VMware vSAN Reviews and Ratings

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.

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,

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.