VMware vSAN

What do you like best?

Easy to manage, easy to scale up, better performance, and monitoring. Ability to stretch the cluster across the city to form a vSAN stretch cluster, which is definitely a great feature by VMware.

What do you dislike?

Host Isolation due to network failure can cause the data loss also. It requires SSD disk for form a vSAN cluster, which could be a budget issue for future expansion.

Always recommended to use the same hardware, so it could be difficult to expand the cluster size after one or more business year as the hardware specs might get changed by the hardware vendor.

Recommendations to others considering the product:

Please consider a minimum of 5 physical hosts for the vSAN production cluster.

Please make sure at least 2 SSD drive for creating a disk group for better performance.

It will reduce the cost of purchasing and maintaining another storage (which might require additional skilled resources to maintain).

Please purchase the vSAN ready node, which is available from Dell, HPE, Lenovo, Huawei.

Please consider the latest hardware and do a proper sizing plan for future expansion.

It is always good to create new cluster instead of expanding the old cluster.

What problems are you solving with the product? What benefits have you realized?

We are running VMware Horizon Desktop and Workspace One (Airwatch) on the vSAN platform.

It is built with HP vSAN ready nodes (specialized server designed for vSAN environment).

Where the users are accessing the order processing application of a pharmaceuticals company.

We are using some install clone feature from Horizon for which vSAN is doing great to provide better performance.