VMware vSAN Reviews & Product Details

The Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM) directly inside vCenter is easily the best part for me.

Coming into AI and ML pipelines from a standard automation background, I expected storage provisioning to be a bit of a bottleneck with lots of back-and-forth tickets. But with vSAN, I can just apply a policy based on what the job needs—like assigning low latency and better striping for fast-access scratch disks when preprocessing training datasets, or lower performance tiers for basic archive logs—right when deploying the VMs or nodes.

Not having to worry about physical LUNs or separate external SAN arrays cuts out so much manual infra coordination. It basically turns storage into just another software setting we can handle directly within the familiar VMware UI, which lets us spin up new experimental pipelines and agent test environments much faster. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

Mainly the licensing costs and hardware pickiness.

The Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) is very strict—if an SSD model or controller firmware is slightly off, you will see warnings. Also, during heavy uncompressed data ingest for ML batches, if the cache tier gets saturated, write latency spikes.

On top of that, licensing feels pricey, and when a disk group acts up or data resync kicks in, figuring out the root cause from the vCenter UI isn't very intuitive without digging through logs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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 Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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). Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like that VMware vSAN integrates seamlessly with VMware vSphere and makes storage management simple and centralized. The biggest benefit is centralized management through the vSphere interface. I appreciate its scalability, policy-based storage management, and built-in data protection. It works well with vSphere and vCenter Server, making virtual machine and storage management easier from one interface. I also find the integration useful for monitoring storage health and managing resources. It helps provide high availability for virtual machines, and the initial setup is relatively straightforward if I already have experience with vSphere. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I find it could be simpler to troubleshoot performance and storage-related issues. Initial setup and configuration can be complex for new users, and monitoring resource utilization sometimes requires deeper technical knowledge. The initial setup is relatively straightforward if I already have experience with VMware vSphere. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like the peace of mind VMware vSAN gives me for stateful workloads. I could apply a simple policy to tolerate a host failure, and it handled mirroring across the cluster automatically. Combined with vMotion, that let me patch physical hosts without taking my database offline. It was quite easy to set up, and the step-by-step wizard made it straightforward. It’s rock-solid and worked great for my Linux VMs and PostgreSQL container. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The biggest drawback for me is the licensing cost, especially after Broadcom's pricing changes. vSAN is licensed per CPU core and bundled into expensive enterprise tiers, so scaling my environment gets pricey very quickly, even if I only need extra storage capacity. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. ​ Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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". Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

I like how VMware vSAN simplifies storage management. We don't have to deal with a separate storage system; everything is managed right through vCenter, saving us a ton of time. Adding capacity or making changes is easy and doesn't require huge projects. It just integrates smoothly with the VMware environment we already have, which is the biggest plus for us. Having storage, performance, health, and policies all visible in vCenter makes day-to-day management a lot easier. We're not constantly jumping between different systems. The ability to scale as needed rather than overprovisioning up front definitely makes growth and ongoing management less of a hassle. It's reliable for our production workloads, virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), and other applications that need reliable storage and flexibility. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

The main thing I'd improve is the amount of planning you still have to do around it. vSAN is pretty sensitive to how the network is designed, and you really notice it during rebuilds or when there's a lot of data movement. Capacity planning can also catch you off guard because you have to account for resiliency, overhead, and enough free space for rebuilds, so raw capacity isn't the whole story. And when there is a problem, the health checks are helpful, but getting from "something's not right" to the actual root cause can still take some digging. It works well overall, but these are the areas I'd like things getting simpler. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.