We had a great time at VMworld 2018 during the vSAN Technical Customer Panel with these 4 great vSAN customers:
They introduced themselves, discussed how they are using vSAN in their environment, and the benefits achieved. After that, we had a stream of questions from the audience that provoked some interesting discussions. If you want to check it out you can view the recorded session here:
This is the third year in the row I’ve been fortunate enough to host this session. This year was the best attended and had the best audience questions. FYI, my colleague, Lee Dilworth, will be hosing this session in Barcelona so we look forward to a good crowd with more good questions and discussion.
I’m looking forward to VMworld 2018 in a few weeks. It’s always a long week but a great time. I look forward to catching up with coworkers, partners, customers, and friends. And, I’ll also have to do a little work. This year I have 2 breakout speaking sessions.
The Panel will consist of 4 vSAN customers: General Motors, United States Senate Federal Credit Union, Rent-A-Center, and Brinks Oakland University. Brinks is a great vSAN customer but is doing an NSX session at the same time as the vSAN session so we are lucky to add Oakland University to the panel. I will moderate the session, ask the customers to describe their company, role, environment, and how they are using vSAN. General Motors will talk about their large VDI deployment. Unites States Federal Credit Union will discuss their use of vSAN in remote offices, VVols, and Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM). Rent-A-Center will discuss vSAN for management clusters, VDI, and the benefit of VxRail. Oakland University will discuss their vSAN stretched cluster, Data at Rest Encryption, and Dedupe/Compression. After each panelist does this, we’ll take questions from the audience.
Here’s a recording of last year’s session to give you an idea: https://youtu.be/x4ioatHqQOI
On the panel we had Sanofi, Travelers, Sekisui Pharmaceutical, and Herbalife. The year before we had Stanley Black and Decker, Synergent Bank, M&T Bank, and Baystate Health. Both were great sessions and this year looks like it will be too.
When it comes to security in vSAN, most think Data at Rest Encryption and to make this all work you need a key management server. It’s tough to beat HyTrust for this. They offer the software for free and support for a small fee. But that’s not all they do. Check out this session to find out more. Dave Siles and I will discuss GDPR-Ready Architecture and how vSAN encryption can help.
I started at VMware on the vSAN team 4 years ago when we had 0 customers. It’s been a pretty wild and fun ride to get to 10,000 but we’ve only just begun. Customers are seeing the benefits of HCI and vSAN for all sorts of use cases including mission critical applications, management clusters, VDI, ROBO, DMZ, test/dev, DR Sites, and IaaS at IBM Bluemix (formerly SoftLayer) and soon at Amazon with VMware Cloud on AWS.
Unfortunately, we cannot fit all 10,000 customers in one breakout session at VMworld, but we can fit 4. I’m hosting a breakout session titled:
vSAN Technical Customer Panel [STO2615PU]
(Now that the session has happened, here is the video recording:)
I hosted a similar session last year with Stanley Black and Decker, Synergent Bank, M&T Bank, and Baystate Health and it was a lot of fun with some great audience participation. For more information check here.
This year we are fortunate to have Sanofi, Sekisui, Travelers, and Herbalife join the panel. The format is this:
Introduce the Panel
Panelists introduce their company, their VMware environment, and their use of vSAN
Q&A – I will have some questions for the panel but we expect the audience questions to generate some great discussion.
Let’s meet the Panelists:
Joachim Heppner Director, Virtualization Engineering Services Sanofi
In 2016 this large pharma needed to refresh their Remote Office Branch Office (ROBO) sites. After a successful proof of concept, 2+ Node vSAN on HPE ProLiant Servers was chosen. Since then, vSAN has been deployed for management clusters and VDI in USA and EMEA as well as in 2 of their 13 regional data centers. Next, Cloud Foundation is being considered to replace their legacy Blade servers & Storage arrays.
In early 2014 this mid-size pharma needed to build a DR site and chose a 4 Node vSphere cluster with vSAN enabled. They used vSphere Replication and SRM to test and automate DR. They also moved their test and development environment to this cluster. This year they are replacing their production data center with HCI and vSAN.
vSAN was chosen to support production and test/dev Hadoop workloads. Two other vSAN clusters are used for new application workload POC’s. In addition, 2 Cloud Foundation configurations, each with a management cluster and a VM workload cluster are being implemented to prove how the built-in automation simplifies operations.
In early 2014 this nutrition company wanted to modernize their data center by automating IT to simplify application access and management and transform Windows delivery. Today they run vSphere and vSAN and are evaluating NSX in multiple call centers to support 4000 Horizon VDI across 5 ROBO sites and their primary data centers for mission critical applications. They’ve achieved great cost savings resulting in significantly reduced TCO while delivering exceptional performance to their users.
I’m looking forward to seeing many great friends and to meet new ones at VMworld. I hope you can come and participate and enjoy this session with these great guests.
I’m really looking forward to attending VMworld 2014 in a few weeks. Its a great time to catch up with friends and meet new ones. For me the week kicks off on Thursday at the VMware SE Tech Summit. Then vOdgeball on Sunday afternoon with a team of former EMC vSpecialists. This is a great event to help out a great cause, the Wounded Warrior Project. We’ll also be honoring our two vSpecialist friends, Jim Ruddy and Stephen Hunt, that were recently involved in a tragic accident. Then the main event starts Sunday night. It should be fun and exhausting.
Live Virtually 