VMware Cloud Foundation is the main virtualization platform for managing virtual machines (VMs) and containers. It unifies vMware products (e.g., vSphere, vSAN, NSX) under a natively-integrated, software-defined infrastructure for storage, compute. networking, security, and cloud management. Pure has a VMware-validated, design-certified Partner Architecture forVMware Cloud Foundation with FlashStack®.

VMware vSphere is a server virtualization platform that includes a suite of products designed to help you virtualize your IT infrastructure. Core product offerings include:

• ESXi: Type-1 hypervisor for decoupling virtual machines from hardware
• vCenter Server: App for managing virtual machines in a vSphere environment
• Virtual Machine File System (VMFS): File system for accessing the physical storage resources needed for your virtual machines (VMs)
• Virtual Volumes (vVols): Representations of storage arrays that provide granular control over the provisioning of storage resources

Tanzu is a Kubernetes cluster-management platform that contains a suite of products designed to simplify deploying and managing containerized workloads across multicloud environments. Core products in the Tanzu portfolio include:

• Tanzu Mission Control: Centralized dash for viewing all your Kubernetes clusters across your on-premises, hybrid, public, and private clouds.
• Tanzu Kubernetes Grid (TKG): A provisionable Kubernetes footprint that can be managed via Tanzu Mission Control. TKG makes it possible to automate provisioning and lifecycle management of Kubernetes clusters both on-premises with vSphere and in the public cloud.

Datastores are virtual storage containers that leverage virtualization to run agnostic of your storage device. Whether your data is stored in a storage area network (SAN) or network-attached storage (NAS) device, vSphere datastores abstract away the details of the underlying storage hardware allowing you to consolidate them into a single data resource.

A vVol datastore is a representation of an array. A single array can have more than one vVol if it can support it. By encapsulating virtual machine files, virtual disks, and their derivatives, vVols act as endpoints that give you granular access to storage resources with policy-based management. In this way, it’s possible to manage and provision VMs and virtual disks as individual objects.

vVols can bring the following benefits to your Pure Storage array deployments:

• Automatic provisioning
• Policy-based management
• Virtual disk granularity
• Array-level VM visibility

When combined with the scalability, reliability, and performance of Pure Storage all-flash storage solutions, vVols can help you bring a Modern Data Experience™ to your data center.