VMware vSAN Reviews & Insights

Score8.6 out of 10

61 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for VMware vSAN are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Cost Savings: Several users have mentioned that using VMware vSAN allowed them to save costs in terms of storage and managed services. They were able to manage all aspects of their workload in one interface, reducing the need for rack space and improving business agility.

Flexibility and Data Accessibility: Users appreciated the ability to write data anywhere and access it anytime, even in the event of hardware failure. This feature provided them with flexibility and uninterrupted access to their data, contributing to a seamless user experience.

Simplified Management: Many users highlighted the ease of managing VMware vSAN from a single management platform, specifically mentioning vCenter. They found it convenient that VMware runs VSAN certification programs to ensure OEMs sell validated nodes, making it easier for customers to select appropriate certified ready nodes. This unified approach simplified infrastructure management and reduced complexity for users.

Reviews

17 Reviews

VMware vSAN!!

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

January 25, 2023

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

It is best suited for applications where there is not much data processing, means if customer does not want to go with external box of SAN or NAS, with the help of VMware VSAN the customer can pool all the hard disks of servers virtually which is shared by different VMs running on ESXI hypervisor. There should be 3 servers mainly to run this software.
Scenarios where there is large amount of data that is being processed by the customer applications, additional storage box is recommended,

Vandana Yadav

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

Vetted Review

Reseller

4 years of experience

Details Vmware vSAN Review for eperts.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

January 19, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Every time upon planning to buy a new hardware we would love to go with another vendor as they would have better feature set that the current provider. However, this means that we completely discard our old system and then utilize the new one. This is not value for money. Hence Storage Virtualization comes into play. We had multiple storages from different vendors and was using VMWare as the hypervisor. We used VMware vSAN to virtualize our strorage devices hence this provided a huge storage and one UI to manage all the storage.

Pros

Virtualizaion
Better Through put
Better perfomance
Better reporting
Better migration opportunity
Scalable up and down

Cons

They could tightly intergreate with all storage providers so that we do not need to use the storage providers for the initial configurations
Can improve the compression ration when using the system for backup as they are now dell. EMC Avamar provides a details level of compression
Can intergreate with softwares like avamar to provide excellent backup solutions out of the BOX.

Likelihood to Recommend

The product is a must for enterprise & SMB segments as this gives a good value for money and the licensing policy is very well defined and cost effective for the feature set it provides. This is very well suited for organization which have multiple brand storage systems and would like to consolidate them all together, thus providing a huge storage capacity for the organizations data growth. The product becomes less appropriate in organization where they have single storage platform as the service provider would have the ability to consilidate all the storage systems. Hence this products may be under utilized.

Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

VMware vSAN review

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

January 17, 2023

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

Likelihood to Recommend

Our VMware Datacenter is built in-house on local premises for the business critical applications. Works great when you want to be able to collocate your serves. Whenever you want to add more hardware or another host it's easy to do. We are hosting multiple hosts, we have failover options. For me this is a wonderful solution. This solution provides us things that work well.. Also, VMware vSAN is a cost-effective solution for our environment.

Edwin Blom

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

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

VSAN

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

January 31, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use vSAN for our virtual environment. We are currently running off of 6 servers. We are running multiple VMs off this setup. Our servers are spread across 2 different buildings but data is transferred seamlessly. It's a different setup than what I was used to but I like it now. It's nice to be able to just add more hardware to a server to increase performance.

Pros

It allows us to run our virtual environment. The management is easy to use.
It provides us with failover options incase a host goes down.
It allows us to upgrade easily.

Cons

I am not able to think of anything at this time. Having additional training information is always great.

Likelihood to Recommend

It works great when you want to be able to collocate your serves. Whenever you want to add more hardware or another host it's easy to do. We have multiple hosts, so we have failover options. For us this is a great solution. This solution provides us with peace of mind that things will work well.

Verified User

Technician in Information Technology (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

vSAN is by far the best hyper-converged storage solution

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

January 27, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have been using VMware Virtual SAN from the initial release and up to this day, we really like the performance, integration, and consolidation capabilities of virtual san, as well as the billing model for cloud providers. The other key benefit is having a single support vendor through VMware's excellent support. The cadence of releases is also stable and new features are adding a lot of value. Overall we haven't had any issues with vSAN and would highly recommend it for any workloads.

Pros

Consolidation of compute and storage through the same management layer
single platform of storage for cloud native applications as well as traditional VMs
policy based management of storage with granular controls

Cons

encryption functions can be improved
HCI Mesh feature can be improved to be more like nutanix
the HCL can be updated more frequently with certified components to use with vSAN

Likelihood to Recommend

Especially relevant for service providers, as well as high-density deployments where rack space is at a premium. For anyone looking into hyper-converged solutions, it would be good to include comparisons with Nutanix and cisco's hyperflex who are also leaders in the space. It might also help to review each software vendors certifications to confirm that vSAN is "certified" with their application through reference architectures (SAP HANA, etc)

Verified User

C-Level Executive in Information Technology (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

Journey with vSAN

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

November 28, 2021

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

vSAN is well suited for any application that can run in Virtual Environment. vSAN serves better for VDI, NSX, and vSphere on Cloud solutions. vSAN is a good fit for small and medium business companies. vSAN can't be a good solution where you have Oracle Solaris or IBM power systems. vSAN can't provide storage space using FCP protocol.

Md Tanjil Islam Bappi

Senior Manager in Information Technology at Omega Exim limited (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

5 years of experience

Verified on LinkedIn

What to expect when deciding about vSAN

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

November 23, 2021

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[.]

Likelihood to Recommend

I would recommend using vSAN if you are looking for a comprehensive infrastructure solution that you would like to use in order to save costs about licenses and interaction with different vendors. The best time to contemplate a migration to this technology is when your storage box is approaching its end of [the] live cycle and you are starting to look in the market to renovate it. Before you make your decision, run all load simulations beforehand, since a migration project is not quick, so you better calculate your load aiming at a higher number [than] your current one.

Kike Maldonado

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

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

VMware vSAN--one of the pillars of the HCI

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

June 30, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our company's infrastructure is fully built on top of VMware's EXSi/VSphere/NSX/VxRail stack, so VMware vSAN is part of this family. We had the HCI, and VMware vSAN is used to manage the storage pool, provisioned from SSD and HDD. Depending on the different use cases and application requirements, those storages are allocated to the VM instances. The integrated vCenter is being used to monitor and manage VMware vSAN together with other resources, and due to the recent adoption of TKG, new features of VMware vSAN 7 will be also embraced.

Pros

Combined with vSphere, VMware vSAN enables us to manage computing and storage with a single, integrated platform
It simplifies storage management and speeds up VM delivery speed from the infrastructure team to the application team
The professional support from VMware is great
Allows the hybrid mode of mixing the SSD and HDD, which is more attractive for low-cost projects
A new feature of VMware vSAN 7 supports file-based persistent volumes for Kubernetes on VMware vSAN data stores. So for TKG , the application team can dynamically create file shares for their applications and have multiple pods share data more easily

Likelihood to Recommend

VMware vSAN is suitable for company that wants to provide better storage as service, and of course it is better when used together with all other VMware components to maximize benefits. Companies with legacy server nodes with storage attached can also consider using VMware vSAN to contribute those servers' storage to the virtual machine, instead of buying the new SAN just for capacity expansion.

Verified User

Strategist in Information Technology (10,001+ employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

VMware vSAN and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

May 8, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

vSAN is a hyper-converged solution and it is easy to set up and meets various workload requirements with support for all-flash. It is integrated with all VMware products and so it helps to achieve Day0/Day1 operations seamlessly. It scale-out and scale-up very well and would be a good choice for many organizations.

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

vSAN is well suited for many generic workloads and enterprise applications. The customer can easily start with a 2-3 node cluster and then scale out. Also, vSAN has to be considered along with other products such as VMware VCF and Horizon to get a complete solution from VMware and other benefits. vSAN uses FTT=1 and it requires double the amount of storage when RAID1 is used. Also, RAID5/6, deduplication, and compression have additional overhead and the customer has to exercise appropriately. Since HDD and SSD prices are comparable nowadays, vSAN All-Flash can provide seamless performance to many workloads such as VDI, SQL Server. Cloud, etc.

Chandrakandh Mouleeswaran

Sr. Technical Consultant in Information Technology at Lenovo (1001-5000 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

View profile

Some info about vSAN features

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

September 21, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Provide management for computing and storage in one place.
Improved business agility.
Unify resources under policy based management
Improve security for data.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

vSAN is well suited for small/mid-sized business implementation to reduce the cost for VMware clusters. It is a big savings to the company on SAN storage. Nowadays, most companies are going to cloud so implementation of vSAN or SAN on-premises is not more required.

Dmitry Malafeev

Senior Systems Engineer in Information Technology at Drake Australia (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience