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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
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- 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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November 19, 2023
What to expect when deciding about vSAN
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.
January 25, 2023
VMware vSAN!!
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.
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.
January 17, 2023
VMware vSAN review
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.
January 31, 2022
VSAN
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
September 17, 2020
Attractive, yet expensive, solution for hyper-convergence.
Our current license is the standard ( we previously had an advanced license). Managing an increasingly complex storage infrastructure with proper efficiency and costs is not an easy task, but vSAN has proven remarkably helpful in order to do that. In conjunction with vCenter and vSphere, it has reduced our complexity and costs greatly.
Our vSAN deployment is currently being used as the main infrastructure solution. We use vSAN for virtual desktops, cluster management, and data warehouse support. We use an SSD disk and HD per each ESXi, vSAN uses the SSD for the cache and the HD for data storage. What I especially appreciate is the data deduplication and compression and the raid 5 versus erasure coding, since it enables higher consolidation ratios, reducing costs. (Sadly this feature is only enabled starting at advanced licenses). It holds the majority of our production virtual servers, It really helps us to solve multiple problems such as data integrity, system stability, and has improved hyper-convergence for speeds and workloads.
Our vSAN deployment is currently being used as the main infrastructure solution. We use vSAN for virtual desktops, cluster management, and data warehouse support. We use an SSD disk and HD per each ESXi, vSAN uses the SSD for the cache and the HD for data storage. What I especially appreciate is the data deduplication and compression and the raid 5 versus erasure coding, since it enables higher consolidation ratios, reducing costs. (Sadly this feature is only enabled starting at advanced licenses). It holds the majority of our production virtual servers, It really helps us to solve multiple problems such as data integrity, system stability, and has improved hyper-convergence for speeds and workloads.
September 14, 2020
VMware vSAN is powerful yet simple to use.
We use vSAN in the College of Life Sciences at BYU. We have two VMware clusters with multiple hosts. vSAN allows us to utilize the storage of each host to create a virtual storage pool for our virtual machines. It has allowed us to eliminate our previous SAN and the administration that came with having a SAN. We no longer need a storage administrator.
September 14, 2020
Fast, solid and easy to use vSAN solution!
We are using our VMware vSAN across the entire network for the majority of our VM, file, and backups storage at this time. Since all our user file shares live there, technically all our departments are using it too. We had many issues before with a physical SAN, but those are mostly a thing of the past.
We started using VMware ESX in a typical dedicated host and dedicated storage model using Dell hosts and Nimble Storage arrays several years ago. We figured out a few years back that a hyper-converged model seemed to make more sense for lower budget SMB users like us. Researching hyper-convergence led us to VMware vSAN. We currently are using vSAN in four datacenters and in several other locations leveraging their vSAN Robo product across our entire organization. vSAN seems to give us more flexibility in upgrades to our environment related to storage, compute, and RAM.
July 11, 2019
Admins agree that vSAN is great!
Our vSAN deployment is currently used as the main hyper-converged infrastructure solution at our main headquarters. It houses the bulk of our production virtual servers including a line of business and critical systems. We do not currently use it for SQL due to excessive licensing costs from Microsoft, but that is not VMware's fault. We do not use VDI but do host virtualized applications from it through Citrix presentation servers.
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.
June 29, 2019
vSAN pairs great with branch and remote offices
vSAN is deployed in our branch locations with small vSphere clusters. It allows us to run storage within the same ESXi hosts without an external array required for shared storage. It has allowed us to use the existing drive bays in our ESXi hosts to create a software-defined SAN.