VMware vSAN Reviews

We have a private cloud that we host in our data center. All of our servers are on VSAN and we have customer servers that we host in our data center on our hardware that is on top of VSAN.

Data store: you don't have to carve out ones and ones and ones and then map from the data stores and data stores and data stores. Good performance.

It makes it really modular too so we can grow as needed, that's actually the case that I submitted to do this talk was about another customer that we host in our rack at our data center wanted to do small entry, have a small entry footprint but then grow as their business acquired other business.

Benefits are being able to grow as needed. We don't have to drop half a million on a SAN for all the storage that we may or may not use and it just eases the pain of a lot of storage. You still have to deal with the, the networking of it, making sure that everything is networked together, but that radically simplifies the storage administration piece.

Some of the problems that I have with, traditional SANS whenever I'm administering them is, whenever I do edit operations I have to be extremely careful. It requires a lot of planning up front to deploy the LUNs. To make sure everything matches all the way through from end to end. So that when I know have a data store, you know, one, whenever I turn it off on the SAN after I’m done using it, I'm not turning off the wrong one and taking down the entire environment. Things like that. You know, I don't have to deal with that 'cause it's just one data store and it does what I need it to do.

So, another big use case that we do is Horizon View for VDI customers. We use it internally and the contrast between our internal use, which is off of an NFS store, contrasting that with a VSAN, deployment is like night and day. Our internal one is kind of slow and kludgy. It's not a big central part of our day to day work so it doesn't impact us as much but I can see how big the difference is between the performance of a Horizon View deployment on an NFS target is compared to how tightly it works with VSAN and how much performance and throughput VSAN does with the, the read and write caching with the flash drives. We haven't got to mess a lot with the flash, all-flash VSAN, yet, but I'm sure we will soon here.

The dedupe is awesome. The stretch clustering is crazy, in my opinion. It's really cool. We've been talking about it internally and have lot of school districts and it actually makes a lot of sense for a school district because they have the fiber runs between the buildings so they can hit the five millisecond, ten, twenty, forty, a gig, requirements of the network and it would be a good use case for them I feel like. We have to look at the reality of it, of course, cause it got announced like yesterday, but it's really exciting to see some of this stuff and especially dedupe. Dedupe for root would be really cool. It's really kind of taking that mindset that I see a lot of people have that VSAN isn't, you know enterprise ready and putting it to rest.

We are a partner with VMware and we do deployments services. Do a lot of professional services that's a lot of what we do and then we're growing our managed services to be able to incorporate VMware monitoring and alerting both, proactive and reactive, to be able to stabilize customer environments and give them the best performance that they can out of their products.

Starting out there was some stability issues but I don't see them the same way that I did. There were bugs, there’s firmware, the HCL cam, seemed a little fluid but things have stabilized significantly. There haven't been any major outages that were something that I would say wasn't our fault or wasn't due to like a configuration error somewhere in the stack so, and the best part about it actually was, whenever we did have these stability issues and outages VSN never dropped data.

It wasn't until we had gone through like five or six, dirty reboots that we started to have it drop the objects from the metadata tables so we couldn't address the objects and see them but they were technically still there, there was just no owner of them. So if we had gone in, you know, with a higher level engineer that knew how to take ownership of those back we would have been able to get them back but it was a VDI deployment so we didn't really care we just scorched earth and began again, but you know, data resiliency has been something that VSAN evangelists really talk about and it's something that they really do. You're not dropping data as long as you stick to the HCL, of course.

Scalability is good. We haven't had to scale a lot. We scale from a three node to a four node and we're trying to decide that to a five node or not, it's pretty easy. Once you have a networking piece set up, like, that's one and done. Upfront costs and then you just bolt everything on the side because you just blast out the same config, same quotes, same everything. Get the exact same hardware. Stick it on. Scales out.

Once you get to the VSAN team they know what they're doing. Like bar-none. They are incredibly receptive. They’re very good at giving you root cause and analyses and helping you work through issues.

We've been a strong VMware partner for a long time and we saw, my direct boss is John Nickelson, he's a vExpert, a huge, huge, huge storage person. He really identified the value that it was going to bring and how, impressive the technology was to have this, you know, kind of decoupling from the, you know, the big SAN box that sits in the corner and it really makes a lot of sense for certain use cases.

Some use cases where a traditional SAN is the right move, you know, if you want the capacity and stuff like that but the VSAN really helps especially with the VDI. That was where our biggest play was initially, was Horizon View mixed with VSAN.

We usually will do a four node deployment. That's in our opinion, the best configuration. Three nodes the minimum, but we like to do four so we can do rolling upgrades without losing our n+1 fault tolerance, and so, when we initially started using this, and technically it was before I started working there. When we initially started using this, we'd roll it out and just take advantage of the performance improvement that it would make. Getting the right cache with the flash drives, you know, allowed us to spin up, spin down, fast log-in times, fast application delivery. Really makes a difference.

If you're looking at a traditional SAN you're already looking at a lot of money anyway. So, VSAN is a contender in a lot of cases.

To my knowledge we didn't ever do like Citrix or, you know, anything like that. We didn't actually deploy the VDIs that are on traditional SANS so I think that we have just done pretty much all VSAN coupled with VDI 'cause it just makes so much sense.

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.

We are VMware and Nutanix partners. I'm more into the architecting role. I propose solutions to the customers. I'm not using it as an end-user.

Our customers use it for their core business applications. They use it for production and non-production workloads.

We are mostly working with its latest version.

There are definitely cost benefits. There is also no OEM dependency. I can reach out to any OEM and deploy VMware vSAN. 

Its ease of use is most valuable. It is easy to configure, and there is a unified interface, which makes things slightly easier.

They can be more competitive in terms of pricing.

They should make the software updates easier. We should be able to upgrade it more easily.

If we can have a unified dashboard for managing the public cloud environment, it would be good.

I have been working with this product for more than five years.

It is stable.

It is scalable. We had a maximum of around 10,000 users.

Our delivery team contacts them. Their response time was good enough.

It is not really difficult, but you need a skilled resource to manage that. The deployment duration varies. It usually takes a week or so.

We set it up for our customers. We have around four to five people for deployment and maintenance.

It is slightly expensive. They can be more competitive in terms of pricing.

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.

VMware vSAN is a hyper-converged infrastructure and we use it as a software-defined storage solution for our customers.

The solution is simple to use compared to other solutions, such as Cisco Hyperflex, Dell VxRail, and Nutanix

VMware vSAN needs to improve its features because other solutions have more advanced features.

I have been using VMware vSAN for approximately four years.

The solution is quite stable in small and medium environments. However, I do not have experience using the solution in enterprises companies.

We have 31 people in my organization using this solution.

Technical has been good in my experience but they could improve.

The price of VMware vSAN is expensive and there is an annual license required.

I have evaluated many other solutions, such as Cisco Hyperflex, Dell VxRail, and Nutanix

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.

We primarily use the solution for our applications and its high availability.

The high availability is very good.

It's a good place to store our applications.

You can install the solution yourself.

The solution isn't as scalable as we would like it to be.

The stability needs to be improved.

The installation process is difficult.

I've used the solution for about three months. I installed it around a year or so ago.

The stability could be better. We're not really happy with the reliability or performance.

The scalability isn't ideal. A company might have trouble with this aspect of the solution.

We have about 500 users still using the solution.

The installation process isn't easy. It's not straightforward. It's a bit difficult, actually. They could work to make it easier.

We have about 17 people on staff that can handle maintenance tasks.

I handled the installation myself. I did not get help from a consultant or integrator. It was all handled in-house.

We do not currently pay a license fee. I cannot speak to any costs related to having this product in the company.

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.

Virtual environment.

It helped to reduce storage costs.

Straightforward and easy to use.

Data services like remote replication.

It's going to be employed for our VDI infrastructure and, potentially, we will move it into our VSI infrastructure.

Considering that we have many storage arrays, this seems to keep us a little bit more contained and it's easier to manage versus some of the legacy storage where we don't have manageability, or we're losing manageability for it.

We have greater uptimes, we're not down nearly as much, and we can identify and deal with solutions to problems that we're encountering in those environments.

• Scalability
• Cost

I would like to see more ease of use, more compatibility with different areas.

The stability is good. 

We have a couple of problems but we're working through them. In the deployments we have in our Dev environment, it's more about how the hardware is interacting. We have them on Dell EMC vSAN Ready Nodes and we're just working through some of the driver issues and some random rebooting that we're having to deal with. But we have support contracts. Everything seems to be doing fine.

Our experience working with technical support has been good.

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.

The primary use case is that we're getting ready to deploy a VDI solution across the campus and our healthcare network.

The opportunity gained with the relationship we have now is limitless, as new features and products roll out, especially with today's announcements: the news about microsegmentation, the RDS in the cloud with AWS, as well as some security features. It's a constant evolution for us. That's really why we're with vSAN.

The most valuable feature for us, long-term, is the integration with VMware that we're going to be using. We're currently using AirWatch, we're working in Workspace ONE. We want to make sure that our VDIs, with the integration of the Windows 10 solution - as well as any-device, anywhere, anytime mobility - work, yet still offer them the ability to gain access to that VDI. That is huge for us.

If you want to get down to the nuts and bolts of room for improvement, we would really like them to look at what Nutanix did for day-one/day-two operations deployment: Bringing in the equipment, getting it deployed, getting it setup, and ease of use of one-click for deploying our 30-node solution. With vSAN we had to go into each one individually and set it up.

The stability is there.

It absolutely scales, that's the beauty of it.

We actually involved VMware from the beginning. We brought in Nutanix, Simplivity, and vSAN technicians, as well as integration with our hardware platforms. But the true key was bringing those guys in, helping us set up the best environment, and seeing exactly what our endpoint was going to look like with our business integration. That was better than, "Yay, we can deploy 40 VDIs in 10 seconds." What does that do for the environment we're currently existing in? So for them to help us set up as a true test in our actual environment, that was a huge help, from all three that we tested. It was really impressive.

I am the manager of the guys who will be implementing the product. We recently received our client from Dell and we have installed it. My two main CI guys are here with me at VMWorld 2018 this week, so we're on a temporary hiatus, but we did get one full rack installed so far, and we're getting ready to deploy the vSAN to it.

The solution is only as good as the technicians you have and the investment put into proof of concept testing. My two technicians are some of the smartest people. You always hire someone smarter than you and I definitely did with these two guys. They've already got it worked out. We had the tasks laid out, what we were going to do day-one, day-two, rolling it into a test environment, and then production. We already had that done before we had the equipment on site.

We're just wrapping up year-two of our five-year ROI plan and this VDI solution, with vSAN, is part of it.

We purchased a VMware Enterprise agreement so vSAN was already included with what we had. It was just a smart choice, given where we were heading eventually, to go with vSAN. That was one of the deciding factors.

We just wrapped up proofs of concept for both hardware and software. We did vSAN, we did Nutanix, and we did Simplivity. We looked at HPE hardware and we looked at Dell EMC hardware, among others.

We actually decided to go with Dell with a vSAN solution, even though Nutanix had better day-one/day-two operations, straight out of the box for us. Long-term, we felt that the vSAN solution itself was going to serve us in terms of to utilizing and leveraging the power of VMware, either going to a private and hybrid-cloud solution or public and hybrid cloud solution.

As far as the hardware goes, we didn't really have that much of a preference among the three, but we did see that Dell EMC's OpenManage solution for managing the hardware, the bare metal itself, was much more productive than the other two.

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".

• Allows for very easy administration
• You don't have LUNs to set up and assign
• The ability to set up storage policies and assign them at the disk level
• Allows for different setups for different workload requirements

• Allows for the expansion of our public library patron computer environment into a three-node VMware cluster using commodity servers
• Eliminates the need for expensive disk arrays and controllers
• Provides greater reliability and performance

We have been using vSAN in one environment for about eight months and in another environment for about four months.

The only issue I encountered during deployment was with the hardware and not with vSAN itself.

The disks in the new servers were installed at the factory as RAID disks. I had to mark them as non-RAID disks so that vSAN would be able to see them correctly in order to add them to disk groups.

There have been no issues with stability.

We have had no issues with scalability.

Fortunately, I have not had to contact support for any issues with my implementations.

We chose VMware vSAN for these reasons:

• It is part of the ESXi kernel. This allows for the product to be very fast with little overhead.
• It is included in the Enterprise Plus version of ESXi. Compared with competing products, it provides great cost savings.

We have a Nutanix environment running in production as well.

The initial setup was straightforward as was learning the vSAN environment.

The complexity comes in setting up and managing the storage policies. These can be simple or complex depending on the environment.

When using VMware Horizon View, there are several storage policies that are auto-created and managed. Creating and managing your own policies and rule sets depend on your needs and workloads.

VMware vSAN is included in the enterprise plus level of software that we purchased. Our cost savings were due to buying commodity server hardware with local hard drives instead of investing in large SAN hardware.