VMware Cloud Foundation 4.2 With S3-Compatible Object Storage Support

VMware, Inc. announced Cloud Foundation 4.2.

The release features updates to help customers improve the storage, networking, management and security of large-scale VM and container deployments on the platform.

The company also announced the availability of the vSAN Data Persistence platform, including Cloudian HyperStore and MinIO Object Storage plug-ins. Together, these offerings provide an unified, hybrid cloud-ready storage platform for modern and traditional applications with operational consistency and simplicity.

Cloud Foundation release delivers platform enhancements
Cloud Foundation 4.2 introduces features and enhancements to help customers deliver developer-ready infrastructure, scale their infrastructure without compromise and simplify operations.

The release features:

• vSAN Data Persistence platform: Manage S3-compatible object storage for unstructured data with the HCI platform via support for Cloudian and MinIO offerings.

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• vSAN HCI Mesh: Software-based approach for disaggregation of compute and storage resources. It helps customers reduce Capex by sharing capacity across vSAN clusters. It also lowers Opex by reducing the amount of storage resources managed through scaling.

• NSX-T 3.1 Federation: Cloud-like operating model for network administrators, simplifying the consumption of networking and security constructs. This includes centralized management, consistent networking and policy configuration with enforcement, and synchronized operational state across large-scale federated NSX-T deployments. With NSX-T Federation, customers can use stretched networks and unified security policies that span multi-region VMware Cloud Foundation deployments, providing workload mobility and simplifying DR.

• SDDC Manager Security Hardening: Secure communications between SDDC Manager and underlying components to minimize threats to Cloud Foundation during all operational phases.

Cloud Foundation 4.2 is expected to become available in the company‘s 1QFY22.

Closer Look at VMware vSAN Data Persistence platform
Unveiled in September 2020, it is a framework for ISVs to integrate stateful services like object storage and NoSQL databases, with the underlying infrastructure. Through co-engineering efforts with partners Cloudian and MinIO, Inc., the platform enables customers to run their stateful services with increased agility, lower TCO and simplified operations and management.

In conjunction with partners, the platform enables customers to:

• Allow developers to use Kubernetes APIs to provision and scale stateful services on-demand in a self-service model with minimal administrator intervention.

• Deliver integrated service health and capacity monitoring through dedicated dashboards in VMware vCenter Server.

• Leverage service-aware infrastructure operations to enable service availability during infrastructure changes, including maintenance and lifecycle management.

• Run stateful services with storage efficiency.

Offers customers 2 different deployment options for platform:

• Standard vSAN Deployment: A fast and convenient way to get started running stateful services on vSAN. Customers can run stateful services and traditional apps on the same vSAN cluster to optimize resource utilization. Customers can select the vSAN Support for Shared Nothing Architecture (vSAN-SNA) storage policy to use the availability features that come with stateful service and turn off replication in the vSAN layer for space savings.

• vSAN Direct Configuration: Deploy stateful service on hardware optimized for application needs and use the availability, efficiency and security features built into the stateful service layer. Additionally, it provides access to the underlying direct-attached hardware for storage efficiency and near bare metal performance. It also supports hardware on the vSAN Hardware Compatibility List (HCL). In addition, VMware provides recommended hardware configurations tested and validated by VMware, Cloudian, MinIO and select OEM partners for use cases of capacity-optimized object storage and performance-optimized object storage.

In both scenarios, vCenter helps customers benefit from unified storage management for modern and traditional apps.

More about the vSAN Data Persistence Platform and the partner solutions.

Object Store offerings on VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu available
Cloudian HyperStore and MinIO Object Storage are both available for VMware Cloud Foundation with Tanzu through the vSAN Data Persistence platform integration. VMware and its partners enable customers to deploy object stores directly from vCenter in a few clicks.

Customers can now use:

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• Cloudian HyperStore: An enterprise-class, infinitely scalable, multi-tenant storage solution with military-grade security, geo-distribution and native S3 compatibility that supports both modern and traditional applications from a single platform. More about Cloudian.

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• MinIO High Performance Object Storage: A high-performance, Kubernetes-native, S3 compatible object store, MinIO is designed to deliver scale, security, resilience and throughput across workloads including AI/ML, analytics, archival and cloud-native web/mobile applications. More about MinIO.

Customers can purchase the object storage offerings directly from Cloudian and MinIO.

Resources:
Blog: Announcing VMware Cloud Foundation 4.2
Blog: Introduction to vSAN Data Persistence Platform (DPP)