The vBrownBag Build day is happening again this month (20 July 2017) with Pure Storage as our hosts. We will be bringing a new vSphere cluster to silicon valley and migrating a bunch of VMs onto a nice All-Flash-Array. The plan is to have a couple of heavy workloads that are constrained by the existing storage, just like a real customer that needs to upgrade their storage. I am very interested to see what happens when the workload gets access to the new array. We will also discuss (and probably demonstrate) a few advanced features of the Pure platform.
The build day live stream will be here on YouTube, set a reminder to watch it live on Thursday the 20th of July from 9 am Pacific time.
One of the challenges of doing a Build Day with a storage vendor is having enough workload to make things interesting. This is where the new lab in a box comes in, more than just the NUC that we used, this lab is quite a capability to build into a travel case. There are two ESXi servers, Supermicro E200-8D machines with 128GB of RAM each. These seem to be the go-to mobile lab servers as they have Intel Xeon-D CPUs and dual 10GBE as well as dual 1GBE, all inside a half-width 1U chassis. There is also a portable NAS, the QNAP NASBook that I wrote about after seeing it at the Australian VMUG UserCons this year. Linking it all together are a couple of switches, 8 Port 1GBE and 8 Port 10GBE. I will write up the lab build at some stage soon, but with 256GB of RAM, 22GHZ of CPU and 1.5TB of SSD storage, it is quite a step up.