VMware Cloud Foundation provides wizard-driven workflows that help users to deploy and manage entire vCenter-based environments with a few simple clicks. These automate many of the repetitive tasks typically associated with the creation and maintenance of a vSphere domain. That all sounds great, but since you are here reading this, I will assume that your next question is: “Does it work with Pure Storage?” The answer is yes. While today there is no direct integration between Pure and VMware Cloud Foundation, the good news is that attaching Pure Storage to your vCF Domain(s) is effortless.
Perhaps the best way to summarize the current state of affairs is via this flowchart:
The two key points are that the Management Domain creation is on top of vSAN and that using the NFS or vSAN storage type are the options for building the Workload Domain today. In the case of the NFS storage type you can provide an NFS file system on something like FlashBlade or create a Linux VM within your management domain and configure it as an NFS share. Once the Workload domain has been built via Cloud Foundation, you then have all the usual Pure Storage consumption options available for VMFS and/or vVols. Yet another important benefit of VMware Cloud Foundation is being able to easily deploy the vRealize Suite within SDDC Manager and then connect them Workload Domains as they come online. This allows you to take advantage of the content packs we have built to streamline controlling Pure Storage from your VMware product of choice.
One more advantage is that Workload Domain deployments are in vCenter enhanced linked-mode by default. This means that both Management and Workload Domains are managed under a single pane of glass. This streamlines migration from vSAN to Pure Storage as well as shuffling VMs among your various domains. Vaughn Stewart wrote a great piece on what we are seeing with that ecosystem .
The most exciting part of this integration is that this is only the beginning. VMware made some very exciting announcements at VMworld about deepening integration with block storage arrays like FlashArray so we expect this integration to only become tighter with Cloud Foundation.
We’ve built a detailed step-by-step deployment process that shows how to create a Workload Domain and then connect it to Pure Storage in a variety of ways. To get some more details, please check out this link which also includes a narrated video demo at the end. Please note that a Pure Storage support site login is required to view. While we are on the subject of VMware, the VMware Platform Guide is our go-to resource for best practices and KB articles for all components that your vCF deployment will use, so please check it out to see some of the exciting stuff we are working on.
