Filter Ratings and Reviews
Filter 33 vetted VMware vSAN reviews and ratings
Reviews (1-9 of 9)
Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why.
September 21, 2020
We used vSAN to test performance on VMware clusters for our Test/Dev Department. It is handy technology that provides fast and easy access to virtual storage on a VMware farm. Due to the high load of our current SAN for the production environment, we decided to test this possibility and it showed good outcomes.
- Provide management for computing and storage in one place.
- Improved business agility.
- Unify resources under policy based management
- Improve security for data.
- License politic from VMware.
- Hard to meet all hardware compatibility on old servers hardware.
- Balancing the disk usage in the vSAN cluster is sometimes hard.
September 14, 2020
We use vSAN in the College of Life Sciences at BYU. We have two VMware clusters with multiple hosts. vSAN allows us to utilize the storage of each host to create a virtual storage pool for our virtual machines. It has allowed us to eliminate our previous SAN and the administration that came with having a SAN. We no longer need a storage administrator.
- It is built in vCenter so you don't need to run a virtual controller VM on each host.
- Very easy to implement, it is just a matter of purchasing licenses and turning it on.
- Simple to monitor within the vSphere console.
- I have not found anything about VSAN that needs improvement. It does what it is supposed to do, and is easy to work with.
September 17, 2020
Our current license is the standard ( we previously had an advanced license). Managing an increasingly complex storage infrastructure with proper efficiency and costs is not an easy task, but vSAN has proven remarkably helpful in order to do that. In conjunction with vCenter and vSphere, it has reduced our complexity and costs greatly.
Our vSAN deployment is currently being used as the main infrastructure solution. We use vSAN for virtual desktops, cluster management, and data warehouse support. We use an SSD disk and HD per each ESXi, vSAN uses the SSD for the cache and the HD for data storage. What I especially appreciate is the data deduplication and compression and the raid 5 versus erasure coding, since it enables higher consolidation ratios, reducing costs. (Sadly this feature is only enabled starting at advanced licenses). It holds the majority of our production virtual servers, It really helps us to solve multiple problems such as data integrity, system stability, and has improved hyper-convergence for speeds and workloads.
Our vSAN deployment is currently being used as the main infrastructure solution. We use vSAN for virtual desktops, cluster management, and data warehouse support. We use an SSD disk and HD per each ESXi, vSAN uses the SSD for the cache and the HD for data storage. What I especially appreciate is the data deduplication and compression and the raid 5 versus erasure coding, since it enables higher consolidation ratios, reducing costs. (Sadly this feature is only enabled starting at advanced licenses). It holds the majority of our production virtual servers, It really helps us to solve multiple problems such as data integrity, system stability, and has improved hyper-convergence for speeds and workloads.
- Very strong data integrity.
- The portability of the VMs.
- Dataflow is great without a lot of tweaking.
- The in-place encryption is a strong layer of security and it is great for establishing multi-tenancy trust.
- Ease of use from vCenter.
- Great data compression, lowering costs.
- Expensive, but it's worth it since it actually reduces costs (in addition, whichever vSphere licenses you need).
September 14, 2020
We are using our VMware vSAN across the entire network for the majority of our VM, file, and backups storage at this time. Since all our user file shares live there, technically all our departments are using it too. We had many issues before with a physical SAN, but those are mostly a thing of the past.
- Fastest SAN solution hands down.
- Easy to connect hosts to LUNS/Datastores.
- Great support staff and easy ticket system.
- More direct integration with backup systems.
- More user friendly interface.
- Lower tier options for budget users would be nice.
VMware vSAN is one of our storage tools and we use it for tier 2 storage. It is great in the scalability but not that great for high performance.
It is a great alternative for a homogenous environment with no high IOPS utilisation.
Sadly, it's too expensive.
It is a great alternative for a homogenous environment with no high IOPS utilisation.
Sadly, it's too expensive.
- Easy to implement
- Scalability
- Easy to manage
- Support is very slow
- Expensive
- More expensive if you need to use advanced features
October 04, 2019
We started using VMware ESX in a typical dedicated host and dedicated storage model using Dell hosts and Nimble Storage arrays several years ago. We figured out a few years back that a hyper-converged model seemed to make more sense for lower budget SMB users like us. Researching hyper-convergence led us to VMware vSAN. We currently are using vSAN in four datacenters and in several other locations leveraging their vSAN Robo product across our entire organization. vSAN seems to give us more flexibility in upgrades to our environment related to storage, compute, and RAM.
- We are using VMware vSAN in our primary datacenters using relative in-expensive flash storage drives. This allowed us to really increase our storage performance over dedicated storage at a much lower overall price.
- By buying ESX hosts that were only partially loaded with drives, we have great flexibility in adding additional capacity without much effort.
- The volume management versus dedicated storage was greatly simplified. Each ESX cluster acts as one single large volume rather than having lots of carved up volumes all over the place as we did with dedicated storage.
- Management is integrated directly into the vSphere client rather than having to go elsewhere.
- We were a fairly early adopter of VMware vSAN and as such experienced several growing pains.
- We experienced a few bugs that took a few software versions upgrades to go mostly away.
- The biggest issue we had overall was with host drivers. Even with vSAN ready node compatible hosts, you have to be very careful that the drivers for NIC and RAID controllers are right.
Departmentally for R&D to investigate how our product line interacts within its framework. It solves multiple business problems including data integrity, business continuity for the department, and hyper-convergence for speeds and workloads. We have found that the platform will significantly accelerate workloads with limited issues. We are always seeking solutions that provide optimal data throughput with non-hardware redundancy.
- Data integrity in an all-flash environment is very strong. Once it is up and running in a "raid 6" type format it will stay running without issues for a long time
- Data flow. VMs sometimes require a lot of tweaking and tuning to get optimal performance but this is to be expected. We found the performance to be exceptional.
- Portability of the VMs was also an unexpected surprise. The ability to migrate the VMs across datacenters was appreciated.
- It would be nice to have fabric-based storage acceptance to disaggregate storage and expand beyond the node concept. The assumption that increased storage needs require increased compute or ram is simply not true.
- The licensing costs are high but you do get what you pay for.
June 28, 2019
vSAN is deployed in our branch locations with small vSphere clusters. It allows us to run storage within the same ESXi hosts without an external array required for shared storage. It has allowed us to use the existing drive bays in our ESXi hosts to create a software-defined SAN.
- Creates a software-defined SAN in a hyper-converged form factor.
- It's simple to deploy and configure.
- It integrates into existing vSphere tools and consoles, decreasing the learning curve.
- It allows us external access to storage with iSCSI connectivity.
- An expanded HCL could assist with more compatibility, becoming less of a problem as new versions are released.
July 11, 2019
Our vSAN deployment is currently used as the main hyper-converged infrastructure solution at our main headquarters. It houses the bulk of our production virtual servers including a line of business and critical systems. We do not currently use it for SQL due to excessive licensing costs from Microsoft, but that is not VMware's fault. We do not use VDI but do host virtualized applications from it through Citrix presentation servers.
- I have had zero problems with vSAN storage and don't even think about it on a day-to-day basis.
- It allows me to throw a bunch of JBODs together and make an enterprise grade SAN out of it.
- Allows a single pane of glass for managing our virtual infrastructure.
- Original implementation was not bad, but we ran into some issues that could have been avoided.
- Calculating disk space is funky and can be misleading.
VMware vSAN Scorecard Summary
What is VMware vSAN?
VMware's vSAN is hyper-converged infrastructure solution.
Categories: Software Defined Storage, Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
VMware vSAN Technical Details
| Operating Systems: | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application: | No |