Las Vegas wasn’t the only destination on VMworld’s itinerary this year. The annual conference traveled overseas and made waves in Spain. The record breaking number of attendeeds at each event heard how vSAN surprassed the noteworthy milestone of 10,000 customers. Many of these customers were out in full force sharing their vSAN experiences in sessions, panel discussions and interviews. To learn more, take a look at this year’s content catalog to see how our customers are modernizing their infrastructure with vSAN.
Representatives from our ecosystem partners—including Cisco, Dell EMC, Fujitsu, Hitachi Data Systems, Honeywell, HPE, Intel, Lenovo, and Supermicro—showcased their hyper-converged solutions powered by vSAN in the HCI Zone. A hotspot at both conferences this year where customers and partners were encouraged to Hit Refresh and modernize their data centers with vSAN. Check out interviews conducted in the HCI Zone on Facebook Live to learn more about how to include HCI in your business initiatives.
And then of course the shows included a host of vSAN announcements and news. If you missed the events this year don’t worry, we have a full recap of VMworld 2017 below:
Key vSAN Announcements and Highlights
New HCI Acceleration Kit for Distributed IT
Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (HCI) is the fastest growing segment in the storage market, and VMworld placed special attention on HCI with the introduction of the new VMware HCI Acceleration Kit. This new offering leverages the power of single-socket servers with aggressive new vSphere and vSAN pricing from VMware to support the deployment of enterprise infrastructure in “Distributed IT” environments, where cost and manageability complexities of traditional SANs have limited the ability to provide data center class IT at distributed and edge sites.
Industry leading influencers and OEM partners, like Fujitsu, commented on their excitement of the newly launched HCI Acceleration Kit. “Fujitsu welcomes the release of VMware HCI Acceleration Kit,” said Kenichi Sakai, Corporate Executive Officer, Senior Vice President, Head of Data Center Platform Business Unit, Fujitsu Limited. “As a leading server vendor and ICT provider, we have been working closely with VMware to provide our customers with FUJITSU Integrated System PRIMEFLEX and many best-in-class solutions. We see that VMware HCI Acceleration Kit will deliver cost-effective and easily provisioned systems for customers trying to process the burgeoning data on VMware HCI.” Check out the blog to learn more about the new HCI Acceleration Kit.
Project Hatchway Delivers Persistent Storage for Containers
Project Hatchway offers persistent storage infrastructure choices for container environments, from HCI powered by vSAN to traditional SAN and NAS storage. The project provides tight integration with leading container orchestrators like Kubernetes and Docker Swarm and enables developers to consume storage infrastructure as code with the freedom to choose the orchestrator of their choice. Answering some customer’s biggest pain points as they are looking to deploy stateful applications with persistent storage in containers.
New Ecosystem Solutions Powered by vSAN
VMworld served as the prime global stage for revealing VMware’s latest collaborative release with vSAN, Lenovo and Intel Xeon Scalable platforms. Lenovo debuted ThinkAgile, a software-defined solutions platform with simplified management and greater efficiency based around Lenovo’s ThinkSystem servers, an ideal platform for HCI powered by vSAN. The newly announced ThinkAgile VX series delivers an integrated system powered by vSAN that delivers a predictable hardware experience with simplified day 2 management and operations.
According to Radhika Krishnan, Vice President and General Manager, Software Defined Infrastructure, Lenovo Data Center Group, “Today’s datacenter market is being disrupted by the increasing demands on IT departments to rapidly deliver new services and applications. The ThinkAgile VX series is a new hyper converged platform from Lenovo and VMware that provides public cloud-like simplicity, in a private or hybrid cloud environment.”
vSAN Powers VMware Cloud for AWS
Attendees got the opportunity to check out new sessions covering VMware Cloud on AWS, which highlighted how enterprises are transitioning to public cloud use by employing intelligent tools and processes to reduce complexity. On top of that, attendees learned how to secure and audit a public cloud through diverse security scenarios using VMware tools to walk through common end-user mistakes or breaches.
A notable use case for VMware Cloud on AWS is data center consolidation for enterprises while maintaining their VMware footprint and the same tools, processes and level of availability they already have. VMware Cloud on AWS also proves useful around hybrid applications where enterprises with traditional applications are looking to integrate them and use other AWS services and offerings as part of a hybrid application stack.
Technical Previews
VMware experts provided early access to upcoming vSAN features and future innovations. Tech previews of Disaster Recovery with VMware Cloud on AWS and Integrated Data Protection for vSAN sessions were presented. You can view these sessions and more here.
New vSAN Specialist Badge
The VMware vSAN Specialist badge proves your expertise on vSAN 6.6 architecture, design and deployment, as well as implementing live vSAN HCI environment. VMware skills are recognized and valued throughout the IT industry, so this certification provides valid verifications of your VMware vSAN knowledge. Learn more about how to earn the badge.
Be sure to check out the VMworld blog for individual recaps of each day. And watch all of the live streamed general sessions here and revisit the on-demand sessions here.
