A session I submitted with Rawlinson, formerly of VSAN fame from VMware, now at Cohesity. Will be talking about how to effectively manage array-based snapshots with vRealize Automation.

Abstract: An integral part of any modern IT organization is the offering of self-service mechanisms for end-users to provision the tools they need, exactly when they need them. Database recovery and/or cloning is no exception. An extremely common use-case for database administrators is the need to be able to, on demand, create, clone, and restore from array-based snapshots of a particular database. Through the XaaS offering of vRealize Automation and Orchestrator, IT can easily and effectively provide the ability for customers to do so. Learn how to use these products to provide a fully-automated self-service snapshot environment with the security and access control your organization demands. As an example, see how snapshot management between Pure Storage and Cohesity, and integration with vRealize streamlines and accelerates this process.

Abstract: vRealize Automation provides a self-service portal for resource provisioning and management. Virtual Volumes (VVols) provide a policy-based, granular mechanism for creating and managing virtual machines. The combination of both technologies is a natural fit. Learn how to use VVol Storage Policy-Based Management and vRealize Automation together to provide a streamlined virtual machine provisioning portal that allows end users to create and provision, exactly to their requirements with little to no administrative overhead. Furthermore, you can use the vRealize Automation function called Anything-As-A-Service (XaaS) and vRealize Orchestrator to provide advanced services and resource actions via the vCenter SDK or other APIs.

Abstract: All-Flash-Arrays are now commonplace in today’s datacenters, and understanding how to configure and manage vSphere to take advantage of them, in both performance and capacity, is critical. The concept of all-flash and, in particular, data reduction changes how some traditional options inside of ESXi should be considered. Topics such as, queuing, space reclamation, SIOC, SDRS, VMFS-6, virtual disk choice, multipathing, QoS and more will discussed.

Trying to deploy private cloud without the headaches of piecing parts together and ensuring it will perform? Are you concerned that the underlying hardware might not be up to the task? VMware Cloud Foundation can be quickly deployed on a completely solid state system with the highest reliability and performance. VMware and Pure Storage have developed a blueprint using a new VMware Validated Design based on vSphere 6.5 and fully solid-state infrastructure. In this session, customers discuss how all-flash SAN storage and VMware’s vRealize powered infrastructure makes their private cloud more manageable and scalable. Learn how infrastructure automation with vRealize saves administrator time and productivity. We will cover a VMware Validated Design that reduces time-to-value and day-to-day operations for multi-site private cloud deployments.

A lot of times, virtualization administrators are tasked with performing testing and validation of storage devices and surrounding infrastructure to be used for database workloads they support. In this session we will give you all the tools you need to be effective at performing such testing and validation. We will argue pros and cons of synthetic testing. Tools like IOmeter, DiskSpd and VDBench will be discussed, along with hypervisor-specific tools, along with tools to replay, or simulate, real world workloads. Links to tools and pre-packaged scripts will be provided.

Out with old, in with the new. SCSI is out, NVMe is what it’s all about. In this session we will discuss the impact that NVMe-powered storage infrastructures can have on the virtualization of databases, and more specifically, the performance characteristics of OLTP and Analytic workloads on SQL Server 2016. We will put a special focus on parallelism, and rethinking pervasive best practices that may not be of much help anymore.

Many organizations are looking to virtual desktops and apps to improve productivity, security, and control — but building infrastructure for large VMware Horizon deployments can be challenging. While some infrastructure approaches are limited in reliability or ability to scale, this talk will present tactics to a build highly performant, highly available and easy to manage solution stack using FlashStack Converged Infrastructure from Cisco and Pure Storage. In this session, we will share insights and results from a recent Cisco Validated Designs for FlashStack with VMware Horizon for 5000 users. We will showcase how real world users can quickly deploy virtual apps and desktops, scale performance for any user type, and keep costs low through a repeatable, reliable converged infrastructure approach to VDI.

Traditional Hadoop models favor direct attached storage where compute and processing are co-located. This has implications for the use of the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) with existing Virtual infrastructure architectures. New Big Data solutions and platforms, such as Spark, can work equally effectively with alternative storage models. This talk explores the use of VSAN and traditional shared storage (GlusterFS) with Apache Spark for different types of big data workloads

SAP S/4HANA is a real-time enterprise resource management suite for digital business. It is built on SAP’s advanced columnar in-memory database platform SAP HANA. vSphere is a great platform to virtualize SAP S4/HANA providing the flexibility, performance and scalability in infrastructure. VMware Validated Designs (VVD) provide for holistic data center-level designs that span compute, storage, networking and management, defining the gold standard for how to design, deploy and run applications like SAP on vSphere. This session will discuss the different aspects of a virtualized S4/HANA TDI environment in a VMware Validated Design.