HPE SimpliVity with VM Essentials for small IT teams and edge sites

For small IT teams, remote offices, retail, and edge sites, simplicity and resilience in virtualization aren’t optional—they’re essential. At ProCloud, we help organisations solve this challenge with HPE SimpliVity and VM Essentials. This compact two-node platform brings together compute, storage, virtualization, and built-in backup in one solution, making operations predictable and costs transparent. It’s exactly the kind of innovation we specialise in delivering: modern infrastructure that’s powerful, reliable, and designed to scale with your business. 📖 Read the full report here:

In today’s edge and SMB environments, IT leaders face a paradox: delivering enterprise-grade resiliency and agility without the enterprise-scale complexity. HPE’s SimpliVity + VM Essentials is a strong example of how the industry is shifting toward simplified, integrated architectures that don’t compromise on performance or availability. This isn’t just about hyperconvergence; it’s about redefining the economics of virtualization: Two-node HA for resiliency without sprawling clusters Built-in backup and rapid recovery for operational confidence Unified support stack to eliminate vendor sprawl The takeaway? Simplicity is no longer a trade-off—it’s a competitive advantage. #HPE #SimpliVity #EdgeComputing #Virtualization Read the full analysis:

Small Stack, Big Impact: HPE SimpliVity and VM Essentials. StorageReview.com have nailed it....Serious alternative to #VMWare "Bottom line, this is the rare combo of simple, fast, and durable. It trades friction for predictability and makes day-two work feel routine. For teams that care about uptime, rapid rollout, and clean recoveries, it hits the sweet spot." https://lnkd.in/g2fv8_nx

🚀 New Cisco Validated Design: FlashStack with Red Hat OpenShift Cisco and Pure Storage have launched a new FlashStack Validated Design — combining compute, storage, and networking to simplify IT operations and accelerate modern workloads. This design brings together: ✅ Red Hat OpenShift for unified container and VM management ✅ Cisco UCS AMD M8 servers with high performance and energy efficiency ✅ Cisco Intersight for consistent, cloud-based infrastructure management ✅ Isovalent (Cilium + eBPF) for secure, identity-aware Kubernetes networking ✅ Portworx + Pure Storage FlashArray for scalable, resilient data services Together, these innovations enable enterprises to run and manage containerised and virtualised workloads side by side — with greater agility, visibility, and control. Martin Altay Greg Lawrence Joff Wayne Wayne David Greg Roger Carim Pete Francis Egor Nick Jeremy Daniel Simon #cilium #ebpf #isovalent #Redhat #purestorage #UCS  #Kubernetes #NetworkPolicy #CloudNative https://lnkd.in/gvKWJMNm

This CVD is a fantastic new resource for all OpenShift users interested in using Isovalent Enterprise Networking for Kubernetes (Cilium)!

The latest migration toolkit for virtualization (MTV) 2.9 release introduces pivotal features to minimize business disruptions and accelerate migrations to Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization. Initiated by certified storage partner Hitachi Vantara, MTV 2.9 includes a storage offloading functionality for cold migrations. As a primary driver of this feature, Hitachi Vantara is the first to have its offload driver reach technology preview. This feature delegates the data copy process to the underlying storage systems, rather than using network resources, significantly reducing downtime for production workloads. Let's dive into what this means for virtualization administrators.

What is Virtualization? Virtualization is the process of creating multiple virtual machines (VMs) on a single physical server by using a hypervisor. • Each VM acts like a separate computer with its own OS, CPU, RAM, and storage. • Benefits: better resource utilization, cost savings, easier management, scalability, and disaster recovery. Example: Instead of 5 physical servers, you can run 5 VMs on one powerful server → reducing hardware, power, and space costs. ⸻ 🔹 ESXi (VMware vSphere Hypervisor) • Type: Bare-metal hypervisor (Type 1). • Vendor: VMware. • Function: Runs directly on the server hardware and allows creation of VMs. • Management: Controlled via vCenter (centralized platform for multiple ESXi hosts). • Strengths: • Enterprise-grade stability and performance. • Advanced features like vMotion (live migration), HA (high availability), DRS (load balancing). • Widely adopted in enterprise data centers. • Limitation: Licensing cost is high. ⸻ 🔹 Sangfor HCI (Hyper-Converged Infrastructure) • Type: HCI solution (combines compute + storage + virtualization in one platform). • Vendor: Sangfor. • Function: Provides built-in virtualization, storage, and networking in a single software-defined system. • Management: Comes with a unified HCI console, no need for separate storage or hypervisor management tools. • Strengths: • Simplified deployment (servers + storage + hypervisor all-in-one). • Lower cost compared to VMware (good for SMBs and mid-enterprises). • Easy scalability by just adding nodes. • Limitation: Less mature ecosystem compared to VMware; fewer 3rd-party integrations.

With the rising popularity of Red Hat OpenShift virtualization, customers are exploring the option of migrating their critical virtual machines from VMware to OpenShift Virtualization. While VMware is known for its mature and feature-rich platform for running isolated virtual machine workloads, OpenShift Virtualization offers a hybrid, container-centric environment where virtual machines and containers coexist on a Kubernetes-based platform. One key consideration for migrating VM workloads is performance, particularly at the storage layer. VMware ESXi provides virtual machines with access to low-latency, high-performance block-based SAN storage, including advanced solutions like vSAN for software-defined storage. On the other hand, OpenShift utilizes the Container Storage Interface (CSI) to interact with storage systems, defining storage features through storage classes. IBM has introduced IBM Fusion Access for SAN to expand storage options for customers, offering high-performance, low-latency access to external storage via SDS over SAN. Leveraging IBM Storage Scale benefits, Fusion Access for SAN provides true storage abstraction independent of the storage vendor, enhancing user experience with an OpenShift-native interface. This guide demonstrates deploying IBM Fusion Access for SAN to deliver high-performance, low-latency storage for OpenShift virtual machines. It includes instructions on enabling and utilizing the iSCSI protocol on Red Hat CoreOS (RHCOS) worker nodes and configuring the Linux-IO (LIO) iSCSI target with IBM Storage Scale as the underlying store. Direct Download - https://shorturl.at/6loI0 #ibmfusion #ibmfusionaccess #ibmstorage #openshift #openshiftstorage #storagescale

Have a look at Nishaan Docrat ‘s guide that demonstrates deploying IBM Fusion Access for SAN to deliver high-performance, low-latency storage for OpenShift virtual machines. #ibmstorage #openshift #redhat #ibmfusion #containers

Managing 5 Kubernetes clusters in your datacenter? Doable. Managing 500 edge clusters across retail locations? That's a different game entirely. You can't have engineers connecting to every cluster for routine maintenance as the economics simply don't work. The edge demands a fundamental shift: ❌ Real-time intervention for every issue ✅ Intelligent systems that operate autonomously ❌ Walking down the hall to fix hardware ✅ Graceful degradation during connectivity gaps Success at the edge isn't measured by response time; it's measured by how long systems run without human intervention. What's your biggest operational challenge when thinking about distributed deployments?