Navigating Strategy Shift: Lessons from Virtualization’s "Three Waves"
The enterprise virtualization landscape has evolved through distinct shifts over the years, making long-term infrastructure planning a top priority for IT leaders. In an insightful article on the Everpure Blog, Matt Webb breaks down the Three Waves of competitive and market pressure that have shaped modern virtualization—from early hypervisor competition and the rise of public cloud to recent shifting licensing models. Key takeaways for managing long-term virtualization costs and operations: Infrastructure Change Takes Time: While application development moves rapidly, core infrastructure shifts are deliberate and require extensive lead time. Early planning, often 12 months or more ahead of renewals, is essential. A Refracted Market: There is no single "successor" path. Depending on business goals, organizations are choosing between remaining on their current stack, shifting to the public cloud, adopting alternative hypervisors, or modernizing workloads with containerized virtualization (e.g., KubeVirt). Control the Fundamentals: Unpredictability in software licensing makes optimizing the underlying storage and physical infrastructure one of the most reliable ways to control total cost of ownership (TCO). Whether you're actively evaluating new platforms or optimizing your existing stack, this piece offers a valuable framework for thinking through long-term infrastructure strategy. 📖 Read the full article: Virtualization's Three Waves: Where Do We Go from Here?FlashArray now supports ActiveCluster over NVMe-oF with VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1
VMware stretch clusters just got an upgrade. 🚀 With VMware Cloud Foundation 9.1, FlashArray ActiveCluster over NVMe-oF enables stretched storage with dispersed namespaces, delivering NVMe performance and zero-RPO metro resiliency for mission-critical workloads. ⚡ Learn how NVMe is redefining stretched storage: https://purefla.sh/4v5ebFD
NVMe-TCP + VMware Design Questions
Q1: In a medium - large datacenter (ie anticipated growth to 500 hosts), would it be a problem to use large subnets (ie 2 x /23 or /22's) to place the initiators + target IPs? All our existing nvme-tcp deployments (which we're having great success with btw) use 2 x /24's, which provides more than enough capacity for the array + a decent sized cluster. But now we're entering into the realms of multiple flasharrays (ie 3 or 4 in a single site) and hundreds of hosts - we'll quickly exhaust a /24 range. Q2: In this site, where we have say 2 x FA-X's an 2 x FA-C's, is it valid to present datastores from all of these arrays over nvme-tcp to a single cluster? With each array / datastore cluster being accessed using the same initiators on the same layer 2's? At what point does it get silly and I need to draw a line and segregate environments? Q3: Is there a capacity limit to the number of client hosts I can have on an array / mapping storage to? (nvm - I think I found the answer to that - looks like it's 1000 nqn's on pretty much all X and C arrays)
Any movement on Active Cluster with NVMe /TCP?
The last update I can find is from 2 years ago was a "maybe 2025" post. Nothing in the AC FAQ that I can find. Is this going to happen or should we just explore other conectivity options at this point? Servers are UCS with internal FC switching for now, we would like to configure uniform access. Pretty sure VMware isn't going to officially support multiple connection types for the same LUN/device/volume, unless someone knows something different.Azure lovers, you'll like this one...
☁️ Did everyone catch the big cloud news at last week's Accelerate? Pure Storage Cloud for Azure Native is now GA! Thats right - it's here! You can now tap into Pure's block storage directly inside azure-no extra layers, no hassle. It works just like the rest of your Azure services but with the simplicity and efficiency you expect from Pure Storage. If you are thinking about how to get more out of Azure, definitely give 👉 this blog a read.Accelerate Breakout Replay: Pure Storage and VMware Core Storage Best Practices Deep Dive
Join this session to learn Pure Storage + VMware best practices. Get answers to "why" and deployment tips. Speakers: Alex Carver Jason Langer Trevin Hale, Columbia Sportswear https://www.purestorage.com/video/webinars/vmware-core-storage-best-practices-deep-dive/6375804979112.htmlAccelerate Breakout Replay: What's New with VMware, Pure Storage, and You in 2025?
Explore Pure Storage + VMware in 2025: ActiveDR™, ActiveCluster™, vVols, NVMe-oF, NFS, and deep platform integrations. Speakers: Alex Carver David Stevens https://www.purestorage.com/video/webinars/whats-new-vmware-pure-you-2025/6375798298112.html
