started with three nodes, added a fourth. It was easy to do, gave us more storage, very scalable. You can just keep on growing and growing.

I was involved with the initial setup. It was fairly easy to get up and running, at first. We had some networking hiccups here and there but, overall, it took about a day to get us ready to go.

The ROI data on vSAN: I would definitely say it's my staff cutting their time by something like 90 percent. They're only dealing with one stack of servers right now. All of them are able to perform the storage tasks needed. Everyone can manage it. We don't have to wait for that one guy to come in and do what he has to do. My entire staff is trained on vSAN. We usually spend no time in it. Before, we were dealing with a lot of different solutions that took up a lot of our time, so time saved is a good reason for our ROI.

If I had a colleague in the field, what I would tell him is that vSAN is great. I would do four nodes instead of three. Make sure that you're safe. Four or five will get you right where you need to be. You won't have any problems. That would be a tip I would give: Go for four nodes. vSAN is definitely worth the money.

I would say it's a nine out of ten. It's not perfect, but it's almost there, and it's great.

We do reference architectures using our SSDs so we're all about All-Flash vSAN. It's part of our portfolio.

• Performance
• Simplicity
• Synchronicity with vSphere

I would love to see vSAN integrate Persistent Memory and NVDIMMs. I know they're supposed to be working on an elastic tier so that we don't have the issues with destaging from the cache to the capacity. Those are the things that I'm interested in.

I'm not an end-user, I'm a partner, we put together proofs of concept for end-users. So my biggest desire is for the VMware/vSAN team to perfect the single tier or what they're calling the elastic tier so that you can pool SSDs as well as NVDIMMs.

The stability is fine, it's as stable as the vSphere, and vSphere has been around for a long time.

We've documented that it scales out per node. The more disk groups, the more nodes, the better the performance.

We have a team of engineers who do the performance evaluation so we don't normally use technical support. We only occasionally use it.

We published the first All-Flash vSAN in 2015. It wasn't straightforward but we got it done.

We use it to provide and sell infrastructure as a service.

The performance for us is very good. Our infrastructure now is only solid-state disks, with two different levels. There is one for write-intensive and one for read-intensive. Our decision was to change traditional storage to vSAN.

One of the valuable features for us is the ability to restrict the performance capacity per client. Other solutions don't have this feature.

I would like to be able to limit IOPS.

When we began with this product, we made some mistakes. But through collaboration with the vendor we were able to find a solution to the problems and, today, it is a stable solution.

We have about 2,000 machines under this solution with about 100 hosts. It can scale beyond what our needs are. We have no problems with scalability.

We have used technical support a lot for this product and for other VMware products. For vSAN, in the beginning, we used tech support intensively. The support is very good for us because we get technical support in Spanish, in Panama.

We are using the different levels of support for different kinds of problems. We are online with them and the response time is very good.

We previously used traditional storage solutions such as HPE, Dell Compellent, Hitachi, and others. We did not use a software storage solution before vSAN.

It depends on the project, but vSAN, in particular, is an easy setup.

Our model is different. Our interest is in how we provide a solution for our clients. vSAN results in indirect benefits for our clients because it helps us reduce costs. But the client does not necessarily know that vSAN is the product behind the solution.

When we began the program with vSAN, it was more expensive than it is now. The price is improving over time. In addition, it includes more features in the same bundle. That is really good for us.

We compared it with Nutanix but Nutanix was so expensive for us because our infrastructure is not as high-end as in America. In Chile, it's lower-end. Also, because we are a service provider, the price of vSAN is not expensive for us. Other products, like Nutanix, don't have a program for service providers and the price is prohibitive for us.

For me, vSAN is a nine out of 10. I don't know what could make it a 10 because I have not really compared it with other products in the last three years. Maybe today there are other products that are better. When we started using it three years ago, vSAN was, perhaps, a seven out of 10 but they have improved the features.