--- title: VMware vSAN Reviews meta_title: 'VMware vSAN Reviews 2026: Details, Pricing, & Features | G2' meta_description: Filter 246 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: 246 scale: '5' date_modified: '2026-08-03' 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:** 246 ## 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. 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.) **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. ### 2. 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.) **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. ### 3. 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.) **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. ### 4. 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.) **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. ### 5. 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.) **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. ​ ### 6. Simplifies Storage Management with Strong Performance and Visibility **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Eduardo F. | Consulate Assistant, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **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. ### 7. Seamless vSAN Integration and Centralized Management in vCenter **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Pitabas P. | Associate, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **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. ### 8. 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.) **Reviewed Date:** March 06, 2024 **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. ### 9. Effortless Storage Scalability with Licensing Challenges **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Joni L. | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **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. ### 10. 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.) **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. ### 11. 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.) **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. ### 12. 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.) **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. ### 13. Easy Integration, High License Costs **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Thierry P. | IT System Administrator, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **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. ### 14. Simplifies Storage Management, Seamless Integration **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jashwaneel P. | Analyst, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **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. ### 15. Seamless vSphere Integration and Scalable, Policy-Based Management **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Education Management | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **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. ### 16. Efficient shared storage without any complexity **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jastejpreet S. | Senior Executive, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **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. ### 17. Modernizing Infrastructure Management with vSAN **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Devesh B. | Senior Software Executive, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **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. ### 18. Cost-Effective Storage with Centralized Control **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Venu Venkata Madhav A. | Software Engineer **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. ### 19. Streamlined Storage Management, But Costly at Scale **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Devansh B. | Associate Software Engineer, Computer Software, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 14, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I like the simplicity and tight integration of VMware vSAN with VMware. It eliminates the need for separate storage infrastructure, allowing us to manage both compute and storage from a single platform. This setup makes scaling much easier and operations faster, especially in dynamic environments. The platform enables fast provisioning, easy scaling, and provides high availability, which are critical in setups like CICD or cloud-native environments. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** I've been using VMware vSAN for around six months. It may not be ideal for extremely high performance or storage-heavy workloads. It can become costly at scale. When I'm scaling, it's a little bit costly. It also tightly couples compute and storage, which can reduce flexibility in some scenarios, actually. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** I find VMware vSAN solves expensive and complex external storage problems by turning local disks into a distributed system. It also simplifies management for me, enabling fast provisioning and easy scaling, which is crucial in dynamic environments like CICD or cloud setups. ### 20. 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.) **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. ### 21. 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.) **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. ### 22. 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.) **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. ### 23. Rock-Solid Platform, Exceptional Data Protection **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Yahya A. | Technical Pre-Sales Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **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. ### 24. Strong vSAN Performance with Built-In Data Security via RF2 **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Bhavesh R. | Technical Consultant, Information Technology and Services, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 31, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** vSAN Performance is very good. It also provides Data Security by applying RF2 (Redundancy Factor 2) algorithm where it also creates another copy of data. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** Disk efficiency is low due to RF2 feature. There is a option of Erasure Coding, but still data efficiency is low. Secondly I must say Cost, cost is too high if one want to procure vSAN separate licenses. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** vSAN is giving SAN based storage from local disks of Servers by creating a pool of disks. It help to eliminate requirement of External SAN of shared storage. ### 25. Easy Setup, Resilient Performance, and Better Space Use with ESA **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Automotive | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 17, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** It’s easy to set up and manage. It’s also very resilient and performant, and with the new ESA architecture, things have improved further, with space utilization optimized even more. Yes ,it is definitely worth the price. Yes ,it is definitely worth the price. Yes ,it is definitely worth the price. Yes ,it is definitely worth the price. Yes ,it is definitely worth the price. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** At the moment, there isn’t much to dislike, especially with all the new developments and enhancements introduced in vSphere version 9.They have simplified even Day 2 operations so its top notch product in Software Defined Storage space. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** It takes away the requirement to have a SAN for workloads with high IOPs requirement as with all Flash NVMe disks and 25/100 GB NIC cards same level of performance can be achieved. ### 26. Easy, Flexible Shared Storage for vSphere with VSAN **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sigurd H. | Senior Consultant, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** VSAN is a very easy way to use shared storage in a vSphere environment without having to buy and configure complex storage solutions. It also gives you the flexibility to provide different virtual RAID levels, depending on what you need. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** Licensing for VSAN is no longer possible as an add-on; it’s now only available through the VCF and VVF bundles, depending on how much you need. As a result, you end up having to buy a lot of functions you don’t need. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** vSAN runs on standard, commodity x86 server hardware ("vSAN ReadyNodes"). It uses a scale-out architecture, which lets you scale capacity and performance in a linear way—either by adding more drives to existing nodes (scale-up) or by adding new x86 servers to the cluster (scale-out). ### 27. Perfect Integration and Simple Management with VMware vSAN **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Alberto B. | System Administrator, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 25, 2025 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I like the native integration with VMware and the simple management from a single console, which makes the operation more efficient and expedient. It allows me to allocate virtual machines, capacities, and agility in any support with fewer review points. I consider that VMware products are well designed and thought out for the current market needs. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** from what I've tried, I still couldn't identify anything I don't like. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use VMware vSAN to centralize storage in my infrastructure. It allows me to avoid the use of independent storage, reducing power consumption, space, and cost. The native integration with VMware and simplified management from a single console make the operation more efficient and allow for agile resource allocation. ### 28. Seamless vCenter Integration for Single-Pane Infrastructure Management **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Jerry J. | Senior Technical Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 31, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** Native integration inside VMware vCenter allows us to manage compute and storage from a single pane of glass. Easily scale to storage and compute. Eliminates traditional physical storage arrays. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** Licensing and subscription pricing models can be expensive. Requires strict compatibility with the Hardware Compatibility List. Consumes local CPU and memory resources on ESXi hosts. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helps to solve high cost, complex management, and extensive scaling limits of traditional external storage hardware by turning internal server disks into a single shared pool. ### 29. vSAN Has Great Integration, but the Steep Cost and Limited Support Hold It Back **Rating:** 1.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Paul M. | Chief Technology Officer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** The feature completeness. UI is not bad, UX is also average. Best integration in the market, and performance among the top. However, the price is too steep, and Support is restricted to Partners. While AI isn't a priority in infrastructure, using AI in vSAN operations can be benefitial. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** The most "worst" aspect of vSAN is its cost and the addition of AI. While AI can be beneficial, it feels bloated. As for the cost, the features and performance do not justify the price increase, as competitors offer similar (if not better) products. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** vSAN built the bridge between hardware and software. As the Software Defined Storage pioneer, vSAN leads the pack in terms of features and integration. ### 30. Streamlined Management with Powerful Performance **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mohamed Nizam A. | Sales Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** August 01, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I like VMware vSAN's easy management, strong performance, seamless vSphere integration, and built-in high availability. These features save time, simplify daily management, reduce downtime, and keep our virtual machines running reliably. The initial setup was straightforward, especially within the VMware environment, and the configuration process was simple, making deployment easier. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** I find advanced configurations complex and I feel troubleshooting could be simpler. Also, the licensing cost can be a consideration for some environments. I think better cost flexibility and simpler troubleshooting tools would make VMware vSAN even easier to manage. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** VMware vSAN simplifies storage management by combining local storage into a single pool, improves performance, reduces hardware complexity, provides high availability, and eases scalability. ### 31. Reliable and Scalable HCI with VMware vSAN **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Sitakanta C. | Cloud Infrastructure Architect, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 26, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** Its seamless integration with the VMware ecosystem, which makes deployment and management very straightforward. It simplifies storage by eliminating the need for separate hardware while providing scalable, high-performance infrastructure. The policy-based automation and built-in resilience also make it reliable for enterprise workloads. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** Its relatively high licensing and hardware costs compared to other HCI or cloud-native alternatives. It can also become complex to manage and optimize without strong VMware expertise. Additionally, vendor lock-in to the VMware ecosystem can limit flexibility for multi-platform strategies. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** VMware vSAN solves the need for dedicated storage infrastructure by converging compute and storage into a single, software-defined platform. This benefits by simplifying operations, reducing hardware complexity, and enabling faster scaling of infrastructure as demand grows. It also improves availability and performance through built-in resilience and policy-based management. ### 32. Centralized Management with Cost Challenges **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2026 **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. ### 33. Scalable Storage Solution with Simple Administration **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I like using VMware vSAN as a strong and modern storage solution for our company, especially to handle storage for virtual machines in one place. It's very easy to manage and can be scaled easily. It combines storage available in different servers and makes it accessible as a single shared storage, which reduces a lot of work for our IT team. Administration is simple since it's built on VMware, saving time and reducing confusion. We can scale based on our usage, so there's no need to invest more initially; we can add hosts or disks as needed. It's designed with flash storage, which makes applications and databases work faster. VMware vSAN grows easily, allowing the company to add more storage and servers when business needs increase. This simplicity in administration saves time because IT teams can manage storage from a single place, reducing daily work and complexity, helping our team respond faster. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** I find the cost a bit expensive; I feel that VMware vSAN licensing and compatible hardware are costly. I notice that it requires a lot of preplanning, or else I end up paying unnecessarily high charges, so I think proper training is much needed. Since compute and storage are in the same place, I find it complicates troubleshooting. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** VMware vSAN provides a strong storage solution, simplifying management and scalability. It combines storage into a single server as shared storage, reducing IT workload. With simple administration, it saves time and confusion, allowing us to efficiently scale and respond faster. ### 34. Simple, Scalable Storage with Seamless VMware vSphere Integration **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in E-Learning | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 20, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** What I like most about VMware vSAN is how simple and scalable it is. It integrates seamlessly with VMware vSphere, which makes storage management much easier and reduces the need for separate storage hardware. Performance has been reliable, deployment is straightforward, and I can scale storage or compute resources without major disruptions. Features such as high availability, fault tolerance, and centralized management also improve operational efficiency, making it a cost-effective option for modern virtualized environments. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** VMware vSAN is a powerful solution, but the licensing costs can be quite high, particularly for smaller organizations. The initial setup and more advanced configuration often require experienced administrators, and troubleshooting can be complex at times. Hardware compatibility requirements may also limit flexibility, and resource usage can increase as clusters grow. Even with these drawbacks, its overall performance, reliability, and tight integration with the VMware ecosystem still make it a strong virtualization storage platform. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** VMware vSAN solves the challenge of managing and scaling storage in virtualized environments by combining local storage from multiple hosts into a single shared storage pool. This eliminates the need for expensive external SAN hardware, simplifies storage management, and reduces operational costs. It has benefited us by improving performance, increasing availability, simplifying deployment, and allowing storage and compute resources to scale easily as business needs grow. ### 35. Seamless vCenter Management and Outstanding All-Flash Performance with VMware vSAN **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Financial Services | Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 15, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** What I like best about VMware vSAN is its seamless, native integration directly into the ESXi hypervisor kernel. Because it runs directly inside the hypervisor rather than as a separate virtual storage appliance, it minimizes CPU overhead and delivers incredibly low latency. The performance when utilizing NVMe and SSD drives in an all-flash configuration is outstanding, easily handling our most demanding database workloads. From a UI/UX perspective, being able to manage both compute and storage resources from a single, familiar vCenter console completely eliminates operational silos. The Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM) is another massive benefit; it allows our team to dynamically adjust RAID levels and deduplication settings on a per-VM basis without any downtime, which has vastly streamlined our daily virtualization workflows. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** The primary drawback of VMware vSAN is the escalating licensing cost and the complexity of the budgeting structure under recent portfolio changes. For mid-sized organizations, calculating a predictable ROI has become more challenging as deployment expenses shift. Additionally, the initial onboarding and hardware provisioning process requires a very strict adherence to the VMware Compatibility Guide (VCG). If you do not use fully certified ReadyNodes or exact drive components, you can easily encounter driver mismatches and stability issues. This hardware rigidity heavily restricts your purchasing freedom across different server vendors and can complicate the post-sales support experience if unlisted hardware components are used in the cluster. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** VMware vSAN successfully solved our need to transition away from expensive, legacy physical SAN architectures and dedicated fiber channel networking infrastructure. By pooling local NVMe and SSD server drives into a unified storage tier, we drastically reduced our data center footprint, hardware maintenance overhead, and initial capital expenditures. The biggest business benefit has been the deployment of stretched clusters for seamless disaster recovery and zero-downtime maintenance windows. Furthermore, the inclusion of intelligent telemetry and advanced analytics introduces proactive monitoring capabilities. The system uses built-in operational intelligence to alert our team about potential drive failures or capacity anomalies before they cause a performance degradation. This has saved our engineering team countless hours of manual troubleshooting. ### 36. Cost-Saving, Centralized Storage—But a Steep Learning Curve for New Users **Rating:** 3.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Brian N. | Cybersecurity Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 23, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** VMware vSAN is greatly advantageous because it reduces storage costs and simplifies everything for the user and administrator by providing a centralized platform to manage all. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** The learning curve may be a bit too much for learners and this creates a barrier between newbies and mid-well seasoned personnel who may need to collaborate. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** Traditionally, you had to buy separate, complicated storage hardware and networking gear to keep your data safe. Managing all of that often required special training and a completely different dashboard. With vSAN running inside VMware vSphere, you can manage both your storage and your virtual machines (VMs) from the same screen. That consolidation can save money on hardware and also save you time day to day. ### 37. Cost-Effective Solution for Educational Labs **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Naveen Reddy C. | Java Software Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 14, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I used VMware vSAN for connecting to practice networking lab sessions in college. It's great for universities since it makes managing large, complex lab setups easy and cost-effective, saving on infrastructure and other costs. Instead of having to buy expensive external drivers, we use vSAN, which helps free up the budget for students instead of spending on hardware. The initial setup was straightforward, requiring just a couple of instructions. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** If there is a scenario where hundreds of students log in at the same time, VMware vSAN can bottleneck, causing frustratingly slow desktop and app loading times. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** VMware vSAN saves on infrastructure costs for complex lab setups in universities, eliminating the need for expensive external drives, freeing up budget for students. ### 38. Well-Managed Hyperconverged Infrastructure with Strong High Availability **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Computer Software | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 29, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** Hyperconverged infrastructure is one of the most important things because it combines storage, compute, and networking, and it’s managed very well. Its high availability also helps provide storage redundancy through policies. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** Nothing much, Just the licensing cost can be supported for the users. Rest al it dependes on the working of a particular project which features need cost management. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** It helps me in multiple ways, My storage issue is totally been taken care of and the it reduces the need for separate SAN storage. managed directly through VMware vCenter Server so no need to worry at all. ### 39. Effortless Storage Management, Seamlessly Integrated **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User | Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 18, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I use VMware vSAN for its seamless integration with VMware vSphere, which really simplifies storage management. The easy scalability allows for hassle-free expansion of storage as our environment grows, and the high availability minimizes downtime during maintenance with its ability to pool local disks across ESXi hosts. These features save time and improve the overall reliability of our virtual environment. The setup was fairly easy thanks to VMware integration, even though advanced configuration needs some expertise. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** I find troubleshooting complex, and I think performance visibility could be improved. We need better automation, and I'd like licensing to be more cost-effective. Easier management for smaller environments would also help. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** VMware vSAN simplifies storage management, improves performance, and provides high availability by pooling disks across hosts. It eliminates separate SAN necessities and scales easily with our environment, reducing downtime during failures. ### 40. Scaling out seamlessly with VSAN datastore **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Technology and Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** Its high availability and scalability, as its data is spread across hosts. When we provision a computing resource, we don't need to worry about where the resource is physically located **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** Its reliability. The communication between vsan hosts is undertaken by the high speed, dedicated network cards, which could potentially create multiple SPoF **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** The ability to be scaled out. This is beneficial especially to the cloud service providers when their business is growing from time to time. They just need to invest more on the hardware, then it would be easily integrated the the existing vsan infrastructure ### 41. Easy to Manage, Seamless VMware Integration, and Reliable Performance **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Mrinal M. | Senior Software Engineer, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** VMware vSAN is easy to manage and integrates smoothly with the existing VMware environment. It simplifies storage administration, scales well, and provides reliable performance. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** The main drawback is that VMware vSAN can be expensive, especially when licensing and hardware requirements are included. Setup and troubleshooting can also be complex, and performance depends heavily on proper configuration and network design. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** VMware vSAN solves the complexity of managing separate storage systems by combining storage and compute within the same environment. This reduces hardware dependency, simplifies administration, improves scalability, and helps us deploy resources faster with less downtime. ### 42. Simplified Storage Management with Strong Performance and Reliability **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Hospital & Health Care | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 23, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** What I like most about VMware vSAN is how much it simplifies storage management. Since everything is handled directly through vCenter, I don’t have to manage a separate storage system alongside the cluster. Scaling is also straightforward—when we need more capacity, we can simply add new hosts. In our environment, performance has been strong and reliability has been consistently excellent. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** One drawback of VMware vSAN is the licensing cost, which can become quite expensive as the environment scales. Troubleshooting storage-related issues can also be more complicated than with traditional storage solutions, and the hardware compatibility requirements may reduce flexibility when choosing servers and other components. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** VMware vSAN helped us eliminate the need for a separate storage array and made our infrastructure easier to manage. Being able to manage compute and storage from the same platform has reduced our administrative effort, improved scalability, and simplified expanding resources as our environment continues to grow. ### 43. VSAN: Save Big by Using Existing or New Hardware Instead of Separate Storage **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Marco T. | IT Systems Administrator, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 30, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** The ability not to have to have a dedicated storage device (cost saving) and to be able to use existing hardware and storage on that hardware or even newer hardware at a fraction of the cost of buying separate storage and compute. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** I don't have too many things that I dislike about VSAN. The most annoying is the host resyncing process, which causes system resources to be under straing and causing VM performance issues. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** The lack of needing to get additional racks in the data centre purchased and placed into use. The cost savings due to not needing additional storage infrastructure on its own. ### 44. Fault-Tolerant Storage with Seamless Setup **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** simone s. | CTO, Small-Business (50 or fewer emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I love the distributed storage on multiple ESXi hosts with VMware vSAN. It adds redundancy, eliminates the need for a traditional SAN, and solves the problem of keeping data in a single system. The initial setup was very easy and efficient. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** The pricing is very high **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** VMware vSAN solves the problem of keeping data in a single system and eliminates a single point of failure. I love the distributed storage on multiple ESXi hosts because it adds redundancy and eliminates the need for a traditional SAN. ### 45. User-Friendly Software with Helpful Support Chat **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Anushna K. | Senior Accountant, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 19, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** It’s user friendly and helpful in difficult situations. Always have a support chat when needed or struck in somewhere not understanding where to go. Which is why I recommend every company to use this software **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** There’s nothing I dislike in this more . Sometimes it’s hard to connect with customer support as it will always route me to chat suport. And it hangs when load is more **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** I like it very much and need it to have more bad like to me using that as it is more flexible and needed more of them for smooth workflow and easy work and task completion ### 46. Efficient, Scalable Storage Management Made Easy with vSAN **Rating:** 5.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User in Information Services | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** vSAN offers efficient storage management, including a self-service portal that makes it easy to provision and manage storage resources for virtual machines. It also provides scalability and resiliency, along with simplified day-to-day management. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** It has rigid requirements interms of the 1. hardware compatibility ( firmwares, controllers and drivers) 2. minimum hosts requirement 3. hypervisor lock in **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** VMWare vSAN is efficiently handling the storage problems. Offering efficient VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) and Server Virtualization and also with ROBO deployments and internal lab use cases. ### 47. Effortless Integration, Reliable Performance **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Verified User | Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 18, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** I like how seamlessly VMware vSAN integrates with VMV, making it easy to manage. It scales well as our requirements grow and provides reliable performance without adding much complexity. The seamless integration reduces the time spent on setup and day-to-day management since everything can be managed from a single interface. The reliable performance helps ensure our applications run smoothly while simplified management reduces operational overhead for the IT team. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** One area that could be improved is the licensing and pricing module, which can be complex for some organizations. Additionally, troubleshooting issues can sometimes require specialized knowledge and experience. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** I use VMware vSAN to simplify storage management, eliminating separate storage hardware. It improves scalability and makes it easier to manage storage resources across our virtualized infrastructure. ### 48. Simplified Shared Storage and Easy Data Center Scaling with VMware vSAN **Rating:** 4.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Dhaanish S. | Software Development Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 22, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** It helps me to simply the shared storage by integrating it directly with my virtualization platform. One data store to use for all. And helps in data center scaling. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** I disadvantage I feel like drawback for VMware vSAN is it requires mandatory high speed fabrics. So it requires massive throughput, especially during disk failure rebuilds. **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** The benefit I had with this is it reduces the cost of addition hardwar and power consumption. Perform maintenance activity in any capacity node without interruption in the production environment. ### 49. Impactful Enterprise Virtualization for Virtual Machines and Physical Servers **Rating:** 4.0/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Vishal B. | AVP- Corporate HR, Enterprise (> 1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** July 28, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** It provides very useful and impactful enterprises software to use virtual machines.Its software helps to run physical servers hardware as well which are flagship products **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** It's softwear are very costly compared to its competitors. As a customer can not buy individual and standalone products, need to buy in the bundle which are over the budget **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** The VMware provides solutions especially for hardware underutilisation and increase efficiency of the physical hardware in very impactful way. This is best benefits of it. ### 50. Reliable, Hot-Swappable Scalability; VMware vSan Meets Expectations **Rating:** 3.5/5.0 stars **Reviewed by:** Joshua O. | Cloud Infrastructure Engineer, Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.) **Reviewed Date:** June 30, 2026 **What do you like best about VMware vSAN?** Ability to grow capacity or performance incrementally by adding disks or additional hosts is fantastic which is hot swappable. This is a value for it service. **What do you dislike about VMware vSAN?** There is nothing to dislike about VMware vSan as it does what I expected and I have used this for a while now in my current role as a cloud infrastructure Engr **What problems is VMware vSAN solving and how is that benefiting you?** ability to Scale beyond what was initially designed for the infrastructure and this is why I will choose it with its easiness of use which is user friendly ## 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?qs=pros-and-cons§ion=pricing&secure%5Bexpires_at%5D=2026-08-03+14%3A01%3A13+-0500&secure%5Bsession_id%5D=a69f77f2-6641-40c5-a706-eb39a20a5af5&secure%5Btoken%5D=eae97faccd10d29497def543db15ce2339c884d360cd4bb5031fa0143e53ee72&format=llm_user) ## VMware vSAN Integrations - [Geneva](https://www.g2.com/products/geneva/reviews) - [Microsoft Azure AI SDK](https://www.g2.com/products/microsoft-azure-ai-sdk/reviews) - [Microsoft SQL Server](https://www.g2.com/products/microsoft-sql-server/reviews) - [Oracle Database](https://www.g2.com/products/oracle-database/reviews) - [vCenter Converter](https://www.g2.com/products/vcenter-converter/reviews) - [Veeam Backup for Google Cloud](https://www.g2.com/products/veeam-backup-for-google-cloud/reviews) - [Veeam Data Platform](https://www.g2.com/products/veeam-data-platform/reviews) - [VMware ESXi](https://www.g2.com/products/vmware-esxi/reviews) - [VMWare Horizon DaaS](https://www.g2.com/products/vmware-horizon-daas/reviews) - [VMware Tanzu Labs](https://www.g2.com/products/vmware-tanzu-labs/reviews) - [VMware vSphere](https://www.g2.com/products/vmware-vsphere/reviews) ## 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 (291 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)