VMworld Europe 2019 and Pure Storage

It’s that time of the year again…again! Pure Storage is back at VMworld in Barcelona.

Before we get into what’s happening at Barcelona, let’s recap a bit what happened in the US conference. As the best way to look to the future sometimes is to analyze the past.

Also check out this panel session I did with Rubrik on VMworld US.

• VMware Cloud on AWS was once again a major topic–this is increasingly getting more attention and something we are paying a close eye on. The most important step around this for Pure is our new offering that is now fully GA, called Cloud Block Store. Our FlashArray software (Purity) now fully running AWS. See my posts here and here on that.
• VMware Cloud Foundations. This is the basis for pretty much all automated VMware stacks–SDDC manager allows you to deploy vCenter, NSX, vRealize (etc. etc.) and of course their lifecycles. SDDC Manager (the management point of vCF) provides the ability to create on “management” domain–this is where all of the VMware services are deployed, and also one or more “workload” domains. Workloads domains are basically a new vCenter server–which gets hooked in via ELM. When deploying a workload domain the storage options used to be only be vSAN or NFS. You could then add block after the fact. In the 3.9.0.0 release, you can now choose Fibre Channel storage as the option. Check out our KB here on it. I expect to hear more about this in Barcelona.
• Containers, K8s, and more containers. VMware’s work since the Heptio acquisition has not slowed down. I would be fairly comfortable saying that the announcement of Project Pacific and Project Tanzu were the talk of the town during and certainly after VMworld. I have no doubt this will bubble up more in Barcelona. The use case around First Class Disks and vVols I think is particularly intriguing.
• vRealize Automation Cloud and vRealize 8.0. vRealize Automation 8.0 is now GA. There are two major things here to unpack. First VMware Cloud Automation Services was renamed to vRealize Automation Cloud. This in and of itself doesn’t mean anything (VMware loves to name things) but what is actually important about that is the “traditional” vRealize Automation set. vRealize Automation 8 is now entirely based on the features/design/architecture of vRealize Automation Cloud. Meaning that what vRAC offers is what vRA on-premises offers (same tools, integrations, features). This makes choosing between the two easier (one question to ask, do I want to host it, or do I want VMware to?). I expect details on this to be expanded in Barcelona.
• vVols. Did you think I wouldn’t bring this up?! Of course I would. vVols is coming back in a big way, and in no small part due to VMware’s renewed push on vVols in their products and with their partners. The automation, integration, and benefits of vVols are making more and more sense these days. VMware gets that, and so do the storage partners. A major topic around vVols is Site Recovery Manager support. Expect to see more vendors talking about that as they furiously work on vVol replication support.

So what do I expect in Barcelona? Well a lot more about the above, I’m sure. A common thought in most customer’s heads is the next release of vSphere. Inferences have been made (NVMe-oF support for instance), but nothing really announced. I think a lot of the talk will be around vendors’ integration responses to the above offerings. We all left VMworld US with a lot of homework to do. I don’t know if there are many more clouds left for VMware to announce support on (AWS, Azure, GCP, IBM, Oracle). I expect a renewed push by MSPs on these offerings and on-premises vCF.

What about Pure? Well:

• Updated demos on SRM + vVols (plus some more SRM stuff we are cooking up)
• vSphere Plugin Updates (some cool new features in the next release we will be showing exclusively in Barcelona)
• vRealize Updates–our latest plugins and integrations
• Cloud Block Store–using VMware services (like Service Broker) to deploy directly into AWS and what it will mean for VMC.
• VM Analytics–some new updates and features around our integration of VMware environments into Pure1.
• Kubernetes of course and our CSI driver–persistent storage and your containers and how Pure can help
• VMware Cloud Foundations–demos of the latest integration and what we are building to make setup even easier.
• NVMe-oF. We have supported this for almost 8 months and have been working with VMware for even longer on it, so check out the progress in our booth.
• vCloud Director! Yes alive and well among MSPs. We are building a VM-granular plugin for VM lifecycle management. Check it out.
• Orchestration/automation in general. PowerShell, vRO, Ansible, Terraform, you name it.

Also of course sessions:

I have three:

Alex Carver who works for me has a VMTN session:

Kyle Grossmiller (who also works for me) has a session on Veeam + Pure

A VMware session on vCD which talks about the (amongst others) plugin we are building.

See ya there!

For more information, check out Craig Waters’ post here:

Cisco and Pure Storage FlashStack at VMworld Barcelona 2019