PEX 2014 VSAN – Content Catalog Part 1

The PEX 2014 Content Catalog is online, so I had quite a bit of searching, slicing, and dicing to do. My initial read-through was looking for clues about announcements which might happen before Partner Exchange, but I gave up on that very quickly. If you think you’ve found something I’ve overlooked, I’d love to hear about it in the comments. Maybe a problem I had was getting sidetracked by content. So it seemed more productive to think about the interesting sessions. This is the first of a few posts about interesting stuff I saw in the content catalog.

PEX 2014 VSAN Content

SDDC3521-BC – Software-Defined Storage & Virtual SAN (VSAN) – Sales Boot Camp
EUC3208 – Architecting VMware View with VSAN – The VCDX Way
TEX3060 – VDI Horizon View on vSAN
TEX3243 – Benefits of Using Virtual SAN (vSAN) with View

It’ll be interesting to see how VSAN’s sales positioning is going to be handled. Are they going to stick with lab and View as the primary use cases? That seems to make sense with the number of sessions targeting  the Horizon View (VDI) use case. The “VCDX Way” is especially intriguing.

So will VMware target the SMB SAN market, which is who actually seems to be clamoring for the product? The VSAN open beta is supposed to be amazingly popular. Of course, whether SMB storage is economically possible with VSAN will depend on the pricing. Since I can’t really extrapolate whether VSAN will be GA by Partner Exchange, it’s tough to do anything besides hope. February would seem to be a good date (offset from VMworld) with plenty of time to shake out first revision bugs and qualify configurations, additional use cases. and more best practices to release around VMworld. But that’s my small fish view on product strategy without any insight into where they are in the engineering effort.

SDDC3522-BC – Software-Defined Storage Technical Boot Camp
TEX3204 – Driving Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) with the Right Direct Attached Drives for your Workload using VMware vSAN

More technically focused sessions which I personally find exciting. Doing a good POC (and partner teams to do them) is a big part of what I want to bring to partner engagements. The second session is the only hint of future product developments I’ve seen, with a discussion of an all-flash VSAN configuration (high-endurance SSD fronting standard-endurance SSD). What does this signal to you? Anything? What does it mean to you about a GA schedule, if anything?

Photo by depone