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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
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- 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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- Pros
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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 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
- Save us costs regarding storage[.]
- Save costs regarding managed services[.]
- It [allows] us to manage in only one interface all aspects of our load[.]
- It reduces rack space[.]
- More granularity in statistics[.]
- More detailed graphs about usage[.]
- Easier way to find unused/unassigned hard drives[.]
January 25, 2023
VMware vSAN!!
- Combines hard drives of servers and creates a common storage pool
- Storage management
- Supports Hyper-Converged Infrastructure
- Management of disks is little tricky.
- Compatibility issues with traiditional servers
- Not a great use case for critical applications.
January 19, 2023
Details Vmware vSAN Review for eperts.
- 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 17, 2023
VMware vSAN review
- upgrade easily
- provides failover options incase a host goes down.
- Runs in our virtual environment.
- The management is easy to use.
- Data anywhere, and anytime access also with hardware failure
- Disk Management
- Guidance for the configs
January 31, 2022
VSAN
- It allows us to run our virtual environment. The management is easy to use.
- It provides us with failover options incase a host goes down.
- It allows us to upgrade easily.
- I am not able to think of anything at this time. Having additional training information is always great.
January 27, 2022
vSAN is by far the best hyper-converged storage solution
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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
- 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.
September 17, 2020
Attractive, yet expensive, solution for hyper-convergence.
- Very strong data integrity.
- The portability of the VMs.
- Dataflow is great without a lot of tweaking.
- The in-place encryption is a strong layer of security and it is great for establishing multi-tenancy trust.
- Ease of use from vCenter.
- Great data compression, lowering costs.
- Expensive, but it's worth it since it actually reduces costs (in addition, whichever vSphere licenses you need).
September 14, 2020
VMware vSAN is powerful yet simple to use.
- It is built in vCenter so you don't need to run a virtual controller VM on each host.
- Very easy to implement, it is just a matter of purchasing licenses and turning it on.
- Simple to monitor within the vSphere console.
- I have not found anything about VSAN that needs improvement. It does what it is supposed to do, and is easy to work with.
September 14, 2020
Fast, solid and easy to use vSAN solution!
- Fastest SAN solution hands down.
- Easy to connect hosts to LUNS/Datastores.
- Great support staff and easy ticket system.
- More direct integration with backup systems.
- More user friendly interface.
- Lower tier options for budget users would be nice.
- We are using VMware vSAN in our primary datacenters using relative in-expensive flash storage drives. This allowed us to really increase our storage performance over dedicated storage at a much lower overall price.
- By buying ESX hosts that were only partially loaded with drives, we have great flexibility in adding additional capacity without much effort.
- The volume management versus dedicated storage was greatly simplified. Each ESX cluster acts as one single large volume rather than having lots of carved up volumes all over the place as we did with dedicated storage.
- Management is integrated directly into the vSphere client rather than having to go elsewhere.
- We were a fairly early adopter of VMware vSAN and as such experienced several growing pains.
- We experienced a few bugs that took a few software versions upgrades to go mostly away.
- The biggest issue we had overall was with host drivers. Even with vSAN ready node compatible hosts, you have to be very careful that the drivers for NIC and RAID controllers are right.
July 11, 2019
Admins agree that vSAN is great!
- I have had zero problems with vSAN storage and don't even think about it on a day-to-day basis.
- It allows me to throw a bunch of JBODs together and make an enterprise grade SAN out of it.
- Allows a single pane of glass for managing our virtual infrastructure.
- Original implementation was not bad, but we ran into some issues that could have been avoided.
- Calculating disk space is funky and can be misleading.
July 05, 2019
vSAN use in an R&D lab
- 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.
June 29, 2019
vSAN pairs great with branch and remote offices
- Creates a software-defined SAN in a hyper-converged form factor.
- It's simple to deploy and configure.
- It integrates into existing vSphere tools and consoles, decreasing the learning curve.
- It allows us external access to storage with iSCSI connectivity.
- An expanded HCL could assist with more compatibility, becoming less of a problem as new versions are released.