VMware vSAN Other Advice

VC
CEO at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

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.

View full review »
Lipaz Hessel - PeerSpot reviewer
Integration Manager at Gilat Satellite Networks

I would rate this solution 4 out of 10. 

For my needs on virtual machine and HCI, which is hyperconverged infrastructure, I have another solution that costs less and gives me better features. When it comes to one feature that only VMware supports, I had to pay. They have the patents, and they have things that only they can do. But I work in the telecom world, and we give services to a lot of companies. On my infrastructure, there are more than 80 million people using the infrastructure on a daily basis. Most of it is not VMware, and I'm so happy.

For the last two years, Gartner and even Nutanix have been above VMware.

My advice is to be sure you really need it, as there are other vendors in the market that give good solutions. Nutanix and Hyper-V give a solution that is good for most cases in the market. If I take the business world, 80% of the businesses in the world will be okay with other vendors and they cost less. 

My environment is 26 physical servers that aren't VMware and two physical servers that are VMware.

Previously, we had 400 servers, and only five of them were VMware. When you look in the market, you know the better solution for your needs. No one in the world has been fired or lost their job for purchasing Cisco; it's the name. It's the same with VMware; it's just too expensive.

View full review »
Emmanuel Nguyen - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at Anetys

I would rather prefer Nutanix over this solution. Overall, I would rate vSAN solution a six out of ten. 

View full review »
Buyer's Guide
VMware vSAN
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about VMware vSAN. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.
SigfridCecillon - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at Arsium

Overall, I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. 

I would advise ensuring that the VPN destination is a good one and reliable. VMware-listed prerequisites on the websites are important, and clients should confirm services are good before deployment.

View full review »
it_user581832 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior VMware Architect with 51-200 employees

vSAN 6.2 has lot of new features which can be good for small and medium-sized servers & VDI infrastructures.

View full review »
SS
Infrastructure Professional Service Team Lead at G-Able

For now, I wouldn't recommend it because of the price. There are other products on the market that work well like Nutanix. 

In your opinion, these are better options. 

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

View full review »
Mahesh Bhadoriya - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at Informatics Technologies

We've been utilizing VMware vSAN internally within our organization for the past three years and offering it as a solution to our customers. It helps eliminate the need for external storage and leverage the latest technology provided by VMware.

It significantly improved our storage efficiency by supporting disk groups. However, there were limitations as it only allowed for five disks. To enhance efficiency further, we needed the capacity to increase to at least seven disks per group. Additionally, for better tiering capabilities, it would be advantageous if it could support 12 disks per tier.

The recent integration with VMware's ecosystem has improved our operations by simplifying deployment and management tasks. With internal integration, deploying and managing the repository from a single dashboard has become easier.

The scalability has supported our business growth effectively. As an organization, we utilize it in various customer roles, which proves advantageous for our organization and clients.

I recommend the product to customers looking for better and more efficient storage capacity. It is a good solution. I rate it a ten out of ten.

View full review »
LM
Senior Solutions Consultant Lead at a comms service provider with 1-10 employees

There are pros and cons. As long as there's VMware vSAN active in the business, the support team along with the hardware and the software services, are good. We've recently implemented vSAN in our Hypervisor. It's already proven on the infrastructure.

The con is that VMware vSAN is no longer perpetual. You need to manage your budget on how everything is going to the cloud, and everything is paid for. If you're using proxmox or Hyper-V or other free redundancies when using VMware. VMware vSAN is the most wonderful hypervisor platform. It is the industry standard and is very prominent in the market.

For advanced users, I recommend using Big Data with VMware. I suggest using vSAN because for automation for startup users. We can provide support for customers with lower budgets who are willing to get support from the system developer. VMware vSAN requires some human intervention.

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

View full review »
ZM
Network Administrator at Mzansi Security and Fire

Considering my IT background, I would say that it is easy to learn to use the product.

I recommend the product to those who plan to use it.

I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten.

View full review »
Vebjorn Nergaard - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT Engineer at Guard Automation AS

I would highly recommend VMware vSAN to others.

If others want to implement VMware vSAN I have experience with the Remote Office Branch Office(ROBO) solution. It's possible to deploy a virtual center during the installation of VMware vSAN. I recommend doing some studying before deploying it because there are some very good tips on YouTube on how to deploy it. It's a special method of how to deploy it, it's important to understand this method.

I rate VMware vSAN a nine out of ten.

View full review »
LP
Head of the Cloud Factory Architecture & President at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten.

View full review »
it_user509289 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at a transportation company with 10,001+ employees

When selecting a vendor like VMware, a lot of the decision comes down to functionality. Functionality, performance, and cost, those are the usually big factors. A lot of times, my company's really focused on cost, which is a pain in the butt. We're a very big VMware shop to start with, so whenever we can use a product that can simplify deployments, simplify management, and integrate with everything that we already have, that makes it really desirable. That's I think what VSAN did; it really simplified the way for us to get our storage for virtual machines and give us that performance and at a lower cost. That satisfied all the different aspects we look for in products.

I gave VSAN a perfect rating because it's been great. We really haven't had any problems with it; it's been solid. I haven't had to deal with the SAN guys, so that makes my life much better. We get much better performance out of it than I would have ever thought. We get all the IOPS we need from it; we get dedupe on the all-flash array. It's my own little SAN and nobody else gets to mess with. I think it's fantastic. I just love it, I really do.

If you have the budget or it's available to you, definitely go for it, because it's going to save money over the traditional SAN.

The only caveat I ever give to anybody about it is that the initial investments are a little rough. You can't just build a 1-node VSAN; you can do a 2-node VSAN, but, boy, no one ever wants to do it. To really get to a point where you get the data redundancy and the high availability, you need a 4-node VSAN, which can cost a fair amount for that initial investment.

If you're trying to do something small, it doesn't make a lot of sense, but if you're in a larger organisation like we are and you have to do a lot, this is a fantastic tool.

View full review »
IS
Business Development Manager at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

I recommend VMware vSAN and rate it an eight out of ten. The product’s support team’s response time and pricing could be better.

View full review »
LN
Director at SOFTLOGIC

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.

View full review »
Neeraj Mehra - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager of Solutions and Support at Esconet Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

Our clients are government and private customers working with VMware vSAN in the manufacturing, defense, oil and gas, and ITIS industries. The solution is generally built on top of the virtualization layer with VMware. It's a part of virtualization. The solution's performance and management are pretty easy.

VMware vSAN is tightly integrated with other VMware products because it's a part of vSphere. It is tightly integrated with the virtualization layer. We can integrate and utilize VMware vSAN for other VMware products very easily.

Using VMware vSAN is totally dependent on the customer's use case. A standard three-tier architecture is recommended for customers who want to use a tier-one application for ERP protection. VMware vSAN is recommended to customers with a use case for VDI, general-purpose computing, and test development environments.

Overall, I rate VMware vSAN a nine out of ten.

View full review »
Yves Sandfort - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO & Majority Shareholder at Comdivision Consulting GmbH

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.

View full review »
Devendra-Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Assistant Manager at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

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. 

View full review »
DL
Consultant at Trigonova GmbH

I would recommend this solution for all use cases. It works for all users and customers. It doesn't matter if it is inside the data center or outside the data center. It also works for VDI use cases. It just works.

We have no problems with the vSAN solution, but it is very important that you use the recommended hardware from the compatibility list. If you follow the recommendations from VMware, you should have no problems.

I would rate it a nine out of 10.

View full review »
AD
Director - IT Strategy Lead at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees

I would recommend this solution to others. It is easy to implement, scale, and maintain. The operational work required to maintain the platform is not that difficult.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

View full review »
Michael Tsang - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Consultant Manager at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

My advice for anybody who is considering this solution is that you need to think about what it's going to be used with. For example, it may be more or less suitable depending on whether it will be used for normal database applications, VDI, or something else. The reason it needs consideration is that the initial hardware purchase depends on it. With respect to the software, there is only one choice, which is the VM license. However, for the hardware, you have to think about the servers, including the storage and other components.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

View full review »
GP
Senior Software and Systems Engineer at SAMU.IT

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.

View full review »
PB
CTO & Co-Founder at Servers Australia

I would advise others to just make sure that latency is brought into the equation because being HCI, network latency determines everything.

I would rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten.

View full review »
Abbasi Poonawala - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Enterprise Architect at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees

I will continue using and recommend this solution.

I rate VMware vSAN a seven out of ten. 

View full review »
Naveen Malkani - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Architect, Consultant and Corporate Trainer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

I rate VMware vSAN nine out of 10. I am a VMware fanatic. As a solution architect, I've designed solutions for many customers. Clients have personal preferences, and they're generally swayed by what the vendors tell them, but my perspective is purely technical. If you are going for features, scalability, and performance, VMware is the best solution. 

It's not dependent on any vendor. The VMware layer is there, and VMware is required, but it saves a lot of costs and provides flexibility. Let's say I bought around 10 or 15 servers, and I'm not satisfied with the performance. I can change my server and migrate all my workloads to the new servers in the future.

VMware has an edge in terms of computing and networking because if we are going for a VMware infrastructure solution, there's a storage layer, so it can work with any kind of server or vendor. Suppose I buy some of my servers from Dell, some from HP, and a few from various companies. VMware gives you the flexibility to work with any vendor, networking, switches, and storage. They can come together in a complete software layer. I can have five servers from five different vendors. If I don't like one, I can plug in a server from any vendor in the stack, and it'll work. 

View full review »
AR
Infrastructure Engineer at Boys Town

I would ask a colleague who is looking at this type of solution, "Do you need storage for VMs?" Hands-down, if you need storage for VMs, vSAN is your option. If you need a SAN for some other reason, other than storage for VMs, then go for it. But if you're running VMware VMs, buy vSAN.

I like vSAN because they release features incrementally, every year, and you don't have to upgrade your hardware to get those features. If you bought a traditional SAN, you would have to upgrade your hardware constantly, every three years: You would get it, and it is how it is for three years. But on vSAN, you upgrade when you have to, when your hardware gets old or when you need more capacity. It's great, you get new features constantly.

I would rate vSAN at eight out of ten. It could get to a ten, once we have more time running it.

View full review »
DM
Director Of IT Infrastructure at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

I would tell a colleague to highly consider it. Do your research and test it. If it fits, it fits.

We've been live about nine months so I would rate it at eight out of ten right now, just because I haven't used it long enough to be confident to say ten. To get it to a ten it will need to be stable for 12 months.

View full review »
RO
Supervisor at RSM US LLP

Look at the ROI carefully, and make sure that you can hit that before pushing the product.

It's cheap, easy, and good for low-end customers. We're a small market, rural area, so we have low-end customers. Price point is just about everything for us.

I would rate vSAN at nine out of ten. What would make it a ten would be lower pricing.

View full review »
CP
Head of IT-Department at a financial services firm with 11-50 employees

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. 

View full review »
MO
Head of enterprise systems at Fidelity Bank Plc

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.

View full review »
MS
Sr. Manager-Data Center and Virtualization at Omgea Exim Ltd

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.

View full review »
JF
Infrastructure Architect at a media company with 10,001+ employees

To me, VMware is a leader of virtualization. I think everyone just follows VMware. 

The reason why we use VMware is because all of the areas that VMware can provide. They fill a need for our platforms. There are other platforms now that provide similar solutions. In the old days, it was a simple Microsoft platform, and they had no management costs. Now they use VMN to create a cross-test and to link all of the servers they want. So they can provide restoration of servers. Furthermore, now they are integrating the movement towards cloud solutions. The only issues concerning the future of vSAN is the price. If someone builds a platform that is free, and only has to pay a license fee for a server, that may cause a problem for VMware.

View full review »
EH
VP of Systems Operations at COGO LABS, INC

I'd say vSAN, on a scale of one to 10, would be a seven or an eight now. (If I have to choose it's a) seven. But with what I've heard while I've been at VMworld, I'd say that they'll probably go up to an eight.

View full review »
AP
Infrastructure Security with 201-500 employees

I work for the portrait gallery and we just serve our own people. We don't sell to the outside. I don't use it for outside organizations.

I'd advise potential new users to ask around for different suppliers who do it, just do a proper tender on supplying, and just to watch out for, if you're upgrading, how your backup treats the upgrade. That's a problem we had. We have Veeam, which is VMware, however, we made a mistake on using a new machine and trying to move stuff across and Veeam made it more complicated, which we didn't realize would happen. It's caused some issues.

Our experience was good, however, I haven't got enough experience with the outside vendors who do this as I only work for this company and we only do the upgrade once every three years or so. That said, I'd advise users to go with someone who's got a good background or reputation. 

Overall, I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

View full review »
CH
Senior Expert Solution Architect at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

A good solution should be small and fast and at the moment VMware vSAN is the best product that can solve our use cases.

I rate VMware vSAN a five out of ten.

View full review »
Ryan Dave Brigino - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at Es'hailSat

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We have been pleased with its capabilities so far. 

I would recommend VMware. The vSAN is just part of VMware.

View full review »
YK
Head of network and web at a maritime company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

View full review »
MC
Senior Manager IT Services at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

View full review »
BM
Head, IS Operations & Infrastructure at IM Medical Centre for Health

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.

View full review »
it_user335178 - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO/CTO at Bay State Health (VertitechIT)

On one side is a strategic vendor and that's where VMware, Microsoft, in the medical case, Cerner, which is a large application provider. There are four or five vendors that I would consider strategic and these are vendors that we could simply not operate without the function that they provide. So when a vendor's classified as strategic and then we look at the function they provide, there has to be a level of commitment. They must be a market leader. They must have enormous R&D capabilities. They must be flexible. They must interact with our engineers at a peering level, not simply as a dictatorial here, use this, and that's what's good for you and no more. VMware clearly acts appropriately like that. So, because, VSAN is part of hyper-convergence, hyper-convergence is a strategic imperative you can connect the dots where a company like VMware is necessary.

I would say, that they are definitely there. They're a high nine [out of 10]. Anybody that's looking to do hyper-convergence I think needs to understand a few basic principals. And all of these apply to VSAN as it applies to any of the elements of hyper-convergence. This is a long project. It's not something that's going to happen all at once and the value is after completion, the sum total of the parts.

If you go through a project like this for example, at Baystate, it's a two to three year project with required funding across that period of time. If, for some reason, we withdrew funding halfway through this process we would end up with less than the sum of our parts, we would end up with a lot of disconnected stuff. So be sure to make sure that your management and the people involved understand that this is a major commitment. It's not, oh, I'm just going to buy this once and forget it.

The other thing I would suggest, be paid attention to, is the affect this has on your people, on your engineers, on your workers, your HR considerations. In a traditional environment like ours, we're siloed. We have our storage guys here, our networking guys here and so on and so on - very expensive, a lot of duplication. In a hyper-converged model, all of that becomes one. Really what you have is a series of better trained, more effective engineers, but less of them. That doesn't mean you fire people.

That means you now put those people to other projects that have been sort of languishing because we just could never get around to them. That's, I think, a big thing to understand, that you will affect the way your users work. If they're not willing to learn new skills, if they're not willing to cross boundaries which were once siloed, your project could be in jeopardy.

When researching anything like hyper-convergence, the more information the better. We spent a great deal of time talking to not just health care institutions, and to be fair, this is a relatively new trend in health care so there really aren't all that many to talk to, but there are a number of non-healthcare institutions that are further along in some of these projects than healthcare is. We spoke with them, we spoke with vendors, we spoke with even other consulting firms. I think it's very important to gather as much information as you can before, you know, embarking on this.

Finding the resources for the gathering of this information is both hard and easy. It depends on which one we're talking about. The ability to get information from other institutions if they're outside of healthcare, and remember I'm speaking from a healthcare point of view, may be difficult, because they may not be allowed to share certain information. Getting consulting information is difficult unless you, of course, engage them. And I would argue that it's not necessarily such a bad idea to engage for a small amount of money the relative experts in some of these consulting firms and just have a quick conversation with them. If all of a sudden they seem to be knowledgeable, you do your homework on them, I would argue a further engagement is not necessarily a bad idea. But you do have to put some efforts into finding the info. It's not just going to fall out of space.

View full review »
AV
Director at a media company with 5,001-10,000 employees

I would rate it an eight out of 10.

View full review »
VO
Managing Director at Ictnet Limited

We are partners and also a solution provider.

The solution is great. I'd rate it at a nine out of ten. I'd advise other people to give it a try. 

View full review »
MA
Senior System Engineer at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees

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.

View full review »
MH
Infrastructure Analyst at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

When we're choosing a vendor, there are two factors involved, and the lowest price isn't always the most important. We need a vendor who provides really good support and products that really meet our needs well. 

I'm going to rate it as a ten out of ten, because it just works. It's always solid.

View full review »
CG
Security Specialist at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Make sure you do a proof of concept. And look at your options for hardware if you're looking at vSAN, compared to some competitors where you have just one option.

I would rate the solution at eight out of ten. To get to a ten they would have to drop the cost. That would get a point right there. Then, going forward, I'd like to see better integration with Update Manager. Some of the manual processes that you still have to do, being able to automate those, have it do them on its own, would be great.

View full review »
it_user335802 - PeerSpot reviewer
Global Cloud Architect at Tribune Media

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.

View full review »
Loay Mohamed - PeerSpot reviewer
System Service Representative at IBM

VMware vSAN is the most trending hypervisor that most of the customers are working with.

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate VMware vSAN a ten out of ten.

View full review »
KM
Senior Server Analyst at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would rate the solution an eight out of ten. To make it a ten, it needs to be able to scale the amount of data that we can hold so we can put bigger, more data-intensive apps on it.

My advice to a person looking at vSAN is get your hands dirty in the labs. Show how easy it is to set up, because it's not very complicated. It's an easy solution that you can implement at your company.

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: Since we're a hospital, we have multiple hospitals in the area. We look at local site resiliency, so we're looking to see if we can put it in each of our hospitals.

View full review »
DR
Senior Systems Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

Make sure you use a solution that is supported. There are a lot of companies out there that are new and sometimes they don't have a life. We have been in that situation before where we have bought something and then it has gone end-of-life or no more support. Make sure you get a solution that is going to be supported for five to seven years, such as vSAN.

I would rate it at nine out of 10. I know it's very young and that they're growing it or doing a lot of updates to it, so I'm thinking it will be a 10. It's just very new to us. To make it a 10 will take some time.

View full review »
KH
IT Project Manager at a museum or institution with 11-50 employees

We are very satisfied with this solution. I would advise others to go ahead and just use it.

I would rate it an eight out of 10. It is a good product.

View full review »
SA
System Admin at Institute of Space Technology (IST)

I advise those people that have a large amount of data and they need very fast retrievals, they must use the scalable feature of VMware vSAN.

I am fully satisfied with VMware vSAN.

I rate VMware vSAN a nine out of ten.

View full review »
VA
R&D Architect at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

View full review »
PL
Systems Administrator at a educational organization with 201-500 employees

The product is at least an eight to eight and a half out of ten. Because the feature growth that I've seen them put into the product since we've been with them since 5.5, they are innovating with each release. They're adding more features and all that adds up to a better ROI on our investment.

As we were consolidating so many servers, we had a really high consolidation ratio. We wanted to have something that was close to being local disk. However, we also needed to have redundancy so we could take a node down for maintenance or if a node would crash. All the same standard reasons of why you would want high availability.

What I look to see in a vendor is good customer support. I want to talk technical with someone. I don't want a lot of marketing PowerPoint stuff. I want to talk to people that know the product very well. Because if I start using the product, I will need that support on the back-end. I don't want to be flailing by myself in the wind. I want to have good expertise that I can call on to help.

View full review »
JL
IT Manager at VelocityEHS

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.

View full review »
MC
Team Lead System Integration at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

The advice I would give is to properly analyze your host infrastructure. Make sure that your network cards are sufficient for the environment you're trying to deploy in, whether it be all-flash. There are already some Ready Nodes available. Go with the Ready Nodes when it comes to vSAN. Don't try and buy your own parts - something we looked at originally that we scrapped. That would be my main advice. Go with Ready Nodes when it comes to virtual SAN.

In terms of improving the product, we're very familiar with the new features in 6.7, which we're going to be upgrading to. Data encryption, we would like to deploy, as well as compression and deduplication. Those features are already available in the new version. We just have to take the time to deploy them.

Out of ten, I'd give it an eight. We're very happy with the product. To bring it to a ten we'd rather not upgrade as often. Right now, we're at 6.2 and that wasn't long ago. They're already going to 6.8 now. We'd like to have a little bit of a normalization period before we get to the next product. I understand it's a focus for VMware. We're very happy they're focusing on it.

View full review »
RT
Senior Network Engineer at Reliance Standard Life Insurance

I would definitely tell colleagues to move towards this solution. I've had a lot of people wanting to go to Hyper-V, not VMware. I have told them VMware is much more mature, it's got the feature list, it has a lot of good qualities.

View full review »
it_user315612 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud Architect Leader at a aerospace/defense firm with 10,001+ employees

I would say that the main reason its attractive is that you can grow as you need. The other thing that makes it especially attractive is that from an IO perspective, VSAN has the better ability to perform more efficiently because it operates within the hypervisor. It's VMWare specific so that can be a downside. But for pure VMWare shops, VSAN is the best option in my opinion.

View full review »
WS
Senior System Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 201-500 employees

I can recommend VMware vSAN if there are problems that they face, such as limitations for their applications. It would be good to use VMware vSAN. If they have not found limitations in their operating system while working with Windows, they can use Microsoft Hyper-V instead.

I rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten.

View full review »
HB
Principal Security Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

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.

View full review »
it_user589482 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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.

View full review »
it_user335157 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at Cloud Carib

There's no issues that we have with it so far. We're very happy with it. I would highly recommend Virtual SAN for any demanding application that this running on VMware. We have no have reservations at all with Virtual SAN. We recommend Virtual SAN to anybody was has demanding applications.

So a lot of people think that Virtual SAN is a new unproven solution that people might use for testing or development but, what we actually see when we talk with our peers and with what we see with our customers is that people are using it in production and we are using it in production. If it can be used in production for a demanding app environment like cloud provider, then it means that it can definitely be used in production for any company that has storage requirements, demanding storage requirements.

Peer reviews and peer comments are very important factors when evaluating storage solutions or any other priced IT solutions is the raw data that you see from the people that are using it the way that we are going to be using something. It's not media or something that's not tested. So, this has the most weight for us. The most important factor when considering a solution whether PRC.

View full review »
Parin Thaker - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Specialist at Dotcad Pvt Ltd

It's important to check the compatibility before deploying. This is a good solution and I rate it nine out of 10. 

View full review »
AM
Works at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

We have been working with vSAN for the last two years, and we haven't seen too many issues overall, but because of the troubles we have faced with the fact that vSAN doesn't let you put a node in maintenance mode unless you have six or more nodes, I would rate VMware vSAN a six out of ten.

View full review »
JM
Senior Solutions Architect at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I rate VMware vSAN nine out of 10. 

View full review »
AB
Senior Technology Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

VMware vSAN is not right for all types of use cases. It is specific to an opportunity if the customer is looking at an interim solution and wants to keep the costs low. This environment is more to do with development testing.

VMware vSAN is a good fit if you are looking at security and scale. In an environment that is more productive and needs better performance, this solution may not be the right fit.

I would rate this solution a 9 out of 10.

View full review »
Muzamil Yakub - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Executive Officer at Infoview Limited

I rate VMware vSAN a nine out of ten.

View full review »
DS
Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

View full review »
MR
AVP at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

VMware vSAN may not be the right solution for everyone or for every solution. There might be more solutions that you want to consider depending on your issues of application deployment at hand.  So you have to look at your own factors and compare solutions thoroughly before you make a big decision. I would rate VMware vSAN at an eight on a scale of ten.

View full review »
JM
Engineer at a consumer goods company with 10,001+ employees

If you're going to run vSAN, make sure that you stick to the HCL and that your firmware and your drivers match what's on the HCL before you implement it or go live with it.

When selecting a vendor, for us, support is number one, the support that we can get from them. The other factor would be the forward-looking direction of the company.

View full review »
TW
Engineering Specialist at a logistics company with 10,001+ employees

I rate it at 10 out of 10 because it is just a really good product. I've used other products like it and it seems to be the most stable and easiest to configure.

View full review »
it_user305391 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Engineer at SynchroNet

Obviously, it saves rack space and that's something you have to consider. It's an important thing 'cause you got to pay for power, cooling, if you got give him more cabinets cause you got another SAN coming in that's more money for you that you may not be fully utilizing and it really helps with that efficiency. You know, your rack space is doing as much for you as they can because if you have to compute the storage memory, in some cases will view the GPU off load just for us all in a little for you, for your rack, and we have three of the exact same deployments just like on top of each other. Two of them are customer's and one of them is ours and they, you know, at 12 views of stuff, just one on top of the other where it would be, probably have a full rack rather than just, you know, a quarter of the rack and that's very beneficial.

I'd probably rate it a seven right now. Probably in six months it'll be an eight or a nine. Just, you know, growing pains obviously. It's a fairly new product. Having to deal with some of the baby steps, you know, and the HCL, getting the HCL right, the ready nodes things that they've been doing they've pretty much replaced the HCL with ready nodes. That was actually our initial offering for VSM was that. So, that actually simplifies the process a lot. It helps to bolster and make sure that you're not deploying something that isn't going to work.

You got to size the compute, the memory and the storage right? You got to make sure that all those are going to make sense so that you're going to be able to hit that within the con-con-confines of VSAN. Yeah, you only get the one flash disk and you want to make sure that you're hitting at least ten percent flash, magnetic disk and so you have to just you have to evaluate it. You know, make sure that it makes sense and don’t discount just because you think it's not enterprise ready or that it's too expensive.

View full review »
DD
Director - DC & Hybrid Cloud Presales Lead for APAC at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

I would definitely recommend it to others. vSAN is not suitable for all environments. It is better to do the assessment before going ahead with vSAN.

I would rate it a seven out of 10.

View full review »
TA
Head Of Products And Solutions Architect at a government with 201-500 employees

In my country, Myanmar, both VMware, and Cisco are the most reliable solution for networking and virtualization than other related solutions. Other vendors, such as Nutanix and SimpliVity are quite strange to our IT environments at this time.

I rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten.

View full review »
FK
Head Of Network & Technical Support at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees

We're using version seven of the solution. I'm not sure if it is the latest version or not.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of then.

I would recommend the solution to other users.

View full review »
SM
Manager at a non-profit with 201-500 employees

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.

View full review »
RL
Product Operations at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor for us are the stability of the product, as much uptime as we can get, and service contracts so that we can get people to react more quickly to cases that we open and get things escalated properly.

I rate vSAN at nine out of ten. What would help make it a ten would be if we didn't have so much inconsistency in the information around how to deploy it. That that would be a little bit better.

View full review »
GL
Manager, Technical Systems at a healthcare company with 5,001-10,000 employees

You'd want to give it a 10 out of 10 based on what they're doing in the future, but if you always give a company a 10 they'll feel like they're already there. I would actually rate vSAN one below Nutanix, as far as maturity of the model goes.

I would give vSAN a very solid eight. There is room for improvement to catch up to Nutanix. Nutanix is definitely a nine. Again I don't like giving anybody a 10 because we always want to see what the next evolution or innovation is that they're bringing to the table. The way vSAN would get to a 10 depends on how they get me to "tomorrow".

View full review »
it_user587577 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Systems Engineer at a non-profit

See if you can really afford it and make sure you have the expertise on hand to deal with initial deployment issues.

I found that buying a new SAN by Tegile is less expensive, less complex, and very inexpensive to maintain. In addition, support is the best in the business.

View full review »
it_user245385 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Manager, Infrastructure and Operations at a agriculture with 1,001-5,000 employees

For our VMUG group, I was trying to set up a lab, and I tried to go with the VSAN for storage purposes. It's a very rock solid product, very robust. Compared to the previous iterations it is very flexible and very strong now. It was a breeze to set up, it didn't take time. The reliability of VSAN is really good, I was able to set it up at four nodes and I purposely took out one node just to see what happens, and it just kept working fine.

Looking at VSAN or a different solution, it depends on the use-case really. Someone looking for Oracle database set up on ASN, is not going to first think of VSAN, but, if you design VSAN the right way, it can host Oracle databases. It's just a matter of how much compute you throw at it, how much storage power you throw at it, and how you design the pool. If you have done things the right way and you have sufficient cache, and you have sufficient Solid State, I think it can be a really good use-case for many different organizations.

It offers a lot of scalability to customers. People looking to scale up in terms of nodes when they need it, it's a perfect fit for it.

View full review »
Omar_Samir - PeerSpot reviewer
Public Sector Sales Manager and DBA at Diverse

I rate this solution nine out of 10. 

View full review »
JF
IT Manager at Triara

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

View full review »
JK
Manager at a computer software company with 11-50 employees

We typically propose VMware to our customers. We advise the customer to switch to virtualization. The main point is the customer would like to recover their data. If they'll use the physical server they cannot meet the requirement of fast recovery of the data. That's why we ask customers to do the server control check into the virtualization. You can save a lot of time managing the physical server and have a lower cost for the backup option. You can have a better recovery solution is the main point our customer use VMware.

I rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten.

View full review »
MS
IT Infrastructure Manager at a retailer with 11-50 employees

I rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten. For virtualization, I would recommend Nutanix over VMware. 

View full review »
AE
Senior System Administrator at Saudi Electronic University

This is a product that I recommend. My advice for anybody who is implementing it is to use a hybrid or private cloud. It's scalable, robust, and secure. Do not go back to the old technologies. Instead, focus on security and a good design. Having a good design will save in terms of cost.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

View full review »
UF
System support engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees

I'd rate the solution at a ten out of ten. We are very satisfied with its capabilities.

I would recommend the solution to others.

View full review »
MC
Manager Innovation Cross Developer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

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.

View full review »
SN
Senior Systems Administration at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

My advice is to look beyond what your initial scope is. If you're looking at using it just for VDI implementations, look at more than just that and how you can leverage it for a lot of different datasets in your data center.

When I look to work with a vendor it's important to find one that is agnostic to either software or hardware and a solution that fits our specific environment.

View full review »
it_user618141 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Manager-IT Infrastructure at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

This will definitely reduce your TCO by at least 50%. Hence, if you are planning to go with this product, just go ahead. But again, as I have said previously, please MAKE SURE that you take a look at the HCL up to the micro level.

View full review »
it_user617412 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Be careful about the chosen hardware, especially HBA, storage devices and CPU depending on deduplication or not.

View full review »
it_user618141 - PeerSpot reviewer
Sr. Manager-IT Infrastructure at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

This will definitely reduce your TCO by at least 50%. Hence, if you are planning to go with this product, just go ahead. But again, as I have said previously, please make sure that you take a look at the HCL up to the micro-level.

View full review »
it_user611970 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Virtualization & Systems and Network Engineer at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

I think vSAN together with other alternatives is the future. Actually, it has already been here with us for a while; network, compute and storage are merging in one box. It’s just a matter of time for it to become the norm.

My rating is for this point in time. However, there have been improvements and new features in the latest release, which will probably make me increase my rating in the coming days.

View full review »
it_user509292 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at Computacenter

I would like to give them a perfect rating if the VMware driver issues, especially with NVMEs, are going to be fixed. Then I would absolutely agree a perfect rating, because we've set up with customers using VSAN Hybrid. We have customers using VSAN All-Flash and it's so simple for the customer to implement, to troubleshoot... It's all about the design and thinking process at the beginning of a project. That's why we are there as a partner.

My advice is to definitely test it out; not listen to all the marketing stuff. Test it out on real-life environments, and especially test it out on newer systems. Don’t test it out on five- or six-year-old servers, because you won’t be able to get the best performance.

View full review »
it_user304773 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

I would easily give it a 9, because 10 would be perfect and nothing is perfect. After the next few releases, who knows? Maybe that 10 will happen.

For people who are evaluating bringing VSAN into their environment, one of the most important things to do is really get an idea of what the performance the requirements are and what workloads are going to go into that environment. That's best done with an assessment. Right now, VMware partners are providing a assessment service for VSAN. That's a great jumping off point to make sure that the VSAN implementation is going to go as expected and have an immediate win.

View full review »
it_user101577 - PeerSpot reviewer
VMware Pre-Sales Engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I have a lot of confidence in it, but it’s a challenge to convince customers because they’re intrigued but don’t want to take the steps. All the specs and concept of having storage within servers is interesting to customers, but not ready to pull trigger. If we can sell more with Horizon, then licenses included for pricing, and must refresh hosts anyways.

View full review »
IZ
Lead Engineer at IBS Platformix

If you want vSAN it is important that you understand all sides of the solution and have the right hardware solution. For example, you should consider if you need reliable disks for cache and split it into more clusters or groups.

I would give this solution a five out of 10.

View full review »
RR
Pre sales Engineer at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

I rate VMware vSAN eight out of 10. In my opinion, vSAN is the most natural way to migrate to a fully hyperconverged solution. If a customer needs a more scalable solution with consolidated management, vSAN is excellent. It causes fewer disruptions from changing the administration. You need about the same amount of knowledge and expertise as vSphere.

View full review »
CC
Account Executiveager at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

I rate VMware vSAN seven out of 10. I prefer a traditional SAN storage solution. Right now, we're only using vSAN for small solutions. At the basic level, it's good enough because it operates the same way as the traditional setup. It's suitable for companies that are starting and might expand in the near future. For those use cases, vSAN is a great choice compared to Hyper-V. It's much easier to maintain. However, I haven't deployed vSAN for a larger configuration.

View full review »
DN
Managing Director at WISE VARY

We are a customer and an end-user.

We are using the latest version of the solution at this time. 

I'd recommend the solution to other users. It's easy to deploy and great for virtualization. 

I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

View full review »
MS
VMware Technician Manager at VAS

We are integrators and a partner to the vendor.

We are working with the latest version of the solution at this time.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. Our clients are pretty happy with it overall.

I'd recommend it to other users and companies. 

View full review »
MM
Senior Infrastructure Solutions Specialist at Fiber Misr

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

View full review »
DA
Founder at a construction company with 11-50 employees

I would advise doing your homework and making sure that it scales according to your expectations, performance, and ownership cost.

DataCore is a company that competes against them. DataCore is more focused, whereas VMware is wide. DataCore is a little bit better in terms of due diligence and information. vSAN is one of the many products based on the VMware industry, whereas DataCore is very focused and very niche. They've been doing virtualization since 1986.

I would rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten.

View full review »
Vishal Bhatia - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a educational organization with 501-1,000 employees

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.

View full review »
PS
Solutions Engineer at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

If I had to rate vSAN, I would give it a nine out of ten.

When we're choosing a vendor, we're looking at the ability for the vendor to be in business:

  • The viability of the vendor
  • Its reputation in the marketplace
  • The technical solution.

These have a lot to do with our decision to work with a particular vendor. We typically seek out the best-of-breed solutions and try to adhere to those. At the same time, we try to work with the same vendors over and over, because we have existing relationships to leverage and existing expertise around the solutions that are adjacent to what we may be evaluating.

View full review »
AW
Systems Engineer at Colorado College

Give it a look. It will save you time and money.

View full review »
it_user581820 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Manager at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

Get a vSAN specialist to come out and spec your vSAN cluster according to your requirements. Have him configure it and test that it is performing properly.

View full review »
it_user315390 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager with 1,001-5,000 employees

Try it out – that’s the best way to know whether it's right for your organization.

View full review »
it_user312501 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Of IT Infrastructure and Operations at a university with 501-1,000 employees

It’s a good solution – the trend is going towards converged infrastructure. It's all policy based – you can set general policy and then trust VSAN to do everything else.

View full review »
Markus Kemppinen - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Specialist at Civilpoint Oy

We have 50 users making use of the solution in our organization.

I rate VMware vSAN as an eight out of ten. 

View full review »
MM
Senior Infrastructure Solutions Specialist at Fiber Misr

There is a cloud offering of this solution but our customers always choose the on-premises version. Most of our customers do not use vSAN as a standalone solution but rather, as part of a hyper-converged infrastructure. We normally propose its use with a product like VxRail and my advice is not to implement it standalone.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

View full review »
AH
Cloud Engineer at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

It's great for DevTest and, as long as you're not going to be consuming data at huge rates, it's great for Prod too.

I would rate vSAN as six-and-a-half or seven out of ten, but only because of the major problems we experienced with them a few months ago that led to some big outages. From what I understand, the current version alleviates those issues. If we're evaluating the current version, I would give it an eight.

It would be a ten if there were more robust lifecycle management and a better-documented implementation within vSphere.

View full review »
it_user618129 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at a tech services company

Keep it simple, and don’t try and over-complicate things. Make sure to follow VMware best practices when it comes to implementing your vSAN solution. Read those whitepapers and make sure you understand how you want to implement it in your environment.

View full review »
it_user613560 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Discuss the deployment with VMware sales; I've met several of them and they are generally smart people looking to help get you the best deployment possible.

View full review »
it_user315648 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director Storage and System Architect at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees

Customer support, the actual technology, how robust or stable it is and the ease of deployment are the criteria too look for when selecting a vendor.

I would say that if you’re a medium IT organization and looking for a cost effective solution, VSAN is worthwhile; but, if you’re a bigger environment, I would go with a bigger SAN like EMC, NetApp, and IBM.

View full review »
it_user315369 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Field Support Administrator at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Try it and evaluate it – it's not a fit for every company, but you should at least do an evaluation to see if it is a fit.

View full review »
MA
Senior System Engineer at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees

I would rate VMware vSAN a seven out of ten.

View full review »
Mohd Azwan Azam - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at Stellariz

It is a good solution to implement if you have a lot of data. It is quite stable and not too difficult to manage.  

I would rate VMware vSAN a seven out of ten. It is a good solution, but it is too expensive.

View full review »
MD
IT Manager at PAFOM

The solution is very good but the price is its downside, this is the reason for my low rating. 

I rate VMware vSAN a seven out of ten.

View full review »
DJ
System Administrator for virtual platforms at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

View full review »
MF
Sys Admin II at a retailer

Go with the full managed support, something like VxRail or, if you go with Cisco, get their full central management system.

vSAN alone, with the current features and version we're at, rates an eight out of ten. The vendor would be a definite one out of ten.

To make the solution a ten, it needs to be vanilla. There shouldn't be any custom drivers, any custom anything. It should just be, "Hey, you know what? These drivers are going to work for this version, the next version, and the version after that." That's the difficulty in this. It takes too much upkeep.

View full review »
GR
Principal Enterprise Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

Go for it. As long as you don't have a very high IOPS-oriented application, it's a great way to go.

I rate it eight out of 10. While it's a little too early to tell, it doesn't seem like it gives the performance that an actual SAN would give for heavy IOPS, read/writes.

View full review »
JB
Systems Administrator at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

If you're coming from a small enough environment, where you have to provision out a stand-alone datastore for this, and you don't have the resources to do it, I would definitely say go look at vSAN for that, because you can definitely combine your compute and resources into one environment.

View full review »
MB
CIO at Dataprev

I rate vSAN a 10 out of 10 because the VMware team works with my team to develop a better, more timely response. We have made improvements for the federal government. We have been working with VMware for almost 15 years

View full review »
it_user614595 - PeerSpot reviewer
ICT Network Administrator at a maritime company with 501-1,000 employees

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.

View full review »
it_user574359 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engagement Cloud Solution Architect - Ericsson Cloud Services at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees

It is easy to design and easy to implement.

View full review »
YR
Solutions Architect at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

My advice to others looking into implementing VMware vSAN is to stick to the rules. That's where the problem is. If you don't stick to the rules and prerequisites, you end up having a nightmare.

People have a tendency to take hyper-converged solutions for granted. They function as the marketing says, as long as you follow certain rules. If those rules are not followed, you end up with a slower infrastructure than you ever had before.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten because it lacks flexibility. Those rules I'm talking to you about, how you have to follow the prerequisites, that is well hidden, is that you can't do what you want. You don't have total freedom. You have to respect the rules and that's why respecting the rules sometimes is a burden.

They always recommend that nodes are the same type, have the same disk structure, and if you change some disk structures, you have to change them on all the nodes. Although somewhere it's understandable, it's a burden. It should not happen.

View full review »
AS
VDI Administrator at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Do your homework. Make sure you know what kind of IOPS and latency requirements you need to meet. Picking hardware is not hard anymore. Everybody has an HCL. vSAN has a great list. Just pick what you want and go, it's not that hard.

I rate it at eight out of 10 because nothing is perfect. I'm hard to please. I'm not saying there are growing pains, but vSAN was still new at the time. They didn't have dedupe and compression yet. The performance was pretty good. Most of it was hybrid in the beginning, but now with all-flash, it's speedy, when it needs to be. It's a young product and nobody gets a 10 out of the gate.

View full review »
DP
CTO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Give it a try.

View full review »
JL
Supervisor at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Be careful of your FTT policies.

I rate it a nine out of ten. It would be a ten if it had better deduping, compression, and the ability to Snapshot volumes on the back-end.

View full review »
it_user625113 - PeerSpot reviewer
Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Have a look at the simplicity of vSAN and how it easily integrates into the existing management tools. It’s not even the ease of implementation; it’s the ease of managing and maintaining the complete stack.

View full review »
it_user618966 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Development at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Start from scratch. Reject all your old dogmas about how things should be and what is right and embrace the functionality that is available.

We designed our system so we can use NSX and all the other features VMware has to offer, even though we didn't plan on using it in the beginning.

If you are putting constraints on your design because of ties to old legacy systems and designs, then you will never get the full benefits.

View full review »
it_user610440 - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Start with a four-node cluster.

View full review »
it_user593439 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT Systems Administrator at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

This is a very good solution if you have the adequate budget to provide for the related requirements or recommendations, e.g., a 10Gb network. It has a wide catalog of uses that fulfill the highest requirements of performance at all levels. Without any doubts, I recommend this solution.

View full review »
it_user590448 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

RTFM and have realistic expectations about the product.

View full review »
it_user315378 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

I think you should try it – its really stable and valuable and help to drill your costs down.

View full review »
it_user315723 - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Support is up there in the top five things to look at. If you can call, have online communities, easy access to articles. I would also add that if you can get through to someone who has deep knowledge of the product quickly.

Stability, the issue that we have run into is that they are fly-by-night brand new startups and you can get stranded without support.

You need to vet the company, they need to be around in a few weeks to help you. Also, peer reviews are very important – invaluable. Salesmen will tell you everything, we look at whitepapers and vendor supplied information. Google is your friend.

View full review »
BM
Account Executive at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

We are a partner of different vendors, e.g. Dell, VMware, Microsoft, AWS, Azure, etc. As we are a partner, we don't use the technology. It's our customers who use it. We've been working with the newest model of VMware vSAN.

There are four engineers who handle the deployment and maintenance of this product.

I strongly recommend VMware vSAN to others because it is easy to manage, especially if you compare it with traditional server and network storage solutions. It's also easy to deploy. Upgrade and authorization for this product is also very easy. These are the reasons why I strongly recommend VMware vSAN to people looking into using it.

I'm giving VMware vSAN a score of ten out of ten.

View full review »
RS
Senior Director at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees

I would rate this solution 7 out of 10.

My advice is to plan well which workload you're going to use for VMware vSAN. Not all workloads are suitable for VMware vSAN. Before using VMware vSAN, you should consider implementation planning, network sites, and group layout.

View full review »
GN
IT Infrastructure Specialist at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

We are a partner of VMware.

Customers considering the solution should be aware that the principal benefits they will get from the solution include integration with HCI, NSX, and cloud solutions.

Overall, I would rate the solution nine ut of ten. We've had a good experience overall and our clients are happy with the product.

View full review »
MP
Trainer in information and communication technologies at a educational organization with 51-200 employees

Make sure your hardware is up to date and make sure you test beforehand. It's a good idea to try and combine the solution with some third party products, such as products for automation.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

View full review »
SB
Systems Operations Manager at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

I would definitely recommend this solution, but be sure to study or complete part of the VMware documentation before you start implementing it.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight.

View full review »
TK
CTO at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

The hybrid storage strategy is not the best thing you can do; for example, when you're mixing standard drives and flash drives, SSDs. Do all SSDs if you can afford it. 

I give vSAN an eight out of ten. It can stand some improvement, but it's much better than it was three years ago when I looked at it.

View full review »
BB
Solutions Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

I would definitely go with the vSAN solution. A lot of times, it's less expensive than third-party software, and it's not managed via third-party plugins. It's there, it's native to the ecosystem, and it works.

View full review »
it_user473589 - PeerSpot reviewer
Virtualization System Administrator. at a integrator with 51-200 employees

Test the product before implementation to see if it fits your needs. Above all, be careful with technical prerequisites and other technical constraints.

To be accompanied by the pre-sales of editor would be the simplest.

Most importantly, the interface is simple, but it is clear that bad handling can have unfortunate consequences.

A simple example: I lose a node in a cluster vSAN, which is also used as a cluster HA. I lose not only the storage part, which is not necessarily serious (depending on the configuration of the vSAN cluster), but on the other hand, I lose also a node of Compute, which can make things complicated quickly.

View full review »
MB
Data Center Engineer at Strategic Solutions of Virginia

Everybody wants to say 10 and I would say it's going to be a 10. I love VSAN and I would say it's probably an 8 and there's room for improvement. It's constantly being worked on and I think it's going to be the storage platform going forward.

Colleagues looking into VSAN, I would recommend looking into the VSAN Ready Nodes, they're pre-configured and you can customize your build to whatever you want really, without having to build your own necessarily.

We aren't currently using the Ready Nodes, but I could see where a Ready Node would be beneficial for deployment. The time to deploy would be improved using a Ready Node.

Peer reviews and peer contents are amazing things to be doing. That's part of the reason why we come here. We want to maintain our relevance, industry wide, and so we always constantly bounce ideas off of other peers in the industry.

View full review »
it_user315327 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Specialist at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

We normally use Gartner as a source, as well as some testing and a POC. The POC was the most important criteria, so my advice would be to do that before committing the resources.

View full review »
JC
Technical manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

VMware vSAN is my main product, and I'm an integrator for it.

The current version we're using is the VMware vSAN 6.2 version.

The setup of VMware vSAN is the same setup as the ReadyNodes, because the ReadyNodes are built on top of vSAN technology. As for how long it takes to deploy, it depends on the number of hosts you're deploying.

We have six clients currently using this software.

For deployment and maintenance of VMware vSAN, we have two technical staff who are in charge: one for setting up the network, and the other one for setting up the physical environment.

I'm recommending this software to others who want to start using it. You can install it on any kind of ReadyNodes.

I'm rating VMware vSAN nine out of ten.

View full review »
RM
Director Of Services Nicaragua at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

It's important to use someone who is familiar with the solution to carry out the implementation. It's fairly straightforward but if you set it up incorrectly then you'll have issues with your underlying storage. It's worth having a professional service to manage things. 

I rate this solution 10 out of 10. 

View full review »
SP
System Administrator at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

My advice is if someone is interested in VMware vSAN it is a good solution. It is stable, supportive, and compatible with many solutions. VMware vSAN is the best.

Customers have to consider when choosing VMware to receive a lot of features, such as replication backup, and if they went with another solution it would be more expensive.

I rate VMware vSAN a nine out of ten.

View full review »
YD
Solution Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate VMware vSAN a nine out of ten.

View full review »
it_user618969 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network and System Administrator with 51-200 employees

Study and evaluate your current setup. Conduct a case study to see if the advantages really outweigh the disadvantages. Virtualization really is the future. Especially here in my corner, almost all or most of the data centers are still in bare-metal setup. Because of the big price (CAPEX), most of the time, management will disapprove this project. But, if you help them see the big picture, I'm sure they are going to promote you for providing this project.

View full review »
it_user587592 - PeerSpot reviewer
R&D Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

It is easy to use and rapidly build up.

View full review »
DN
Senior Buyer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

I would recommend this solution to others.

I would rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten.

View full review »
SS
Assistant General Manager at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

View full review »
FL
System Administrator at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

The solution is an eight out of ten. To get to a ten it would need to be more stable and easier to upgrade.

View full review »
CT
Senior Systems Engineer at SMITHFIELD FARMLAND CORP

Make sure your storage network is strong. But I would recommend vSAN.

It's a pretty solid product now that's it's at 6.5 Update 2. I know that it's going to get better, but right now I'm pretty happy with where we're at. I would rate it at seven out of ten. Nothing's perfect. There's always room for improvement.

View full review »
ME
Virtualization Architect at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees

Properly align your workloads to the storage policies and make sure you know what your workloads are before you leverage vSAN. Have a good understanding of the size of your VMs, the amount of change that they have, and how you are going to be doing maintenance in your cluster. Understand the workload and what you're going to be doing with it before you jump in.

View full review »
DH
Systems Engineer/Partner at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

As far as a software-based, storage control product, it is great. They are staying ahead of a lot of the competition out there. vSan is what a lot of the competition is using.

View full review »
it_user574359 - PeerSpot reviewer
Engagement Cloud Solution Architect - Ericsson Cloud Services at a comms service provider with 11-50 employees

It is easy to design and deploy to react to a changing environment.

View full review »
it_user621819 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect with 501-1,000 employees

Invest the time and resources to properly design and size vSAN early on, long before hardware is purchased. It is very important to ensuring stability and its overall functionality. Contact a trusted solution provider or expert and evaluate the existing infrastructure or environment to determine the correct hardware and software configuration. Lastly, VMware is very consistent with releasing up-to-date ready node configurations that are certified and tested for vSAN functionality. Adhere to those guidelines and the solution will be successful.

View full review »
it_user610437 - PeerSpot reviewer
Virtualization Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

I would definitely recommend vSAN to others. The old, cumbersome, and traditional storage environments are done and belong to the past. Hyper-converged is the next big thing. It is more cost effective, easier to manage, and scaling up can be done almost on the fly.

I recommend going for an all-flash vSAN setup, if the budget allows it. Some vSAN features like deduplication/compression are only available on an all-flash configuration.

With the falling GB/$, an all-flash is becoming the evident choice. The benefits are there (more features and all-flash performance for all VMs).

View full review »
it_user572724 - PeerSpot reviewer
Virtualization Architect at Grupo Sothis

Both vSAN and Nutanix give very good performance, but the support when the infrastructure works with VMware is a simple support; with Nutanix, you have two support vendors if the hypervisor is VMware. Nutanix has a proprietary hypervisor based on KVM.

View full review »
NP
General Manager Sales at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

We're a VMware partner. 

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

If you are using VMware for a long time, there is no need to change your platform, and you can easily add vSAN as a solution. On top of that, there are multiple tools available to be able to have a hybrid cloud solution available for vSAN. If you go with the VMware Cloud, you've got the SCA as well as a hybrid cloud solution in a single product. If you are not willing to use VMware, then you can definitely choose either Nutanix or maybe a Microsoft option or any number of other solutions that may be available in the market.

View full review »
PA
Manager at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

I would rate vSAN seven out 10.

View full review »
TM
President & CEO at McMillan Consulting

Coming from the early networking days when storage was software-defined, and seeing the announcement of this product caught my interest. The platform has been improved much over the first version. Today, we are comfortable running any of our mission critical apps on it.

View full review »
it_user315789 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at Sequel Data Systems

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

View full review »
it_user233772 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Infrastructure Manager at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Try it out. It’s worth it.

View full review »
FV
System Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

I would rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten.

View full review »
TC
Solutions Specialist at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

I rate VMware vSAN a nine out of ten.

View full review »
it_user938985 - PeerSpot reviewer
Customer Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

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.

View full review »
it_user611973 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Operations Manager at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

View full review »
it_user574458 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Technical Engineer at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

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

View full review »
NN
System Analyst at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

If you are already using VMware, then it is great to fun your applications and carries your infrastructure to the cloud. But, I would not recommend this solution to new customers. I give this solution a seven out of ten.

View full review »
SK
Vmware Administrator at Intertech

I would say that if you need more storage-level performance, scalability, or security, you can definitely consider using this solution. I would rate this solution as nine out of ten.

View full review »
SA
System Engineer at GoVirtual

This is a good solution.

I rate VMware vSAN a ten out of ten.

View full review »
VS
Director at Dnipro-Technocnter

My advice when it comes to products like vSAN or Nutanix is that these are products for new customers. Existing customers have a classic architecture and they have no reason to implement a hyper-converged infrastructure.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

View full review »
it_user316464 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology Architect at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

It's not enterprise class yet because it's a new iteration and a work in progress. Just make sure it fits and meets your requirements.

View full review »
RA
IT Coordinator at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I think I am satisfied with the product. I would say it is so so. 

I rate VMware vSAN as a seven out of ten. 

View full review »
it_user609789 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Virtualization at DataLine LLC

You need to use it for the reason of economical efficiency. It’s one of VMware’s great products.

vSAN is a great product, and we see improvement from 5.5 to 6 and 6.5.

View full review »
it_user315741 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Advisor IT Architecture for Cloud Computing Solutions at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

They lose points because its tricky to fully understand.

View full review »
it_user315600 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

You should look at scalability and integration withing the vSphere environment.

View full review »
RA
Head of Professional Solutions at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

I rate vSAN eight out of 10. I would recommend it to others. 

View full review »
AS
Server Administrator at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

When vSAN was introduced we were quite excited about it. We were looking for something that was not traditional and we wanted something hyperconverged. vSAN was a perfect fit for us.

I rate the solution an eight out of ten. To get to a ten it would need improvement in the Health status checkup.

View full review »
it_user629625 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at a tech services company

Work hard on the sizing matters.

View full review »
it_user693828 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior System Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Use VMware vSAN for special use-cases only and don’t use it as an all-purpose storage solution.

Use VMware vSAN for VDI, small VSI, and dev-test environments. Don’t use it for messaging/database solutions as the licensing costs are huge.

View full review »
it_user588603 - PeerSpot reviewer
Virtualization Management at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Be careful with the sizing of the SSDs, as they’re a big part of the infrastructure. Don’t hesitate to go to 10Gb for the network, even if it can work with 1Gb.

View full review »
it_user280782 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Make sure you size correctly when you do the initial implementation.

View full review »
NO
Solutions Coordinator at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

My advice for anybody who is looking into implementing vSAN is that it's a good platform if you're working with VMware. My customers generally do not complain about vSAN. However, if they are interested in a Hyper-V or Nutanix environment then this is not a good solution.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

View full review »
AL
Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

I like this solution very much and I would recommend it. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

View full review »
it_user316428 - PeerSpot reviewer
Storage and Virtualization Engineer at a university with 501-1,000 employees

It feels forward thinking and I can see this as big game changer, which is exciting, but it's only one-and-a-half-years old -- a toddler. There are some minor things wrong, but it's potential value could far overshadow it curent weaknesses, Currently we don’t have NSX, and that could be a pivotal thing, but we don’t have that licensing yet.

View full review »
TG
Professional Member at a tech company with 1-10 employees

I rate VMware vSAN an eight out of ten.

View full review »
Ravikumar Korada - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Recruiter at Covalense

The greatest impact of the tool on my operational efficiency stems from the fact that it serves as a software-based storage solution, specifically for Dell computers, and integrates well with VMware vCenter while offering availability and pre-configured DRS functionalities. VMware vSAN also integrates with vRealize Suite and VMware SRM for monitoring and DR.

I have manually integrated VMware vSphere with VMware vSAN. I have also manually integrated VMware vSAN with Dell and HPE servers. Dell has a pre-configured set of tools with VMware vSan, like vSAN Ready Node R740 and vSAN Ready Node R750.

The integration of VMware vSphere with VMware vSAN has benefited our company's IT infrastructure since it has made it faster than many other storage solutions. The performance offered is also very high.

The reliability offered by the product is very high since everything comes under one system. With the storage solution, you can easily set up a huge number of virtual desktops in your infrastructure.

I recommend the product to those who want a reliable storage system to store their data, specifically in the cloud.

There needs to be an increase in the capacity offered by the product, considering that thousands of products are used in the corporate sector.

It is easy to use the product. You can also use it online through its web interface.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

View full review »
Buyer's Guide
VMware vSAN
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about VMware vSAN. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.