VMware vSAN

I came from environments where we used hosts and a san. The Sans are always very expensive and to add additional resources to the san it's in large amounts. Most of the environments only had a couple of hosts so downtime or outages were always a concern. Being able to spread the resources and hardware across multiple devices gave us reliability and security.

Nutanix was the first hyper-converged solution, but it requires its own hardware. hyperflex looks promising, but it's also only working on cisco hardware. in both cases the costs are much higher, compared to building a custom vSAN solution on certified hardware, leveraging existing supply chain relationships that each organization has with their supply chain partners

Our VMware solution is built in-house for the organization's private application, we don't want to put our data on cloud premises. Also, vSAN is a cost-effective solution for our environment. We have done the POC with both products to understand the Flexibility, Management, and cost. After the successful POC, we have chosen the VMware vSAN.

Currently[,] we are testing both technologies in a time frame so we [still know] after some years which one is the best, according to our loads' needs. We had VMware before moving to vSAN, one [of] many [reasons] to move to vSAN is the opportunity to make the jump in a continuous way. The basic infrastructure did not change, our tech team knowledge was maintained since we did not move to another vendor's solution.

Since vSAN is inside the compute you don't need to expend more rack space. Also it's a VMware product with the same philosophy so the virtualization expert can do everything with no storage team involved.

Nutanix and VMware are comparable solutions but VMware ESXi is a leading hypervisor. Nutanix also support ESXi and AHV and other hypervisors. We support both Nutanix and VMware and it is customer choice to choose considering many other things like software, channels and partnership.

vSAN was handy to do our testing. It helps to provide plenty of storage performance with a simple interface. It is easy to configure and works just great. VMware software, in general, provides the best performance and reliability for the virtualization platform. It's always worth trying HCI and testing modern technology.

We used HPE SimpliVity in the past. HPE SimpliVity provided a similar functionality, but it required a virtual controller VM on each host which consumed CPU, RAM, and Storage. Upgrades and maintenance on the HPE SimpliVity nodes was more difficult because the controller VMs had to be shutdown separately because they could not be vMotioned to another host. vSAN is a far superior product.

VMware vSAN is the only hyper-convergence product we have used, but it replaced multiple dedicated Nimble storage arrays. Nimble had a vCenter plugin which made it much easier to use, but VMware vSAN is baked right into the vCenter. vSAN also really doesn't require much if any management after it is setup and running which wasn't the case with the dedicated storage array.

We only tested vSAN.

vSAN is far more integrated than any other SDS solution running on vSphere. It is also a simpler deployment and management model.