Home > Blogs > Virtual Blocks


Storage and Availability at Partner Exchange 2015

VMware’s 2015 Partner Exchange is now just about one week away, and it’s shaping up to be a great one!

In storage and availability we’ll have a lot to talk about across the board: Some sessions will offer deeper examinations of our current products, others will give you a great exploration of some of the newer things VMware has to showcase.

I’ve made a list of some of the sessions put on by those of us in the storage and availability product team; it’s a good cross section from product marketing, product managers, and technical marketing people such as myself.  Outside of the engineers who actually write the code, these are the people closest to the products you use, so sign up and hear something new.  There are also sessions from our highly experienced field sales and technical teams — the experts at understanding how these products address customer requirements and explaining their value to our customers.

I’m personally doing a technical session with my colleague Rawlinson on Virtual SAN (STO4275) and looking forward to it quite a bit.

Lastly, don’t be shy to come say hello after the sessions.  We love to hear your thoughts, if we’ve got time between activities…

These, then, are the VMware storage and availability sessions I’m looking forward to, sorted by topic (Storage first, Availability below), then by schedule.  An asterisk denotes a technical session.

Storage

Tuesday

  • STO4280 – VMware Software-Defined Storage Overview In this session, you will learn about VMware’s holistic strategy to storage and how to position the VMware software-defined storage solution to capture this rapidly growing opportunity. Software-defined storage (SDS) is changing the game of how storage infrastructure is architected and managed. We will discuss how VMware partners can take advantage of VMware Virtual SAN to deliver unique value to customers capitalizing on the rapidly growing opportunity of hyper-converged infrastructure. Additionally we will review how partners can leverage Virtual Volumes for storage in SAN/NAS environments.
  • *STO4278 – Virtual Volumes Technical Overview Virtual Volumes (VVOL) is VMware’s new storage paradigm for external SAN/NAS storage arrays. In this session, we will walk you through key technical concepts of Virtual Volumes, in depth. We will also compare in detail some of the existing features in VMFS/NFS with VVOL. In addition, You will also get an overview of some of our partner solutions and their approach with VVOL.
  • STO4273 – What’s New with VMware Virtual SAN and How to be Successful Selling It Come learn about the next release of Virtual SAN, a disruptive product that gives customers a new approach to managing storage in virtual environments. Virtual SAN is radically simple shared storage product delivered as software through a hypervisor-converged architecture that can deliver a simple and high performance storage tier to provision and manage storage while dramatically reducing the total cost of ownership. We will also discuss enablement activities for pre-sales and post sales tools for Virtual SAN. We will deep dive on the value proposition of VSAN and how it applied to different customer situations as well as go into a detailed analysis of where the capital and operational cost savings are coming from.
  • *STO4289 – Conducting a Successful Proof of Concept for Virtual SAN This session will teach you the best way to run a Virtual SAN Proof of Concept, starting with laying the groundwork for a successful installation, to setting the right objectives, to being prepared to manage road bumps along the way. Specific topics include: hardware selection, infrastructure prerequisites, test plans for performance and availability, and monitoring and troubleshooting.

Wednesday

  • *STO4275 – Virtual SAN Technical Walkthrough This session will provide a technical exploration of Virtual SAN 6.0.  Attend this session to learn how Virtual SAN has been enhanced in the areas of performance, availability, and manageability.   We will also go over the greatly expanded hardware options that are available to architects, which allows them to build the Virtual SAN cluster that’s just right for them.
  • STO4290 – Delivering SDS to SAN/NAS with Virtual Volumes Virtual Volumes represent the completion of VMware’s Software-Defined Storage (SDS) vision. Virtual Volumes is an industry-wideinitiative supported by all major VMware storage partners that will allow customers to embrace SDS while leveraging their current SAN / NAS storage architecture. Come learn how Virtual Volumes, together with Storage Policy-Based Management (SPBM),automate provisioning of storage quality of service for virtual machines, provide finer control on a per VM level, and enable native array data services  to deliver SDS for external storage.
  • STO4464 – Virtual SAN Panel: View from the Sales Trenches In this session, you can hear from our panel of VMware VSAN sales specialists and your partner peers as they discuss and share lessons learned, best practices, and the inside scoop of Virtual SAN Sales.
  • *STO4465 – Performance and Best Practices for Business Critical Applications Leveraging Virtual SAN Attend this session to see how to build solutions for Tier-1 applications like Exchange and SQL Server on Virtual SAN.  We will present guidelines for architecture and operations, and show the results of performance benchmarking.  Learn how Virtual SAN provides unique benefits for running these applications that no other storage platform can match.    After viewing this session, you will be able to plan the deployment of your organization’s business critical applications on a Virtual SAN cluster.

Thursday

  • *STO4276 – Virtual SAN Hardware Guidance & Best Practices Do your customers have growing performance, capacity and availability demands for enterprise workloads that you plan to run on Virtual SAN but don’t know where to start in terms of putting together the right hardware that meets your needs?  In this session, we will help simplify your hardware selection process for your Virtual SAN environment. In this session, we will also walk you through best practices, sizing considerations and performance recommendations for building Virtual SAN solutions for different use cases such as VDI, Tier 1 workloads, DR Target, and others.
  • *STO4279 – Software-Defined Storage: The Key to Agility with Control One of the biggest benefits of Software-Defined Storage is the ability to operate a highly agile datacenter while maintaining full control over resource usage.  See how VMware can deliver a complete set of storage services, on-demand and dynamically created, using exciting new solutions such as vRealize Automation, Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM), Virtual SAN 2.0, and Virtual Volumes.

Availability

Wednesday

  • STO4295 – SRM & Business Continuity Overview Here at VMware we prepare you for the threats to your IT infrastructure with solutions like vCenter Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication, which ensure the simplest, most reliable disaster protection for all your virtualized applications. Join us and learn about the latest capabilities of Site Recovery Manager, which will enable you to architect the next-generation disaster protection and take you to a fully functional Software-Defined Data Center.

Thursday

  • *STO4293 – SRM & VR6 Technical Deep Dive Join us to learn about all the new features in the latest VMware Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication releases. We will provide deep insight into several of the biggest enhancements, we will demonstrate the features and time will be allocated for live Q&A, so bring your questions!