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One of the most positive points of VMware vSAN is its management of storage. As VMware stores all data online servers and because of that businesses do not need physical hardware systems to store data. It saves many issues related to storage and businesses can easily do storage from anywhere through VMware tools. Another excellent feature of VMware vSAN is its scalability. At the start, businesses can setup small storage and with the expansion of business the companies can expand storage by adding more servers according to the business need. Another positive feature of VMware vSAN is its built-in data protection system. Due to any reason one server stops working because of virus or any other reason, the other server automatically starts working which helps businesses to continue their work with no delay.
Storage performance is better for VSAN clusters. It offers management through the same interface as your VCF. vSan can be bundled with other VMware services.
I really appreciate that it scales the way we grow. The tight integration with the VMware stack is another big win. vSAN doesn't feel like a separate product, it behaves like a native extension of ESXi and after we paired it with NSX, we can apply security policies right at the VM level without touching physical firewalls.
One of the downsides of VMware vSAN which I don't like is that without skilled or trained IT staff it is very difficult to implement VMware ecosystem in the company. Without trained staff, it would be difficult to do system troubleshooting, configuration and optimization. Another downside is that no doubt VMware is an excellent platform for the businesses but its high cost of licensing is a hurdle for the companies to implement it. Because large enterprises need more than one server as well as many advanced features of VMware vSAN, the combined cost is very high for even large enterprises. VMware vSAN troubleshooting is also very complex and it becomes complicated sometimes because many of the features of VMware are interlinked and combined like networking, storage and virtualization.
Licensing is expensive. The latency curve for vSAN has a huge variance after nodes enter destage mode. There is risk of data loss if multiple systems go offline.
What frustrates me most is that it demands a lot of upfront homework. This isn't a 'Plug it in and go' solution. If we don't nail down the network design jumbo frames, MTU Settings, and low-latency links, it can be a headache in the future. Another pain point is licensing and feature gating.