VMware vSAN Reviews

We use vSAN as our server virtualization solution for Dell install of our customer base, and vSAN is our primary solution.

vSAN can help customers save on storage system costs, and also save on the human cost. For an SI (like us), vSAN can save tech service time and easily deploy for maintenance.

VMware vSphere with vSAN HCI system: It is easy to train customers to operate the system even if they have or do not have a VMware operator KB. Most customers can save tech service time via vSAN. vSAN is easy for deploying and maintenance, so some customers can do service themselves.

Simple manager with only one datastore. vSAN has just one datastore. so customers do not need to think where to put their VMs, how to design the physical disk RAID, the LUN size, the LUN mapping, etc. when they use NetApp/EMC/HDS or other storage systems.

• Online dedupe
• VM disk size limitations

vSAN does not have online dedup. When opening the inline dedupe, the performance will be lower than off inline.

Virtual machines disk size cannot cap more than a single node. For a VDI user, it may not save enough to hold a file server or exchange server on a single node storage space.

Simple to set up, manage, and integrate it with tools you’re already familiar (vCenter, vClient) with.

It also gives us a policy-based storage on a per-VM level.

Also if you can apply redundancies to machines, they’re all different.

• All built within hypervisor
• Easily stood up with hardware you already have
• Truly virtualized storage
• Get rid of all hardware, and you get a much smaller footprint
• Nodes can be in different datacenter, and so can stretch cluster

• Good job integrating with vRealize, vCOPS, etc.
• Needs complete integration with vRealize for GUI for drill down analysis
• Would be nice to see features like dedupe because it wastes a lot of mass when striping across multiple nodes and vSphere hosts.

Some difficulty finding compatible hardware, but if you follow the HCL provided by VMware. and make sure you're buying the correct nodes, storage devices, and SSD’s that are all supported, then it’s a stable product. Even if you have problems, it's still only one phonecall.

It supports up to 64 nodes so huge scalability.

As a VMware customer for many years, sometimes it takes a few calls, but they have some brilliant people who can solve difficult technical problems.

• Setup just a few clicks after hardware all connected, “pretty stupid easy”.
• Customers can test and validate without going out and buying vSAN ready nodes.

It loses points because it lacks lots of performance and deduplication abilities that competitors have.

• It's easy to implement.
• It performs very well.

The total cost of ownership, as it's really cheap for us and we have budgetary constraints. Plus, as we're a hospital, doctors need to access their patient data quickly, which VSAN allows them to do.

We haven’t had an issue and we've been using it for about six months now.

I find it’s easy to scale, so if you need 100 more VMs, you know the amount of users per node, and you know exactly how much it’s going to cost you to scale up.

Never had an issue.

The only thing is that as we were early adopters, we found tech support was difficult to deal with because our hardware was Cisco, and they didn’t know what we were talking about.

We had one issue with an MTU, but it didn't take me even a day to set up.

Basically we're a one man shop – we like to keep our list short and simple: VMWare and Cisco.

Try it out. It’s worth it.

I am a system integrator, and this is one of the products that we implement for our customers.

VMware vSAN is used in the deployment of OpenShift Containers.

It is simple to manage without the need for configuration which is the feature that I like the most. The simplicity, as well as the integration with virtualization.

On the troubleshooting front, it was occasionally difficult for me to perform some troubleshooting. We are currently working in a demo environment, so we are not encountering many issues. However, when you reach production with a heavy load, troubleshooting the vSAN may become difficult. 

Troubleshooting with vSAN is an area that needs improvement.

Based on my testing, I would like to expand deduplication to include hybrid deployments and not just for all-flash deployments.

I have been working with VMware vSAN for four years.

I use version 6.7 ESXi with vSAN

So far the stability has been good. We have not had any problems with the stability of VMware vSAN.

The scalability appears to be good. I have not tested it that much, but it seems fine similar to clusters in VMware. 

At the moment, we have approximately 300 users who use this solution.

In reality, we haven't used technical support yet. I don't have an opinion on the support at this time.

I have experience with Cisco HyperFlex solutions.

The initial setup was straightforward. We did not have any problems with it at all.

The deployment did not take more than two or three days. It was very fast.

We have two people to deploy this solution.

We completed the deployment ourselves.

As an architect, I am not involved in the negotiating process and don't have many details about the cost and licensing.

I would rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten.

We use vSAN primarily as an R&D tool to test our products and see how they work on it, and it is absolutely phenomenal. It is one of the best hyperconverged solutions I've been able to get my hands on.

vSAN has improved our organization by allowing us to perform faster workflows, get better overall performance, and create some really new solutions.

The most valuable features for us are the ability to scale out the nodes independently, and the flexibility of the nodes. We can put almost any type of server in there with our connectivity and everything works great. 

The biggest room for improvement I see in vSAN is the lack of SAN connectivity. I've kind of joked around that there is no "SAN" in vSAN. And it's something that we've worked to try and introduce some options for, and we're going to continue to work towards that. But it looks like the door is starting to open and there may be some options, with some of the announcements that came out of VMworld 2018.

vSAN has been very stable for us. Once we get it up and settled in and the workflows going, usually we don't have to intervene at all. Things just keep working. Stability is important for us with vSAN because it becomes the rock that we depend on. When we need an application to stay up and maintain that ability to bounce between hosts, to work in a true hyperconverged manner, it's the only choice for us.

Scalability in vSAN has been really good. It's very easy to add nodes in, to automatically generate the drives and the disk groups. It has been a piece of cake, surprisingly so.

We have not needed to use vSAN tech support, believe it or not. We have not had any kind of an instance where we couldn't resolve it on our own, or it didn't fix itself.

We had no hyperconverged solution beforehand. We knew that we needed to do some testing with them. It started off as a compatibility (test) and just kept ballooning from there until we went and implemented it.

When choosing a vendor, our most important criteria are reputation and stability. You can't go into something without understanding just how good it is, and if you roll the dice, sometimes you get burned. We're a risk-averse company.

I was involved in the initial vSAN setup. The experience was really wonderful, it was really easy, it was very intuitive. There were some learning curves for us because we had never done it before but, overall, the wizard and the experience with the online tutorials that we were able to find solved every concern or question that we had, very quickly.

ROI for us comes in uptime, keeping applications up and running. That's important to us because that's directly attributable to our revenue stream.

Do your research, dig, find out what your particular needs are, what would the overall cost be to - sometimes it's a forklift, sometimes it's a migration. But look at all the factors, look at the requirements of vSAN, look at the requirements of other hyperconverged solutions, and then make the decision.

I would rate vSAN as a solid nine. To get it to a ten it would need: the ability to support a SAN and a little bit of a larger scale. Those would be the two things that I would request.

Deduplication and compression: Software-based deduplication and compression optimizes the all-flash storage capacity.

Compared to other vendors, vSAN is compatible with more expensive hardware, and Nutanix is available on multiple hardware platforms, like Supermicro, Dell and Lenovo.

I have used it for two months; just for test purposes.

We have not encountered any stability issues.

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

Technical support is 10/10.

We did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup was straightforward; I had the KB from VMware to help me deploy the solution.

Before choosing this product, we evaluated OpenStack Object Storage.

It is a good solution for customers that are looking for performance, storage efficiency, and scalability.

It is inside the data center as software-defined storage for the infrastructure.

The most important thing is the simplicity of the product. It is a well-established product with good stability.

Its installation should be easier, and its price should be cheaper. 

It would be good for the product if they can include the data locality feature.

It has good stability.

It is scalable. We have around ten customers of this solution.

Their technical support is fine.

It is neither easy nor complicated. It is in-between. The deployment took one to two days. You need one to two engineers for its deployment and maintenance.

It is expensive. It should be cheaper.

It has a perpetual license as well as a subscription-based license, but they are moving towards subscription-based licenses.

I would rate VMware vSAN a seven out of ten.

• HA
• No physical SAN overhead

Having high availability without the need for a full vCentre/host license is a plus that, along with not needing a physical SAN, makes this solution great when you need functionality without the extra overhead of additional hardware and licences.

It accelerated our P2V plan.

There are bugs in the SAN Health Check utility. It misreports latency issues when the hosts are actual within the correct tolerances. I have been on the phone with VMware about this and they have said it’s a bug.

I have used it for 10 months.

I have not encountered any stability issues yet.

We have not crossed this bridge yet.

So far, technical support is 8/10.

We did not previously use a different solution.

Initial setup was straightforward.

Licensing is fairly straightforward.

Before choosing this product, I did not evaluate other options.

Take a look at the network requirements and use 10GbE.