Why Choose ONTAP for VMware Cloud Foundation 9?
Today, VMware by Broadcom announced the general availability of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0. The announcement stated, among other things a renewed focus on private clouds and revealed several enhancements to help customers realize a single pane of glass for common tasks through VCF Operations and deliver cloud-like agility through VCF Automation.
To read more about the VMware by Broadcom VCF 9 Announcement.
At NetApp, we know embarking on a hybrid cloud journey can be complex, but VCF 9, paired with NetApp ONTAP, simplifies this journey. VCF seamlessly integrates compute, network, and storage elements with VMware products and third-party integrations, supporting both Kubernetes and virtual machine-based workloads. Key components such as the underlying hypervisor, network virtualization, management suite, container orchestration, hybrid cloud connectivity, software-defined data center management, and integrated storage solutions make up this powerful platform.
NetApp ONTAP complements various VCF deployment models, whether on-premises or in the public cloud offered through cloud providers, to help you lower your TCO, streamline administration, and deliver best-in-class business continuity. You get the best of both worlds – enterprise-grade storage capabilities coupled with service delivery that rivals the public cloud experience.
Understanding VCF Domains
At the core, VCF organizes resources into distinct, independent groupings called domains, ensuring efficient resource utilization. Each domain includes its own compute, network, and storage.
- Management Domain: This domain handles core functions like resource provisioning, monitoring, and maintenance. VMware Cloud Foundation Installer or convert an existing vCenter environment with ONTAP backed datastores. Additionally, the management domain houses integrations like NetApp ONTAP Tools for VMware.
- Workload Domain: Designed for specific operational needs, these domains pool resources and are easily deployed via the SDDC Manager, automating complex tasks.
Storage with VCF
Storage is central to VCF domains. While VCF includes CPU-core-based vSAN capacity, it also supports a wide range of external storage solutions. This flexibility is crucial for enterprises with existing storage investments or additional protocol needs.
- Principal Storage: Allocated during domain creation, it supports VCF administrative components in management domains and storage for applications and VMs in workload domains.
- Supplemental Storage: Added post-deployment to any workload domain, leveraging existing storage infrastructure for optimized performance, scalability, and cost-efficiency.
Why Choose NetApp for VCF and VMware Private Clouds?
Deploying VMware workloads in a private cloud allows enterprises to leverage the full suite of VMware virtualization technologies, deploy workloads and organizations as tenants with their own services and entitlements and ensures optimal resource utilization and scalability. When pairing VMware with NetApp's integrated storage solutions, organizations can achieve high performance and data reliability, supporting diverse applications and workloads seamlessly. This deployment strategy provides enhanced security, control, and customization, tailored to meet specific business needs while maintaining robust disaster recovery and data protection capabilities. The storage and compute resources that your workloads need become an offering the catalog with VCF Automation.
NetApp ONTAP brings several advantages to VCF deployments:
- Flexibility and Scalability: Using ONTAP allows for independent scaling of resources within VCF. Start with the required capacity and grow as needed without needing to add compute hosts. It supports multiple workload domains, avoiding storage islands and reducing costs.
- Offloading Compute Tasks: ONTAP handles CPU-intensive storage operations, freeing hosts to focus on compute tasks. This reduces the number of hosts and cores needed, lowers energy and cooling requirements, and optimizes license costs.
- Enterprise-Grade Data Availability: ONTAP ensures data is always accessible and secure with a high-availability architecture, automatic failover and failback, and built-in data protection features like RAID-DP and RAID-TEC.
- Efficient Backup and Recovery: ONTAP snapshots and SnapCenter Plug-in for VMware vSphere provide efficient, crash-consistent backups and restores, integrating seamlessly within a vCenter environment and supporting long-term retention by offloading snapshots to object storage.
- Comprehensive Business Continuity: ONTAP supports robust disaster recovery capabilities with SnapMirror data replication, MetroCluster synchronous replication, Cloud Tiering for cost-effective storage, and BlueXP DRaaS for rapid recovery and business continuity.
Summary
ONTAP meets all workload requirements with customized block storage solutions and unified offerings, delivering faster results for VMs and applications reliably and securely. It minimizes the data center footprint with advanced data reduction techniques and ensures enterprise-level availability for critical workloads. AWS, Azure, and Google support NetApp-powered external storage to enhance vSAN storage in VMware cloud-based clusters. NetApp's collective, superior capabilities make it the ideal choice for VMware Cloud Foundation deployments.
For more information about NetApp solutions with VCF see the following:
https://docs.netapp.com/us-en/netapp-solutions/vmware/vmw-vcf-overview.html#introduction-to-vmware-cloud-foundation
