{"id":1995,"date":"2023-05-10T17:10:21","date_gmt":"2023-05-10T16:10:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vminded.com\/?p=1995"},"modified":"2023-05-10T17:10:22","modified_gmt":"2023-05-10T16:10:22","slug":"leveraging-nfs-storage-in-vmware-cloud-on-aws-part-2-flex-storage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vminded.com\/index.php\/2023\/05\/10\/leveraging-nfs-storage-in-vmware-cloud-on-aws-part-2-flex-storage\/","title":{"rendered":"Leveraging NFS Storage in VMware Cloud on AWS – Part 2 (Flex Storage)"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In my latest post<\/a>, I have covered how to supplement a VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC deployment with Amazon FSxTM<\/sup> for NetApp ONTAP<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this blog post, I am going to present the similar option delivered by VMware called Cloud Flex Storage<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Overview of Cloud Flex Storage<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Cloud Flex Storage<\/a> is a natively integrated cloud storage service for VMware Cloud on <\/a>AWS<\/a> that is entirely delivered, managed and maintain by VMware.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The solution delivers a performant, scalable, natively integrated and cost effective solution for VMware Cloud on AWS use cases where storage and compute scaling need to be independent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Firstly, it uses a native cloud storage solution that has been developed and delivered for years with robust capability and that relies on a scale-out immutable log structured filesystem. Secondly, it is the same technology that backs VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In term of consumption model, customers can consume the service on-demand or through a 1-year<\/strong> or 3-years<\/strong> subscription<\/strong> with a minimum charge of 25 TiB <\/strong>per filesystem. Secondly they can add storage capacity in 1 TiB<\/strong> increments to a subscription. Pricing includes production support.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Architecture model of Flex Storage<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Architecturally, VMware Flex Storage is providing a standard NFS Datastore to SDDC Clusters for production workloads.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This scale-out datastore file system consists of a two-tier design<\/strong> model that enables to scale storage performance and capacity independently. The first tier<\/strong><\/em> is using NVMe disks that seats in front to offer an optimized large read cache tier. Backend controller nodes in HA Pair are supplementing the NVMe cache. The front end cache serves all reads and can deliver up to 300K IOPS per datastore (this is the peak read IOPS with at least 4 hosts). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second tier<\/strong> <\/em>comprises a Cloud Object Storage function based on Amazon S3 for low-cost object storage that seats behind the scene to provide elastic capacity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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You can deploy up to six<\/strong> Flex Storage datastores allowing for up to 2.4 petabytes<\/strong> of storage capacity in a single region. A maximum limit of (1) datastore can be presented to a single SDDC. That datastore can be connected to all clusters in the SDDC after being created.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can independently provision up to ~400 TiB<\/strong> of usable storage capacity per datastore to VMware Cloud on AWS hosts. Moreover, the storage capacity is highly redundant across multiple AZs and is presented as an NFS<\/strong> datastore to the clusters. A single datastore can support up to 1000 powered on VMDKs. For current limits, it’s always preferable to check the configuration maximum Tool here<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since version 1.22 of VMware Cloud on AWS each client can leverage multiple TCP\/IP connection to NFS datastore with the support of nConnect in NFS v3. These connections are used on a round-robin basis and allow each vSphere host to increase the per datastore throughput (up to 1 GB\/s).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most importantly, any application can use transparently each Flex Storage datastore which are automatically mounted as an NFS datastore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What kind of Workloads can benefits from Flex? Storage<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In the version 1.0 of the service, Cloud Flex Storage is targeting the capacity heavy workloads where the performance needs are not as extreme as what a standard vSAN datastore can offer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So it’s probably not recommended to use it for the highest transactional Databases but any tier 2 apps will benefits from it. When I say Tier 2, I mean lesser than mission critical system and also with lesser performance than Tier 1.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This includes for example:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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