# How are you balancing vSAN 8 ESA performance gains with higher subscription licensing costs?

vSAN 8 Express Storage Architecture (ESA) feels incredibly fast and resilient, especially for massive database performance, and it simplifies infrastructure by removing the need for separate SANs and standalone file servers. At the same time, the move from perpetual licenses to subscription bundles has driven big cost increases, and ESA can show latency spikes under heavy write loads that could impact sensitive setups like VDI. If you’re running vSAN ESA today, how are you justifying the licensing shift and managing write-heavy latency behavior?

##### Post Metadata
- Posted at: 5 months ago
- Author title: Network Engineer /CCNA-CCNP-NSE4-MTCNA-MCSA
- Net upvotes: 1


## Comments
### Comment 1

For me the performance is great, but the subscription licensing still feels pricey. I justify it mostly by the time saved: instead of waiting 2 to 3 days on tickets for new disk space, I can apply SPBM policies right in vCenter and have the right capacity and tier in under an hour. On the write-heavy side, I have seen write latency spike when the cache tier gets saturated during uncompressed ML ingest, and troubleshooting resync or disk group issues in the UI usually means digging into logs.

##### Comment Metadata
- Posted at: 15 days ago
- Author title: Senior Software Engineer at Optum | Building Future-Proof Solutions for over 4.5+ years | 6x UiPath Certified | 5x Microsoft Certified | Python | PostgreSQL




## Related Product
[VMware vSAN](https://www.g2.com/products/vmware-vsan/reviews)

## Related Category
[Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) Solutions](https://www.g2.com/categories/hyperconverged-infrastructure-hci-solutions)

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