VMware vSAN

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

It dependents on what your needs are. I don't recommend it for high performance. But if you need a reliable easy SAN it's a great idea to use it.

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.

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.

It's not that good performance-wise and sadly the cost on each processor quickly scales up. However, it's great for scalability and data integrity, easy to deploy and configure. If you need more power, buy more nodes. It's great for small data centers but I wouldn't personally use it for big ones. vSAN is a good, yet expensive (because of the cost for each processor will quickly add up), option for hyper-converged storage.

The only thing I disliked is that data deduplication and compression and the raid 5 erasure coding are only for licenses equal or higher than advanced.

VMware vSAN is perfect in an environment where you have existing servers with storage and you would like to use them in a VMware environment. Also, for someone looking to build a VMware environment, they could purchase servers with storage and not have to worry about purchasing a separate SAN. vSAN would not be appropriate for someone who already has a SAN.

VMware is widely known for their virtual server prowess and their vSAN implementation is just as good as their other products. It's easy to recommend this product to colleagues as everyone is using a SAN these days. I have already recommended this to others who are in the market for a new SAN or vSAN.

For an SMB, vSAN and other hyper-converged products seem to provide a cost-benefit especially as it relates to future growth and reduced management. VMware vSAN is not, however, a simple-to-understand product. It can be easy to set up and deploy with the proper understanding, but there are serious complexities that need to be understood and mitigated for you to be successful and very happy with its long term care and operation.

If you're already a VMware shop, vSAN is a no-brainer, especially if you're looking to upgrade storage already. With the improvements in vSAN 6.7, it's really on par with the best storage solutions out there and can be really cost effective. Depending on your budget you can customize your solution to tailor your own needs whether it's a low-cost hybrid solution or an all-flash with NVMe screamer.

High IO is excellent, but I was surprised by the performance in high write transactional testing. It performed well above my expectations. It performs well in environments with focused workloads and we recommend that each workload be its own cluster size-dependent of course. Again, assuming the workload needs the performance, you would be hard-pressed to find a better solution if you already have VMware in your environment.

vSAN works very well in the branch or remote office use case. It is also well suited for smaller data center deployments.