VMware vSAN Reviews & Insights

Score9.1 out of 10

59 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for VMware vSAN are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

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.

VMware vSAN Reviews

9 Reviews

Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees)

Details Vmware vSAN Review for eperts.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

January 19, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Every time upon planning to buy a new hardware we would love to go with another vendor as they would have better feature set that the current provider. However, this means that we completely discard our old system and then utilize the new one. This is not value for money. Hence Storage Virtualization comes into play. We had multiple storages from different vendors and was using VMWare as the hypervisor. We used VMware vSAN to virtualize our strorage devices hence this provided a huge storage and one UI to manage all the storage.

Pros

Virtualizaion
Better Through put
Better perfomance
Better reporting
Better migration opportunity
Scalable up and down

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

The product is a must for enterprise & SMB segments as this gives a good value for money and the licensing policy is very well defined and cost effective for the feature set it provides. This is very well suited for organization which have multiple brand storage systems and would like to consolidate them all together, thus providing a huge storage capacity for the organizations data growth. The product becomes less appropriate in organization where they have single storage platform as the service provider would have the ability to consilidate all the storage systems. Hence this products may be under utilized.

Verified User

Administrator in Information Technology (Education Management company, 501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

VMware vSAN review

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

January 17, 2023

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use VMware vSAN for our virtual production environment where we run the most of our business-critical applications. We are running multiple VMs off this setup. Our servers are located across 2 different buildings but data is transferred seamlessly. It's a different setup than we used before. It's nice to be able to just add more hardware to a server to increase performance.

Pros

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

Cons

Disk Management
Guidance for the configs

Likelihood to Recommend

Our VMware Datacenter is built in-house on local premises for the business critical applications. Works great when you want to be able to collocate your serves. Whenever you want to add more hardware or another host it's easy to do. We are hosting multiple hosts, we have failover options. For me this is a wonderful solution. This solution provides us things that work well.. Also, VMware vSAN is a cost-effective solution for our environment.

Edwin Blom

System Administrator OT in Engineering at KEMA BV (Mechanical Or Industrial Engineering, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

VSAN

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

January 31, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

I am not able to think of anything at this time. Having additional training information is always great.

Likelihood to Recommend

It works great when you want to be able to collocate your serves. Whenever you want to add more hardware or another host it's easy to do. We have multiple hosts, so we have failover options. For us this is a great solution. This solution provides us with peace of mind that things will work well.

Verified User

Technician in Information Technology (Education Management company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

vSAN is by far the best hyper-converged storage solution

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

January 27, 2022

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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

Likelihood to Recommend

Especially relevant for service providers, as well as high-density deployments where rack space is at a premium. For anyone looking into hyper-converged solutions, it would be good to include comparisons with Nutanix and cisco's hyperflex who are also leaders in the space. It might also help to review each software vendors certifications to confirm that vSAN is "certified" with their application through reference architectures (SAP HANA, etc)

Verified User

C-Level Executive in Information Technology (Information Technology & Services company, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

Journey with vSAN

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

November 28, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

vSAN is well suited for any application that can run in Virtual Environment. vSAN serves better for VDI, NSX, and vSphere on Cloud solutions. vSAN is a good fit for small and medium business companies. vSAN can't be a good solution where you have Oracle Solaris or IBM power systems. vSAN can't provide storage space using FCP protocol.

Md Tanjil Islam Bappi

Senior Manager in Information Technology at Omega Exim limited (Information Technology & Services, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

Reseller

5 years of experience

View profile

Some info about vSAN features

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

September 21, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Provide management for computing and storage in one place.
Improved business agility.
Unify resources under policy based management
Improve security for data.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

vSAN is well suited for small/mid-sized business implementation to reduce the cost for VMware clusters. It is a big savings to the company on SAN storage. Nowadays, most companies are going to cloud so implementation of vSAN or SAN on-premises is not more required.

Dmitry Malafeev

Senior Systems Engineer in Information Technology at Drake Australia (Consumer Services, 201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Fast, solid and easy to use vSAN solution!

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

September 14, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

Fastest SAN solution hands down.
Easy to connect hosts to LUNS/Datastores.
Great support staff and easy ticket system.

Cons

More direct integration with backup systems.
More user friendly interface.
Lower tier options for budget users would be nice.

Likelihood to Recommend

VMware is widely known for their virtual server prowess and their vSAN implementation is just as good as their other products. It's easy to recommend this product to colleagues as everyone is using a SAN these days. I have already recommended this to others who are in the market for a new SAN or vSAN.

Verified User

Manager in Information Technology (Government Administration company, 501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

VMware vSAN - hyper-convergence versus dedicated storage is a great alternative

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

October 4, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

For an SMB, vSAN and other hyper-converged products seem to provide a cost-benefit especially as it relates to future growth and reduced management. VMware vSAN is not, however, a simple-to-understand product. It can be easy to set up and deploy with the proper understanding, but there are serious complexities that need to be understood and mitigated for you to be successful and very happy with its long term care and operation.

Verified User

Director in Information Technology (Government Administration company, 501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

vSAN use in an R&D lab

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

July 5, 2019

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

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.

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.

Eric Garrison

Customer Engineer in Sales at ATTO Technology Inc (Information Technology and Services, 51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

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VMware vSAN - hyper-convergence versus dedicated storage is a great alternative

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

October 4, 2019

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

Verified User

Director in Information Technology (Government Administration company, 501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience