What is VMware vSphere?

vSphere is the product name for VMware's suite of server virtualization products that includes its ESXi hypervisor and vCenter management software.

Why does VMware care about external storage?

Customers typically have a variety of workload demands including those related to the storage needed by their applications, users, and protection policies. With respect to VMware environments, these needs are generally met in the form of datastores or guest-connected storage. Datastores are available through VMware vCenter configurations while guest connected storage is on a per VM or container basis. Often both of these access methodologies are facilitated through shared storage like NetApp ONTAP.

VMware organizes storage into 2 categories: traditional storage and software-defined storage models. Traditional storage models include configurations such as SAN, NAS and Raw Device Mappings (RDM) while Software-defined storage models include VMware Virtual Volumes (vVols) and vSAN. NetApp is the perfect platform for traditional storage offerings and vVols as evidenced by our product integrations, enterprise grade features, and solution depth and breadth.

How do VMware datastores work?

Datastores are logical containers, analogous to file systems, that hide specifics of physical storage and provide a uniform model for storing virtual machine files. Datastores can also be used for storing ISO images, virtual machine templates, and floppy images.

What is FlexPod?

FlexPod is a converged infrastructure solution offered by the Cisco / NetApp partnership. It contains an "all in one" virtual datacenter composed of compute, network and storage. FlexPod offers many solutions based on VMware products.

Why is NVMe over TCP important to VMs?

For VM’s running on NVMe over TCP, you can reduce CPU utilization and gain performance and reliability with NVMe coupled with Virtual Volumes on NetApp for scalability, simplicity, and automation.

What is VMware HCX?

VMware HCX is an application mobility platform designed for simplifying application migration, rebalancing workloads, and optimizing disaster recovery across data centers and clouds.

HCX provides services between two or more distinct environments. The environments might be running legacy vSphere, or they might be running modern vSphere SDDC, they might also be VMware-based public cloud instances.

What is VMware Tanzu?

vSphere with Tanzu is the new generation of vSphere for containerized applications. This single, streamlined solution bridges the gap between IT operations and developers with a new kind of infrastructure for modern, cloud-native applications both on premises and in public clouds.

What is VMware Aria?

VMware Aria is an intelligent multi-cloud management solution, consisting of a suite of products that enable you to consistently deploy and operate your apps, infrastructure, and platform services. Aria enables you to gain control of your environment across private, hybrid, and multiple clouds from a single platform and with a common data model.

The editor of the Aria Automation Orchestrator Client allows for the creation of simple to complex service offerings by using the library of predefined and administrator-configured workflows. By combining predefined storage tasks within this library with NetApp’s REST-based APIs, a variety of service offerings can be created. It is when these service offerings are published in a self-service catalog, within Aria Automation, that any business or IT objective can be accomplished.

In addition to the operations related tasks that can be achieved, Aria helps administrators with real-time visibility into their infrastructure. The VMware Aria Management Pack for NetApp FAS/AFF is an embedded adapter for VMware Aria Operations. This integration provides analytics and up to the minute information about the infrastructure, helping you identify problems as they arise or potentially sooner.

What is VMware virtual volumes (vVols)?

VMware vVols is the low-level storage for virtual machines that supports operations on the storage array level, similarly to traditional LUNs used to create datastores. Instead of using the traditional VMFS file system, a storage array defines how to provide access and organize data for VMs using the storage array.

What is VMware Cloud Foundation?

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) is a hybrid cloud platform for both traditional enterprise and modern applications. Built on VMware’s software-defined stack for compute, storage, network, container, and cloud management; resources within VCF are made available through the creation of domains. Domains group compute, network, and storage into a logical unit according to best practices. There are 2 types of domains: the initial management domain and virtual infrastructure workload domains.

Following the creation of the initial management domain, subsequent workload domains are deployed as needed to satisfy business requirements. Workload domains are allocated performance and capacity with principal or supplemental storage. VCF delivers a simplified and standard experience for heterogenous environments through the deployments of these application-ready workload domains.

What is VMware Site Recovery Manager?

Site Recovery Manager (SRM) is the industry-leading disaster recovery (DR) management solution, designed to minimize downtime in case of a disaster. It provides policy-based management, automated orchestration, and non-disruptive testing of centralized recovery plans.

What is hybrid multicloud with VMware & NetApp?

No other infrastructure provider can support workloads on VMware both on-premises and in the cloud, any cloud. NetApp is the first infrastructure provider to support VMware in the cloud on AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.

Each of the major public cloud providers offer virtualization services on which applications and workloads can be run as they are on-premises.

NetApp provides a full set of solutions for these cloud virtualization environments.