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VMware vSAN

Score8.6 out of 10

61 Reviews and Ratings

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What is VMware vSAN?

VMware vSAN is an enterprise-class storage virtualization software that provides a simple path to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and multi cloud. VMware vSAN is no longer sold as a standalone product and is now available as a part of VMware Cloud Foundation.

Categories & Use Cases

Reviews

What users are saying about VMware vSAN.
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What to expect when deciding about vSAN

Incentivized
Kike Maldonado
Project Manager in Information Technology at Vueling (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have used vSAN to store our SQL databases. We have migrated them from an [all-flash] storage vendor and at the same time, we have migrated the SQL servers in active/passive clusters to [Always-On clusters]. Currently[,] we have 6 nodes for all our SQL production databases. We created an isolated cluster in vSAN so we [would] solve two main issues: SQL licenses (associated with hosts' CPUs) and storage [licenses] (associated with a storage box). We have [configured] different kinds of raids [(5, 6, and 10)] [depending] on each VM service.

Pros

  • Save us costs regarding storage[.]
  • Save costs regarding managed services[.]
  • It [allows] us to manage in only one interface all aspects of our load[.]
  • It reduces rack space[.]

Cons

  • More granularity in statistics[.]
  • More detailed graphs about usage[.]
  • Easier way to find unused/unassigned hard drives[.]

Most Important Features

  • Easy of management[.]
  • Single point of contact for VMware and storage teams[.]
  • Less rack space[.]

Return on Investment

  • Reduce in SQL licenses[.]
  • Reduce in storage licenses[.]
  • Reduce in data center costs[.]

Alternatives Considered

Nutanix AOS

Other Software Used

Nutanix AOS, Microsoft SQL Server, Citrix Virtual Apps (formerly XenApp)

VMware vSAN!!

Incentivized
Vandana Yadav
Presales Executive in Information Technology at Corporate Infotech Pvt Ltd (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We recommend VMware vSAN to our customers , especially where the customer does not want to use any external storage. VMware vSAN combines all the storage of servers installed in a cluster and creates a unified storage pool for the applications running on those servers. This is basically a hyper-converged solution, which can be used by many customers efficiently to run their applications.

Pros

  • Combines hard drives of servers and creates a common storage pool
  • Storage management
  • Supports Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

Cons

  • Management of disks is little tricky.
  • Compatibility issues with traiditional servers
  • Not a great use case for critical applications.

Most Important Features

  • Virtualization of storage
  • Performance enhancement
  • Provides Hyper converged Infrastructure

Return on Investment

  • Positive because of its performance
  • Faster performance of my applications
  • Positive as it cuts my additional storage cost for small applications

Alternatives Considered

Red Hat Ceph Storage, Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure and HPE SimpliVity

Other Software Used

HPE SimpliVity, Red Hat Ceph Storage, Dell VxRail

VMware vSAN review

Incentivized
Edwin Blom
System Administrator OT in Engineering at KEMA BV (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use VMware vSAN for our virtual production environment where we run the most of our business-critical applications. We are running multiple VMs off this setup. Our servers are located across 2 different buildings but data is transferred seamlessly. It's a different setup than we used before. It's nice to be able to just add more hardware to a server to increase performance.

Pros

  • upgrade easily
  • provides failover options incase a host goes down.
  • Runs in our virtual environment.
  • The management is easy to use.
  • Data anywhere, and anytime access also with hardware failure

Cons

  • Disk Management
  • Guidance for the configs

Most Important Features

  • Local backups
  • upgrade and adding more hosts
  • Failover hosts
  • downtime for maintenance of vSAN node.

Return on Investment

  • upgrades are cheaper and easier
  • update on the hosts during business.
  • maintenance windows
  • high availability

Alternatives Considered

Dell Unity XT Unified Storage

Other Software Used

Dell Avamar, Dell PowerStore T Series, PowerProtect DD, Dell Unity XT Unified Storage

Journey with vSAN

Incentivized
Md Tanjil Islam BappiView profile
Senior Manager in Information Technology at Omega Exim limited (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use vSAN for our production environment where we run the business-critical services: ERP, VDI, HRM, EMAIL, Active Directory, DNS other in-house applications. We also have an iSCSI storage for the production environment with a few SATA disks. vSAN is built with 2xSSD and 4xSAS disks, with 2 disk groups on each host. This vSAN configuration gives us faster IOPS than the iSCSI storage we have. It reduces the cost of additional hardware, maintenance, and power consumption.

Pros

  • Write data anywhere, and anytime access with hardware failure.
  • Perform maintenance activity on any capacity node without interruption in the production environment.
  • Cost saving
  • Easy to manage from single management platform, that is vCenter.

Cons

  • NFS share isn't easy thing to do.
  • User friendly disk management.
  • Walkthrough guidance for the configuration for the user, that will bring [a] lot of customers.

Most Important Features

  • Zero downtime for maintenance of vSAN node.
  • Single UI to manage the VMs and Storage.
  • Easy to migrate the workloads from one cluster to another cluster without downtime.

Return on Investment

  • vSAN provide great flexibility and efficiency.
  • Low cost management for the services.
  • It provide high availability of the resources.

Alternatives Considered

NetApp Cloud Volumes ONTAP

Other Software Used

VMware NSX, Veeam Backup & Replication, Commvault Complete Backup & Recovery, VMware Workstation Pro, VMware vCenter Server

VMware vSAN and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX

Incentivized
Chandrakandh MouleeswaranView profile
Sr. Technical Consultant in Information Technology at Lenovo (1001-5000 employees employees)

Pros

  • VMware runs VSAN certification programs to make sure the OEM sells validated nodes. It helps customers to select appropriate certified ready nodes like Lenovo ThinkAgile VX which comes factory configured and easy to set up.
  • Hyperconverged solutions reduce real estate space and networking costs when compare with shared storage. The host overhead also less.
  • Supports All-Flash (SATA and NVMe SSDs) and Hybrid vSAN with HDD and SSD. So customers can choose cost-effective solutions appropriate to their workloads.
  • Supports different storage policies, RAID and duplication, and compression features and it makes a complete storage solution.

Cons

  • vSAN is a single datastore or volume for the whole cluster and it makes less choice to isolate or group virtual machines.
  • Deduplication and compression is applied for the complete vSAN in the cluster and it cannot be done virtual machine level.

Most Important Features

  • We are OEM partner to VMware and one of the leading hyperconverged solution preferred by many customer.
  • vSAN Certification program makes easy for us to deliver quality products to customers.
  • Many workload solutions are well performed and scaled in our lab environment and which makes us pitch confidently to different customers.

Return on Investment

  • It depends on customer relationship with VMware and how they build solution out of it.
  • Many customers got benefited from the solutions.
  • Licensing cost is one aspect which may increase for vSphere 7 onwards due to 32 Core model.

Alternatives Considered

Nutanix AOS

Other Software Used

Lenovo ThinkSystem DE Series, Lenovo ThinkAgile HX Series, Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Series