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VMworld 2020 has come to a close. It was a completely different experience this year. I was on time for every single one of my enrolled sessions and had absolutely no problems hearing the presenters. Plus, it was refreshing to be able to go through the sessions at my own pace. The best part about virtual conferences is that all the content will remain online and on-demand for our viewing pleasure. I can also catch any sessions I missed due to overlapping schedules.

My biggest takeaway from the conference is VMware’s evolution into a powerful technology company with many new capabilities and a vision to help organizations run any type of application, on any cloud, to any device. Here are more key takeaways and highlights:

VMware Cloud Foundation

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) with Tanzu delivers on the digital transformation that organizations are looking for. VCF deploys quickly to enable multicloud capabilities with support for Kubernetes with four new VMware Tanzu Editions: Basic, Standard, Advanced, and Enterprise. All the editions share core characteristics and provide additional capabilities as you ramp up. It’s important to note that VCF 4.1 now supports vVols as Principal Storage in VCF Workload Domains to deliver greater flexibility and storage options.

Pure Storage®

During VMworld 2020, Pure Storage announced an expanded design partnership with VMware. With 10+ years of VMware experience, we’re driving hybrid-cloud innovation. Our key technologies for VMware include:

  • VMware Virtual Volumes (vVols) with VMware Cloud Foundation
  • Site Recovery Manager with vVols
  • VMware Cloud Native Storage for vSphere 7 with Tanzu
  • NVMe-oF with vSphere 7

As I mentioned in my post on day one, I’m standing up a new lab and need to get the latest storage best practices. The Core Storage Best Practice Deep Dive: Configuring the New Storage Features session answered a lot of my questions. The session also happens to be a VMworld all-time favorite session over the past couple of years, so be sure to check it out if you missed it. Here are some of the questions Cody Hosterman and Jason Massae answered for me:

  • Latency PSP
    • Is it any better than standard round robin?
    • Are default settings best for my environment?
  • iSCSI for VMFS and vVols
    • What are design considerations?
    • What are best practices?
  • Queuing
    • Where should I change values?
    • What are best practices?

I ended my FlashArray™ sessions with David Stamen’s valuable automation session. He has a ton of VMware experience and is very knowledgeable with every available tool to automatically operate and manage FlashArray.

The world of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and high-performance computing is completely outside of my comfort zone—the application deployment and software dependencies are completely different from what I’m used to. Pure’s resident expert Bikash Roy Choudhury hosted a joint, deep-dive session with VMware’s Mohan Potheri on optimizing AI, ML, and HPC applications with vSphere Tanzu and Pure FlashBlade® with Pure Service Orchestrator™. Here’s what I learned about vSphere Tanzu and FlashBlade, including RWX for distributed applications and object store capabilities on a single data platform.

  • Performance: Distributed file system with massively parallel data access for ML/HPC applications
  • Data disaggregation: Scaling compute and storage independently for heterogeneous ML/HPC application workloads
  • User experience: Collaboration and reuse data set without compute overhead among end-user users

VMworld delivered solid and extremely informative content. I found myself browsing deep into the content catalog across the seven channels. There’s something for everyone with more than 500 on-demand sessions. I went deep into the NSX sessions, ended up watching a magic show with Adam Trent, and wrapped up with a yoga session. Did any of you end up on that same track?

Tune into VMworld 2020 on demand if you missed out on the live event.

Be sure to join us on October 7 for a live recap session with Cody Hosterman and VMware’s Cloud Platform VP and CTO, Kit Colbert.

Watch Vaughn Stewart’s key takeaways from VMworld 2020

Check out the other posts in my virtual VMworld 2020 blog series: