VSP- Hyper-Converged Infrastructure

Solutions Overview 2018 – Student Guide

Table of Contents
HCI Solutions Overview 2018 ........................................................................................................................ 2
Introduction .............................................................................................................................................. 2
VSP Hyper-Converged Infrastructure 2018............................................................................................... 2
VMware HCI Solutions Overview .............................................................................................................. 2
Market Overview ...................................................................................................................................... 5
Customer Personas ................................................................................................................................. 10
Qualify Sales Play Opportunities ............................................................................................................. 11
Sales Triggers .......................................................................................................................................... 13
General Competitive Differentiation ...................................................................................................... 14
Selling Motion ......................................................................................................................................... 15
Sales Tools and Resources ...................................................................................................................... 16
VSP-Hyper-Converged Infrastructure 2018 Bootcamp – Student Guide

HCI Solutions Overview 2018

Introduction
• This course is for Partner and Internal Sales Engineers. The first section presents a Hyper-
Converged Infrastructure or HCI market overview, customer challenges, solutions, and sales play
opportunities.
• Next, you will have the opportunity to practice the concepts of identifying and qualifying
prospective customers.
• By the end of this course, you will be able to:
o Identify and qualify a VMware HCI prospect based on customer's business issues and
desired business outcome
o Articulate the value proposition of VMware HCI to the customer.

VSP Hyper-Converged Infrastructure 2018

Important to Remember:

• The SDDC redefines the architecture and operational model of the data center. The SDDC
enables IT to complete the transition to hybrid cloud and maximize its benefits.
• To accelerate the customer journey to the SDDC, VMware has introduced VMware Cloud
Foundation as a new unified SDDC platform for the private and public cloud. Cloud Foundation
brings together VMware compute, storage, and network virtualization into a natively integrated
stack that can be deployed on-premises or run as a service from the public cloud. This makes it
easy to provision and operate SDDC infrastructure.
• This module introduces you to Cloud Foundation. You learn about its solutions and benefits and
how they impact different roles in an organization.
• You discover the types of triggers to watch out for, the qualification criteria to help you validate
a customer opportunity, and finally where to locate further resources to assist you.

VMware HCI Solutions Overview

• This course is for Partner and Internal Sales Engineers. The first section presents a Hyper-
Converged Infrastructure or HCI market overview, customer challenges, solutions, and sales play
opportunities.
• Next, you will have the opportunity to practice the concepts of identifying and qualifying
prospective customers.
• The market for goods and services continues to rapidly evolve, presenting new opportunities
and challenges for business leaders.
• Technology is one of the key drivers of market change, and new applications, delivering new
capabilities, are paramount for business success. For example, social media has changed the
way companies interact with customers and discover customer insights.
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• Big data applications, such as Hadoop, empower companies to analyze messy, unstructured data
to better understand their customers and find new ways to market to them effectively.
• Companies also use new technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence or AI and machine learning,
to optimize their operations, achieving more efficient processes than by human analysis alone.
• If businesses don’t evolve, they risk being left behind by competition. Legacy infrastructure
carries three significant risks for businesses.
o Escalated CapEx and OpEx:
▪ Legacy infrastructure is expensive. In the healthcare industry, a recent study
found 81% of IT budgets went to just maintaining infrastructure, stifling
investment.
▪ High up-front costs due to multi-year capacity purchases prolong procurement,
and many vendors escalate maintenance costs as infrastructure ages.
▪ At the same time, purpose-built infrastructure often relies on highly manual
processes performed by dedicated IT staff, ballooning OpEx.
o Reduced Business Agility:
▪ Legacy infrastructure is purpose-built and can’t adapt to new use cases or
support modern applications.
▪ In response, businesses must maintain high levels of dedicated, siloed IT staff to
perform highly manual, error prone processes.
▪ IT staff can’t be quickly reassigned to another role as new initiatives arise, and
the high cost to maintain these processes and staff eliminate budget that can be
used for innovation.
o Increased Security Exposures:
▪ Cyber-attacks are on the rise, and legacy infrastructure is often the target.
▪ Highly manual lifecycle management often leaves hardware exposed to attack;
the recent WannaCry attack crippled the UK’s National Health Service after
finding a loophole in endpoints’ operating systems.
▪ Cyber-attacks cost businesses billions of dollars and uncountable brand damage.
• Digital transformation requires a secure, flexible digital foundation.
• Only VMware can provide a common software infrastructure layer, or digital foundation, from
the edge to the core to the cloud.
• IT administrators use a common control plane from a central location to deploy and manage any
application, regardless of where the application is physically located or what hardware powers
the application, either on-premises or as a service.
• The digital foundation empowers businesses to simplify their operations by providing common
tools and operating models regardless of the underlying infrastructure.
• Finally, the digital foundation provides security to protect from internal and external threats.
• Software provided encryption, micro-segmentation, and distributed firewalls enable policy-
based security to ensure compliance, and lowers the Total cost of Ownership, or TCO, by
avoiding costly physical alternatives.
• VMware HCI powers all important applications.
• Over two-thirds of customers power their business-critical applications, including relational
databases and email exchanges, on vSAN.

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• With up to 150,000 IOPS per node in an all-flash configuration, customers can deploy their most
mission critical workloads with confidence.
• vSAN also simplifies the adoption of containers. vSAN supports vSphere Docker Volume Driver
for native support directly through Docker APIs.
• This allows Docker to be built on top of vSAN and take advantage of the proven, persistent
storage capabilities of vSAN.
• Also, vSAN for Photon is an integral part of the Photon Platform, delivering vSAN capabilities for
greenfield container environments.
• vSAN has optimized storage policies for cloud-native applications to efficiently run these critical
workloads, and high performance of vSAN is ideally suited for these write intensive applications.
• The vSAN team has also tested and released numerous reference architectures for these types
of solutions.
• Finally, VMware powered HCI enables customers to seamlessly migrate workloads from private
to public cloud and back again. No other HCI software has this capability.
• So, we’ve covered the importance of transforming your data center, the importance of the
digital foundation, and some of the key benefits you can experience. But, how do you transform
IT?
• We believe that there are clear steps to build a digital foundation. Most customers have already
done this by virtualizing their servers with a hypervisor.
• A logical next step to modernize your infrastructure is through hyper-convergence with vSAN,
then add networking, optimization, and automation capabilities with NSX and vRealize.
• Customers can then extend their SDDC to the public cloud and the edge to build a digital
foundation for a true hybrid cloud architecture.
• The HCI market is the fastest growing storage segment. This translates to a $5 billion-dollar
market opportunity this year, growing to $8 billion by 2021.
• This growth is being fueled by improved operational efficiency of systems, documented statistics
on the reduced TCO provided by HCI, enhanced scalability, and a desire for data center
consolidation.
• Businesses are requiring greater support from their IT departments to deliver critical business
services, and this has driven the growth of the HCI market.
• You have a great opportunity to take the existing VMware installed base and use a server
refresh and vSphere upgrade to get into the HCI market.
• VMware has been able to grow and maintain a loyal customer base because companies
recognize that the scope of the VMware solution, including the large number of vendors
supporting it, will ultimately lead to better outcomes over the long term.
• Customers can practically be assured that whatever they want to do to enhance their data
center can be accomplished quickly by simply adding on to their infrastructure.
• This is simply not the case with competing solutions.
• HCI is an excellent example of why customers are loyal to VMware.
• HCI is a proven path to rapid return on investment and greater data center efficiency.
• And since the majority of VMware customers do not currently have HCI, this presents a
tremendous opportunity for you.

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• VMware offers the broadest set of deployment options in the market. For the private cloud, we
leverages the strongest ecosystem, with all major server vendors offering vSAN ReadyNodes
that are ready to run vSAN.
• Each vSAN ReadyNode is a validated server configuration in a tested, certified hardware form
factor. vSAN ReadyNodes are hyper-converged building blocks for larger data center
environments that are moving towards greater automation and more sophisticated cross-cloud
configurations.
• There are over 500 options to choose from now with all different form factors, from general
purposes servers to storage dense systems, to rugged systems for the edge.
• And for those customers that want an appliance model to further reduce their operational costs,
we works closely with Dell EMC to jointly engineer the VxRail and VxRack SDDC solutions.
• And then for customers looking to deploy in, or extend to the public cloud, we have
relationships with major cloud vendors, like Amazon and IBM, and with hundreds of our service
provider partners, like RackSpace and CenturyLink, who offer solutions built on HCI powered by
vSAN.
• When a customer is interested in the automated platform that comes with additional software
for data protection and is willing to pay the initial higher cost in order to save money in the long
run, VXRail may be the best platform.
• For customers who already have their VMware environment automated, for example host
profiles, update manager, and OpenManage, and have their own backup strategy through Dell
EMC or a third party, vSAN Ready Nodes may be the best platform.
• This will allow them to have the latest features and functionality as soon as they are available.

Market Overview
• In this section, we will look at factors driving the growth in the HCI market.
• Analysts have projected that software-defined storage will have a significant impact on storage
decisions.
• Wikibon projected that traditional storage markets are starting to shrink (declining close to 20%
annually) as customers shift to HCI, which is also known as Server SAN solutions while some big
enterprises like Google and Alibaba, customers shift to a hyperscale model also based on x86
server platforms.
• Traditional storage will go from the dominant player today, to a niche solution in less than 10
years.
• The storage architecture of the future is clear, it will be a Server SAN-based architecture,
whether it is hyper-scale, cloud-based storage or enterprise Server SAN.
• Organizations are shifting to HCI to address their IT and storage challenges, fueling rapid growth
projections of over 65% over the next several years according to Gartner, with the HCI market
expected to exceed $10.7B by 2021.
• As a leader in the SDDC, VMware is ideally situated to simplify this transition to HCI.
• Our approach with vSAN also enables customers to seamlessly evolve their vSphere into HCI
without starting over with a new hypervisor, new management tool, or new hardware.

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• VMware is now the HCI market leader.

• vSAN is the most widely purchased software for HCI, with over 15,000 customers.
• The business momentum continues with seven consecutive quarters of 150% growth (year-over-
year).
• As part of this growth, vSAN has been adopted by numerous Fortune thousands companies and
across all verticals including health care, financials, SLED, retails, and so on.
• Recent customer testimonials include stories from Kroger, GM, Chevron, and Fox Broadcasting
who are all investing key initiatives in vSAN, from running critical Super Bowl and World Cup ads
on vSAN infrastructure to deploying at scale across thousands of remote sites.
• In addition, we are being deployed across all verticals and have been awarded best-in-class and
product-of-the-year accolades by various industry publications.
• The challenges that are covered are compounded by the fact that many IT organizations are still
using traditional three-tiered architecture. In this classic approach to infrastructure, we have
three distinct silos:
o Compute with servers or blades
o External storage, which is our classic SAN or Network-Attached Storage or NAS arrays,
and
o Specific networking hardware, which can be fiber channel, and or IP networks
• Not only do we have distinct hardware in each of these silos, but we often have separate, siloed
teams that work in each of these areas.
• While this approach works, and we have delivered tremendous IT capabilities based on it over
the past 10-15 years, this approach is becoming unsustainable.
• HCI eliminates the silos of three-tier architecture and enables centralized management of
compute, storage, and networking resources.
• You’ve likely already realized the benefits of policy-based management with compute resources,
automatically provisioning virtual machines.
• Within the same vSphere Client, admins can now manage their storage infrastructure and
govern policies down to the virtual machine level.
• You can turn on encryption with a single click, protect data with erasure coding, and reduce
capacity utilization up to seven times with deduplication and compression.
• vSAN also offers high availability or HA through stretch clusters.
• HCI clusters are managed with vCenter Server, the same tool used to manage vSphere, and
customers can manage global deployments from a central location.
• vRealize Operations offers advanced monitoring, troubleshooting, and capacity management.
• Networking virtualization is also embedded in the hypervisor, and NSX can automate their
network processes to deliver fast, consistent, and secure provisioning of resources.
• In fact, IT can blueprint entire network topologies and rapidly deploy them on demand.
• Finally, all these capabilities can run seamlessly in the public cloud, creating a true hybrid cloud
architecture.
• IT is moving from traditional, three-tiered architecture to HCI, to lower costs, simplify
management, and increase agility.
• Since the emergence of server virtualization over 10 years ago, the data center has been based
on separate compute, storage, and storage networking silos.
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• The digital foundation is today’s most important IT investment decision. Many IT leaders have
mandates to move workloads to the cloud and manage the rise of workloads at the edge.
• These new deployments, until recently, required specialized skills, re-training and re-architecting
of the infrastructure.
• With VMware, you can deploy and manage any application anywhere with your existing skillset -
no new tools or expertise required.
• All VMware products, from vSphere to vRealize Suite, seamlessly scale to the cloud and edge.
• You can accelerate your pace of innovation with VMware run any application in any cloud on the
software you know.
• VMware for HCI is the proven solution from a market leader.
• Customers can trust the world’s most robust and natively secure hypervisor and market leading
operations management for their most demanding applications.
• VMware for HCI has a native console built for the SDDC platform.
• Customers prefer native instrumentation that is designed by integrated engineering teams, and
that works seamlessly with vSphere, VMware Cloud, and vSAN.
• VMware for HCI has a true Cloud Management Platform. Self-driving operations are connected
to deep data and market leading automation, so IT staff can drive hands off and hassle free with
confidence that performance and costs are optimized accurately and according to business
intent.
• VMware HCI solutions provide the best enterprise-wide monitoring and troubleshooting.
• When problems do arise, customers must fix them quickly with intelligent analytics that span
data types and a broad ecosystem of applications and infrastructure.
• Self-driving operations capabilities provide options for automated fixes, while allowing
customers to take back the steering wheel in an emergency.
• Building an infrastructure that fully embraces the concept of the Internet of Things or IOT,
requires architecting from edge to core to cloud and vSAN is the common platform for this.
• Advanced on-device processing and analytics is referred to as edge computing.
• The edge is the universe of internet-connected devices and gateways in a data center that
provides a counterpart to the cloud.
• vSAN provides critical support for edge services, business critical applications, and virtual
desktop infrastructure or VDI.
• We surveyed our customers, and we found that there is a typical progression from low data
criticality to mission critical applications. Many customers start by implementing VDI with HCI.
• As compute and storage resources scale linearly, and VDI has high IOPs demands, it fits well with
HCI’s architecture and performance.
• Over time, customers often find that other workloads run well on HCI, and they migrate their
remote offices to vSAN.
• Many of our customers experience superior performance, and vSAN’s centralized management
capabilities reduce the need to send IT staff to remote locations to maintain ROBO
infrastructure.
• Finally, businesses run their most critical applications on vSAN.
• In a recent survey, over two-thirds of vSAN customers were running business critical databases

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on vSAN.
o Example:
▪ For example, Airbus runs big data applications to monitor the performance of
the A380, the largest passenger jet in the world.
▪ The A380 has hundreds of thousands of sensors onboard, monitoring every
aspect of the plane’s operation.
▪ The data files from these sensors are analyzed by a Big Data cluster that runs
atop vSAN.
▪ The big data cluster is located in a central data center, not on the plane itself.
▪ As a result of the sensors and Big Data analysis powered by vSAN, when a plane
lands, the maintenance crew knows exactly what parts need to be oiled, what
parts need maintenance, and what needs to be replaced, allowing them to get
the plane back in the air sooner.
▪ This is mission-critical, because for every hour that a passenger jet sits on the
ground, airlines lose approximately $25,000.
▪ For partners, the services drag increases as customers progress to applications
with higher data criticality.
▪ More value for customers means more services and profit for partners.
• Customers run their most critical business applications on vSAN, such as Oracle Databases,
Microsoft Exchange, and SAP, with enterprise reliability, security, and performance.
• Customers also report vSAN integration into such areas as VDI, and common Microsoft
productivity applications such as SharePoint.
• vSAN’s all-flash architecture can deliver 150K IOPS per node with sub milli-second latencies.
• More than 60% of VMware customers run their business-critical applications on vSAN.
• There are three steps that are recommended to get you started on the road to success selling
HCI.
o Convert a vSphere upgrade or server refresh to an HCI opportunity:
▪ When working with customers whose goals require an upgrade to their licensed
vSphere edition, introduce them to the benefits of deploying a full HCI solution.
▪ This can be done by emphasizing the ability to achieve faster return on
investment.
o Fund customer expansion or consolidation with HCI economics:
▪ Customers whose data centers are growing quickly, or that are consolidating
their data centers to reduce costs, will be interested in learning about the
economics of scale opportunities provided through HCI deployment.
o Help customers anticipate the public cloud — only vSAN runs in the public cloud:
▪ Customers who are moving towards deploying a public cloud should be made
aware that VMware HCI solutions are the only viable options for the public
cloud.
• vSAN enhances data security through the incorporation of security zones.
• The primary purpose of this architecture is adding another layer of security to further reduce
the risk of unauthorized access to an organization’s internal network, applications, and data.
• Using VMware AppDefense with VSAN data storage products, and in conjunction with NSX

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security features, significantly increases virtual machine security.

• Integrating storage policy consumption model into vRealize Automation enables virtual machine
granular control based on the storage policy-based management or SPBM framework.
• vSAN provides other significant benefits for the management and automation of storage, and in
support of management features such as cost modeling.
• vSAN provides many features to enhance data center operations.
• With Smart Rebuilds, vSAN compares the cost of re-using existing components versus the cost of
continuing to resync new components, and chooses the one with the lower cost.
• vSAN 6.7 delivers enhanced operational efficiencies that reduce time-to-expertise and
accelerates decision making.
• vSAN enables substantial improvements in IOPS and average latency across both the cache and
capacity tiers.
• Using Intel’s Optane Non-Volatile Memory Express or NVMe as the caching tier for vSAN enables
up to 2.5 times greater IOPS, and up to a 2.5 times reduction in disk latencies for write intensive
workloads.
• Major benefits gained by using the VMware Integrated HCI Stack are extended through
integration of other VMware products such as vSphere and vRealize Operations, which support
the new feature set known as self-driving operations.
• The goal of self-driving operations is to greatly reduce the level of effort required for managing
and monitoring data center operations.
• vSphere is the most secure universal platform for traditional and next-generation apps.
• vSphere is the world’s most trusted, stable, and industry leading hypervisor to run, manage,
connect, and secure applications in a common operating environment, across clouds and
devices.
• Customers can cut their costs in half and operate with less manual effort, reducing hardware
costs by maximizing server consolidation, automatically balancing workloads to densify clusters,
and reclaiming wasted capacity.
• Customers can also reduce unplanned downtime by 75%. Self-driving operations means more
uptime for applications that drive the business, allowing cloud administrators to automate
remediation tasks based on policy and proactive alerts about potential issues.
• From Day 0, VMware HCI solutions automate and simplify installation, configuration,
infrastructure sanity while providing performance checks.
• By Day 2, the solutions monitor the health of the infrastructure, including performance
monitoring from workload down to hardware.
• And we do all these native vSphere tools, both UI and application programming interfaces or
APIs, including support for your preferred scripting languages.
• Beyond Day 2, these solutions ensure data center-wide controls and automated operations
using the integration of vRealize Operations with vRealize Automation.
• vRealize delivers the following features to achieve consistent operations through automated
delivery of infrastructure and app services across private and public clouds.
• It supports a wide range of developer choice in the form of API and GUI access to resources.
• vRealize Operations provides intelligent health, performance, capacity, and configuration
management through self-driving operations.
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• One aspect of self-driving operation is automated costing and usage metering for infrastructure
services across clouds.
• Self-driving operations enable customers to run production operations hands-off and hassle-free
across private and hybrid clouds by offering features that allow them to:
o Scale operations as needed to meet demand growth
o Monitor and troubleshoot their environment intelligently
o Efficiently utilize capacity and plan for future growth, and
o Assure performance around the clock to meet service level agreements

Customer Personas
• Let’s explore some of the characteristics and goals of some of the key customer roles, that you
will be working with while selling HCI solutions and see how each has its own perspective on
data center priorities.
• Selling Operational Efficiency solutions means talking to key players, understanding their
challenges and developing relationships to get ahead.
• Here are typical key personas in medium to large enterprises that you need to target when you
have Hyper-Converged Infrastructure conversations.
• It is important to remember that discussions at the top of the organizational chart are more
strategic, and they become more tactical as you move down the hierarchy.
• So, the CTO or CIO is very interested in tools that help her or him realize their strategic vision.
• Moving to the VP level, discussions revolve around how technologies like Hyper-Converged
Infrastructure can enable their organizations to better serve the business.
• Architects are more focused on specific solutions, and admins are very focused on one or a small
number of components of the customer's complete IT landscape.
• When talking to customers, be sure you understand their concerns and tailor your message
accordingly.
• The key concerns of various executives vary significantly.
• So, the CTO or CIO is very interested in tools that help her or him realize their strategic vision.
• Moving to the VP level, discussions revolve around how technologies like HCI can enable their
organizations to better serve the business.
• Architects are more focused on specific solutions, and administrators are very focused on one or
a small number of components of the customer's complete IT landscape.
o CTO/ CIO:
▪ Lowering IT costs
▪ Increasing productivity
▪ Competitive advantage
▪ Integrating and supporting new apps
▪ Increasing security and compliance
o VP, IT Operations:
▪ Providing seamless experiences for developers
▪ Eliminating manual processes through automation

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▪ Ensuring integration of different systems and apps

o VP, IT Infrastructure:
▪ Reducing infrastructure costs
▪ Increasing agility
▪ Ensuring up time and QoS
▪ Providing LOB and Ops teams with competitive solutions
o VP of Apps:
▪ Increasing app development
▪ Ensuring app security
▪ Gaining visibility into app network-level dependencies

Qualify Sales Play Opportunities

• Next, we will take a quick look at how you can qualify a sales opportunity by identifying specific
customer goals, then matching these goals to a solution set.
• Here are the sales play opportunities that you should focus on when you identify the
deployment of a software-defined private cloud as their primary IT initiative.
• These customers want to unify compute, storage, and networking with integrated management,
which is a natural next step for a current vSphere customer.
• The goal is to determine the software requirements that fit the specific customer needs, and in
this case, there are three possible options, which you will work toward by seeing which of the
three qualifiers most closely matches the customer’s goals.
o Qualifier 1:
▪ The first-listed qualifier represents organizations that are incorporating
virtualization relatively slowly.
▪ They want to create or expand vSphere-centric compartments within their IT
infrastructure to improve operational efficiency, to include some virtual storage,
without deploying a full SDDC.
▪ The products to focus on in this case are vSphere, vSAN, and vRealize
Operations.
o Qualifier 2:
▪ The second-listed qualifier represents customers who are focusing on
operational efficiency, but who likewise are not ready for completely defining
an SDDC.
▪ Unlike the first case, they are not looking to change their storage infrastructure,
but they are very focused on reducing hardware costs.
▪ They will need vRealize Operations Advanced Edition to maximize their ability to
reduce hardware spending.
o Qualifier 3:
▪ The third case represents customers who are ready for a full SDDC and while not
currently interested in defining hybrid cloud environments, they are expecting
to incorporate hybrid clouds in the future.
▪ VMware Cloud Foundation is the best solution as it meets all the requirements

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for an SDDC and hybrid readiness.

• The next example is for customers who are focused on fully committing to hybrid clouds as
critical to the future of their business.
• They want to build a flexible and future-ready environment that minimizes risk and provides a
predictable long-range strategy that is adaptable to a range of outcomes.
• There are also three key qualifiers for these customers, which reflect a range of strategic goals.
Read through the qualifiers and see which solutions match up with each.
• In this scenario, the customer is highly focused on increasing data center efficiency through
automation and implementing a range of cloud services.
• Because they are interested in a highly customized deployment.
• For example, through Management Packs or Wavefront integration, it is important to engage
your specialists for additional guidance.
• There are two primary paths here based on different qualifying criteria. They are:
o Customers who are focused on building a modern private cloud with hybrid cloud
readiness, and
o Customers who are mostly focused on consolidating and automating by replacing the
technology silos that they have, with the result being a multi-cloud environment.
• In the first example, Cloud Foundation is the best solution, and in the second the vRealize Suite
combined with VMware Cloud Services is the preferred solution.
• The fourth scenario involves customers who are primarily focused on deploying a wide range of
next-generation applications. Take the time to review the three qualifying statements displayed.
• As you can see, identifying the exact priorities of customers in areas such as this will require
asking a lot of questions, and the answers can result in significantly different solution stack
opportunities.
• For example, in the third scenario, customers whose main priority is an infrastructure that is
ideal for software developers, the solution stack includes VMware Pivotal Container Service or
PKS, and Pivotal Cloud Foundry or PCF for VMware, as well as Wavefront.
• Emphasizing the implementation of a fully hyper-converged infrastructure can grow the deal
size significantly while accelerating the sales cycle.
• Look for customers who want to accelerate business responsiveness with faster deployment,
smoother operations, and improved scalability.
• Most customers want to lower their TCO, through efficient use of hardware, consistent
management, and native automation.
• With HCI, they will also be able to deliver on the common customer challenges, or pain points,
displayed here.
• With VMware solutions they can leverage their existing skillsets, enhance security, and improve
management with intelligent, self-driving operations.
• Let’s take a look at what Fox Networks achieved through their vSAN implementation.
• Fox was looking to improve broadcast resiliency and availability across Master Control Facilities,
to support high performance video workloads.
• They wanted to simplify support and eliminate never ending scale dependencies while reducing
the footprint and power consumption.
• They replaced their existing storage solution with vSAN hybrid and all-flash clusters and
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combined three sites into one.

• After vSAN implementation database performance issues were eliminated, fault domains and
overall architectural resiliency dramatically improved.
• Capacity increased dramatically, while utilizing less real estate, power, and cooling.
• They achieved a finely tuned system with minimal investment, scaling throughput and enabling
massive video performance gains.
• The global economy has created huge opportunities for ACI Specialty Benefits.
• Once focused on providing employee and student benefits solutions to the U.S. market, ACI is
now applying its expertise worldwide.
• Through acquisitions and organic growth, ACI’s business has expanded to cover over 12 million
lives worldwide, leading to a 300% annual growth in digital benefits coverage for three straight
years.
• To sustain its global growth strategy, ACI worked with VMware to build a private cloud in an
SDDC environment. With a software-defined approach,
• ACI can quickly onboard acquired companies’ systems and data, provide end users with superior
services and uptime, and easily meet compliance requirements in diverse geographies.
• It can also more securely and cost-effectively manage a deluge of data from wearable medical
devices.
• Ryan Fay, ACI’s CIO, reports that their new SDDC has definitely given us a competitive
advantage.

Sales Triggers
• Sales triggers are key customer concerns that, when identified, can help you to move towards a
successful engagement.
• When you identify these sales triggers, you should focus your efforts around addressing them.
• As we have seen, digital transformation presents some new challenges, but it also presents
many new opportunities.
• Many of these new opportunities can be discovered by carefully listening to sales triggers in
your conversations with prospects.
• During or after a live demonstration, customers may have objections and it is important that you
are prepared to handle such objections.
• The various sales tools and assets that are available to VMware sales resources on Partner
Central and elsewhere will help you address these objections.
• Here are four typical objections that you may encounter.
o I know traditional storage and it’s a proven solution:
▪ The HCI industry is growing 30%+ and vSAN has over 10,000 customers.
▪ HCI reduces and simplifies your infrastructure, eliminates the expense of
complex, proprietary hardware requiring specialized skills, while introducing the
agility of a software-defined architecture.
o People are worried about losing specialized skills or their jobs:
▪ New roles and skills are required in the modern data center.

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▪ Additional people are needed that understand the company’s business and can
offer consultative IT services to help them meet their needs.
▪ By creating a common management framework that aligns all of your teams,
everyone’s knowledge and skills become immediately more valuable because
they can now all collaboratively and directly support the needs of the workloads
by eliminating their silos of management and skillsets.
o It is too expensive to add capacity optimization:
▪ Capacity management capabilities deliver tangible ROI (increased capacity,
consolidation ratios, hardware savings).
▪ In fact, most of our customers see a full ROI within the first budget cycle.
▪ Plus, the ability to make everyone better at their jobs by growing their skill sets
and capabilities is a valuable business investment.
o I am already familiar with my storage management solution, so sticking with it is the
easiest option:
▪ Your storage management solution almost certainly doesn’t help you manage
your entire environment and don’t you want to make sure that your workloads
have everything, especially with our unique approach to policy-based
management and automation?
▪ Unified visibility across compute, storage, and network, leveraging native
integrations across SDDC can reduce complexity and increase team efficiency
and pull even greater impact out of existing storage, while providing a future-
proof approach to management.

General Competitive Differentiation

• Next, we will look in more detail at some of the key differentiators for VMware HCI solutions.
• When you look at the HCI market, vSAN is unique. There are three key factors that make vSAN
unique.
o Best vSphere Storage vSAN is the only HCI environment that can be used in the Edge, in
the Core data center, and in multiple public clouds. No other HCI vendor can offer these
vSAN features.
o Choice, Flexibility and Rich Ecosystem vSAN is supported by all the major server
vendors and is not limited to just a few platforms.
o Edge to Core to Clouds vSAN is the best storage for vSphere because it is integrated in
the kernel and you can assign a specific storage policy to each application, instead of
using a one-size-fits-all policy, or make sure that each virtual machine is on the right
container, volume, and Local Unit or LUN.
• Here are the reasons other HCI offerings fall short. Let’s first consider the Cloud.
• Competitors claims they are the Cloud of the future but unlike VMware, they are still quite
hardware-dependent and will have a difficult time expanding into a true Cloud offering.
• The flexible deployment options of VMware with numerous on-premises and public cloud
options makes it a significantly better option for anyone considering any type of public, private,
or hybrid cloud solution in their future.
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• Now consider Choice. Competitors continue to force their customers to choose from a limited
list of hardware partners, eliminating one of the most significant benefits of virtualizing, choice
of platform.
• An unparalleled list of compatible hardware and flexible deployment options of VMware
continues to be valued by our customers, allowing them to maintain their choice in trusted
hardware partners, while also providing them the ability to adapt, grow, or change, should their
business needs take them in a new direction.
• Next let’s look at the Ecosystem considerations.
• When choosing a platform, the availability of expertise and general knowledge provides
immense value when committing to a solution.
• Competitors continue to have a small and limited ecosystem of familiarity around their products
and solutions while the large customer base of VMware to over 500,000 organizations, and the
proven global ecosystem of knowledge, support, and innovation ensures that there are always
experts and ample information available to help you address any needs you may have.
• Lastly, consider the customer’s Journey.
• VMware has always understood the unique needs of our customers as they have embarked on
their journey of innovation and business impact and now, a transition into cloud.
• VMware is significantly better equipped to guide customers on this journey since we have a
mature portfolio of flexible solutions and history of customer guidance that competitors just
can’t provide with their limited portfolio of products.

Selling Motion
• Sales motions encompass the sales methods that you can use to deliver products and services to
customers. In this section, we will examine effective sales motions for VMware HCI solutions.
• Many partners ask about selling HCI versus traditional storage. HCI has a different selling
motion.
• The vSAN license portion is only a small portion of the deal. vSAN enables you to sell beefier
servers and more services too. This means you can get up to 5 times drag.
• Customers also buy more often, which gives you the ability to have a closer relationship with
them. This allows you to sell even more over time.
• Since HCI starts at a lower point, the risk is lower. This means you can help customers get
started faster with shorter selling cycles.
• Here is an example of a typical vSAN deal, and how hardware and services drag can greatly
increase the deal size.
• The HCI appliances from EMC and Dell that you can add to your deals, creating vSAN
ReadyNodes, not only improve your commissions but enhance your customers’ ROI.
• vSAN ReadyNodes provide the most flexible server options to build HCI based on VMware vSAN.
• In this instance, hardware and services make up 83 percent of the total deal.
• While the profit margin for hardware and services is lower than it is for software, they will
increase your sales commissions significantly.

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Sales Tools and Resources

• Now, let’s look at the various tools and resources that are available to you to enhance your
knowledge of VMware products and solutions.
• When selling VMware products, you will find that the more information you have and the
greater your understanding of the products, the more likely it is that you are able to close more
sales, reduce the length of sales engagements, and increase the size of deals.
• Here is a list of available sales tools and resources to help support and strengthen your selling
motions.
• The VMware vault, at vault.vmware.com, is the internal sales resource portal for a wide range of
information supporting the sales processes.
• To access the vault, you must be logged into the VMware internal network.
• From the Vault main screen, search for HCI to display a list of HCI-related resource links.

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