by Kevin Lees, Chief Technologist, IT Operations Transformation
I’m pleased to announce the release of my second book: Operationalizing VMware vSAN co-authored with Paul Wiggett, a Senior Technical Operations Architect at VMware. Like my first book, Operationalizing VMware NSX (download here), Operationalizing VMware vSAN addresses what happens after you’ve designed and implemented a key VMware solution in your environment. In this case, our software-defined storage solution VMware vSAN. vSAN is one of the key components and enablers of VMware’s software-defined HCI stack as recently recognized by Gartner, who placed it in the Leaders quadrant in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI).
Customers have been and continue to rapidly adopt vSAN due to the agility, scalability, and cost efficiency it affords. But, as with NSX and our software-defined datacenter solutions generally, the question I always get is “we love vSAN as a technology, but what’s the impact on operations?” Customers inherently know something needs to be done differently in operations to fully leverage the power of software-defined storage, but what exactly? This is where “operationalizing vSAN” comes into play.
Operationalizing vSAN refers to what happens after you’ve designed and implemented vSAN in your infrastructure. You may think, well isn’t “day 2 operations” what happens after we’ve designed and implemented vSAN? You’re right, day 2 operations do happen once vSAN is deployed but to really leverage the capabilities provided by vSAN as well as the Software Defined Datacenter and related software-defined solutions generally, you need to think beyond just day 2 operations.
How do you optimize the way you operate vSAN? Are you currently organized in such a way as to fully take advantage of what vSAN provides? What skills are needed? What about your current operational processes? Could you optimize your operational processes to unlock the full benefits of vSAN? What about operational tools for vSAN? Can you leverage existing investments in VMware tools? The answers to these questions are what we address in Operationalizing VMware vSAN.
Kevin Lees is the field Chief Technologist for IT Operations Transformation at VMware. His focus is on how customers optimize the way they operate VMware-supported environments and solutions. Kevin serves as an advisor to global customer senior executives for their IT operations transformation initiatives. He also leads the IT Transformation activities in VMware’s Global Field Office of the CTO. Kevin is also the author of the book Operationalizing VMware NSX which provides knowledge and guidance for achieving operating model optimization for operating a NSX-based network and security infrastructure, downloaded here.
