G2

Mallikarjun H.

Technology Analyst

Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.)

9/2/2026

"Powerful, Seamless Storage Management for vSphere—Held Back by Rising Licensing Costs."

4.5/5

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.

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. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.