VMware vSAN Scalability

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

It is quite scalable. We are using it ourselves, and we are providing virtual machines to other customers. 

We are using 16 nodes. For creating this storage, we have about 600 terabytes of storage in VMware vSAN in each cluster. If you have to make it several petabytes, then I don't know whether it will work or not, but up to one petabyte, I don't see any challenge in VMware vSAN. I have no idea about the scalability larger than that.

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Lipaz Hessel - PeerSpot reviewer
Integration Manager at Gilat Satellite Networks

The solution is scalable.

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Emmanuel Nguyen - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at Anetys

I would rate the scalability a six out of ten. It is less scalable than Nutanix. 

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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.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
SigfridCecillon - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at Arsium

Scalability is not as simple as expected. While it's okay, there are restrictions and complexities. For instance, you need a minimum number of servers for certain functionalities, making it less flexible to adapt. I don't know the prerequisites listed by VMware that are not allowed. 

Initially, you need to have three servers, for example, when deploying the solution. If you want a backup solution, you need to have three servers for that. And if you want to have a mirror of the room, you need to have three more servers. You can't have just two. You need to have three. So, it's not as simple to expand, adapt, or modify due to these strict requirements.

We have around five customers using vSAN. 

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it_user581832 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior VMware Architect with 51-200 employees

We have encountered some scalability issues and got a couple of performance tickets.

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SS
Infrastructure Professional Service Team Lead at G-Able

Scaling vSAN is manageable; however, upgrading the entire cluster to a new version can take a lot of time and challenging for our customers.

It is easy, but it takes time to upgrade the cluster.

I would rate the scalability capabilities a seven out of ten. It should be improved.

We have small and medium-sized businesses as our customers. 

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Mahesh Bhadoriya - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at Informatics Technologies

We have seven to eight VMware vSAN users in our organization. It is a highly scalable product. I rate the scalability a ten out of ten.

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LM
Senior Solutions Consultant Lead at a comms service provider with 1-10 employees

The solution is scalable.

VMware vSAN offers a robust architecture with various scaling capabilities, enabling organizations to scale up their storage infrastructure efficiently. It provides both capability and performance for different workloads, automatically increasing IOPS based on workload requirements. Scalability is crucial when it comes to allocating resources, and vSAN supports future-proofing up to 64 clusters.

Deploying VMware vSAN is seamless. You simply need to add nodes or increase the capacity of existing ones. Migration processes may vary, but configuring full capacity per node simplifies the addition of nodes, ensuring a seamless experience.

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ZM
Network Administrator at Mzansi Security and Fire

Considering the IT support team and engineers in my company, I would say that around 25 people use the product.

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Vebjorn Nergaard - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior IT Engineer at Guard Automation AS

The scalability is excellent because we can expand with more disks if we choose. The expansion is part of the license model which is simple to adjust.

We have approximately 60 people using this solution in my organization. The solution is always running in the background, it is always being used.

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

For the product cloud, scalability is okay. However, when we try to use a larger cloud, we can add more new nodes into the same vSAN configuration.

Every year, our number of users increases.

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

We're actually scaling out right now from several 4-node VSAN clusters to - I think we're going to go to - some 8-, and then eventually 12-, node VSANs. That's one of the really nice parts about it; we'll just be able to scale out. The only downside I think I have with it from a scale perspective is, we've got some hybrid VSAN right now. That's what we all started out with. We really liked the all-flash VSAN arrays that you can get, so we're doing that. However, we can't merge the two, so we have to create whole new clusters for the all-flash VSAN. That makes scaling a little bit rough there, but I don't think that will be much of an issue going forward, because flash is pretty inexpensive now and that's probably going to be the standard from here on out.

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IS
Business Development Manager at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees

It is a scalable product. It is suitable for enterprises.

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LN
Director at SOFTLOGIC

VMware vSAN is scalable, if you choose good servers at the beginning with many slots for disks, you can then add disks and extend the storage. You can add memory if you have good servers, and then you can enable your construction. But you have to choose good servers for production from the beginning.

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

In terms of scalability, we have to just add the nodes. If you require more computing or storage, you have to add the nodes to the existing cluster. Our clients for VMware vSAN are medium and enterprise businesses.

I rate the solution nine and a half out of ten for scalability.

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Yves Sandfort - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO & Majority Shareholder at Comdivision Consulting GmbH

Scalability for us is an important part of the product because we resize clusters all the time in our environment. We clean them out and actually start from scratch. With vSAN, it's easier for us to add nodes. If in a test scenario that we are building, we currently might have only four or five nodes in the beginning. If we add more, it's an easy add-on for us. It's easier for us to manage it this way than with legacy storage, where we would have to add additional disk shelves.

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

The solution is scalable, we have around 5,000 users. I think there are about 15 people in the company who deal with monitoring, management, and implementation.

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DL
Consultant at Trigonova GmbH

Its scalability is quite good.

I don't know exactly how many customers are using vSAN because some of our customers install it on their own, but we probably have more than 20 customers.

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

We had a long discussion with our vendor partner about a plan to scale up the system. They gave us several options, but we ended up with the most cost-effective one where we had to trim down some of the node requirements that we were planning to buy initially.

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

Scalability-wise, I would describe it as medium-level when compared to others.

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AH
EUC Consultant

It's easy to manage and scale vSAN. We can increase the volume as necessary for the VM or the user. We have around 2,000 users. Right now, we're not planning to increase usage yet, but maybe we will take another look in six months to see if we need to scale the solution or not.

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GP
Senior Software and Systems Engineer at SAMU.IT

VMware vSAN is a scalable solution, as are all hyper-converged solutions.

We have 30 customers using vCenter, and five using vSAN.

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PB
CTO & Co-Founder at Servers Australia

It is surely scalable for 64 nodes. We can run petabytes of data if we want. 

Our clients are small to medium companies.

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

The solution is scalable. We have more than 50 administrators and approximately 200 operators using the solution.

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

Once you develop all three of your stacks, you can plug in the rack servers and all. If you are increasing in parallel, vSAN automatically increases the overall computing capacity of the IT infrastructure in terms of network storage and what you can compute.

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AR
Infrastructure Engineer at Boys Town

We're not that large at Boys Town. We probably only have 500 VMs. Realistically we have about 50 VSXi hosts. So for us, it's great because we can just buy servers and expand any cluster we need. We split clusters based on other needs, like licensing or something else. It's not like we get to 64 nodes. So we don't have any issues with scalability. It works great for us.

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DM
Director Of IT Infrastructure at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

It scales out.

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RO
Supervisor at RSM US LLP

We haven't dealt that much with scalability because we're rural. It's a small area with small community-type banks. Being able to convert existing storage into vSan is really a perfect solution for a lot of our customers.

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MO
Head of enterprise systems at Fidelity Bank Plc

I think VMware vSAN is a scalable solution.

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MS
Sr. Manager-Data Center and Virtualization at Omgea Exim Ltd

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

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

It's a scale-out architecture.

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

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JF
Infrastructure Architect at a media company with 10,001+ employees

We have 130,000 people connected to the platform and to the servers. Eventually, we want to use the cloud, which will help with the volume.

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EH
VP of Systems Operations at COGO LABS, INC

So far, for scalability, we've just been running it on five nodes at our primary data center, and we're building out a second data center. It's going to be running on five nodes there. We haven't really scaled it up since we built it.

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AP
Infrastructure Security with 201-500 employees

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.

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

VMware vSAN is scalable, it is easy to scale out.

The number of people that use the solution can be anywhere from 1,000 to 10,000,000 depending on the customer.

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Ryan Dave Brigino - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at Es'hailSat

The solution can scale. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so. 

At this time, the administration team for the vSAN infrastructure is just three people.

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

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

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

Its scalability can be improved so that it can be integrated with more than 32 nodes.

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BM
Head, IS Operations & Infrastructure at IM Medical Centre for Health

When talking about scalability, the real value is that, for the first time, I can just build it out one host a time. Over the years, I'm sure everyone has experienced hitting the wall on their array where it's too old or the technology has changed, and they're up for a large sum of money in one hit. The actual, repeatable, non-quantity of the cost to increase the storage, is very valuable.

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it_user335178 - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO/CTO at Bay State Health (VertitechIT)

It's actually the internal feature that I think gets us the great feature of savings out of it. With VSAN I simply add disk drives and hosts to my infrastructure at any of the facilities I have. The net result is an increase of both storage and processing.

In the older model, if I need to add, let's say a terabyte of space for some particular tier one application, I have to add a terabyte, from let's say EMC, into data center one, a terabyte into data center two, a terabyte into data center three, and if, in my adding of those, I cross one of those magic boundaries where I'm out of cabinet space or whatever, then I have all those expenses. None of that is true with VSAN. In VSAN, I simply add drives into a chassis anywhere in my system. If I need more space, I buy a simple chassis, throw it in there, and continue to add the drives. Much more scalable. There really is no limit to it.

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AV
Director at a media company with 5,001-10,000 employees

It is pretty scalable. 

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VO
Managing Director at Ictnet Limited

The scalability has been great. If you need to expand it, you can do so. 

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MA
Senior System Engineer at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees

It is really scalable. We have five to six administrators and implementers who work with this solution.

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MH
Infrastructure Analyst at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Scalability: pretty simple. You just add more and away you go.

The data sets are constantly growing, so we have internal needs, new VMs are getting spun up all the time. They're gobbling up all kinds of storage space. We try not to over-commit too much, but everybody does, right? But it's constantly growing and we're constantly adding to it.

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

It's very scalable. I like that. Adding a node is easy. Adding a disk group is easy.

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it_user335802 - PeerSpot reviewer
Global Cloud Architect at Tribune Media

I'm looking at two different ways of scaling that system. One is for speed and one is for mass. It scales into mass based on what size of disc you choose and it scales in to speed based on solid-state drive size. Both of those are two different avenues that work well for us.

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

We scale it with our test environment. We are looking to do it with Horizon. We are able to scale it to see how many VMs that we can host and how long it will take us to add new hosts, if needed.

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DR
Senior Systems Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees

The scalability is very good. If we know that we need more CPU, more memory, we can add more nodes to it. We don't need to do that today but we know, tomorrow, that we have that capability.

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KH
IT Project Manager at a museum or institution with 11-50 employees

At the moment, we have a limit because we host 50 servers. We could have a bit more memory, and we have to buy it.

There are 60 users who are using all the servers. Its usage is moderate.

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SA
System Admin at Institute of Space Technology (IST)

I have found VMware vSAN to be scalable.

We have approximately 50 people using this solution in my organization.

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

vSAN is scalable for us. If any additional capacity needs to be included, we just add to the host and configure the vSAN cluster.

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PL
Systems Administrator at a educational organization with 201-500 employees

We started with a three-node cluster. We are now at a nine-node cluster. We can just add nodes piecemeal as needed to add capacity. It's been very transparent. Users have never noticed when we've had to do that. So, scalability has worked real well for us.

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JL
IT Manager at VelocityEHS

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

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MC
Team Lead System Integration at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

We find the scalability very good. We've been able to upgrade very easily as users come on, as we need to create more VDI workstations. Adding the extra drives gives us the capacity we need.

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GK
Product Manager at Micron Technology, Inc.

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

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RT
Senior Network Engineer at Reliance Standard Life Insurance

We haven't tested the scalability as much, but the small amount we have done has been very good.

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

Scalability is why were using it – especially with v6. Any scalability issues we had, were addressed.

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WS
Senior System Engineer at a energy/utilities company with 201-500 employees

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.

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

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

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it_user335157 - PeerSpot reviewer
Director at Cloud Carib

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.

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Parin Thaker - PeerSpot reviewer
Solution Specialist at Dotcad Pvt Ltd

The solution is scalable. 

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AM
Works at a computer software company with 201-500 employees

You can increase the compute capability as well as the disk storage, so it is scalable.

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AB
Senior Technology Consultant at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

The solution is scalable. Our customers have varying workloads, so we use the combination of on-premises and hybrid cloud, moving from private to public, and public to private so the scalability is always there. 

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Muzamil Yakub - PeerSpot reviewer
Chief Executive Officer at Infoview Limited

VMware vSAN is scalable.

We have approximately 20 to 30 customers using this solution.

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MR
AVP at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees
JM
Engineer at a consumer goods company with 10,001+ employees

It scales really well. However, we're going to be in need of some, not external storage, but ways to expand storage without adding additional nodes to the cluster.

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TW
Engineering Specialist at a logistics company with 10,001+ employees

It's very scalable. That is a really good feature of the product.

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it_user305391 - PeerSpot reviewer
Lead Engineer at SynchroNet

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.

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

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

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TA
Head Of Products And Solutions Architect at a government with 201-500 employees

We have 31 people in my organization using this solution.

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

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.

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SM
Manager at a non-profit with 201-500 employees

The solution is very scalable. If a company wants to expand the solution it can. It's not a problem.

We have about 500 users on the solution currently. We do plan to continue to use it.

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

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

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it_user616041 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Administrator at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees

We have had no issues with scalability.

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

It's all about adding nodes, and the number of drives to it. VSAN is very scalable. I was able to, just for a lab purpose, scale it up to 10 terabytes, and I started off at four, so it tells you that it was easier to scale from 4 to 10 terabytes, and the same mechanisms I've read online reviews and some white papers around it, it goes up to quite a few hundred terabytes.

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it_user316422 - PeerSpot reviewer
Virtualization & Storage Administrator at Franklin University

We’re scaling in a very phased process, running dev test environment with just a small three node cluster, but gradually shifting.

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Omar_Samir - PeerSpot reviewer
Public Sector Sales Manager and DBA at Diverse

The solution is scalable. 

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JK
Manager at a computer software company with 11-50 employees

The scalability of VMware vSAN is good.

We currently have approximately 80 customers using this solution.

We plan to increase usage. Our sales team prefers this solution over other solutions.

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MS
IT Infrastructure Manager at a retailer with 11-50 employees

This solution is scalable. 

In our organization, there are around 1,000 users of VMware, including some servers and the self-service website. We have plans to increase our usage. 

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AE
Senior System Administrator at Saudi Electronic University

Scalability is based on your hardware. We can scale the hardware and then it only requires extending the license.

At this point, we have not had a very heavy workload. We plan to increase our usage once it goes into production.

There is approximately 50 IT staff that have access to it. Our users will include between 30,000 and 35,000 students, and approximately 3,000 staff made up of instructors and doctors. 

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

The solution is scalable. We have already upgraded to extend it. We do plan to extend it again and we are going to expand.

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

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

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

For me, it scales really well. We have multiple product vendors. We're able to leverage all of them using the vSAN capabilities of all of those vendors.

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

We did have some scalability issues. Similarly, when we added a new host in the existing cluster, we faced a similar issue with the HCL, but that was resolved soon.

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

We have not had scalability issues.

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

We did encounter scalability issues. Similarly, when we added a new host in the existing cluster, we faced a similar issue on HCL, but that was resolved soon.

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it_user509292 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant at Computacenter

Most of our customers are using it for up to eight hosts in a cluster. Normally, we know - and our customers know - that you can easily scale up to 64 machines, but today, up to eight is absolutely enough.

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it_user304773 - PeerSpot reviewer
Principal at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

For scalability of VSAN, I mean, you've seen the blog post out there. They've taken up to four million IOPS. In terms of scalability, we haven't seen any roof, any limit, any ceiling to the scalability there. We are extremely surprised that VSAN has been able to keep up with solutions that are four or five times more expensive.

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IZ
Lead Engineer at IBS Platformix

There have been no problems with scalability of this solution.

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RR
Pre sales Engineer at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees

I think vSAN is more scalable than some solutions we've tried. We don't have the same issues as we do with VxRail. It's less of a concern because the software is more independent of the hardware.

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DN
Managing Director at WISE VARY

We currently have ten people that directly use the solution in our organization. 

The scalability is simple. It's very easy to scale the HCI node.

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MS
VMware Technician Manager at VAS

We do have plans to continue to work with the solution. However, we do not use the solution ourselves. We are integrators. Deployments and their sizes depend on the clients.

We have about 60 to 100 clients that use the solution.

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MM
Senior Infrastructure Solutions Specialist at Fiber Misr

It's scalable up to 96 nodes. We have over 500 users in our company who are using this solution.

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DA
Founder at a construction company with 11-50 employees

I wouldn't really be able to comment on that because we don't really have enough of an environment to understand what the cost of scale would look like. Our customers are small to medium enterprises.

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

In our organization's case, we started with a number of nodes and I scaled it up from there. I didn't find any issues expanding the product. Scalability was not a problem.

This is a pretty recent deployment. While I've been working with the solution for three or four years, it's new to the company for the most part.

We plan to increase usage in the coming year. New workloads will get deployed and we'll begin to expand it more.

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PS
Solutions Engineer at a insurance company with 1,001-5,000 employees

I can't really speak to scalability. We have a fairly limited deployment at this point with three nodes, so it's a bare minimum sort of configuration.

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AW
Systems Engineer at Colorado College

It scales well. We have plenty of room to grow. It should be a good long term solution for us.

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it_user581820 - PeerSpot reviewer
Infrastructure Manager at a financial services firm with 51-200 employees

There haven't been any issues with scalability. Adding additional storage was as simple as inserting a hard drive into a hard drive bay or adding an additional server node to the data center cluster. That was all we had to do, and vSAN auto-configured everything.

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it_user315390 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Manager with 1,001-5,000 employees

Unsure – all I know is what I read, if it does what it says it does I'm very impressed.

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

Very scalable, it's one of the reasons we bought it. They are in v2.0, and we feel like now it’s mature.

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Markus Kemppinen - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Specialist at Civilpoint Oy

While the solution is scalable, I feel that this can be better. 

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MM
Senior Infrastructure Solutions Specialist at Fiber Misr

It is easy to deploy additional machines when you need them for your workload.

vSAN can be expanded up to 96 hosts.

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

Scalability is slightly limited in that you're pinned by the physical disks in your hosts, but provided that your solution doesn't require you to have specific disk technology, you can get the size you need and expand it out as much as you need to.

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it_user618129 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at a tech services company

We had no scalability issues.

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

The product scales easily, up easier than down, due to the need to remove the disks and migrate the data from the nodes you wish to remove from the cluster.

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it_user315672 - PeerSpot reviewer
VMware Administrator II at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees

I think it’s scalable in a linear fashion. We’ve outgrown our low-end SAN and hit a wall. We didn’t have a storage guy so we hit a wall when we hit 180 users and it was thrashing the SAN. With VSAN, that kind of issue – especially using the sizing tool – says that you should be more than fine. We're a small shop so we don’t have any doubt that it will scale to size.

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

The scalability seems ok – I would give it 6/10 because in a traditional SAN you can go up to a few terabytes. However with VSAN, it seems you can only get a couple hundred terabytes, and I expected more.

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

It's got good scalability - 10/10.

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MA
Senior System Engineer at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees

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

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Mohd Azwan Azam - PeerSpot reviewer
Systems Engineer at Stellariz

We didn't increase our storage.

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

We don't want to enlarge the environment. If we have a new need, we will separate and start a new system.

We don't want to have a general-purpose infrastructure. It's not a good idea for our purposes.

We value less scalability more accurate assessment as it is not the way in our environment. We don't want to add more nodes to the same cluster, it's not a good idea. We separate it.

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MF
Sys Admin II at a retailer

The scalability is fine. Adding new nodes is very simple.

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GR
Principal Enterprise Architect at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

The scalability has been pretty good for us so far.

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

Scalability is very easy. We've already run into one scenario where we've needed some more storage. We were able to provision the drives, slide them into our current hosts in that cluster, and expand it. It was very easy.

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MB
CIO at Dataprev

My team is starting to develop and make use of the scalability. The team in Brazil is very big in cloud performance but we are just beginning to move into a cloud program.

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AK
Principal Technical Consultant at Fujitsu Consulting India

In scalability I didn’t face any issues.

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

The scalability of the product is way beyond our needs.

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

I have not encountered any scalability issues.

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YR
Solutions Architect at a computer software company with 501-1,000 employees

Regarding the scalability of the solution, you've got 64 nodes into a stretched cluster for VMware. Nutanix goes a little bit above. The only problem is that due to licensing things, such as when you have Oracle and other things, what you tend to do is multiple clusters in order to avoid licensing costs.

The biggest network I have implemented was 16 nodes.

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AS
VDI Administrator at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Scalability is easy. You just buy a node and go.

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DP
CTO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

It has its quirks but the scalability is good. Given that you have to have the hardware, the right driver, the right framework, and so on, it's not easy to put it together, it's not a plug-and-play solution. But once you get all of that done, it becomes a good product.

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

The scalability is very good. You plug it in and it goes.

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

We have not had scalability issues in both ways. Scaling down to two hosts with direct cabling is possible for ROBO, as well as big clusters with over 32 hosts.

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

Scalability is one of the major advantages of this new installation.

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it_user610440 - PeerSpot reviewer
CEO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

I did not encounter any issues with scalability. I suggest starting with a four-node cluster.

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

The vSAN solution has scalability inside its core. Although it has a widely supported HCL, you have to choose the new components when adding nodes to ensure that you won’t have any bottlenecks. With our vSAN installation, we didn’t encounter any issues like that.

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

There have been no scalability issues at this stage.

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it_user315378 - PeerSpot reviewer
Works at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

It’s really scalable in terms of both capacity and performance, at least for our needs.

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

I haven’t looked at configuration maximums but it seems like you can scale it up pretty hard in terms of clusters with vSphere 6.

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RS
Senior Director at a tech vendor with 201-500 employees

I haven't had any issues with scalability, but I think historically it supports only 64 nodes. It's a VMware limitation, but in our deployment in Sri Lanka, hardly any customers use that many nodes. If you consider that aspect, then scalability is okay. The largest customer we have here uses two nodes.

For Nutanix, there is no such limit as far as I know.

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GN
IT Infrastructure Specialist at a computer software company with 51-200 employees

Sometimes our clients find the scalability to be lacking and it affects performance. They're not sure, if they scale up, how much performance they will have left afterward.

Our clients are small to medium-sized businesses typically. They aren't to big.

I'm not sure if any of our clients plan to increase usage. It's hard to predict, due to the pandemic situation. The majority of my customers don't have plans to upgrade or acquire some additional equipment.

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

Scalability of the solution is easy, you simply have a new host and provide a few contributions and then compute. We only have a few people using this product. 

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SB
Systems Operations Manager at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

VMware vSAN is both scalable and stable.

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TK
CTO at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees

I would have liked it to have been more scalable. It's scalable but not as much as, for example, the ScaleIO systems were or the Kaminario. We looked at Kaminario but that was a risky technology, so we didn't want to go there. I think vSAN is okay. It could use a bit more work on the scalability. I think that's key.

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BB
Solutions Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

I've seen it scale up to large databases. I've got some customers who utilize a small vSAN cluster for their Exchange environments because it keeps it encapsulated for them.

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it_user473589 - PeerSpot reviewer
Virtualization System Administrator. at a integrator with 51-200 employees

No. It's no problem. To be honest, we have not upgraded any vSAN infrastructure to date.

I just had to increase the capacity of a cluster in production by a simple addition of hosts, from the moment the compatibility with the existing one has been checked, there are no problems.

Adding this very simply by drag and drop from the host to the vSAN cluster, beforehand, the host must be placed in maintenance mode. Then, we have more than to add the HDD and SSD to the cluster vSAN in place -- either they are claimed automatically or manually. It all depends on the cluster configuration.

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MB
Data Center Engineer at Strategic Solutions of Virginia

The scalability is much greater than the current SAN that we're on because we're technically locked in to a certain number of discs and a certain number of performance and so the scalability is drastically improved. We currently have a four node cluster and we're going to be just incrementally moving off of our legacy SAN.

UPDATE: We expanded our cluster to five vsan nodes however we are now in process of retrofitting four legacy hosts for a total of nine vsan nodes.

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

Considering I've only done one VSAN cluster, I'd say that the scalability is good. We haven't yet tried to add more clusters.

Our company currently has 20,000 users and we expect further growth, so we'll likely have to scale down the road. That said, I don't anticipate really any issues with scalability at that point.

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JC
Technical manager at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

VMware vSAN is a scalable software.

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

This solution is very scalable. However, we've seen some limits within the platform although I believe the latest version may have solved those problems. 

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SP
System Administrator at a tech services company with 11-50 employees

The scalability of the solution is good. The node cluster they are using has been enough for them.

we have approximately 1,000 users using this solution.

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YD
Solution Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

VMware vSAN is scalable.

We have approximately 5,000 people using this solution in my organization. 

Our last customer in India had over 180 servers running.

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it_user618969 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network and System Administrator with 51-200 employees

Scalability is one of its strengths.

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

Many popular SDS products can support up to 1000 nodes. This is an area where I hope vSAN is improved.

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DN
Senior Buyer at a tech services company with 1-10 employees

It is easy to scale VMware vSAN.

In our organization, we have 100 members.

We may increase our usage in the future. With the company's growth, there are plans to expand in the future. We may require additional members. It's possible that we'll be able to scale this solution more in the future.

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

This is a scalable product. As it is only used for server virtualization, we do not consider usage on a per-user basis.

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FL
System Administrator at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees

The scalability is pretty good. I'm pretty satisfied with it.

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CT
Senior Systems Engineer at SMITHFIELD FARMLAND CORP

Scalability is easy to do. It's just drop-and-add and you're good.

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

Adding new nodes and expanding vSAN forward is simple and non-disruptive for a lot of our customers. It makes it simpler so we are not doing late night deployments, and we can answer the needs of the business immediately.

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

We have not had scalability issues.

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it_user621819 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect with 501-1,000 employees

Scalability is not a major issue with vSAN. The latest version can scale up to 64 nodes per vSAN-enabled cluster. The nodes can be configured to be very dense when it comes to CPU, memory and local disk configurations. A majority of the 2U servers out there contain up to 24 slots (SSD or HDD). All-flash configurations provide more disk capacity thus making the solution more dense. Scaling the solution is also very easy. Scale up or scale out; it all depends on how the solution was initially sized during the design phase.

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

Scalability on vSAN is extremely easy. If the host is compliant with the prerequisites (one SSD and one spinning disk), it will be accepted by the cluster instantaneously. All raw storage will be committed to the vSAN data store and directly available for usage.

In terms of sizing the cluster, as deduplication and compression are only available on all-flash arrays, this can heavily impact the storage capacity of the vSAN cluster.

Since we chose a hybrid-configuration, the lack of deduplication and compression caused a storage growth that exceeded the limits quite rapidly. We had to scale up and address the issue in other ways.

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it_user572724 - PeerSpot reviewer
Virtualization Architect at Grupo Sothis

I have not encountered any scalability issues; very easy to scale.

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NP
General Manager Sales at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

The solution is scalable. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so. 

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it_user315789 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at Sequel Data Systems

It supports up to 64 nodes so huge scalability.

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

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

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FV
System Engineer at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

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

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

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it_user938985 - PeerSpot reviewer
Customer Engineer at a tech vendor with 51-200 employees

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

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

We have not encountered any scalability issues.

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

We have not crossed this bridge yet.

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SK
Vmware Administrator at Intertech

The scalability is good - storage is expandable with no extra cost.

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SA
System Engineer at GoVirtual

VMware vSAN is scalable.

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VS
Director at Dnipro-Technocnter

This is a scalable product.

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it_user515658 - PeerSpot reviewer
Application Support Specialist at a tech company with 501-1,000 employees

There were no issues with scalability.

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it_user645621 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Consultant EUC and Cloud at a tech consulting company with 51-200 employees
it_user316464 - PeerSpot reviewer
Technology Architect at a tech company with 10,001+ employees

It's not a consideration, because in my impression VSAN is deployed in set-sizing and is not customizable.

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it_user609789 - PeerSpot reviewer
Head of Virtualization at DataLine LLC

We have not encountered any scalability issues; you can scale vSAN horizontally without any issues. But you need to start from 5 (!) nodes; not 3 or 4. It’s a long story – why? :)

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it_user315741 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Advisor IT Architecture for Cloud Computing Solutions at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
  • Awesome scalability, especially when combined with vSphere 6
  • With vSphere 5.5, limited scalability
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it_user315600 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Engineer at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees

From what I’ve seen it’s extremely scalable.

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RA
Head of Professional Solutions at a tech services company with 201-500 employees

vSAN is scalable.

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AA
Senior Consultant at global brands

I know it can scale up or scale out but I have not had the need to do so.

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AS
Server Administrator at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees

We don't scale that much because we have a three-year refresh time. We tend to acquire for how much we predict we will scale up in the next three years.

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it_user629625 - PeerSpot reviewer
Solutions Architect at a tech services company

I did not encounter any scalability issues.

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

As stated earlier, all the hosts have to be exactly the same for a consistent performance experience, which limits the scalability of the product. Also, the computer and storage components within the HCI solution are linked to each other, it’s not possible to add only storage nodes.

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it_user280782 - PeerSpot reviewer
Cloud consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

There are no issues because it is linear.

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NO
Solutions Coordinator at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

The scalability of this solution can be improved a little bit.

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AL
Solution Architect at a tech vendor with 1,001-5,000 employees

Scalability is good. We had a customer who bought five hosts a year ago and this year they expanded their infrastructure to 12 hosts, and everything was fine. 

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PT
IT Architect with 1,001-5,000 employees

Scalability should be pretty good, but we're not getting the performance we want out of it right now, so we're not going to scale it unless something changes.

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

First and foremost, it offers a different way to scale, it’s smaller and easier to digest in smaller bites. As older ESXi hosts are phased out, you can replace with VSAN and add more nodes. Very incremental approach.

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Ravikumar Korada - PeerSpot reviewer
Technical Recruiter at Covalense

The scalability offered by the product is very simple. If you face any hardware issue, you can simply remove that part and purchase a new one, which may even include parts like the hard disk.

The scalability features offered by the product are highly used and are very popular nowadays. I rate the product's scalability a ten out of ten.

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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.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.