VMware vSAN Reviews

VMware vSAN is our hypervisor and we are using it for all our applications.

We are facing some problems with updates with the VMware vSAN. When we upgraded from version 6.5 to 7, we have been faced with many problems. They have been deploying many hotfixes for this version, and they need to continue to improve this version.

I have been using VMware vSAN for approximately three years.

VMware vSAN is a stable solution.

The solution is scalable.

We have approximately 1,000 users using this solution.

VMware is the host of all of our servers. We have many kinds of servers, such as application, service, call manager, and mail servers. Many users use these servers from all the titles in the company. We use this solution every day in our company.

When we faced some problems, we opened support tickets with VMware, and their support was very fast. They were able to fix the problems we had.

We were previously using Microsoft Hyper-V.

VMware vSAN is more professional than Microsoft Hyper-V for this kind of application. The scalability for VMware is better than  Microsoft. There are limitations in Microsoft Hyper-V. and many applications support VMware vSAN, such as Oracle, Cisco, and Linux.

The implementation is simple, it was very straightforward. It took us approximately three weeks because it was installed in four locations.

We used a consultants company called Adaptive here in Cairo, Egypt for the installation.

The consultant was very good, and their information was perfect. They were very helpful to us.

We have a two-person technical team that supports this solution.

There is a license to use this solution and we pay approximately $30,000 annually. There were not any additional fees required other than the license. The solution is expensive.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The initial setup was straightforward, not complex at all.

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

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

I find that vSAN allows for very easy administration. The fact that you don't have LUNs to set up and assign is great. The ability to set up storage policies and assign them at the disk level is also a great part of this product. You can allow for different setups for different workload requirements.

vSAN allowed for the expansion of our Public Library Patron computer environment into a three-node VMware cluster using commodity servers. This eliminated the need for expensive disk arrays and controllers while providing greater reliability and performance.

We have been using vSAN in one environment for about eight months and 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 for addition to disk groups.

We have had no issues with stability.

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

We have a Nutanix environment running in production as well. We chose VMware vSAN for several reasons. First, the vSAN solution is part of the ESXi kernel. This allows for the product to be very fast with little overhead. Secondly, vSAN is included in the Enterprise Plus version of ESXi which, compared to competing products, provides a great cost savings.

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 purchase. Our cost savings is in buying commodity server hardware with local hard drives instead of investing in large SAN hardware.

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

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

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

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

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

I tested it over a period of five months.

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

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

Technical support is excellent. VMware provides top notch support.

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

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

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

We did not evaluate any other options.

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

With Virtual SAN we did like the performance, the simplicity, the fact that it’s very easy to manage and upgrade and the integration with all of the VMware technologies that we are very familiar with. Also the fact that it's completely different from the old paradigm of provisioning storage and different storage systems and it's also saving rack space. We use less physical space for the deployment of storage systems.

When we first were shown Virtual SAN, we compared our traditional storage system what we had with the Virtual SAN performance in one of our labs and we showed that the performance was impressive with Virtual SAN. So, we started adding more applications to it and expanded this Virtual SAN Proof of Concept that we had. So, we realized that our performance is comparable to old flash, disk carriage at a much better core structure that we get as cloud providers. So, the fact that it is very fast, very simple and the fact that it's also easy to consume as a cloud provider, this made it a no brainer for us.

The simplicity to provisioned VMs and applied policy to specific VMs for our customers is one of the most important features for us without having to separate the area of storage like we had before with our traditional storage system. As a cloud provider the biggest challenge with storage is that you get completely mixed workloads. You don't know what the customers will be landing on. So, there is no way to predict the storage performance needs of a customer before they actually start using the systems.

There's some features in the future releases that we would really like to see: encryption as part of the offering. The application and compression would be nice to have those features available in the next Virtual SAN releases and also the capability to serve storage through other protocols. Like NSF or iSCSI for other vendors, for other applications that are not VMware. We have some solutions now that we use like Nexenta, in order to do that but it would be nice if Virtual SAN support of this natively. So we have one vendor to deal with.

Cloud Carib is a cloud provider in the Bahamas, and it’s targeting enterprise customers in the Caribbean. The company started about three years ago and because we're using VMware products since the beginning, working with Virtual SAN on the new storage offering in addition to our vCloud stock which is the Cloud Director, vSphere, and VCNS.

There’s never been an issue with Virtual SAN over the last year that we've been testing it. Support is really efficient because it's same global support with VMware that we've been with and we are familiar with. As far as I know, some of the highest rated support from any vendors that we use. We did all sorts of tests initially before we deployed in the production environment. We simulated disk failures, host failures, network failures, and Virtual SAN didn't have any issues dealing with all of these failures, so we're confident in that deploy more applications, more VMs in this system.

Since the original deployment, we have doubled the capacity of our recent cluster with zero down time. So the more nodes we have the more capacity we get the more performance and there's no downtime. So, it's very easy to scale up, scale-scale out with VSAN and all it takes is a few clicks. It's a very efficient way to upgrade your storage without adding more rack space than you actually need because by having converged storage network in the computer capacity, we don't have to waste rack space which is at a premium where we are in the Caribbean. So we did like the fact that we can scale our compute and our storage at the same time without wasting rack space.

The technical support that we get from VMware is part of our cloud provider contract is very efficient, very quick responses. The support is always knowledgeable and they can resolve the issues. As far as I know it's one of the highest rated support from any vendors that we use and this is very important for our storage system because that's the most critical aspect of customers' data. They need to be able to have confidence that the data is on a solid stable system.

So the way that we found out about Virtual SAN, we kept running into performance problems and capacity problems with our current storage that we had before. With all storage that we had and Virtual SAN is a radically different approach. So we were intrigued by that and, after testing it, we realized that all of our requirements were met by this approach. So some of the criteria that we look at when we evaluate vendors is the credibility of the vendor in the industry. The support history that we have with them, customer references.

So with VMware, we know that VMware is already used by everybody in the Fortune 500. Huge companies globally rely on VMware for day to day operations. So, we’re fully con=fident in basically running all of our infrastructure through the VMware technologies.

We spent quite a bit of time studying the design guides from VMware about the proper implementation and the hardware compatibility list. Ran all of the self-checks that were listed on the website and we used hardware that was certified ATL. And with these requirements- having passed the requirements it was very simple to enable Virtual SAN. So, after the initial, deployment design we're able to implement it in a matter of hours. It was, very, very simple. Much easier than deploying a hardware based storage system.

The vendors that were directly competing with Virtual SAN for our project were hardware vendors that were providing all-flash systems. This would be the comparison for us. The cost of the all-flash systems was prohibitive for us. We are a relatively small cloud provider in the Caribbean and, with Virtual SAN, we like the fact that we can pay through the VCOM program where we pay for only what we use and this was another huge benefit with Virtual SAN in our use case.

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.

Our customers use this product when they don't want to deploy an expensive storage device but they're looking for good storage technology. I'm a system integrator.

This is a mature, easy-to-use, and easy-to-scale type of technology. When a customer wants network security and integration of NSX technology, vSan is a good solution.

I'd like to see a simplification of the upgrading process. For now, I have to verify each and every component before upgrading. If there were a technology to check the compatibility without the complexity, it would be helpful to users.

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

Whenever I need support from VMware, I get very good support from the team.

The initial setup is somewhat complex. It involves checking hardware compatibility before buying it and installing the VMware components. One person can deploy an entire environment in a day.

Licensing costs are more or less on par with other similar products. 

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

We primarily use the solution on Microsoft Windows Active Directory and loads of applications. Most of our stuff, over 90% of our servers, are on VMware.

The ease of use is great.

The initial setup and upgrade process was pretty straightforward. 

Technical support is great.

The updating process could be easier. It's just a bit more complex. I don't update very often. It's something I do infrequently, and therefore, we haven't got that much experience with it. That said, this Lifecycle looks better. There's a new feature called Lifecycle, which is dealing with the issue sI mainly have.

I haven't done an update yet with the new system. My understanding is it's an improvement from what I can see. 

Guests that are pinned to hosts for various reasons, for antivirus or the backups should be able to be reported that they are being pinned, and also reported if things have snapshots. When you're doing certain things, they don't work so well if you've got snapshots on or if you've got things that are pinned. They can't move. When you're doing things, if there was something that was going to stop it from working that's within VMware, these should automatically be checked. 

The stability of the product is very good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable and the performance is good.

The scalability is quite good. I don't know any others, to be honest. I've never used Hyper-V or any of the others. It's quite a de facto standard so I'm happy enough. I'm not informed as to how difficult or easy it is compared to others.

We'd like to expand in the future. We've tried to utilize it for everything. We can't do that at the moment due to licensing. Not the VMware licensing. It's more due to Oracle.

Technical support is very good. We have two places to get assistance. We have this vendor who supplied the new VMware and installed it and converted it, and we got another supplier who maintains everything and they're both very good. I'd recommend both of them.

The last setup was an upgrade. It's not so complex as we had to upgrade an existing system. It's not overly complex. I'd rate the process at a four out of five. 

The issues we had were mainly due to other things like the backup and data transfer. It wasn't actually to do so much with VMware itself and the other things. It was the transfer of data from one storage device to another and VMware wouldn't let us do it.

The deployment took about two weeks. 

We had a third party do it. They are a lot more experienced than us so we paid them for all the new hardware and we paid for them for the engineering to fit it and install it. We paid for them to convert from the old system to the new system - from the old VMware to the new VMware.

Our experience with them was very good. They were extremely helpful.

I don't deal with the licensing. I can't speak to the costs involved.

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.

All of our customers are either doing virtual storage on the cloud, or they're trying to extend their on-prem storage solution into the cloud. Our typical use case is providing features in the cloud that are typically on-premise, and that includes storage as well. For example, we might have vSAN on-prem storage that the workloads are accessing, and we want to extend it to the cloud to start spanning workloads out there. 

Most customers have a hybrid setup, with some of their infrastructure on-prem and some on the cloud. Other customers are getting out of the data center business altogether and moving everything into the cloud.

There is a lot that VMware could improve from a marketing perspective. The cloud is still new for many people, so extending storage should be effortless. It shouldn't be so complicated to extend the storage so workloads can access it no matter where they go. 

When you're moving a workload, you don't want to worry about whether the storage will be there or not. Ideally, that should be easily replicated and extended to a cloud environment. We have a lot of vendors trying to extend their on-prem infrastructure seamlessly. That could be workloads. It could be extending the virtual hardware to on-prem storage or the physical storage to virtual storage in the cloud. Everything should be easy for customers to consume and configure, but some of this stuff is still pretty complex because it's so new.

I've been using vSAN for about five years.

I think vSAN's stability is good. It's an underlying solution for both on-prem and in the cloud, especially the VMC on AWS stuff too. VMware has been around for a long time, so it's pretty stable.

All the vendors are working on making the setup more straightforward. Things are becoming a little more scripted. More automation and installations where you don't have to check every box are always good.

I rate VMware vSAN nine out of 10.