VMworld 2017 Session Wrap-Up

I’m back from VMworld 2017 US and then VMworld Europe and a nice vacation. Time to get back to work and of course some (well a lot hopefully) blogging.

Had a great time catching up with friends at VMworld and talking about the new stuff that both Pure Storage and VMware have coming. I had quite a few sessions this year–VMware was kind enough to post online–many of them publically (no login required).

First session was the biggest–alongside Cormac Hogan at VMware. Went over the pieces of information that we wrote about together in the Core Storage 6.5 Update paper (found here). This was my first time presenting with Cormac and it was a lot of fun! Definitely hope to do it again soon. We had almost 1,000 people in the US version of the session which was unreal! Thank you so much for attending. Here is the recording:

The next session was with Pete Flecha on VVols and Pure Storage. We overview what VVols are and what we have done at Pure Storage for our VVols offering. Always enjoy presenting with Pete–a very nice guy. In this session I try to focus on what VVols can offer you from a use case perspective–I think people often miss the huge number of advantages it can offer above and beyond VMFS or NFS.

This session came from a labor of love post I wrote earlier this year (Understanding VMware ESXi Queuing and the FlashArray). I gave the session at a VMUG and for an VMUG webinar and personally for a lot of customers and it went over well, so I consumed one of Pure Storage’s vendor sessions to talk about how queuing works inside of ESXi and whether you should change these settings (answer is usually no) and how to manage them.

Also my vSphere best practices for All-Flash Arrays session. Once again I did this with my friend and colleague Vaughn Stewart. This is an ever-evolving session. I take the configuration-related conversations, support cases, questions, etc. I have with customers each year and make a presentation answering the common ones. I keep this as vendor neutral as possible, try to focus on how AFAs and data reduction make you think somewhat differently about using ESXi and vCenter features.

Lastly, my vBrownBag presentation. This is the concept of how VVols actually improve data mobility for you, not add additional lock-in. VMware designed VVols to provide this and it is something we worked very hard on to make sure the Pure VVol implementation took advantage of.

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