ASP.NET MVC Session vs Global vs Cache

Question

I have an application that was written in vanilla ASP.NET that I would like to port over to ASP.NET MVC.

I, however, am confused about the right place to persist objects. I need to persist for a couple reasons:

1. I would like all to have a single database connection, wrapped in a "repository" or "manager" style object.
2. Each user has a user object that needs to be saved on a per-session basis.

Normally, I would say that #1 would be saved as a static item in the Globals.asax that can be hit using Global.Repository or similar.

And I would normally say that #2 should be a property with a session backing store somewhere in the base class of the pages.

Now the reason I am confused is that I have heard that sessions have changed in MVC, and the Global.asax no longer holds the same class. Also, the concept of pages has been removed, so adding a property to the base class of a controller seems... wrong.

What say yall?