VMware Cloud Flex Storage Release Notes

From VMware, Inc.

These release notes provide information about VMware Cloud Flex Storage product features, system requirements and software support, caveats and limitations, and any known or fixed issues related to the service.

VMware Cloud Flex Storage is a SaaS offering for VMware Cloud on AWS, and provides the ability to provision and scale storage independently of their SDDC hosts.

It is VMware-managed and natively integrated, so you can cost-effectively supplement your capacity needs.

It offers a simple pay-per-utilized gigabyte consumption model. You can buy a subscription, or pay on demand. With this model, you can scale storage at a low cost without adding hosts, which reduces your overall TCO.

The initial release of VMware Cloud Flex Storage provides NFS datastores for workloads that do not require VMware vSAN performance for mission critical or consistent low latency storage requirements. You can independently provision and scale storage capacity external to VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC hosts, up to ~400TB of logical/usable capacity.

VMware Cloud Flex Storage utilizes the Scale-Out Cloud Filesystem (SCFS), which provides built-in data services and integrity features that are always on by default. Storage capacity is presented as an NFS datastore that can be attached to existing vSAN clusters in your SDDC, and is managed through vCenter and through a dedicated management interface.

You can create datastores, mount or unmount datastores for SDDC clusters, and then delete datastores when you no longer need them. Datastore monitoring provides performance statistics such as I/Os, throughput, latency, cache hit rate, and logical storage usage. VMware Cloud Flex Storage offers a simple pay-per-utilized gigabyte consumption model. You can buy a subscription, or pay on demand, as you need.

It supports VMware Cloud on AWS SDDCs version 1.18 and above running i3, i3en, and i4i hosts.

Caveats and limitations

• VMware Cloud Flex Storage does not support stretched clusters.

• VMware Site Recovery and VMware Site Recovery Manager are supported, but VMware Cloud Flex Storage cannot be used as a VMware Site Recovery target datastore.

• AWS GovCloud (US) is not supported.

• PCI-DSS SDDCs are not supported.

• You cannot protect VMware Cloud Flex Storage workloads with VMware Cloud DR.

• Cloning VMs that reside on a VMware Cloud Flex Storage requires a full data copy and hence can take some time to complete.

• VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols), vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA), and VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI) are not supported with VMware Cloud Flex Storage.

Restrictions for creating datastore

• Each SDDC can be associated with only one VMware Cloud Flex Storage datastore.

• Once you create a datastore, you cannot move it to a different AWS availability zone.

• Non-ASCII characters are not supported in the datastore name.

Known issues:

• Datastores list incorrectly shows physical capacity
  When you select Datastores from the left navigation of the VMware Cloud Flex Storage UI, the datastores list shows shows an incorrect capacity value for the datastore. It should display the logical amount of storage being used.

  To view the logical storage currently being used by a datastore, click an individual datastore and view Cloud storage.

• Do not mount datastore if major SDDC operation is in progress
  In some cases, if you attempt to mount a datastore to a cluster while the SDDC is running a major operation, such as adding or removing hosts from a cluster, or the datastore mount operation might have issues.
  
  Workaround: Check your SDDC to ensure no major processes are running before you mount a datastore to a cluster on the SDDC.

Resource:
VMware Cloud Flex Storage FAQ