March 2024: What’s New with VMware Cloud Flex Storage?

By Oliver Romero, senior product marketing manager, VMware Cloud Flex Storage, VMware , Inc.

VMware Cloud Flex Storage has taken a leap forward in its advancement and feature offerings for customers. We’re thrilled to announce the availability of the new disaggregated m7i.metal-24xl instance for VMware Cloud on AWS, offering increased flexibility and options for Cloud Flex Storage customers.

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This release provides users with a choice between 4 instance types: i3.metal, i3en.metal, i4i.metal, and m7i.metal-24xl for VMware Cloud on AWS. We’re eager for you all to experience these improvements, many of which were extensively discussed in our previous blog announcement here. So, let’s now again explore what these newly available features are below.

What is this update?
In the past, customers were required to provision instances with locally attached storage using vSAN when setting up an SDDC cluster. However, with the introduction of this new disaggregated instance, customers will now have the option to establish SDDC clusters without any locally attached storage. When configuring disaggregated SDDC clusters via the VMware Cloud Services Console, customers can seamlessly provision Cloud Flex Storage and connect it to the SDDC.

Cloud Flex Storage with new disaggregated architecture

Diagram 1: Leveraging Cloud Flex Storage with different VMware Cloud on AWS instance types.

Why do customers need this?
The introduction of the m7i.metal-24xl instance offers VMware Cloud on AWS and Cloud Flex Storage users a new disaggregated infrastructure option, allowing for more effective alignment of compute, memory, and storage resources with their specific needs.

By integrating Cloud Flex Storage with this instance, users can independently scale compute and storage, enhancing flexibility and value. Alongside the existing hyperconverged instance types, m7i.metal-24xl and Cloud Flex Storage provide enhanced scalability, performance, resilience, and cost-effectiveness. Currently, VMware Cloud on AWS offers 3 hyperconverged instance types: i3.metal, i3en.metal and i4i.metal, providing 50TB and 30TB of raw local NVMe flash storage per host, respectively, with the option to expand storage capacity using VMware Cloud Flex Storage. With the upcoming m7i.metal-24xl disaggregated instance, users can incrementally scale storage and compute, with support for up to 3.2PB of storage and a maximum of 4 datastores per cluster. Additionally, Cloud Flex Storage delivers high performance and reliable low latency, meeting the demands of enterprise mission-critical applications.

Customer benefits:

Scalable and elastic: With Cloud Flex Storage and the m7i.metal-24xl instance’s disaggregated architecture, customers can independently scale compute and storage, adjusting storage capacity as needed for their business requirements. VMware Cloud on AWS ensures high performance and reliability for modern workloads.
Flexibility: The disaggregated architecture of the m7i.metal-24xl instance offers customers more flexibility in compute and storage options. They can choose from three instance types and different storage option, including vSAN or Cloud Flex Storage
Improved Performance: The 4^thGen Xeon Scalable processor provides enhanced performance efficiently, particularly beneficial for AI/ML workloads, analytics, or HPC workloads.
Simplified operations: Cloud Flex Storage is fully managed by VMware, offering customers a seamless, integrated solution within VMware Cloud on AWS. Adding storage capacity to an m7i.metal-24xl cluster is straightforward and fully supported by VMware.
Predictable cloud economics: Cloud Flex Storage offers a cost-effective storage solution with granular provisioning and transparent pricing, enabling customer to forecast their spending accurately.
Cost efficiency: The m7i.metal-24xl instance type provides a cost-effective infrastructure for use cases requiring limited compute, storage, and memory resources. Customers can optimize storage costs by controlling consumption granularly according to their needs.

We’re thrilled to expand this service to additional architectures, providing the scalability and elasticity necessary to accomodate the varied demands of modern workloads.

Resources:
VMware Cloud Flex Storage Resources
Blog : See how customers are realizing cost savings with VMware Cloud Flex Storage