VMware vSAN Valuable Features

vSAN gives us a lot of advantages when we need to expand resources. We have an overall larger host infrastructure, and we split that up for specific customer test and use cases. In that specific scenario, we can easily add more hosts or reduce the number of hosts in the environment. This is an advantage when we use vSAN. We have pretty constant performance results, which is sometimes, on a normal three-tier storage architecture, harder for us to achieve because the customer doesn't want us to verify that the performance of a specific device works. What we typically have to test is that we have a constant scenario across different versions, platforms, and similar things. Here, vSAN gives us the advantage that we can actually work with it. We can also create test cases, which is maybe not something in other customer scenarios, but for us, it's important. We can even throttle down performance or release more performance. So, we can run more precise test scenarios. If someone says, "We need to run this later on on a relatively small or lower scale edge device," we can actually configure vSAN in a way that it reduces the amount of resources. When we do to do more scaled load testing, we can run more dense workloads and still have the same results across all specific nodes. Otherwise, we could have that noisy neighbor effect when we work with legacy output. View full review »

We like that it is a hyperconverged solution. Everything is in a box. You got the compute, memory, and storage. So, we can scale out by adding nodes as we go and eliminate the back-end storage, whether that's a NAS or iSCSI device. You get the benefit of local storage, but you have the protection of shared storage. View full review »

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. View full review »

With vSAN coming in, we have stability within the cluster of resources which has been grouped together in a local storage. This is a wonderful feature in vSAN. View full review »

I like the fact that I've got some degree of redundancy built in and, of course, the performance is great. View full review »

The most valuable features are being able to keep it off by itself and the ease of use. View full review »

The valuable features of vSAN are that * you can get it up and running quickly * you get redundancy built-in * it's pretty much the perfect solution for a cluster. View full review »

Flexibility, growth, and expansion are probably the more important features for us. As our environment grows, the more users come on, the more VDI workstations that we need, we can easily expand either horizontally or vertically with the environment. We're very happy with that. View full review »

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

The most valuable features of vSAN are its simplicity to deploy and that we can use commodity disks in our servers without complexity or need for external storage arrays or storage specialists on our teams. It's part of our vSphere admin's duties as opposed to storage experts. The features of vSAN allow us to reduce our operational complexity to a large degree. It's a single pane of glass for the administrator, and we're able to somewhat reduce costs, other than the fact that vSAN is somewhat expensive to license. View full review »

The most valuable feature that VSAN offers is reliability. In my mind, as long as their storage is up and running, we can always access what we need when we need it, that's what's important. It's super important to have reliability, particularly for internal operations: for employee data, payroll management; and then as well for the customer side of the equation with customer information and customer databases. View full review »

The most valuable features are ease of deployment and ease of management. If you compare it to other software-defined storage products, it's much easier. It's a checkbox. It's lot easier to manage. View full review »

For my organization, the most valuable features of vSAN are as follows: * The most important to me, in my role, is cost. In the renewal cycle for storage, it was about a 40 percent saving compared to going to an all-flash array, which is what we first looked at doing. * Performance: our clinical data access in five seconds; we need to do everything we can to retain that metric. * I was really pleasantly surprised during the data migration across to vSAN, that it happened almost instantly. Whereas, in the past, migrating from array to array was an arduous and fraught process. View full review »

The most valuable feature is that we're not spending any additional money on an external storage solution for it. It gives us the all-in-one, Swiss Army knife kind of solution. View full review »

One of the valuable features for us is the ability to restrict the performance capacity per client. Other solutions don't have this feature. View full review »

The most valuable feature would be: You own the hardware already. Why not just throw some drives into it and have a software-defined network storage system? View full review »

* Cost was big for us. * Speed * Scalability We can scale it very easily for a test environment. We were able to segment our DMZ so it wasn't connected to anything, which we really liked. View full review »

* Encryption * Deduplication * Compression * The ability to manage all of your storage within your server rack View full review »

There are so many valuable features. View full review »

* It's easy to scale. * It's easy to predict IOPS needs. * You can design for low latency using all-flash. * The whole hyperconverged notion is pretty neat. Also, for setting up new clusters for VDI quickly, it's nice. You don't have to wait on an order for a storage vendor to ship you a system and help you configure it, you do it all yourself. It's kind of convenient that way. And the sizing guides are pretty straightforward. View full review »

It is scalable, overall. If you need to add storage, it makes it easy to scale by adding additional hard drives into the existing servers or you can add storage by just adding more servers. View full review »

* Cost * Being hyperconverged, it simplifies what equipment we have to buy View full review »

* Scalability * Standardization - one size fits all It's also intuitive and easy to use because one size fits all. Obviously, it scales out, but it's the same solution at every physical location I manage. View full review »

The feature I've been most pleased with is the import management functionality. View full review »

* The non-complexity * The cost View full review »

The most valuable feature is the simplification of storage. We no longer need to deal with Fibre Channel and the external storage arrays. View full review »

The ability to have a disaster recovery option for our end-users by being able to use VDI and the vSANs, and the ability to do replication across multiple data centers, are valuable to us. View full review »

The most valuable features are * price point * you can use existing storage; no specific storage requirements are needed. View full review »

Software-defined storage. View full review »

Performance and the ability to use all-flash. View full review »

The most valuable feature is the simplicity of its scalability: being able to grow it without having to make sure you get the right disks and the right nodes. The solution is also easy to manage. It's all right there in the vSphere Client. You're not going through multiple things. You don't have to know, once you've created the vSAN node. You add storage, it sees it, and you create your data storage from there. Everything is right there for you. View full review »

* Scalability * Cost View full review »

* Its redundancy * Its uptime capabilities * The performance is great. View full review »

The simplicity of everything, even though it was a new technology at the time with some quirks. The lower skill cost of maintaining it meant that we could do more with the people that we had. View full review »

* Hyperconverged storage * Computing View full review »

* Performance * Simplicity * Synchronicity with vSphere View full review »

The most valuable feature is the flexibility, the ability to move the machines around without hesitation. View full review »

The ability to have an HA cluster in the absence of a shared storage device or SAN. Not having to retain SAN expertise and the cost of a storage area network (SAN) warranty are big pluses, too. View full review »

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

* The ease of implementation * The ease of expandability View full review »

I like the availability aspects of it. View full review »

* Hot add * Upgrades * Ease of management Any VMware engineer can easily manage vSAN, troubleshoot issues, and perform an upgrade on the vSAN without any downtime. Since the storage space is local to the hosts, it reduces the overall response time and improves the performance. View full review »

The most valuable feature is the ability to continue our business needs and have higher visibility. It has definitely increased our business productivity levels. View full review »

Based on my findings, it seems easier to deploy than the traditional SAN. I was told vSAN can be deployed in a few minutes. View full review »

The most valuable feature of this solution is that it is cheap storage. View full review »

The migration of servers feature makes server rack maintenance easy. View full review »

Ease of use and implementation. View full review »

All the features are working great. View full review »

Straightforward and easy to use. View full review »

Horizon VDI View full review »