VMware 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

VMware vSAN is one of our storage tools and we use it for tier 2 storage. It is great in the scalability but not that great for high performance.

It is a great alternative for a homogenous environment with no high IOPS utilisation.

Sadly, it's too expensive.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.