I’m thoroughly excited, for the first time in years, to attend an in-person VMworld. Honestly, I started to think that I might never attend one again. And as it turns out, I technically can’t. Because it’s now called VMware Explore!
What’s in a (new) Name?
If you look back, the buzzwords of past VMware events were largely centered on the virtual machine (VM)—VM backup, VM recovery, VM granularity, VM insights. But these are less applicable than they once were because what we were really talking about was the application. And the application had a 1:1 relationship with a virtual machine.
(1) VM = (1) application
A given VM always equaled the same application. The VM didn’t outlast the application, and the application did not outlast the VM. They lived and died together. In other words, a VM-related workflow was also an application-level workflow—the transitive property of application virtualization.
Yet with the continued march towards containerization, this equation is changing. One VM does not equal one application. Alternatively, one VM may equal many applications. These applications might shift to other VMs. The VMs might outlive the applications or these applications might outlive the VM. This paradigm has shifted.
Or has it? 🤔
Essentially, the relationship between VM and the application is not an unfamiliar one. It’s just moved up a level. Consider what server virtualization like VMware ESXi accomplished: It changed the relationship between physical servers and operating systems. One physical server used to equal one operating system. Just like then, when physical servers didn’t go away, containers do not mean the end of VMs.
VMware administrators are now being asked to handle both while being asked the same questions as before:
- How do I deploy?
- How do I analyze?
- How do I manage?
- How do I track?
- How do I recover?
- How do I protect?
This is why VMware was “renamed” VMworld. It’s changing alongside infrastructure. It isn’t just about the VM any more. So “renaming” isn’t really the right term. It’s VMworld evolved.
What You’ll See from Pure at VMware Explore 2022
VMworld isn’t the only thing that has evolved; so has Pure Storage®, with application-granular services, application-granular storage features, and Kubernetes-integrated data management.
This year, our focus areas are:
- Application granularity
We’re focusing on application granularity in many ways via our Portworx® offering, which is tightly focused on the Kubernetes layer. Portworx, when running within Kubernetes, on top of VMware, leverages the VMware Cloud Native Storage (CNS) driver to provision storage. Portworx, or a consumer directly using CNS, takes advantage of storage policy-based management (SPBM), a focal point of vSphere Virtual Volumes.
This provides application-granular storage via a policy-driven provisioning mechanism. Together, Portworx + vVols focuses on what matters; not the VM, but the application and the persistent volume used by an application. One persistent volume provisioned by vSphere Cloud Native Storage is one volume on FlashArrayTM. This provides end-to-end performance, capacity, and feature management/insights.
- Ransomware protection
VMs and containers are both susceptible to ransomware attacks. A key to protecting against them is having a way to assign air-gapped protection, ensure it is configured, and quickly restore. (If a restore takes too long, it may even be cheaper to pay the ransom). Pure SafeMode™ provides mechanisms to protect data, so no one—not even internal user administrators—can disable, delete, or alter it. Pure1® provides fleet-level reporting, and FlashArray provides immutable SafeMode protection with instant volume recovery, regardless of the dataset size. Our vSphere plugin provides the recovery process directly within the vSphere Client.
- Next-generation data center technology
Containers are not the only burgeoning technology for customer environments. To support next-generation applications, you need next-generation performance and features—the likes of which traditional SCSI doesn’t offer. Pure’s early and on-going support of NVMe over Fabrics (NVMe-oF) and tight engineering collaboration with VMware via design partnerships keeps you at the bleeding edge.
- A cloud operating model
Another key point is that next-generation IT infrastructures aren’t just about the technology, they’re also about the model that they follow. The cloud operating model includes as-a-service, intelligent management, Opex chargeback, and more.
Pure has invested in this via Pure FusionTM, our scale-out storage model that unifies arrays and optimizes storage pools on the fly. And our evolved business models provide plenty of choice with Evergreen//ForeverTM, Evergreen//FlexTM, and Evergreen//OneTM.
We’ve taken our best-in-class VMware integration and expanded that to cover the move to containers, all while continuing to simplify managing, running, and protecting both VM-based and container-based applications. As always, Pure is doing all of the above with our core principles in mind: simple, cost-effective, and evergreen.
Visit Pure Storage at VMware Explore
Come visit us at VMware Explore this year and find out how we can enable your business to keep up.
Don’t forget to join our sessions:
Core Storage Best Practice Deep Dive [CEIB1382USD]
Abstract: There have been new core storage features released with VMware vSphere and correctly configuring them is critical to optimum performance and resilience. We’ll review new and common features, as well as best practices. We’llfocus on NVMe over Fabrics (NVMeoF), VMFS, and vSphere Virtual Volumes.
Speakers:
- Cody Hosterman, Director, Pure Storage
- Jason Massae, Staff Technical Marketing Architect, VMware
Active-active stretched cluster vVol support with VMware and Pure Storage
Abstract: Stretched clusters offer the ability to balance VMs, application workloads between two geographically separated datacenters, with non-disruptive workload mobility enabling migration of services between geographically close sites without the need for sustaining an outage. Also, stretched cluster SDDCs offer an availability strategy to customers. The solution would provide the SDDC with an extra layer of resiliency in the event of host-level failures within the cluster or with AZ-level failures within the region. In this session, we will talk about the stretched cluster support enabled through the joint solution between Pure Storage and VMware using vSphere Virtual Volumes alongside a preview demo
Speakers:
- Cody Hosterman, Director, Pure Storage,
- Naveen Krishnamurthy, Sr. Product Manager VMware
More Applications in Production with Tanzu and Pure Storage
Abstract: More than 55% of organizations are running Kubernetes in production today. VMware Tanzu provides a solution to run secure, consistent production grade Kubernetes on vSphere or any public cloud. The Portworx by Pure Storage Kubernetes data platform was created to solve the needs of customers that require multi-cloud mobility, high availability, disaster recovery and backup for their most critical production applications. Combined with fully automated application Granular storage for vSphere with Pure Storage FlashArray. This session will deep dive into how you can get over the common hurdles preventing you from running more applications in Production in Kubernetes and gaining the Cloud Native efficiency, end-to-end insights, and agility to provide value to your business.
Speakers:
- David Stamen, Principal Field Solution Architect,
- Jon Owings, Director, Cloud Native Strategy
Build and Publish a PowerShell Module to the PowerShell Gallery [CODE1877US]
Abstract: Have you ever created a PowerShell module and needed to share it and didn’t know how? The PowerShell gallery is a great place to do this. Join this session and learn how to build and publish a PowerShell module to the PowerShell gallery, and allow your contribution to be shared with the VMware community.
Speakers:
- David Stamen, Principal Field Solutions Architect,
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