The landscape for VMware users continues to evolve. Many organizations are seeking options to understand what is next for their VMware workloads. They are asking for flexibility and choice with the goal of delivering better VMware service at a lower cost.
A common challenge has been the tight coupling of the VMware infrastructure, where storage and compute are required to scale together, which increases costs due to overprovisioning. Other challenges include the complexity and burden of refactoring applications as part of migration to the cloud. Now, there is a solution: Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS). With Amazon EVS, customers have a way to run VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) directly within an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). This presents a fast and secure way to migrate and modernize VMware workloads to AWS, so they can gain all the performance and resilience benefits possible, without undergoing costly and time consuming application replatforming or refactoring projects.
In addition, to simplify and accelerate migrations, reduce costs, and maintain operational consistency, Amazon EVS can use Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP (FSx for ONTAP) as its external datastore. FSx for ONTAP is a fully managed AWS storage service that delivers the features of NetApp® ONTAP®. By using FSx for ONTAP as the external datastore for Amazon EVS, VMware users now have a path to scale compute and storage independently, all while gaining a wide range of enterprise-grade storage capabilities. With FSx for ONTAP and Amazon EVS, customers can streamline and enhance their VMware workloads on AWS with powerful features that reduce costs, improve data protection, and simplify the extension and migration of workloads to AWS.
In this blog we will discuss: the benefits and challenges of VMware migration, why using FSx for ONTAP as Amazon EVS external storage solves common challenges, the key benefits of using FSx for ONTAP with Amazon EVS, and how to build a high-performance and cost-optimized VMware architecture on AWS.
VMware migration benefits and challenges
For more than 400,000 organizations, VMware's software-defined data center (SDDC) architecture has been the backbone of enterprise IT on-premises. To take advantage of the cloud, many organizations choose to migrate and operate VMware workloads on AWS for the following benefits:
- Scale and performance: VMware on AWS delivers the independent scaling of compute and storage as business needs change and more resources are required at peak periods of operation.
- Enhanced disaster recovery (DR): The AWS Cloud can be used as a disaster recovery target for the on-premises VMware SDDC.
- Cloud economics: Facilitate “cloud-first” strategies and execute the decommissioning aging infrastructure.
Application modernization: Unlock modern application development by creating new environments that work seamlessly with both on-premises and AWS datastores.
As customers look to move their VMware workloads to the cloud, they need to consider the following challenges:
- High TCO: The hyperconverged infrastructure traditionally used by VMware couples compute and storage, making it costly to operate and scale.
- Inefficient data protection: Traditional VMware backup and DR solutions can be slow, costly, and complex, often requiring multiple copies of data.
- Complex data migration: Moving large VMware workloads without causing disruptions to existing operations can be difficult.
Inconsistent hybrid cloud operations: Keeping workflows consistent and minimizing disruptions across on-premises and cloud environments requires careful planning.
To address these challenges and offer a more seamless migration experience, AWS has introduced Amazon EVS. Amazon EVS has been designed to speed up your ability to deploy virtualized applications and benefit from the scalability, resilience, and performance of the AWS Cloud while keeping familiar VMware tools and existing skills. You get full control over the entire VMware architecture and a virtualization stack that’s optimized to serve all of your workload needs, even when working with third-party tools.
Why Amazon EVS?
Amazon EVS is intended for workloads that have complex dependencies. There are workloads that IT teams don’t want to disturb. However, when faced with a data center exit, or the long-term strategy of moving to the cloud, these workloads can become an issue. Amazon EVS allows you to migrate to the cloud without re-platforming or refactoring applications and still get the scalability, resilience, and performance benefits of AWS. There are other migration strategies for migrating VMware workloads to AWS, but these require re-platforming.
- Re-platforming your VMware-based VMs to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). This option requires refactoring, which can include infrastructure and licensing changes, and may introduce protection, compliance, and compatibility challenges.
- Re-platforming your applications for containerization with Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS). This option offers better scalability, but requires application redesign.
Amazon EVS provides a faster way for your VCF workloads to gain the benefits of AWS, and doesn’t require refactoring or replatforming your applications. Plus, Amazon EVS gives you the ability to run other applications within your Amazon VPC in addition to VCF. It’s easy to operate Amazon EVS using either the AWS Management Console or the AWS Command Line Interface (AWS CLI). As an AWS-native service, Amazon EVS extends your VMware workloads’ access to over 200 AWS services, opening up the possibilities for working with services such as analytics, containerization, serverless, managed databases, generative AI, and much more. Amazon EVS delivers:
- Flexibility: Customers can bring their own VCF licenses to AWS and take advantage of different consumption options, including on-demand, 1-year, and 3-year plans. Customers can also take advantage of Amazon EC2 Savings Plans.
- A consistent VMware experience: Amazon EVS extends your familiar VMware environment to AWS, minimizing the learning curve for your teams.
- Enhanced control: With Amazon EVS, admins can use several management and security tools, including Network Virtualization and Security Platform (NSX), Elastic Sky X Integrated (ESXi), SDDC manager, and vCenter. This gives customers full control over configuring the entire virtualization stack even while working on AWS.
Amazon EVS delivers even more benefits when using FSx for ONTAP. As a fully managed ONTAP storage service on AWS, FSx for ONTAP provides a range of enterprise-grade benefits, including elastic storage decoupled from compute, that can increase your flexibility and reduce costs. The following diagram shows a high-level overview of what an on-premises VMware vCenter and Amazon EVS architecture looks like, providing full compatibility and operational consistency while gaining access to many AWS services and solutions.
By using FSx for ONTAP with Amazon EVS, organizations get powerful new capabilities that directly address the main migration and operation challenges.
Connectivity options available for using FSx for ONTAP with Amazon EVS
When attaching FSx for ONTAP to Amazon EVS as its external storage, users can choose from three primary connectivity options:
- NFS datastore
FSx for ONTAP provides highly scalable, high-performance, file storage for your VMware workloads, enabling you to separate storage scaling from compute requirements. This option is ideal for organizations with data-intensive applications that need to independently scale storage capacity and performance while simplifying VMware workload manageability and recoverability.
- iSCSI datastore
For workloads requiring block storage, FSx for ONTAP delivers Internet Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI) LUNs that deliver enterprise-grade performance and data management capabilities. This option provides the low-latency, high-throughput, storage needed for mission-critical, block-based applications. In the following diagram you can see the combined Amazon EVS and FSx for ONTAP architecture for the NFS/iSCSI datastore use case.
- Guest-attached NFS/SMB storage
Virtual machines can directly mount FSx for ONTAP volumes, supporting multiprotocol access for both Network File System (NFS) and Server Message Block (SMB) files, giving you flexibility for different application requirements. Using this option is highly beneficial in situations where data needs to be accessed by multiple hosts and heterogeneous operating systems. In the following diagram you can see architecture for the guest-attached NFS/SMB storage use case.
FSx for ONTAP manages storage lifecycle tasks such as security updates, upgrades, and patching, while Amazon EVS handles the virtualization environment lifecycle. You retain control over network connectivity and storage configuration, which provides more flexibility to administrators. For more details on which clients and protocols are supported by FSx for ONTAP, please refer to the Supported FSx for ONTAP Clients documentation.
Key FSx for ONTAP benefits for Amazon EVS customers
Cost optimization
In addition to storage scaling independent of compute, FSx for ONTAP offers storage efficiencies, including data deduplication, compression, compaction, tiering cold data to a lower-cost capacity pool, and thin provisioning volumes as needed. This means that you won’t be locked into operating on a certain scale. Your storage can grow with your needs, without ballooning costs. The following diagram shows how FSx for ONTAP allows you to scale up storage without adding cluster nodes to the Amazon EVS virtualization environment.
Through the FSx for ONTAP storage efficiency capabilities, your organization can achieve TCO savings that can reach 50% of the overall service cost—outperforming what you can expect to achieve with VMware vSAN technology, especially for storage-heavy workloads.
Data protection and high availability capabilities
FSx for ONTAP includes various capabilities that enable highly available and well-protected VMware deployments:
- FSx for ONTAP is highly available with the choice of using multiple Availability Zones (AZs) or single AZs. Each FSx for ONTAP file system is deployed in an active-passive configuration. If one node fails, the other takes up operation automatically, increasing availability and maintaining your business continuity. Using the multi-AZ option adds even more resilience, as your workloads can maintain continuity even if an entire AZ is unavailable.
- NetApp Snapshot™ technology creates instant, thin, crash-consistent, point-in-time data copies for use in backup, recovery, and archiving.
- NetApp SnapMirror® replication technology replicates your VMware data, including application-consistent Snapshot copies. This is a major component of BlueXP™ disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), which offers a simple, efficient, and cost-effective way to protect and recover your VMware workloads. BlueXP DRaaS provides seamless replication via SnapMirror, enabling fast failover as well as non-disruptive failover testing that enhances recovery readiness without affecting production.
- Enhanced backup via NetApp SnapMirror, which replicates your NetApp Snapshot data to a low-cost backup repository. This is superior to traditional VMware software-based replication methods as there is virtually no performance impact and minimal storage overhead.
- NetApp SnapLock® creates tamper-proof, write once, read many (WORM) data copies that offer indelible data protection.
Data migration and hybrid cloud management
With FSx for ONTAP, VMware customers can maintain consistent data management practices in AWS and on premises.
For users coming from on-premises ONTAP, FSx for ONTAP offers:
- Seamless and scalable bulk data migration with native ONTAP capabilities such as SnapMirror.
- Familiar ONTAP workflows—no need to retrain teams or change processes.
- Interoperability with AWS services for enhanced storage, analytics, and compute capabilities.
- A seamless experience across the hybrid on-premises and AWS environments.
In a hybrid cloud environment, FSx for ONTAP gives you the benefits of operational consistency at the storage level as well as the same architecture, same capabilities, and a simple migration step.
Multiprotocol support for guest-attached storage
FSx for ONTAP simplifies multi-protocol data access by supporting both NFS and SMB in a single solution. This is critical for applications requiring shared access across Windows and Linux environments.
VMware integration
FSx for ONTAP offers tight integration with the VMware technology, supporting vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) for both iSCSI and NFS datastores. VAAI integration offloads day-to-day VMware management operation to FSx for ONTAP, providing:
- Lightning-fast virtual machine (VM) cloning and migration with reduced overhead.
- Optimized vSphere Cluster and VM management operations, such as storage reclamation and datastore volume locking.
- Offloads VM snapshot and backup operations to ONTAP technologies, which results in less performance impact on the virtualization environment.
Next steps: Build a better VMware strategy on AWS
The combination of Amazon EVS and Amazon FSx for ONTAP empowers organizations to migrate, operate, and optimize VMware workloads in AWS with greater flexibility, lower costs, and improved data protection.
By using Amazon EVS with FSx for ONTAP, you can build a smarter, more efficient cloud strategy for your
VMware workloads—one that’s cost-effective, scalable, and secure.
