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VMware vSAN is a versatile solution that users and customers have used to address various storage challenges. For instance, some users …
Overview
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…
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Product Demos
VMware vSAN 6.6 Nested Lab Deployment DEMO
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vSAN 6.7 U1 Quickstart Demo
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VMware vSAN 6.6 Demo
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Product Details
- About
- Tech Details
- FAQs
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. It enables users to scale compute and storage independently at petabyte scale via disaggregation for optimal resources utilization and lower costs.
VMware vSAN's additional features include:
VMware vSAN is no longer sold as a standalone product and is now available as a part of VMware Cloud Foundation.
VMware vSAN's additional features include:
- Developer-Ready Infrastructure - Enables developers to consume storage to create apps at scale, while providing the governance admins need to manage the infrastructure for VMs and containers.
- Integrated File Services - Provisions a file share with a single workflow, and vSAN can be used as a unified storage control plane for both block and file storage.
- Stateful Services - The vSAN Data Persistence platform framework can be used to integrate cloud-native applications into the underlying virtual infrastructure.
- Consistent Storage Policy-Based Management - Storage can be aligned with the application demands of VMs and container volumes. Define storage needs for a VM, volume or VMDK and let the software apply and enforce the requirements.
- Cloud-Connection for vSAN+ - Transforms on-premises infrastructure with cloud-connected services that centralize management and enhance efficiency.
VMware vSAN Technical Details
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
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.
Reviewers rate Usability highest, with a score of 9.2.
The most common users of VMware vSAN are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
- Recommendations
VMware vSAN is a versatile solution that users and customers have used to address various storage challenges. For instance, some users have migrated their SQL databases from all-flash storage vendors to vSAN, effectively solving issues related to SQL and storage licenses. Additionally, vSAN has been leveraged in production environments to run critical business services like ERP, VDI, HRM, EMAIL, Active Directory, DNS, and in-house applications. This demonstrates the product's ability to handle diverse workloads efficiently.
In terms of configuration flexibility, vSAN supports different kinds of raids such as 5, 6, and 10 for each VM service. Moreover, the vSAN configuration with 2xSSD and 4xSAS disks has proven to provide faster IOPS compared to iSCSI storage. This not only enhances performance but also helps reduce hardware and maintenance costs.
One highlight of vSAN is its ease of setup and integration with all VMware products. This seamless integration allows users to maximize their existing VMware infrastructure while benefiting from the unified storage pool created by vSAN. Furthermore, the compatibility with all-flash technology ensures that it can meet a wide range of workload requirements.
vSAN has been highly recommended for use cases such as testing performance on VMware clusters for Test/Dev departments and hyper-converged models used by SMB users. It also serves as the main hyper-converged infrastructure solution for housing production virtual servers and critical systems. Customers who prefer not to use external storage can leverage vSAN's ability to combine the storage of servers in a cluster, eliminating the need for a separate SAN and storage administrator.
Overall, vSAN provides a unified storage management solution for multiple storage devices from various vendors while delivering features like data deduplication and compression. Its usage spans across virtual desktops, cluster management, data warehouse support, VM, file, and backup storage across networks. With positive outcomes reported by users and a wide range of use cases, VMware vSAN proves to be a reliable, flexible, and cost-effective solution for storage challenges in various industries.
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.
Difficult Disk Management: Some users have found it challenging to manage disks in the vSAN cluster, citing issues with finding unused/unassigned hard drives and balancing disk usage. They suggest a more user-friendly interface and guided configuration to simplify the process.
Limited Datastore Choice: Several reviewers express dissatisfaction with vSAN's limitation of having a single datastore for the entire cluster, which restricts their ability to isolate or group virtual machines as desired. This has been seen as a drawback by some users.
Compatibility Concerns: Many users mention compatibility issues with older servers and find it difficult to meet all hardware requirements. They believe that an expanded Hardware Compatibility List - HCL would be helpful in ensuring more compatibility and avoiding any potential complications during implementation.
Users of VMware vSAN have made several recommendations based on their experiences with the product. First, they suggest considering building your own VSANS (Ready Nodes) instead of using VXRails. This recommendation comes from users who have found that building their own VSANS allows for more customization and flexibility in their vSAN deployments. Second, users advise finding an easy algorithm to reduce CPU overhead and improve disk read and write cache. Some users have suggested that optimizing the CPU overhead and improving disk performance could enhance the overall efficiency of vSAN. Lastly, users recommend talking to support to confirm compatibility with the operating system requirements. They advise reaching out to support to ensure that vSAN is compatible with the specific operating system requirements of their environment. These recommendations provide valuable insights for users looking to make the most of VMware vSAN, allowing them to explore alternative deployment options, optimize performance, and ensure compatibility with their existing infrastructure.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
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January 19, 2023
Details Vmware vSAN Review for eperts.
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.
- Virtualizaion
- Better Through put
- Better perfomance
- Better reporting
- Better migration opportunity
- Scalable up and down
- 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.
January 27, 2022
vSAN is by far the best hyper-converged storage solution
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.
- 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
- 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
November 28, 2021
Journey with vSAN
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.
- 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.
- 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.
June 30, 2021
VMware vSAN--one of the pillars of the HCI
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.
- 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
May 08, 2021
VMware vSAN and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX
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.
- 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.
- 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.
September 21, 2020
Some info about vSAN features
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.
July 05, 2019
vSAN use in an R&D lab
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.