VMware vSAN and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX
May 08, 2021

VMware vSAN and Lenovo ThinkAgile VX

Chandrakandh Mouleeswaran | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with VMware vSAN

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.
  • 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.
  • We are OEM partner to VMware and one of the leading hyperconverged solution preferred by many customer.
  • vSAN Certification program makes easy for us to deliver quality products to customers.
  • Many workload solutions are well performed and scaled in our lab environment and which makes us pitch confidently to different customers.
  • It depends on customer relationship with VMware and how they build solution out of it.
  • Many customers got benefited from the solutions.
  • Licensing cost is one aspect which may increase for vSphere 7 onwards due to 32 Core model.
Nutanix and VMware are comparable solutions but VMware ESXi is a leading hypervisor. Nutanix also support ESXi and AHV and other hypervisors. We support both Nutanix and VMware and it is customer choice to choose considering many other things like software, channels and partnership.

Do you think VMware vSAN delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with VMware vSAN's feature set?

Yes

Did VMware vSAN live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of VMware vSAN go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy VMware vSAN again?

Yes

vSAN is well suited for many generic workloads and enterprise applications. The customer can easily start with a 2-3 node cluster and then scale out. Also, vSAN has to be considered along with other products such as VMware VCF and Horizon to get a complete solution from VMware and other benefits. vSAN uses FTT=1 and it requires double the amount of storage when RAID1 is used. Also, RAID5/6, deduplication, and compression have additional overhead and the customer has to exercise appropriately. Since HDD and SSD prices are comparable nowadays, vSAN All-Flash can provide seamless performance to many workloads such as VDI, SQL Server. Cloud, etc.