--- title: VMware vSAN Reviews meta_title: 'VMware vSAN Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 293 reviews by the users' company size, role or industry to find out how VMware vSAN works for a business like yours. aggregate_rating: rating_value: 4.4 review_count: 293 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-09-29' parent_category: name: IT Infrastructure url: https://www.g2.com/categories/it-infrastructure --- # VMware vSAN Reviews **Vendor:** Broadcom **Category:** [Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) Solutions ](https://www.g2.com/categories/hyperconverged-infrastructure-hci-solutions) **Average Rating:** 4.4/5.0 **Total Reviews:** 293 **AI Verified:** At least 10 G2 reviewers have confirmed using this product's AI features and functionality. ## About VMware vSAN VMware vSAN is VMware’s integrated, hyperconverged storage software in VMware Cloud Foundation, enabling a cloud operational model for storage within VMware's premier private cloud platform. vSAN, as a part of VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF), enables management of compute and storage with a single, integrated platform. vSAN delivers the agility, scalability, and performance essential for today’s dynamic applications and workloads. With direct integration into VCF and VVF, vSAN ensures unmatched storage efficiency, performance, and operational simplicity. vSAN empowers organizations to build, manage, and optimize private clouds using standardized storage building blocks, with the added flexibility to integrate seamlessly with edge and hybrid cloud environments. ## VMware vSAN Reviews ### 1. Powerful, Seamless Storage Management for vSphere—Held Back by Rising Licensing Costs. **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mallikarjun H. | Technology Analyst, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account added to their profile **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** September 02, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** Native vSphere Integration: Runs directly in the ESXi kernel, letting you manage all storage straight from vCenter without third-party SAN consoles. Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM): Allows dynamic assignment of RAID, IOPS limits, and encryption rules per VM rather than managing rigid physical LUNs. Seamless Scalability: Scales out compute and capacity simply by adding nodes, or scales up by inserting new drives into existing hosts. High Performance with ESA: Takes full advantage of modern NVMe drives to deliver low latency and high IOPS for intensive database workloads. Robust Resilience: Offers automated self-healing and stretched cluster support for zero-RPO disaster recovery across separate racks or sites. Simplified Operations: Eliminates dedicated Fibre Channel fabrics and traditional storage silos, sharply cutting administrative overhead. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** Licensing, Cost, and Packaging: VMware’s shift under Broadcom to bundled subscription models (such as VMware Cloud Foundation) makes licensing significantly more expensive and rigid, especially for smaller deployments or environments needing only targeted storage scaling. Overhead, Operational Slack, and Hardware Sensitivity: Maintaining optimal cluster health requires strict adherence to narrow Hardware Compatibility Lists (HCL) and reserving substantial capacity (often 20–30% "slack space") alongside host compute overhead for internal rebalancing, deduplication, and rebuild operations. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** VMware vSAN solves the high complexity and cost of managing traditional, siloed SAN/NAS hardware and rigid LUN provisioning by pooling server-attached drives directly into a software-defined storage layer. This benefits you by eliminating separate storage fabrics, cutting administrative overhead through unified management inside vCenter, and allowing dynamic, policy-based performance and redundancy controls right down to individual virtual machines. ### 2. VMware vSAN Streamlines Storage Management with Reliable, Scalable Performance **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Surya Karan S. | Information Technology Support Specialist, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **AI Translated:** This review has been translated from English using AI. **Reviewed Date:** September 08, 2026 At G2, we prefer fresh reviews and we like to follow up with reviewers. They may not have updated their review text, but have updated their review. **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** We use VMware vSAN in our organization, and what I appreciate most is how it streamlines storage management by integrating storage directly into the VMware environment. It’s straightforward to manage, scales well as our needs grow, and helps us maintain a reliable infrastructure without introducing unnecessary complexity. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** We use VMware vSAN in our organization, and my main concern is the cost and the complexity of its licensing. It also requires careful planning around hardware choices and capacity, which can add extra overhead when we need to expand the environment. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** VMware vSAN has helped simplify our storage infrastructure by bringing storage management directly into the virtual environment. It’s made it easier for us to scale capacity as needed, reduce hardware complexity, and maintain reliable performance. Overall, this saves the IT team time and makes day-to-day storage management more straightforward. ### 3. vSAN Setup Was Easier Than Expected **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Abhishek D. | Cloud Implementation Analyst, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 01, 2026 At G2, we prefer fresh reviews and we like to follow up with reviewers. They may not have updated their review text, but have updated their review. **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** What I like most is the ability of how it works with the rest of the VMware stack. Since we already were using vSphere, adding vSAN was very easy. Scaling out is easy too, you just add a node, and the storage grows with it. For day-to-day operations, that simplicity saves a lot of headaches. Also, the UI is user friendly and easy to understand. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** Honestly, the licensing cost caught us off guard, it adds up fast once you're scaling beyond a few nodes. Hardware compatibility is another sore spot, you really have to stick to the HCL or you'll run into weird performance issues nobody can explain. We did have to reach out to support for one such incident and the response shocked us. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** It mainly solves the problem of managing separate storage arrays. Before vSAN, we had a whole dedicated SAN setup with its own team, its own refresh cycles, its own headaches. Now storage is just part of the cluster, so provisioning new capacity or spinning up VMs is way faster. The biggest benefit for us has been less time spent firefighting storage issues and more time actually focused on the applications running on top. ### 4. High Performance but Too Many Management Consoles and bit a expensive. **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Balkrishna B. | Developer Analyst, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account added to their profile **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 02, 2026 At G2, we prefer fresh reviews and we like to follow up with reviewers. They may not have updated their review text, but have updated their review. **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** Lower Infrastructure Cost, vSAN is fully integrated into VMware vSphere, So, No need to learn separate storage management software, Scale out gradually instead of replacing an entire storage array, High Performance **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** Multiple management consoles & High cost and complexity. End of Perpetual Licenses: Broadcom eliminated perpetual licenses, forcing all customers onto subscription models. The new licensing model charges based on raw storage capacity (per TiB). **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** VMware vSAN is solving several infrastructure challenges for us by simplifying how we manage on-premises storage and compute. Instead of relying on separate, dedicated storage arrays, it uses the local storage within our VMware hosts to create a shared storage platform. This helps reduce infrastructure costs and avoids the need for large hardware refreshes. Because vSAN is fully integrated with VMware vSphere, our teams can manage compute and storage from a single platform rather than using separate storage management tools. This simplifies administration and reduces operational overhead. It also provides excellent scalability. As our infrastructure grows, we can add hosts or storage incrementally instead of replacing an entire storage array, making expansion more flexible and cost-effective. Finally, vSAN delivers high performance for our on-premises virtual machines, helping ensure applications run reliably with low latency and supporting the performance requirements of our business workloads. Overall, it gives us a simpler, scalable, and efficient infrastructure that's easier to manage while supporting business growth. ### 5. If the entire site fails, failover takes effect automatically **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Koutarou K. | Senior Cloud Infrastructure Engineer, Consulting, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 03, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** vSAN Stretched Clusters ensure business continuity by mirroring data across two separate locations with an RPO of almost zero. A Witness Host at a third site maintains quorum to prevent split-brain issues. In the event of a disaster taking out an entire site, automatic failover kicks in to ensure that applications continue to run. This object replication across ESXi hosts provides built-in protection inside vSphere. Tight integration with vCenter provides us with a real competitive advantage and plays a key role in VMware Site Recovery Manager. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** Replicating data as objects on the vSAN network between ESXi hosts provides us with robust built-in protection within vSphere. It's quietly reliable. This ensures that apps stay up. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** Our infrastructure team was very successful, and disaster recovery has been simplified on a large scale. When we migrated from dedicated SANs to vSAN, we eliminated a lot of management complexities, such as the complex provisioning of LUNs and SAN zoning. ​Another advantage is how tightly it integrates with our VMware setup, vCenter Server and VMware Site Recovery Manager. While Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct is excellent in a Windows Server environment, vSAN fits well within the VMware Cloud Foundation stack, providing a more coherent and easier-to-use and automate private cloud. This includes NVMe (classes D and F) and 25 Gbps NICs — expensive upgrades for older configurations. In some cases, it even involves purchasing new hosting. It's not a small task. ### 6. vSAN is an file system which ships with the hypervisor kernel as a VIB **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jose G. | CL_ INGENIERO DE DATOS, Telecommunications, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** July 31, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** vSAN eliminates traditional SAN friction, storage silos and manual provisioning in our virtual datacenter. It automatically creates VM storage, delivers 500 VMs per host with 300K IOPS and sub-millisecond latency at peak storage load. VCF 9.1's zStandard compression is efficient capacity extender. In VDI, VMware Horizon integration offers the same user experience across the various VMware products, and works in harmony with VMware NSX. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** Most often, our snags are caused by problem foundation issues. No deviation from the Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) is allowed; otherwise it will be unstable and lose data. ​ **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** The Original Storage Architecture (OSA) stores data in a caching and capacity Disk Groups, while the Express Storage Architecture (ESA) stores data in a single tier NVMe pool for improved performance. VM data placement and cluster protection is automated by using Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM). The seamless integration with VMware's VMware ecosystem is definitely a plus. It is compatible with vSphere technologies for virtualization, such as vMotion, DRS, HA and is simple to manage from our central vCenter server. ### 7. Seamless vSAN Integration Makes Virtualized Storage Easy to Learn **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** ASHISH K. | Student, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **G2 Icon:** Our network of Icons are G2 members who are recognized for their outstanding contributions and commitment to helping others through their expertise. **Reviewed Date:** July 30, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** It is seamlessly it integrates with the vspher ecosysytems. As someone learning virtualization and IT infratstructure skills, vSAN makes understanding virtualized storage straightforward. Pooling local drives into unified datastore directly inside vCenter avoids complex hardware SAN setups. It allows mme to gain pratical experience with hyerconvergend architecture, making enterprise storage intutive to master. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** The incredibly strict Hardware Compatibility List and high enterprise licensing costs. As someone trying to build skills in a home lab environment, it is frustrating that you cannot just use standard consumer-garde SSDs without running into warnings or stability issues. Also, troubleshooting stroage faults deep within the hypervisor can get overwhelmingly complex without enterprise-level support. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** It solvves the problem of complex, expensive, and rigid traditional storage setups like massive hardware SANs by letting you pool the local hard drives of your servers into one shared, software-defined datastore. For these mens i get learn and manage enterprise-level stogare directly through vCenter, Skipping the steep learning curve of proprietary hardware arrays. It gives me pratical, hands-on experience with hyperconverged infrastructure, which is a highly sought- after IT skill, all while simplifying scalability and troubleshooting. ### 8. vSAN ESA Delivers Breakthrough HCI Performance with Powerful Data Services **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Luke F. | Enterprise Cloud Manager, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** July 29, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** vSAN, particularly in the form of ESA over OSA while using nVME, has given us HCI storage performance within the HCI space that was previously unknown. Compression, de-duplication, and encryption are key features that keep attracting us back to the product. vSAN was further enhanced with the introduction of VCF 9.1 and "Auto RAID". **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** Nothing in particular about vSAN itself is problematic in its current ESA form, the only issue with storage in general at the moment are nVME costs. This is nothing to do with vSAN itself and more of an industry supply issue. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** vSAN is helping us reduce our reliance on traditional block storage and the requirements that come with it, such as network dependencies and the fine-tuning needed for iSCSI, or the less frequently used FC fabrics. We’re also saving money by eliminating FC networks and replacing them with high-speed Ethernet (100Gb+) and RDMA/RoCE. ### 9. Simplifies Shared Storage with Seamless VMware Ecosystem Integration **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Shudhansu P. | DevOps Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** July 16, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** What I like most about VMware vSAN is how it simplifies shared storage by integrating it directly into the virtualization platform. Having worked with storage solutions like OpenEBS for Kubernetes workloads and Rook-Ceph RBD on Proxmox, I appreciate the value of software-defined storage and the flexibility it provides. Compared to managing separate storage infrastructure, the centralized management and policy-based storage approach in vSAN makes administration much simpler. Features like data redundancy, storage scaling, and seamless integration with the VMware ecosystem help reduce operational overhead while maintaining good performance for virtual machine workloads. It also makes expanding storage capacity much more straightforward as infrastructure grows, without introducing unnecessary complexity. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** VMware vSAN is a solid platform, but it comes with a fairly steep learning curve, especially when you're new to the VMware ecosystem. Licensing costs can also become significant as the environment grows, which may not be ideal for smaller organizations. Compared to open-source storage solutions I've worked with, such as Rook-Ceph and OpenEBS, vSAN offers tighter integration with VMware but provides less flexibility in mixed environments. Troubleshooting storage or cluster-related issues can also require familiarity with multiple VMware components, so having a good understanding of the ecosystem is important. I would also like to see more streamlined monitoring and simpler guidance for diagnosing performance or capacity-related issues. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** VMware vSAN helps solve the challenge of providing shared, highly available storage for virtual machine workloads without relying on a separate external SAN. It simplifies infrastructure by pooling local storage from multiple hosts into a single distributed storage platform, making it easier to manage capacity, redundancy, and performance from one place. From my experience working with software-defined storage solutions like Rook-Ceph and OpenEBS, I appreciate how this approach reduces infrastructure complexity while improving resiliency. It also makes it easier to scale storage as the environment grows, supports high availability for virtual machines, and reduces operational effort by keeping storage management integrated with the virtualization platform. ### 10. Simple, Scalable vSAN Storage with Great Performance and Easy vCenter Management **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nayan J. | Enterprise Customer Support, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Source: Organic:** Organic review. This review was written entirely without invitation or incentive from G2, a seller, or an affiliate. **Reviewed Date:** July 15, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** The architecture is simple, no need for separate NAS or SAN, the storage of hosts are utilized. I find it easily scalable as well. We can configure different storage policy like RAIDs and also thin provisioning for optimum distribution of storage and high availability. The cache and capacity differentiation in vsan OSA provides excellent iops. All these configuration can be managed by central vcenter which is very easy to use. Due to various deduplication and replication policies, data are well protected. And replacing hard drives are also easy and there is minimum downtime. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** Obviously the licensing cost is high. And only vmware compatible hardware is supported to use as cache and capacity disk. The over consumption of host's resources is one of the concern. Sometimes it takes a long time resynchronizing data if a host or disk is replaced after it fails. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** Unlike older architecture, vSAN provides hosts shared resources which helps me utilize features like HA and vMotion which helps in minimizing downtime. ### 11. Seamless vSAN-vCenter Integration and Easy Scaling, But Troubleshooting Can Be Complex **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Aashish G. | Senior DevOps Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** September 28, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** Of course, the most obvious upside of using vSAN is how seamlessly it integrates with VMware storage and lets you manage storage policies from the same vCenter interface, rather than having to manage a separate storage platform. Scaling is also fairly straightforward, since you can add capacity to the existing cluster as your requirements grow. In terms of cost, I'd say, if you're already managing your infrastructure on VMware then you do not need a separate infra or storage management control plane license. In terms of performance, it's not just about vSAN as a service, it depends heavily on underlying disk types, network configuration, cluster design and type of workload running. If you are already on VMware vSphere and vCenter, having vSAN integrated into the existing VMware environment reduces the learning curve., in therm of support, troubleshooting is a complex thing when issue related to disk groups, network connectivity, storage policies or hardware compatibility, so having proper documentation and support mechanism is important. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** One thing I personally found challenging with vSAN is the overall cost. It’s not only the licensing; once you factor in compatible hardware, disks, networking, and the cluster requirements, the total investment can become significant, especially for smaller environments. In my view, this is something that needs to be evaluated carefully during the initial planning stage. I also found that troubleshooting vSAN issues can sometimes take longer than expected. When there’s a performance or availability problem, it isn’t always clear whether the root cause is the disks, the ESXi host, the network, the storage policy, or the underlying hardware. You often have to check multiple layers and rule things out before you can pinpoint what’s actually causing the issue. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** The main problem vSAN solves for me is the complexity of managing separate compute and storage infrastructure. Rather than relying on a dedicated SAN for VM storage, vSAN lets us use the storage available across our ESXi hosts and manage it directly within the VMware environment. This has made my day-to-day operations much simpler, especially when provisioning VMs, expanding capacity, or applying different storage requirements. I no longer have to treat storage as a completely separate platform, and the integration with vCenter gives me a single place to monitor and manage the overall environment. Another benefit I see is scalability. As the environment grows, we can add hosts and increase both compute and storage capacity at the same time, instead of having to redesign the entire storage layer. ### 12. Centralized Management with Cost Challenges **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** David G. | Professor, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **AI Translated:** This review has been translated from English using AI. **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2026 At G2, we prefer fresh reviews and we like to follow up with reviewers. They may not have updated their review text, but have updated their review. **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I like the idea of one management system with VMware vSAN, where servers, virtualization, and storage are all managed together rather than through a separate storage console. I also like the per VM storage policies, which give our administrators the ability to provide stronger protection for important VMs without having to redesign the whole storage system. This makes changes easier, as we only need to modify one policy, and ensures that compliance is visible. These features make day-to-day management easier. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** I would say, first and foremost, the cost and licensing can be expensive, particularly when VMware vSAN is required as part of a broader VMware package. Maintenance can be somewhat slow; if we need to remove or reboot a host, that may trigger rebalancing, resynchronization, and so forth. Troubleshooting is not always simple. The interface is unified, but the underlying system is distributed, which can require specialized knowledge to diagnose issues. Those are the main things. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use VMware vSAN for general server virtualization, hosting critical applications. It integrates storage and management, reducing operational work. However, it's expensive, and troubleshooting can be complex due to its distributed nature. Per VM storage policies ease management without redesigning storage systems. ### 13. It sticks storage directly to our ESXi hosts, without external arrays and lots of friction **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jawahar A. | Senior Network & Systems Infrastructure Analytics Engineer, Telecommunications, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** July 29, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** vSAN is a distributed software layer that is added on top of ESXi, which pools server SSDs into object storage that are used for caching, and pools server HDDs and SSDs into object storage for capacity. Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) enables automatic placement across Disk Groups using granular VM performance, availability and capacity policies for All-Flash or Hybrid configurations. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** The tight integration with VMware ESXi is advantageous and at the same time is a functional limitation. Comparing vSAN with its competitors, the tight coupling of vSAN to ESXi is contrasted with Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI) that is supported in multiple hypervisors. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** We know that performance can rapidly become an issue when the network settings are not configured correctly, hardware resources are not adequate or the Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) policies are setup incorrectly. ​ ### 14. vSAN Delivers Seamless vSphere Storage with Easy Scaling and Solid Performance **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Govind P. | Bug Bounty Hunter, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **AI Translated:** This review has been translated from English using AI. **Reviewed Date:** September 13, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** Honestly, the best thing about vSAN is how seamlessly it fits into vSphere. There are no separate storage boxes, no extra management tools, and no added headache. I just log into the vSphere Client I’m already using, set a policy, and boom—storage is handled. Scaling is stupidly easy, too. Need more capacity? Add a node or drop in a disk. That’s it. No complicated setup and no downtime drama. Performance has been solid for us. Latency has been good, and throughput has been especially strong, particularly with the newer ESA architecture. Dedup and compression actually help keep costs down without me having to babysit anything. The built-in resilience is a big plus as well. Everything feels protected, and features like encryption and immutable snapshots are included. Stuff that would normally require extra hardware or separate software just comes with it. vSAN makes storage feel like it was never a separate thing to begin with. It simply works with what you already have, and that’s the part that matters. Since we're already deep in the VMware world vSAN fits like a glove. It's not really "integration”. Its more like it was always supposed to be It talks natively with vSphere and vCenter obviously. No extra connectors or plugins needed. VMotion works with it DRS balances workloads across nodes without any fuss and HA just does its thing. That tight coupling is the point. We also use Veeam for backups. It supports vSAN snapshots and APIs without any drama. SRM (Site Recovery Manager) works too for our DR workflows. Stretched clusters plus SRM is a solid combo. On the networking side we're running NSX-T and vSAN traffic rides on the stack without issues. We just dedicated some NICs for vSAN traffic. Its been smooth sailing. The one thing I'd call out is that it's VMware-centric by design. If you've got a hypervisor environment or you're using non-VMware tools for storage management you might feel some friction.. If you're all-in, on VMware like we are it's pretty much plug-and-play. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** Look vSAN is good. It is not cheap. The costs for licenses grow quickly especially if you are a company. You are basically paying extra for the ease of use. Sometimes it seems like VMware is aware of that. Also it is not very forgiving if you do not plan your cluster properly from the beginning. Once it is running, making changes to your storage settings or adding new nodes can become complicated. You really need to understand what you are doing. You might find yourself in a difficult situation. Support has been inconsistent for us too. Sometimes you get someone who really understands the product times you end up explaining the same thing three times to different people. For the price you pay you would expect more reliable assistance. Honestly it is very tied to VMware. If you ever wanted to switch or use hypervisors you are pretty much stuck. This lack of flexibility is a problem, in the long run. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** Before vSAN we were managing a SAN array and to be honest it was a mess. Storage lived in its silo—different team, different tools, different everything. Every time we needed capacity it meant starting a full procurement process, running cables doing configuration the whole thing. It could take weeks just to add a little disk space. Now it’s completely different. We simply add a node to the cluster. We’re good. No separate storage team involved. No extra management console to log into. No waiting for hardware deliveries for weeks. Our VM administrators handle storage policies inside vSphere so we’ve eliminated a lot of handoffs and delays. The biggest improvement has been in disaster recovery and resilience. We used to have a separate DR storage setup. It was expensive and hard to test. With vSAN’s stretched cluster and built-in replication disaster recovery is now part of the core design. We’ve reduced DR testing time from days to hours.. We’re no longer paying for duplicate storage gear. We also saw a drop in total cost of ownership. No separate SAN hardware. No separate support contracts. No more need for storage administrators. That’s made a difference in our budget year after year. Line: vSAN changed storage from being this isolated, costly and slow-to-change component, into something that’s just part of our compute layer. That shift has made us much faster to respond to business needs. ### 15. Highly Scalable, Simplifies VMware Storage Management **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nima T. | Technology Analyst, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** September 12, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I really like how VMware vSAN simplifies storage management within a VMware environment. I can manage everything through vCenter without needing a separate storage system. It's highly scalable and provides good performance and availability, which makes it easy to expand storage as the environment grows. I appreciate the centralized management through vCenter, the storage policies, and the built-in high availability. The storage policies are a real help for defining requirements for individual VMs, and I find it very useful to be able to scale storage by just adding disks or hosts as needed. The monitoring and health-check tools are also great for quickly identifying any issues before they impact workloads. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** One area that could be improved is the overall cost, especially for larger environments where licensing and infrastructure requirements can add up. Initial setup and configuration can also be a little complex for teams that are new to hyperconverged infrastructure. I’d also like to see more straightforward troubleshooting and monitoring tools, with clearer recommendations when performance or storage issues occur. Overall, vSAN is powerful, but making it more cost-effective and easier to manage would improve the experience. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use VMware vSAN to simplify storage management in virtualized environments, reducing reliance on external storage. It effectively pools storage, improves scalability, and ensures high availability during hardware failures. This enhances infrastructure management by reducing complexity and improving flexibility. ### 16. Flexible, Scalable, but Steep Learning Curve **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Malibongwe H. | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** This review contains authentic analysis and has been reviewed by our team **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **AI Translated:** This review has been translated from English using AI. **Reviewed Date:** September 10, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I really like VMware vSAN's integration with the VMware environment. Once configured, managing storage is straightforward and it provides great visibility for troubleshooting. The flexibility to set storage policies based on workload needs and its overall reliability stand out to me. When everything is set up right, it performs really well, and the visibility into issues it provides is very helpful, though sometimes overwhelming. The setup was fairly easy, with just a little troubleshooting needed initially. All in all, it's powerful, scalable, and fits naturally into a VMware environment. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** The biggest challenge for me was probably the initial learning curve. There are quite a few concepts around storage policies, networking, disk groups, and performance that you need to understand before you can confidently troubleshoot an issue. When something does go wrong, figuring out whether you're looking at a storage, network, configuration, or underlying hardware issue can take some investigation. I’ve also found that performance and reliability depend heavily on having the underlying environment configured correctly. Simpler diagnostic or recommendations would help should anything go wrong. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use VMware vSAN to integrate storage with our VMware environment, simplify scaling, improve availability, and manage storage policies more effectively. It provides visibility for diagnosing issues, helping us troubleshoot performance or capacity problems. Overall, it simplifies shared storage management while offering flexibility, resilience, and scalability. ### 17. VMware vSAN Simplifies Storage Management with Easy Scalability **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rahul J. | Software engineer 2, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 10, 2026 At G2, we prefer fresh reviews and we like to follow up with reviewers. They may not have updated their review text, but have updated their review. **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** What I like most about VMware vSAN is how it simplifies storage management by using the existing server resources. It is easy to scale as the environment grows, and the centralized management makes provisioning and monitoring storage much more convenient. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** The main thing I dislike about vSAN is that it can be expensive when scaling the environment, especially with the hardware and licensing requirements. Performance and capacity also depend heavily on the underlying hardware, so proper planning is important. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** vSAN helps us avoid the complexity of managing separate storage systems by pooling storage directly from ESXi hosts. It makes capacity easier to scale, simplifies provisioning, and gives us better flexibility while keeping storage management within the familiar VMware environment. ### 18. Streamlined Storage Management with Seamless VMware Integration **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Nivetha A. | System Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 27, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I like that VMware vSAN is integrated directly with the VMware environment. It allows us to manage storage through vCenter, without needing a separate storage management tool. I also appreciate how vSAN combines storage from multiple hosts into one pool, making storage management for virtual machines much more straightforward once it's configured properly. It's helpful for monitoring when managing several hosts, allowing us to spot capacity or hardware issues needing attention. I also found the initial setup of VMware vSAN to be easy. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** I dislike most is the vSAN can become expensive as the environment grows, especially when you need to add more capacity or hardware. It also requires proper planning from the beginning, because changing things later isn't always simple as it sounds. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** I find VMware vSAN solves the problem of managing separate storage for each host by pooling storage across servers. It integrates with VMware, allowing storage management through vCenter without a separate tool, simplifying day-to-day management and troubleshooting, and helps monitor capacity and hardware issues effectively. ### 19. SPBM Is vSAN’s Crown Jewel for VM-Granular Storage SLAs **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** James H. | Sr. Engineer, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 24, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM) — VM-Granular SLAs SPBM is the absolute crown jewel of vSAN. It allows platform engineers to define storage requirements and SLAs (availability, performance, replication, and encryption) directly in vCenter as software policies, and apply them on a per-VM or per-Virtual Disk (.vmdk) level: * Dynamic Re-striping: If a database VM suddenly requires higher availability or performance, you can change its policy (e.g., from RAID-1 Mirroring to RAID-5 Erasure Coding) on-the-fly. vSAN will dynamically move and re-reconcile the physical storage blocks in the background with zero downtime and zero volume migration required. * Granular Quality of Service (QoS): You can enforce IOPS limits directly on specific virtual disks to prevent "noisy neighbor" workloads from saturating cluster disk queues. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** Split-Brain & Partitioning Risks In smaller deployments (such as 2-node or 3-node clusters common in remote offices/branch offices), vSAN relies on a separate "Witness Appliance" to act as a tie-breaker during network partitioning: * The Pain Point: If the network link between the active nodes and the Witness is disrupted, vSAN can enter a partitioned state where VMs are locked or forced offline to prevent data inconsistency ("split-brain"). Managing witness routing and latency constraints (must be < 500ms) adds substantial architectural complexity. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** Eliminating Hardware and Operational Silos (SAN Complexity) In traditional data centers, provisioning storage requires coordinating with a dedicated storage admin team to carve out LUNs on external SAN arrays, configure Fiber Channel (FC) zoning, and map host paths. * vSAN's Solution: It completely abstracts the physical SAN fabric. Local SSDs inside our ESXi hosts are aggregated into a single, unified, logical datastore managed entirely via software policies (SPBM) inside vCenter. ### 20. Reliable, Fast, and Easy to Manage in the VMware Console **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** James H. | Platform Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** September 14, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** that it is reliable and fast with ssd. it is easy to manage through the vmware console. that it is easy to back up and restore from. did I say that it is reliable? **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** there is not really much to not like, paying for it i guess. why isn't it free? I know it can't be free but it would be a lot cooler if it was! give it some thougth! **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** it is solving the issue of provisioning disk. It is easy to grow a disk through the api. we also have the connector from openshift that can provision a disk. ### 21. Great fit if you are already on VMware, but licensing pinches **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Love C. | Associate Data Engineer, Information Technology and Services, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 07, 2026 At G2, we prefer fresh reviews and we like to follow up with reviewers. They may not have updated their review text, but have updated their review. **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** The best part for us is that we did not have to buy any separate SAN or storage box. vSAN just pools the local disks of our ESXi hosts, so we are managing storage and compute from the same vCenter, which saves a lot of running around. We are a team of around 12 people handling the virtualization side, and adding capacity has become very simple, whenever we are short on space we just add disks or one more host and it gets absorbed into the cluster on its own. Storage policies are also handy because we can keep different FTT settings for critical and non critical VMs without touching any hardware. And honestly the health check and performance dashboards have saved us many times, mostly we come to know about a failing disk or a latency spike before the application team starts raising tickets. Since our full setup is already on VMware, keeping storage in the same stack has reduced a lot of coordination headache for us. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** The biggest pain point for me is the licensing cost. After the Broadcom takeover the pricing has gone up quite a lot and the bundling also changed, so for a mid size setup like ours it becomes a costly affair to justify to management every renewal. Second thing is the initial setup is not a click and finish job, the cluster planning, disk group design and network configuration all need proper attention, and for someone new to vSAN there is a decent learning curve. We also faced trouble with hardware compatibility, if a driver or firmware is not exactly matching the HCL then random issues start coming, and the error messages are not always clear. Many times we had to dig through logs and KB articles just to understand what actually went wrong. One more thing, during a rebuild or resync the performance does take a hit, so we have learnt to schedule such activities in off hours. If VMware can make the alerts more descriptive with proper next steps, it would save us a good amount of troubleshooting time. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** Earlier our storage was sitting on a traditional SAN and every time we needed more capacity or a controller upgrade it used to turn into a big procurement plus downtime exercise, and we were always dependent on the storage vendor even for small changes. With vSAN that headache is mostly gone, the storage now sits inside the same ESXi cluster and our team of 12 can manage it on our own without waiting on anyone. Scaling is the biggest benefit for us, if some project suddenly needs more space we just add disks or a host and it is done in a day instead of weeks. It has also helped a lot with VM availability, because of the FTT policies a disk failure or even a host going down does not bring the VMs down, which earlier used to give us sleepless nights. And since compute and storage are both inside vCenter, our day to day monitoring and maintenance effort has come down, one console means fewer tools to juggle and quicker troubleshooting. In short it has made our infra more predictable and cut down our dependency on external storage hardware. ### 22. Simplifies Storage Management with Strong Performance and Visibility **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Eduardo F. | Consulate Assistant, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** June 11, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I like how it simplifies storage management by converging compute and storage into a single platform. Instead of managing storage arrays, storage resources are aggregated directly from ESXi hosts, which reduces the infrastructure complexity and operational costs. It also, the combination of performance, simplicity, and operational visibility. From the support standpoint, it provides excellent visibility into the health of the storage. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** One limitation is that it is tightly coupled to the VMware Ecosystem. Organizations that operate heterogeneous environments or want greater flexibility in their infrastructure choices may find that this increases vendor dependency. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** It solves several challenges associated with traditional storage infrastructure. Historically, organizations had to manage separate storage arrays, storage networks, and visualization platforms, which increased complexity, operational overhead, and troubleshooting effort. vSAN consolidates storage directly into the vSphere environment, allowing compute and storage resources to be managed as a simple platform. ### 23. Seamless vSAN Integration and Centralized Management in vCenter **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Pitabas P. | Associate, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I like vmware vsan for its seamless integration with the vsphere hypervisor, which eliminates the need for separate storage systems and allows for centralized management through a single pane of glass in vcenter. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** It's little bit high in cost and complex to maintain it. Performance and stability can be improved. Sometimes it need specific hardward requiremebt to operate smoothly. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** I had a local storage network and It has some issues. Vmware vsan solves the problem of high cost and complexity associated with traditional, dedicated storage hardware by eliminating the need for separate storage arrays. It achieves this by pooling the local storage of standard x86 servers into a single, software-defined shared datastore managed directly by the vsphere hypervisor. ### 24. Dependable vSAN, But AI Features Still Maturing **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Accounting | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) This reviewer's identity has been verified by our review moderation team. They have asked not to show their name, job title, or picture. **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 08, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** What stands out most is how seamlessly vSAN integrates with the rest of the VMware stack. vCenter, vSphere, and NSX work together without requiring a separate management layer, which helps cut down operational overhead. Performance has been consistently solid, even under mixed workloads, and being able to scale storage simply by adding nodes (instead of doing a forklift upgrade) has made capacity planning much easier. Policy-based management is another standout. Defining storage policies per VM rather than per LUN gives far more flexibility, and it means I no longer have to manually provision separate storage arrays. The AI-driven capabilities available through Aria Operations have also been useful, especially for predictive capacity planning and for flagging anomalies before they turn into real problems. From a support perspective, VMware’s documentation and knowledge base are extensive. Onboarding our team took less time than expected because the interface remains consistent with tools we already knew. In terms of ROI, consolidating compute and storage into a single HCI layer has reduced our hardware footprint and simplified licensing compared to running a separate SAN. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** My biggest pain point is the UI/UX around troubleshooting. When a health check fails or a disk needs attention, the error messages aren’t always intuitive, and I often end up cross-referencing VMware KB articles just to understand what a specific alert is actually telling me. Integrations with non-VMware tools—especially third-party backup and monitoring platforms—can also take extra configuration and aren’t always as plug-and-play as the native VMware integrations. On the performance side, resync operations after a host failure or a maintenance window can be resource-intensive and can occasionally impact production workloads if they aren’t carefully scheduled. Pricing/ROI is another consideration: licensing can get expensive as you scale, especially once you factor in add-ons like Aria Operations, and the total cost isn’t always transparent upfront. For support and onboarding, the documentation is thorough, but for complex issues it can sometimes take longer than expected to get a support engineer who deeply understands vSAN specifically (rather than VMware in general). Lastly, the AI/intelligence features are promising but still feel like they need more maturity—the predictive alerts are useful, yet they sometimes generate false positives that require manual verification instead of being fully trusted as automation. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** Before adopting vSAN, we relied on a traditional SAN setup that required separate teams to manage compute and storage. That split slowed provisioning and made scaling a multi-step process that was often expensive. With vSAN’s hyper-converged approach, storage and compute are now managed through the same vCenter interface, which has dramatically reduced the time it takes to provision storage for VMs—what used to take days of coordination can now be done in minutes. This shift has also made our disaster recovery strategy much simpler. Policy-based management allows us to define availability and performance requirements per VM, instead of manually configuring RAID groups or LUNs for different needs. From a cost perspective, consolidating storage and compute has reduced our hardware footprint and lowered the licensing and maintenance costs that came with running a separate SAN. Overall, vSAN has freed up our infrastructure team to focus on higher-value work rather than routine storage administration. As our workloads grow, scaling capacity is now mainly a matter of adding nodes, instead of planning a major infrastructure overhaul. ### 25. Streamlined Storage Management with Some Setup Complexity **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Daniel H. | Cloud Enginner, Telecommunications, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 04, 2026 At G2, we prefer fresh reviews and we like to follow up with reviewers. They may not have updated their review text, but have updated their review. **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I like how VMware vSAN integrates well with the VMware ecosystem. Managing storage from the same interface as other virtual machines saves time. Scaling the environment has been much easier than with traditional storage solutions, and it has been reliable for our daily rollouts. It helps us eliminate the need for dedicated storage hardware and reduces infrastructure complexity. Managing everything from the vCenter console makes troubleshooting and routine administration more efficient. Our virtualization and storage can work from the same console, reducing mistakes and speeding up changes, making daily operations smoother during upgrades and maintenance. Once everything was in place, management became simpler with compute and storage on the same platform, reducing complexity and making future expansion easier. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** I find the initial deployment and configuration of VMware vSAN to be a bit complex, especially if you're new to vSAN. The licensing is also on the expensive side compared to other alternatives. I think having better billing, reporting, and easier troubleshooting would really improve our experience. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** VMware vSAN eliminates the need for dedicated storage hardware, reducing infrastructure complexity. It integrates well with the VMware ecosystem, making management easier. Scaling is simpler than with traditional solutions, and managing everything from vCenter streamlines operations and reduces errors. ### 26. Simplified Storage Management, Great vSphere Integration **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** KOMARA R. | HPE VM Essentials Administrator, Computer Software, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 05, 2026 At G2, we prefer fresh reviews and we like to follow up with reviewers. They may not have updated their review text, but have updated their review. **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I use VMware vSAN mainly for managing storage in my virtualization environment. It lets me pool local disks from ESXi hosts and create a shared datastore without needing external SAN hardware, which has been very useful for running critical VMs, HA/DRS clusters, and migration projects. What I like is the easy integration with vSphere and vCenter, plus the scalability when adding new hosts. The built-in health checks and alerts help me catch disk group issues early. Performance has been solid, and troubleshooting things like disk group degradation or multipath failures is much easier with the built-in tools. The best thing about vSAN for me is how well it integrates with vSphere and vCenter. I don't have to deal with separate storage systems; everything is managed from the same console, which saves a lot of time. I also like that scalability by adding new hosts or disks is easy and doesn't require any complex reconfiguration. Also, initial setup was manageable with straightforward enabling through vCenter if you already have VMware experience. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** I find the licensing costs to be on the higher side compared to other storage solutions, which can be challenging for smaller environments. Hardware compatibility is another factor that complicates things, making it necessary to carefully plan and validate hardware against the VMware HCL. Additionally, the initial learning curve can be steep with VMware vSAN. Setting up disk groups, configuring fault domains, and tuning performance requires careful planning and isn't just a plug-and-play experience. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** VMware vSAN lets me pool disks to create shared storage without external hardware. It simplifies management, reduces costs, scales easily, and integrates well with vSphere and vCenter. It simplifies troubleshooting with built-in tools and catches issues early, eliminating the need for costly SAN setups. ### 27. Seamless Integration and Simplified Management **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Krish . | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** This review contains authentic analysis and has been reviewed by our team **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 05, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I like how easily and seamlessly VMware vSAN integrates with the VMware ecosystem. Managing both compute and storage from within vCenter makes day-to-day administration work much simpler, especially compared to maintaining a separate storage solution. The storage policy-based management feature is particularly useful because it lets us define performance and availability requirements at the VM level instead of configuring everything manually. It simplifies storage management through vCenter, making it easy to scale our infrastructure while maintaining good performance and availability. The seamless integration with VMware vSphere and vCenter Server provides a single interface for managing compute, storage, and virtualization, making it easy to operate in our environment. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** While VMware vSAN has been reliable overall, there are a few areas where it could improve. The biggest challenge is the licensing cost, which can become expensive as clusters grow or when advanced features are needed. Troubleshooting can also be complex because storage, networking, and virtualization are tightly integrated, so diagnosing issues often requires experienced VMware admins. I think VMware could make licensing simpler and more predictable, especially for organizations that are expanding their infrastructure. The current licensing model can be difficult to estimate as environments grow, so clearer pricing tiers or more flexible options would make planning easier. On the troubleshooting side, I'd like to see more built-in diagnostic capabilities. When an issue occurs, it's sometimes difficult to quickly determine whether the root cause is related to storage, networking, or virtualization layers, so improvement in that area would be beneficial. Proactive alerts would also help admins resolve problems before they affect production workflows. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use VMware vSAN to simplify storage management and provisioning, avoiding separate storage arrays. It enhances availability with data replication and enables easy scaling and storage policy-based management. Overall, it reduces operational overhead and makes administration more consistent. ### 28. Great Storage and VMware Integration, but Licensing Costs Add Up **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Diego P. | VP of Engineering, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through Google using a business email account **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 03, 2026 At G2, we prefer fresh reviews and we like to follow up with reviewers. They may not have updated their review text, but have updated their review. **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I think it is a really good solution for storage, with the integration with VMware network solutions; these 2 combined make a really smooth and great experience. The best part of vSAN is that it turns storage management into a software policy instead of a hardware headache. Because it’s embedded directly into the vSphere kernel, I don't have to jump between vCenter and a separate storage array console or deal with LUN masking, WWNs, and SAN fabric zoning. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** Licensing cost is the problem for me. I used this service only once for a company that was able to afford the cost. The integration was really easy to do, and support was excellent; however, when I moved to a different company, I proposed using this solution on a project. I wasn't aware of the high costs, and this was immediately discarded due to the low prices of competitors. From a technical side, the product is great, but the commercial reality is making it really hard to justify the ROI. When you combine the new software costs with the strict (and expensive) hardware requirements like high-end NVMe drives and 25GbE+ networking, traditional hardware SANs are starting to look much more appealing from a budget perspective. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** It solves the 'storage silo' bottleneck. Before vSAN, whenever the virtualization team needed a new datastore or a specific tier of storage for a high-I/O database, we had to submit a ticket to a separate team, wait for them to carve out a LUN, zone the network fabric, and present it back to our ESXi hosts. It slowed everything down. The main benefit is the speed and autonomy we get now. Because it's all hyperconverged and managed via vCenter, the VMware admins control the storage end-to-end. Through Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM), we just define a policy—like RAID-1 for raw speed or RAID-5 for space efficiency—and apply it directly to a VM. It completely eliminated the cross-team friction and lets us deploy or tweak infrastructure infinitely faster. ### 29. Effortless Storage Management with VMware vSAN **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Gaurav C. | Associate Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account added to their profile **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 03, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I like how simple VMware vSAN is once it's set up since everything lives right inside vCenter, allowing me to manage storage from the same place I manage the VMs without needing a separate storage tool. I appreciate the ability to set storage policies per VM, and scaling out by adding nodes just works. The deduplication and compression on the all-flash setup saved us a good chunk of space, which is vital since flash isn't cheap. The maintenance process is low drama, letting me patch hosts without downtime. The health checks in vCenter provide great peace of mind, warning me before small issues become big problems. Together, these features make storage something I mostly don't have to think about, which is exactly what I want. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** The licensing cost is the main pain point for us; it's not cheap and the pricing changes lately have made budgeting harder. Sizing can also be tricky at first; if we don't plan our disk groups and network right, we can run into performance issues, so it has a bit of a learning curve. We really need fast networking, like 10Gb at minimum, or it drags. When something does go wrong, digging into the logs to figure out why isn't always straightforward. Nothing is dealbreaking, but those are the rough edges. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use VMware vSAN to replace our old SAN, eliminating physical storage headaches. It simplifies storage management, scales easily, ensures redundancy, and allows maintenance without downtime. Dedupe and compression save space and cost. Health checks provide alerts before issues escalate. ### 30. Easy-to-Use vSAN with Reliable Performance and Smooth vSphere Integration **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Abdulraheman A. | Cloud Architect, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 03, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** VMware vSAN offers an easy-to-use interface and integrates smoothly with vSphere and vCenter. From a single console, I can manage storage and compute resources, monitor performance and capacity, and keep an eye on overall health. It delivers reliable performance and helps simplify day-to-day infrastructure operations through policy-based management and automated health monitoring. While the licensing can be expensive, it still provides solid value and ROI for organizations that are already invested in the VMware ecosystem. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** The main drawback is the licensing cost, which can be high for smaller environments. vSAN also requires careful hardware compatibility checks, proper sizing, and experienced resources during the initial setup. Troubleshooting performance or cluster-related issues can also be complex at times. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** VMware vSAN removes the need for separate storage systems by bringing compute and storage together in the same cluster. It makes day-to-day management simpler, supports easier scaling as needs grow, and delivers reliable performance. It also reduces operational effort thanks to centralized monitoring and policy-based storage management. ### 31. Effortless Hyperconverged Storage with VMware vSAN **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Luis F. | Global Infrastructure Business Analyst, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Source: Organic:** Organic review. This reviewer was offered a nominal incentive as thanks for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** March 06, 2024 At G2, we prefer fresh reviews and we like to follow up with reviewers. They may not have updated their review text, but have updated their review. **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I find VMware vSAN very easy to manage and deploy, and it's incredibly fast—it's the fastest thing I’ve ever used. I love that it creates a bigger volume by using local disks in a hyperconverged infrastructure, which is amazing. The seamless integration with existing VMware products means there's no need for extra plugins or installations; it just works. This makes it easy to learn and manage, especially if you're familiar with VMware vSphere and other products. I also appreciate that the setup is super straightforward and simplifies things like rack space by using local disks instead of purchasing cabinets. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** I think VMware vSAN could improve by including more features in the entry-level licensing. Right now, I feel like the entry-level doesn't have everything I'd like it to include. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** I find VMware vSAN solves the gap of storage providers, allowing the use of local servers and disks. It simplifies storage management in a hyperconverged environment, making deployment super easy and fast. The seamless integration without extra plugins is really convenient. ### 32. Effortless Storage Scalability with Licensing Challenges **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Joni L. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** July 29, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I like VMware vSAN's ease of use and reliability in a cluster setting. It's been really easy to change the virtual SAN to scale storage needs and implement high-availability in our VMware clusters. The initial setup was very easy using the integrated setup utility. Also, it's a great solution for utilizing storage with redundancy in our cluster without needing a physical SAN. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** The biggest caveat for me with VMware vSAN, and really the VMware platform in general, is the cost of the licenses. It's now part of bundles that cost quite a lot compared to previous licensing models, which means it's not as cost effective versus using a hardware SAN as it used to be. Also, it needs overhead from the hosts since it runs on the software layer, so you have to ensure you prepare your hosts with that overhead in advance, though this is not exclusively tied to VMware but virtual SANs in general. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** VMware vSAN allows us to utilize local and direct-attached storage with redundancy in our clusters, eliminating the need for costly physical SANs, and it offers ease of use and reliability, making storage scaling and high-availability implementation in our clusters seamless. ### 33. Effortless Storage Management with VMware vSAN **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Venkata Sidda Reddy P. | Cloud Devops Engineer, Information Technology and Services, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** July 29, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I love how VMware vSAN simplifies storage management and integrates well with VMware, making it easy to manage. It provides good performance and has been reliable in our daily operations. I find expanding our infrastructure much easier with vSAN, as it scales more smoothly compared to traditional storage solutions. The health monitoring tools are useful, and the straightforward updates add to its reliability. Additionally, its integration with the VMware ecosystem simplifies administration tasks. The initial setup was pretty easy, especially since it felt familiar with VMware, and with proper planning, it was up and running without major issues. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** Main downside for us is the licensing cost. It would also be nice if troubleshooting and some advanced options were easier. Other than these things, it's very good. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use VMware vSAN to simplify storage management, improve performance, and make scaling infrastructure easier. It consolidates storage management within the VMware environment, reduces downtime, and provides reliable storage solutions, making it straightforward and efficient. ### 34. Incremental Scalability with Complex Setup **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Ankit P. | Digital Marketing Manager, Marketing and Advertising, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account added to their profile **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** July 29, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I find VMware vSAN particularly valuable due to its ability to simplify storage problems by consolidating local and server storage into a single solution. I really like its incremental scalability, which is a huge advantage for us because we don't need to make large investments in storage as our virtual environment grows. We can add additional local disks to the cluster, and VMware vSAN automatically incorporates these resources, which is fantastic. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** The initial setup process of VMware vSAN is a little complex. We managed to get through it using support articles from the website and FAQs, which helped a lot. But if the process were simpler or if there were some official video tutorials available, it would definitely help. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** VMware vSAN simplifies our storage problems, consolidating local and server multiple storage into a single storage. Its incremental scalability is a big advantage, allowing us to add resources as our virtual environment grows, without large upfront investments. ### 35. Efficient Storage Management with High Integration **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** krishna h. | Application Development Senior Analyst, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I mainly use VMware vSAN for managing storage in our virtualized env, and it makes it easy to pool storage across our hosts. I really like how well it integrates with the VMware environment, allowing me to manage compute, VMs, and storage from the same place instead of juggling multiple systems. Provisioning and managing storage for new VMs becomes much easier with it. The policy-based approach is really helpful, and the high availability and flexibility it provides for managing my VMs workload are great. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** I find the cost to be a concern, especially for larger environments. The initial setup and configuration can also be challenging; you really need a good understanding of the VMware ecosystem to get started. It would be nice if there were some kind of click-through tutorial or guided steps, like those offered by AWS. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use VMware vSAN for managing storage in our virtualized environment. It eliminates the need for separate storage infrastructure, making scaling easier. It provides high availability, better flexibility for managing VMs workload, and integrates well with VMware, simplifying management tasks greatly. ### 36. Easy Integration, High License Costs **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Thierry P. | IT System Administrator, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through a business email account **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **AI Translated:** This review has been translated from French using AI. **Reviewed Date:** July 31, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I love the integration with vSphere because everything is integrated in the same place, including alerts, performance graphs, and storage. It's really convenient to be able to add storage or change the RAID without interrupting the service, which avoids production losses and satisfies everyone, whether it's the IT department or the users. The initial installation was made easier by the integrated deployment wizard, which was done without complications. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** As with everything today, the problem is the cost of licenses. From my experience, I sometimes have issues with vSAN health check displaying error messages that are not really understandable. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** VMware vSAN solves the complexity of administration and the bottlenecks of storage networks. Everything is integrated into vSphere, which makes management easier without interrupting the service, avoiding production losses and satisfying both the IT service and the users. ### 37. Simplifies Storage Management, Seamless Integration **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jashwaneel P. | Analyst, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** July 25, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I like the seamless integration of VMware vSAN with VMware vSphere and vCenter, which lets us manage compute and storage from a single interface, simplifying day-to-day administration. I find the policy-based storage management very useful because it allows us to define availability, performance, and redundancy requirements for individual machines. It's easy to scale by adding hosts or drives, and it provides good visibility into storage health, capacity, and performance. The integration with monitoring and backup tools simplifies troubleshooting and recovery operations and provides a centralized view of the environment. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** From our perspective what could be improved is the overall cost, especially licensing and the requirement for compatible hardware. Initial deployment and troubleshooting can also be complex, as VMware vSAN performance and stability depend heavily on proper network design, disk configuration, and hardware compatibility. When an issue occurs, identifying whether it is related to storage, networking, or the ESXi host can sometimes take time. Simplified troubleshooting tools, clearer error messages, and more flexible licensing options would make the solution easier to manage. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use VMware vSAN to simplify storage management and reduce complexity by combining ESXi hosts' local storage into a shared pool. It improves availability, scales storage, and reduces dependency on dedicated SAN infrastructure, while providing centralized management through vCenter. ### 38. Seamless vSphere Integration and Scalable, Policy-Based Management **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Education Management | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) This reviewer's identity has been verified by our review moderation team. They have asked not to show their name, job title, or picture. **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** July 20, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** Seamless integration with VMware vSphere. Everything can be controlled directly from vCenter. It delivers excellent results for virtual workloads, with the ability to scale storage and compute together by adding hosts. I also like the convenient, policy-based management for configuring performance and availability without complex administration requirements, which reduces dependency on traditional SAN infrastructure. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** One of the main challenges with VMware vSan is the licensing cost, especially for smaller organizations. The hardware compatibility requirements can also be limiting in terms of flexibility, and they can make troubleshooting more complex if issues arise. Expansion often requires a larger investment as well, since compute and storage resources are tied together and typically have to be scaled at the same time. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** VMware vSAN integrates easily into our VMware ecosystem and has proven to be a reliable hyperconverged infrastructure solution. It delivers strong performance and, most importantly for us, simplifies the management of enterprise-grade availability. ### 39. Efficient shared storage without any complexity **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jastejpreet S. | Senior Executive, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** July 19, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** What I like most about VMware vSAN is how simple it makes storage management. Since it's fully integrated with VMware vSphere, there's no need to manage a separate storage system. It's easy to scale by adding more hosts or disks. The performance is excellent. And the built-in resilience gives us confidence that our workloads stay available even during hardware failures. Overall, it's a reliable and user-friendly solution. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** One area that could be improved is the pricing as VMware vSAN can become expensive, especially for smaller organizations. The licensing model is also a bit complex and can be difficult to understand. Initial setup and advanced troubleshooting may require extra experienced VMware administrators and software updates can sometimes be time consuming to plan and execute. Better licensing, transparency, and simpler management would make the overall experience even better. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** VMware vSAN eliminates dedicated storage, reducing costs and complexity. It enhances performance by using local disks efficiently, scales easily, and provides built-in redundancy for high availability. It simplifies storage management and improves reliability. ### 40. Easy Remote Management with Minor Connectivity Issues **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sharib W. | Senior Solution Specialist for Microsoft Endpoint Management , Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** September 13, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I find VMware vSAN easy to use and not complex. The prompts and display settings are very user-friendly, making it simple to find what I need and transfer data to my main computer. It provides a good remote connection, allowing me to manage computers easily. I feel it's a tool that can be used by anyone, whether they are in management, IT, or finance. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** The connection part sometimes lags, so it needs to be fixed. I think VMware vSAN should be integrated with some IPs or geographic locations to make it more easily accessible. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** VMware vSAN helps me get a good remote connection, making it easy to remote into the computers I manage, and it's easy to use with clear display settings. ### 41. Modernizing Infrastructure Management with vSAN **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Devesh B. | Senior Software Executive, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** July 17, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** What I like most about VMware vSAN is how it transforms infrastructure into a software defined model. Instead of relying on dedicated storage hardware, it uses local disks intelligently to create a shared, resilient storage layer. This is not only simplifies operations but also makes the environment much more flexible and adaptable to changing workload demands **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** One aspect that doesn't work well for me with VMware vSAN is how scaling is tied together. If we only need more storage, we still have to add a full node with compute resources, which isn't always efficient. Additionally, in some cases, troubleshooting performance issues can take a bit longer because everything is abstracted into the same layer, so it's not always immediately clear where the bottleneck is. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use VMware vSAN to simplify infrastructure management, integrating storage and compute into a single platform. It solves managing separate storage systems and makes scaling easier, especially in changing environments. It reduces the need for dedicated storage hardware, aiding in easier management and maintenance. ### 42. Cost-Effective Storage with Centralized Control **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Venu Venkata Madhav A. | Software Engineer **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** July 16, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I use VMware vSAN to lower the costs for data center storage. The best thing about it is that it keeps the application online even when the hardware fails. The RAID level architecture is an important feature I like because it solves a problem for me. I also appreciate the ability to control multiple remote sites from a single vCenter interface. This setup allows me to manage my funds properly and interact with data from multiple remote sites quickly without changing the URL. It optimizes both material and labor costs as I don’t need many people to monitor the system. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** I noticed that there is CPU overload as a basic issue when using RAID 5/6 with VMware vSAN. For the cost in the legacy vSAN, I think there could be more control on CPU overhead. It would be more useful if support could increase up to 500 VMs, which would help manage costs and CPU power more effectively. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use VMware vSAN to lower data center storage costs. It keeps applications online during hardware failures, supports RAID level architecture, and offers centralized control across remote sites, optimizing material and labor costs by reducing the need for multiple monitors. ### 43. vSAN Turns Local Drives into a Shared Datastore with Easy Scaling **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Kareena M. | Social Media Manager, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Source: Organic:** Organic review. This review was written entirely without invitation or incentive from G2, a seller, or an affiliate. **Reviewed Date:** August 21, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** No separate storage hardware. We had servers with local drives doing nothing and vSAN pooled all of it into one shared datastore. Everything runs through vCenter which we already had. Storage policies handle redundancy on their own. Need more space? Add a node. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** Licensing. Not cheap, and you're paying for vSphere on top of it. The 3 node minimum is annoying for smaller setups. There's a 2 node option but it needs a witness appliance and the setup is awkward. Networking took longer to configure than the docs made it sound. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** We stopped buying SAN hardware. No fiber channel switches, no HBA cards. Drive failures used to be a scramble. Now vSAN rebuilds data across nodes on its own. DR got simpler too with stretched clusters across two sites. ### 44. Seamless VMware vSphere Integration, Scalable Performance, and Excellent Support **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) This reviewer's identity has been verified by our review moderation team. They have asked not to show their name, job title, or picture. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **AI Translated:** This review has been translated from English using AI. **Reviewed Date:** September 12, 2026 At G2, we prefer fresh reviews and we like to follow up with reviewers. They may not have updated their review text, but have updated their review. **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** The raw performance and architectural efficiency have been impressive, especially after moving to NVMe-based all-flash configurations (vSAN Express Storage Architecture / ESA). By eliminating the traditional two-tier cache/capacity design, we saw an immediate drop in write latency and reduced CPU overhead for I/O-intensive workloads and databases. Beyond raw IOPS, the native compression and encryption integrated at the storage layer are a major plus, with no noticeable performance degradation. Overall, this gives us strong throughput and predictable latency, while also helping reduce our physical rack footprint compared with managing traditional external SAN arrays. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** vSAN is extremely sensitive to hardware compatibility. The Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) is strict, and even slightly outdated or mismatched firmware on drives or storage controllers can lead to strange latency spikes or health warnings that are difficult to troubleshoot. When a drive fails or a host enters maintenance mode, the I/O impact from rebuilding components and resyncing can increase production workload latency if network QoS hasn’t been properly throttled. While ReadyNodes help reduce some of this risk, day-2 troubleshooting still often means digging into ESXi CLI logs or relying on vSphere monitoring, instead of getting a more intuitive, proactive diagnostic breakdown directly in the vCenter UI. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** The Problem: We struggled with multi-year storage forecasting. Traditional dual-controller SAN storage forced us to over-provision capacity upfront just to avoid running out of headroom mid-lifecycle. That led to high initial capital expense, along with underutilized hardware consuming multiple rack units. The Solution & Benefit: vSAN changed our capacity planning into a modular, scale-out approach. We can now expand incrementally by adding drives to existing nodes or by dropping a new ReadyNode into the cluster when needed. This just-in-time scaling reduced our initial hardware over-purchasing, and moving away from dedicated storage shelves also lowered our physical rack space and the related power/cooling footprint by approximately 30%. ### 45. Native ESXi Integration Makes vSAN Storage Management Easy **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Rahul M. | Desktop Support Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Current User:** The reviewer uploaded a screenshot or submitted the review in-app verifying them as current user. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Source: Organic:** Organic review. This review was written entirely without invitation or incentive from G2, a seller, or an affiliate. **Reviewed Date:** July 22, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** VMware vSAN has one of its best features in its native integration directly into the ESXi hypervisor. This makes it easier to manage your storage using policy-based settings, so you can control how storage is handled through policies rather than manual configuration. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** The bigger issues are the high licence cost, strict hardware constraints, and the performance bottleneck. You have to use hardware that follows the VMware compatibility guide. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** It shows all my server disks in a single dashboard without needing to purchase another SAN or NAS device, which would be very costly for me and would add extra complexity to my environment. ### 46. Easy vSAN Setup and Straightforward Operations with Solid Performance **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Architecture & Planning | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) This reviewer's identity has been verified by our review moderation team. They have asked not to show their name, job title, or picture. **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** September 13, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** vSAN is easy to set up, and both the setup and day-to-day operation are pretty straightforward. It integrates well with vCentar, which helps keep things simple. I also like that there are fewer separate storage boxes to manage, and the performance has been decent to good overall. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** vSAN feels like a build-it-yourself model with no bundled deployment tooling, which means you end up owning the hardware compatibility work and the setup learning curve yourself. At the same time, you’re still paying the full HCI cost across the hardware, VMware licensing, and support. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** vSAN eliminates the need for a separate FC SAN box for our VDI management blocks by pooling the local disks across our three-node Dell FX chassis into shared storage. That simplifies day-to-day management because everything is handled within vCenter, and it also makes scaling more straightforward since we can grow by adding nodes instead of purchasing another storage array. ### 47. Seamless vSphere Integration, High Performance, But Pricey **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Andrew R. | Information Technology Support Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** June 26, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I use VMware vSAN to provide software-defined shared storage for virtualized environments. I like its seamless integration with VMware vSphere, which makes deployment and management simple. Its scalability, strong performance, built-in data protection, and centralized management through vCenter stand out the most. VMware vSAN eliminates the need for traditional storage arrays, simplifies storage management, and improves availability for virtual machines. I appreciate how it makes it easy to scale storage and performance as infrastructure grows. The integration with VMware vSphere and vCenter, and my ability to use it with VMware vMotion and high availability for seamless workload migration and improved uptime, are also valuable. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** VMware vSAN can be expensive, especially for smaller environments. Initial setup and troubleshooting can also be complex, and advanced features often require additional licensing. The complexity of advanced configurations is also a drawback. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use VMware vSAN to eliminate traditional storage arrays, simplifying storage management, improving availability, and enabling easy scalability as infrastructure grows. ### 48. Integrated Storage, Simplified Management **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** DHRUVA W. | Full Stack Developer, Cloud Infrastructure Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** June 24, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** What I like most about VMware vSAN is its simplicity and tight integration with the VMware ecosystem. Since storage is built directly into vSphere, we can manage compute, storage, and virtual machines from a single interface instead of maintaining separate storage platforms. This significantly reduces operational complexity and makes day-to-day administration much easier. I also appreciate the scalability. As infrastructure requirements grow, we can simply add new hosts and expand both storage and compute resources without major redesigns or disruptive migrations. The hyperconverged architecture makes capacity planning and expansion much more straightforward than traditional storage environments. Another feature I value is policy-based storage management. It allows us to define performance, availability, and protection requirements at the VM level, helping ensure that workloads receive the appropriate storage resources automatically. Overall, the combination of centralized management, scalability, reliability, and reduced storage complexity is what I like most about VMware vSAN. It enables our team to spend less time managing infrastructure and more time supporting business applications. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** While VMware vSAN has worked well for us overall, there are a few areas that could be improved. The biggest challenge is cost and licensing. Recent licensing changes have made budgeting more difficult, and the overall cost can become significant as environments scale. For smaller organizations in particular, the pricing can be difficult to justify compared to some competing solutions. Troubleshooting and diagnostics, while generally manageable, can become challenging without better diagnostic tools, clearer error reporting, and more guided remediation workflows. Additionally, resource consumption is a consideration as vSAN uses compute resources from the same hosts that run workloads. More optimization of CPU, memory, and storage overhead would improve efficiency. Lifecycle management and documentation could be enhanced with more automation and clearer guidance. Finally, while vSAN works best with certified hardware configurations, expanded hardware compatibility and faster certification cycles would be beneficial. Overall, improvements in licensing flexibility, troubleshooting capabilities, resource efficiency, and support experience would make VMware vSAN an even stronger platform. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** VMware vSAN eliminates our need for separate SAN or NAS storage, reducing costs and simplifying management. It improves scalability, availability, and resilience, and allows us to manage compute and storage from a single platform, boosting efficiency and reliability for our virtualized workloads. ### 49. Vast, Secure High-Throughput Storage for Internal and External Apps **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Tony D. | Program Admin Specialist II, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** August 03, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I like the vast storage and security options it provides. It offers high-throughput storage for all our applications that are used internally and externally. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** The least helpful aspect of the server is its per-host limit. The next thing is that it operates as a virtual machine, which means it cannot access or use the built-in resources. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** The servers solve scalability issues, cost reduction concerns, are easily managed, offer better support, resilient infrastructure, and we are able to use the current applications that have been tied to the organization since inception. The integration of the servers has been key in identifying outliers in the overall system. There seems to be some sort of AI intelligence, but it feels as if you still have control over all the functions when needed. ### 50. Rock-Solid Platform, Exceptional Data Protection **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Yahya A. | Technical Pre-Sales Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Validated Reviewer:** Validated through LinkedIn **Incentivized:** This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Source: G2 invite:** Invitation from G2. This reviewer was offered a nominal gift card as thank you for completing this review. **Reviewed Date:** June 19, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I truly appreciate the VMware vSAN system and the team behind it, especially for its scalability. It sets my team up well, and I find its disaster recovery features valuable. We make integration with construction, which we really value for our operation—it effectively takes my application to the next level. The way it handles data duplication within the infrastructure is also something I appreciate. Additionally, I believe it helps in ensuring data safety, even in scenarios like a regional disaster; my data would remain safe, and I have access to it perpetually. This level of reliability is something I love about VMware vSAN. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** It was actually very challenging, in terms of complications, and there was some imports that you had to set some kind of third party creations, some kind of dashboards you have to establish and have the right details in place. I mean, close with chatting, but with the right team of engineers, we were able to have the setup as. It's not perpetual. Anyone can actually agree with this firmly in place and firmly set. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use VMware vSAN to host my digital production systems, appreciating its scalability and disaster recovery features. It duplicates data for safety, ensuring access even during regional disruptions like tsunamis, which helps in securely planning and managing production systems. ## VMware vSAN Discussions - [How do you balance VMware vSAN performance and scalability with hardware prerequisites and cost?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/how-do-you-balance-vmware-vsan-performance-and-scalability-with-hardware-prerequisites-and-cost) - 1 upvote - [How are you balancing vSAN 8 ESA performance gains with higher subscription licensing costs?](https://www.g2.com/discussions/how-are-you-balancing-vsan-8-esa-performance-gains-with-higher-subscription-licensing-costs) - 1 upvote - [View VMware vSAN pricing details and edition comparison](https://www.g2.com/products/vmware-vsan/reviews?section=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-09-29+18%3A02%3A51+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=bd422e53-1cc8-4266-99b7-5421880b318f&secure%5Btoken%5D=fa65a4f6216a2da0b58d07687715b9130c73b3c20dcc103ab4beb25c2e5c3e42&format=llm_user) ## VMware vSAN Features **Core Functions** - Server Virtualization - Storage Virtualization - Network Virtualization **Performance** - High Availability - Low Latency - High Scalability - Fast Application Deployment **General Functionality** - Dynamic Scaling - High Availability - Data Security - Backup and Recovery **Functionality** - Simplified Management - Monitoring Tool - Cost-Saving **Configuration** - Appliance Independence - Hardware Integration **Security** - Business Continuity - Data Security **Agentic AI - Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) Solutions** - Autonomous Task Execution - Adaptive Learning - Decision Making ## Top VMware vSAN Alternatives - [Nutanix Cloud Infrastructure (NCI)](https://www.g2.com/products/nutanix-cloud-infrastructure-nci/reviews) - 4.5/5.0 (299 reviews) - [DataCore SANsymphony](https://www.g2.com/products/datacore-sansymphony/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (28 reviews) - [VxRail](https://www.g2.com/products/vxrail/reviews) - 4.3/5.0 (32 reviews)