iSCSI

That's how I failed my first VCP.

I didn't know anything about iSCSI.

I'd never used it, whatever.

I just went in and sat down and, what the hell, let's do this.

And, yeah, you get one iSCSI question wrong, and then now you've got 20 of them.

And it's, well, yeah, great.

Thanks.

let me take this.

So one of the area where customers liked us and loved us is, let's imagine you have a VMware or one of this hypervisor environment, and you have some back-end storage that is either NFS or iSCSI.

That's where your VMDKs, for example, the objects for the VMs are residing.

It is incredibly different, incredibly hard, I should say, to troubleshoot an issue or flow that traverses through the fabric from your storage to your server or server to your storage.

If it is flaky, it's even harder.

So, How do you go about troubleshooting this, right? It gives you an ability to find the path, first and foremost, right? The path from the server to the storage.

And also, checks the intent of Apstra along the way and where it has deviated and where it has seen problems have occurred, and then maps it to your exact iSCSI and NFS mount volumes, which is incredibly valuable, right? When you are in the fire to debug issues and get your application up and running.

So this is one example,

But primarily it's just focused on ZFS.

There's this crazy notion that's out there of do one job and do it well, and I kind of like that, which is why it doesn't do all the other things like iSCSI.

Yeah, you can do that yourself.

You wanna set up an NFS share? Yeah, you can do that yourself.

run as a server or something like that.

So it's still just storage, but yeah, the good news is it has ZFS, iSCSI, some things that people have been wanting on the other models.

This is now the, I think it's the only model that does ZFS.

So I don't know if we'll have maybe an Enterprise NAS Core or additional Pro models in the future that have ZFS, but...

It's just how you get there.

And oftentimes it's referring to this VMware KB that we've been sharing often about the converged workflow where maybe you're an iSCSI shop.

When you do the VCF installer on Greenfield, there's only two options when it comes to external storage.

There's NFS v3 and VMFS over Fiber Channel.

And that causes all sorts of confusion because it's just a workflow thing.

So you do a converged workflow.

You can go ahead and consume an existing vCenter 9 environment that has iSCSI storage.

That's probably one of the dominant topics when it comes to how do I adopt, how do I get to VCF? And then it gets into the enterprise data cloud and fusion around exactly what Alex was mentioning of, you know, I may be looking at using VKS or VMware Kubernetes service, and those new services are going to consume object.