Moving VMware workloads to Google Cloud? Don’t let storage become the limiting factor. You need more than just a datastore. You need a storage platform that delivers enterprise data services, scales independently from compute, simplifies disaster recovery, aligns cost to how data is actually used and remains resilient through infrastructure refreshes and node lifecycle changes.
Google Cloud NetApp Volumes Flex Unified is now Broadcom certified as external storage for Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) and ESXi z3 baremetal deployments, available in every Google Cloud VMware Engine region. VMware teams now have a validated storage architecture that combines enterprise-class storage capabilities with the operational simplicity of a fully managed first party Google Cloud service.
In this blog, we will examine how Google Cloud NetApp Volumes Flex Unified enables VMware teams to go beyond traditional cluster attached storage. You will learn how certified external storage can help simplify disaster recovery, reduce infrastructure costs, leverage enterprise data services such as snapshots and replication, decouple storage from compute lifecycles, support both NFS and block workloads, and scale capacity and performance independently as VMware environments grow.
More than a Certification
Google Cloud NetApp Volumes Flex Unified solves some of the most common storage challenges VMware teams face. It enables them to:
- Scale: Scale storage independently of ESXi host count
- Protect workloads: Apply enterprise data services such as snapshots, clones, and replication at the storage layer without impacting performance
- Disaster Recovery: Design efficient disaster recovery environments without mirroring production compute resources
- Reduce costs: control the cost of inactive data as workloads grow through automatic tiering
- Maintain separation: separate storage lifecycles from compute lifecycles
- Deploy multi protocol: Support both file(NFS) and block-based(iSCSI, NVMe/TCP) VMware workloads from a single managed storage platform
- Migrate: Avoid disruptive migrations as infrastructure evolves.
For organizations deploying Google Cloud VMware Engine infrastructure, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes Flex Unified provides a certified storage foundation that aligns infrastructure growth with workload requirements instead of cluster constraints.
Certified for Production VMware Deployments
For VMware platform teams, certification is often the final validation step before a technology enters production. External storage that has not been validated against the platform introduces risk that most organizations are unwilling to accept for business critical workloads.
Google Cloud NetApp Volumes Flex Unified is listed in the Broadcom Compatibility Guide as a certified external storage for Google Cloud VMware Engine, providing a validated architecture for attaching NetApp storage to VMware private clouds running on Google Cloud.
With qualification across GCVE and ESXi z3 baremetal deployments, customers can confidently deploy Google Cloud NetApp Volumes Flex Unified in both existing and new environments without waiting for additional storage qualification cycles.
Availability in every Google Cloud region where VMware Engine operates completes the architecture. The same storage design can be applied consistently across regions, which simplifies standardization for organizations operating multiple private clouds or planning geographically distributed deployments.
Enterprise Data Services at the Storage Layer
Organizations are frequently limited on their recovery point frequency due to the operational impact. Host-level protection approaches compete with production workloads for resources, forcing administrators to balance recovery objectives against application performance. Google Cloud NetApp Volumes shifts protection to the storage layer through storage-side snapshots that avoid placing additional I/O burden on production virtual machines. This allows you to decrease your recovery point objective all while maintaining application performance. VMware environments with GCNV benefit from enterprise data services, including:
- Snapshots for rapid, low-impact recovery points
- Instant Clones for fast provisioning of test, development, refreshes and investigations.
- Integrated backups for long-term data protection, with support for both in-region and cross-region backups
- Replication for cross-region disaster recovery and business continuity
- Encryption with Google Cloud KMS managed as part of the NetApp Volumes security model
All these capabilities are delivered as a fully managed service. There is no storage infrastructure to procure, deploy, patch, or refresh.
Simplified Disaster Recovery
Because legacy storage is typically bound to the production cluster, traditional disaster recovery solutions often require maintaining a similarly sized standby compute environment, increasing infrastructure costs and complexity.
Google Cloud NetApp Volumes decouples storage from compute, enabling a more efficient disaster recovery design. Organizations can maintain a smaller standby Google Cloud VMware Engine cluster while replicating data with NetApp Volumes replication and scaling storage independently. This allows recovery environments storage to be sized around RPO and RTO requirements, reducing infrastructure costs by eliminating the need to mirror production compute resources.
Storage Lifecycle Independent of Compute Lifecycle
One of the most significant benefits of external storage in Google Cloud VMware Engine is the ability to separate storage lifecycles from compute lifecycles.
Many organizations carefully plan capacity, protection, and recovery strategies, only to discover later that cluster-local storage has tied their data lifecycle to node maintenance schedules, infrastructure refreshes, and platform transitions.
When storage resides within the VMware cluster, infrastructure events often become storage events:
- Node maintenance can impact storage operations
- Hardware refreshes can introduce migration projects
- New node generations may require datastore transitions
- Cluster growth can trigger storage redesign efforts
Google Cloud NetApp Volumes helps decouple storage from those infrastructure changes:
- Node maintenance does not require storage migrations
- Node generation transitions become datastore attachment decisions rather than large-scale migration projects
- Datastores persist independently of cluster growth and host refresh cycles
This separation enables VMware teams to manage storage and compute as independent resources, reducing operational complexity and long-term risk.
Optimize VMware storage costs with Auto-Tiering
Not all data in a VMware estate is active. Content libraries, images, archives, logging and telemetry data, backup targets, and aging virtual machine disks typically account for a significant portion of consumed capacity while being accessed infrequently. In most environments, this inactive data occupies the same storage tier as production data, and cost scales accordingly.
Google Cloud NetApp Volumes addresses this with automatic tiering. Infrequently accessed data is moved to a lower-cost storage tier automatically, based on access patterns, without administrative intervention.
For VMware architects, this delivers value in several ways:
- Cost follows actual usage. Capacity that is no longer active does not continue to consume premium storage economics.
- No workload redesign is required. Virtual machines continue to use the same datastore. Data placement is handled by the storage service, not by Storage vMotion campaigns or secondary archive datastores.
- High-capacity estates remain manageable. Archives, backup targets, and content repositories can grow on a single volume while long-term cost is optimized in the background.
- Operational overhead is reduced. There is no separate archival process, tiering policy engine, or data movement project to maintain.
Auto-tiering is most valuable for workloads with large capacity footprints and relaxed performance and latency requirements for the inactive portion of the dataset. Performance-sensitive virtual machines continue to operate on the storage tier appropriate to their requirements, while the cost of cold data is optimized automatically.
The result is a storage model where capacity growth does not translate directly into proportional cost growth; an important consideration as VMware estates expand in Google Cloud.
One Storage Platform for NFS and Block Workloads
Most VMware estates contain a mix of workload types and storage requirements. Google Cloud NetApp Volumes Flex Unified supports both NFS datastores and VMFS datastores for Google Cloud VMware Engine, with NFS, iSCSI, and NVMe/TCP.
Google Cloud NetApp Volumes Flex Unified provides a unified storage platform that supports:
Workload Requirement | Protocol |
|---|
File based VMware datastores | NFS |
Block storage for traditional SAN applications | iSCSI |
High-performance Low-latency workloads | NVMe/TCP |
The same storage pool can also serve file and block workloads outside VMware. Consolidating on a single platform simplifies architecture, procurement, and ongoing operations compared with maintaining separate storage services for file and block requirements.
Scale Capacity and Performance Independently
In many environments, storage growth drives infrastructure purchases that are unrelated to actual workload needs causing higher costs. However, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes allows capacity, performance, and compute resources to scale independently which eliminates this dependency. That means:
- A 200 TB workload does not need premium performance pricing if it doesn't require high IOPS.
- Performance increases do not require capacity purchases.
- Capacity growth does not require additional ESXi hosts.
This flexibility helps VMware teams align spending with actual workload requirements rather than infrastructure design limitations.
Key use cases include:
- High-capacity environments such as backup repositories, archives, content libraries, and telemetry data.
- Supplemental capacity for migrations, temporary projects, and datastore expansion.
- Development and test environments that require cost-efficient storage without sacrificing management capabilities.
Why choose Google Cloud NetApp Volumes
VMware workloads on Google Cloud no longer need to accept the traditional trade-offs between storage functionality, scalability, and operational simplicity.
With Google Cloud NetApp Volumes Flex Unified, organizations can:
- Take frequent storage-based snapshots without impacting production VMs.
- Leverage ONTAP data services including snapshots, clones, and replication.
- Maintain storage independently of node maintenance and hardware refresh cycles.
- Design disaster recovery around recovery objectives instead of mirrored production infrastructure.
- Support both NFS and VMFS datastore requirements.
- Integrate encryption with Google Cloud KMS.
- Scale capacity and performance independently of ESXi node count.
- Deploy on Broadcom-certified storage qualified for GCVE and ESXi z3 baremetal configurations.
For VMware teams planning disaster recovery initiatives, expanding datastore capacity, supporting storage-intensive applications, or simplifying long-term infrastructure operations, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes provides a modern storage architecture for Google Cloud VMware Engine.
Get Started
Google Cloud NetApp Volumes Flex Unified is generally available as Broadcom-certified external storage for Google Cloud VMware Engine in every supported Google Cloud region.
The fastest way to evaluate the service is to start with a single workload:
- A snapshot-sensitive datastore
- A disaster recovery replica
- A capacity-intensive dataset
- A supplemental datastore for cluster expansion
Measure the results in terms of recovery point frequency, operational effort, storage utilization, and ESXi node requirements.
To learn more:
For VMware architects looking to modernize storage operations while preserving enterprise data services, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes Flex Unified delivers a certified, scalable, and operationally efficient storage foundation for Google Cloud VMware Engine.
