What a VMworld this has been for VSAN. The building momentum of this product is awesome to see, especially for those of us who have been evangelizing it from the beginning. The conversations have changed significantly this year. Previously it was all about “Why should I use VSAN?”. Now that the benefits of VSAN are obvious, the conversations this year were more technical and more around enablement, e.g. “How would I achieve X with VSAN, what are the points I need to consider when I use VSAN for Y, etc?”.

As I mentioned in a previous post, this year I presented two technical sessions at VMworld 2016 in Las Vegas with my buddy, Paudie O’Riordan. Both recordings are now available, even to those folks who were not registered for VMworld. The first session was VSAN Day 2 Operations, covering monitoring, upgrading and troubleshooting. The second session was Conducting a successful VSAN Proof of Concept, which I’d delivered at previous VMworlds, but which has been updated for VSAN 6.2.

Unfortunately there was an issue with the recording of the slides in VSAN Day 2 Operations, so the video just shows Paudie and I talking for the duration of the session (I guess the lucky charms didn’t work after all). While you might like looking at our handsome faces and listening to our lovely accents for the best part of an hour, we thought the slides accompanying the presentation might also be useful to have. 🙂 I have therefore uploaded the slides via SlideShare:

For completeness, I have also added the slides from the Virtual SAN POC session to SlideShare too:

The other thing I want to call out is the success of the VSAN Hands On Lab. Kudos once again must go to John Browne of GSS in Cork in putting this together, and to the HOL team for all their help. VSAN was once again the #2 HOL at this year’s VMworld, with a total of 772 labs taken. If you are interested in “kicking the tires” of VSAN, and going through some of the common workflows, check out the HOL on VSAN.

One additional point, there was a VSAN beta announcement soon after VMworld. Duncan has some further details in this blog post. If you are interested in any of these upcoming features, be sure to participate in the beta.

Finally, Paudie and I will be re-running our VSAN Day 2 Session in Barcelona. If you are attending VMworld 2016 in EMEA, we’d be delighted if you attended our session.