Item: VMware vSAN
Rating: 9
Author: Eric Garrison

Overall Satisfaction with VMware vSAN

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros and Cons

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Return on Investment

Speed on testing is improved.
Speed on getting testing initialized has greatly improved because we can migrate the VMs easily now.

Alternatives Considered

We only tested vSAN.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

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vSAN use in an R&D lab