Many of you have seen VMware's announcement today regarding the general availability of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0. VCF 9.0 delivers many powerful new capabilities as well as changes to existing supported technologies. Among other things, one change you will see is that “starting with VCF 9.0 and vSphere Foundation 9.0, the vSphere Virtual Volumes capability, also known as vVols, is deprecated and will be removed in a future release of VCF and vSphere Foundation. Support for vSphere Virtual Volumes will continue for critical bug fixes only for versions of vSphere 8.x, VCF and vSphere Foundation 5.x, and other supported versions until end-of-support for the respective release.”
Note: vSphere 8.0 reaches end of service on October 11, 2027.
You can read more in the VCF 9.0 Release Notes: https://techdocs.broadcom.com/us/en/vmware-cis/vcf/vcf-9-0-and-later/9-0/release-notes/vmware-cloud-foundation-90-release-notes/platform-product-suppo...
How the NetApp advantage helps you transition your existing vVols storage architecture into an intelligent data infrastructure.
Why it matters: Traditionally, the top three reasons that vSphere administrators deployed vVols were:
- Granular quality of service, especially in SAN environments. With traditional VMFS file systems, the storage array has no visibility of the individual VMDK inside the datastore. Therefore, without vVols, the only way to provide storage-native VM or VMDK granular data services was with vVols.
- Simplicity at scale. Again, this is mostly seen as an advantage in SAN environments, where, traditionally, vSphere administrators were required to manage many different VMFS file systems to meet the needs of the business. With vVols, admins simply consumed the allocated capacity from the array, instead of being limited to a specific VMFS datastore for any given VM.
- Snapshot offload. VMware strongly recommends that administrators limit the use of traditional vCenter managed snapshots. This is because each snapshot incurs unnecessary IO amplification throughout its life, reducing performance and becoming a single point of failure for the VM. With vVols, since each VMDK is a unique entity on the storage array, you can use the array's native snapshot or cloning technology to create thin snapshots that do not incur any performance penalty.
The NetApp Advantage: What do you do if you require all or some of these storage capabilities? There are many options, and it can appear daunting to sift through them all. The following are just a few of the options available, and in many cases you will want to leverage more than one solution.
- Customers can take ownership of their data and directly connect to it from the guest OS using in-guest software iSCSI or NVMe/TCP initiators or NAS protocols.
- By taking ownership of your data in this way, you future-proof your investment and gain complete flexibility to re-platform to any hypervisor, anywhere, even to a cloud instance where they could connect to their data in FSx, Google Cloud NetApp Volumes (GCNV) or Cloud Volumes ONTAP (CVO) by using SnapMirror.
- By directly connecting to application data using NAS protocols, ONTAP will have a first-person view of the data. You gain the advantage of being able to leverage the entire Intelligent Data Infrastructure with technologies like Data Classification, autonomous ransomware protection with AI, fpolicy, vscan, QoS, quota management, direct access to recover individual files from the snapshots directory, etc.
- Likewise, using guest-connected block protocols, you unlock the ability to use SnapCenter or BlueXP Backup and Recovery Service regardless of the underlying hypervisor. You also gain the ability to restore or clone individual VM disks from a snapshot for test/dev, VDI, etc, without having to first clone and mount the entire datastore.
- Using the NetApp PowerShell Toolkit, you can transform your existing VMDKs from NFS datastores into LUNs and thus, into NVMe namespaces (if required) using the same underlying technologies as the NetApp Shift Toolkit for zero-copy migrations. This, again, brings back VM-disk granular quality of service and VM-disk granular access options. A vVol LUN or namespace could even be converted back into a VMDK for NFS access.
- Even with traditional VMFS datastores, SnapCenter and BlueXP Backup and Recovery Service, included for free with the ONTAP One license for ONTAP-to-ONTAP backups, integrate ONTAP native snapshots directly into the vCenter UI. With SnapCenter and BlueXP, vCenter administrators can easily and intuitively leverage ONTAP snapshots, which have no performance penalty or IO amplification, for individual VM or VMDK recovery. There is even a feature to clone and mount a VMDK to recover specific files.
- NetApp Trident, when used with KubeVirt-based hypervisors like Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, can deliver equivalent functionality to vVols. Using CSI storage in this way can even be seen as superior to vVols because it does not require an out-of-band VASA Provider.
- For customers who prioritize the simplicity at scale that vVols offers, consider NFS-based datastores. Traditional FlexVol volumes can provide up to 300TB per datastore, and FlexGroup volumes can provide up to 60PB, with 400 billion files on a 10-node cluster for a single datastore.
- While non-vVols NFS datastores are not able to fully maximize granular QoS due to the nature of the ESXi NFS client, you can nevertheless use QoS to mitigate the blast radius of a noisy neighbor VM to just the host where the VM is running.
- Direct access to the .snapshot directory makes copying and recovering VMDKs as simple as dragging and dropping them.
- Managing access to NFS at scale is generally seen as the easiest way to use storage when block protocols like NVMe/TCP are not required.
- While ONTAP itself cannot see inside of a VMDK, ARP/AI can protect individual VMDKs in a datastore by understanding the entropy of the data itself, just as it can protect guest files using guest direct NAS access.
- Modern NFS features like nconnect and session trunking boost NFS performance to new levels.
The NetApp advantage isn’t just in how you use a single array or integrate with off-box software. It’s the entire intelligent data infrastructure because ONTAP isn’t just an array. It’s an intelligent data management platform that allows you to leverage your data any way you want, anywhere you want. Be it in the on-prem core, at the edge, or in the public cloud.
