VMware 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.

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

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.

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[.]

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

Easy to implement

Scalability

Easy to manage

Support is very slow

Expensive

More expensive if you need to use advanced features

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.