Better, faster, stronger: Equipping VMware workloads in the Cloud
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Ronen Schwartz
Azure NetApp Files has enabled customers to migrate performance-sensitive, business-critical workloads to the cloud so successfully that it has become one of the fastest-growing Azure services ever. Now, Azure NetApp Files datastores for Azure VMware Solution will do the same for your storage-intensive VMware workloads in Azure.
Enterprises have told us they want to augment the Azure VMware Solution local instance storage provided by VMware vSAN with storage that can scale independently of compute resources. Now they can, simply and quickly. Azure NetApp Files datastores for Azure VMware Solution is now available in public preview. This is great news if you have been reluctant to migrate your storage-heavy VMware workloads to the cloud.
Until now, enterprises could use Azure VMware Solution with Azure NetApp Files only for guest OS mounts and supplemental file services. The addition of datastore support provides enhanced functionality and increased scalability for enterprises to migrate and run storage-heavy VMware workloads in Azure.
Hybrid cloud use cases
- Hybrid Extend
Manage a unified (on-premises and cloud) VMware environment and transition workloads to the cloud and back, as operations and demand require
Quickly expand storage capacity, on-demand, to scale apps and accommodate dev/test workflows
- Hybrid Migrate
Rapidly and seamlessly transition VMware VMs to Azure VMware Solution
Minimize re-architecting and accelerate migrations by leveraging consistent storage services on-premises and in the cloud
- Hybrid Disaster Recovery (DR)
Leverage Azure VMware Solution as a DR-endpoint for business continuity -- with managed, assisted, or self-service DRaaS options
Gain flexible DR options to meet customer RTO / RPO objectives, with capacity on-demand and pilot-light architectures
Azure NetApp Files benefits
Azure NetApp Files ensures even your most storage-intensive, previously un-migratable workloads, including enterprise-scale Oracle, SQL Server, and other complex databases—migrate and run efficiently in the cloud, combining the scale and flexibility of the cloud with the speed, throughput, and ultra-low latency for large datastores you thought were possible only on-premises.
Azure NetApp Files can offload and directly host file services for both VMware and other customer environments, reducing the number of VMs to optimize service costs.
Azure NetApp Files features three tiers of service: Standard, Premium, and Ultra so you can choose the right service level for your workload, and you can adjust tiers on-demand as necessary to meet ever-changing capacity and performance requirements.
We also offer a growing range of additional services such as Azure NetApp Files backup, Cloud Insights, and Global File Cache designed to complement Azure NetApp Files and provide enhanced functionality. In addition, Azure NetApp Files integrates seamlessly with other Azure services to provide elastic, highly available storage.
Supported Regions
Azure VMware Solution currently supports the following regions: East US, Australia East, Australia Southeast, Brazil South, Canada Central, Canada East, Central US, France Central, Germany West Central, Japan West, North Central US, North Europe, Southeast Asia, Switzerland West, UK South, UK West, US South Central, and West US. The list of supported regions will expand as the preview progresses.
Extend Azure NetApp Files benefits to Azure VMware Solution
Azure VMware Solution is an easy way to migrate existing VMware private clouds to run natively on Azure. Azure VMware Solution offers customers symmetry with on-premises environments to accelerate datacenter migrations and permits the benefits of the cloud to be realized sooner.
The new integration between Azure NetApp Files and Azure VMware Solution allows customers to create NFS datastores and mount them on their Azure VMware Solution SDDC clusters. Azure NetApp Files datastores for Azure VMware Solution enables customers to scale storage independently of compute resources.
For storage-intensive workloads running on Azure VMware Solution, the integration with Azure NetApp Files helps to easily scale storage capacity beyond the limits of vSAN local instance storage built into Azure VMware Solution nodes and lowers total cost of ownership.
Extend NetApp’s on-premises VMware benefits to Azure
If you are already a NetApp customer, you have even more to gain because you can use the same VMware datastores with Azure VMware Solution that you are using on-premises now. This means you leverage the skills and experience of your team and create a positive user experience as well as significant operational efficiencies.
“Azure NetApp Files and Azure VMware Solution combine to provide the flexibility and simplicity enterprises need to migrate business-critical VMware workloads cost-effectively to Azure, disaggregating storage from compute and providing the benefits of the most powerful file storage solution in the cloud.” – Andrew Chen, Principal Group PM Manager, Azure Storage, Microsoft
“The addition of Azure NetApp Files to the expanding capabilities of Azure VMware Solution opens a range of customer use cases enabled by its high-performance cloud-scale storage. Disaster recovery, backup, and large database workloads are now all candidates for easy cloud migration and app modernization on Azure VMware Solution with the compelling economics and flexible storage capacity provided by Azure NetApp Files.” – Narayan Bharadwaj, VP Cloud Solutions, VMware
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Ronen Schwartz
Ronen Schwartz is senior vice president and general manager of NetApp’s Cloud Volumes business. He is responsible for accelerating the Cloud Volumes business, building the robust Cloud Volumes platform across hybrid clouds and multiclouds, and expanding NetApp cloud data management services.
Before joining NetApp, Schwartz was executive vice president in charge of technology and ecosystem, operations, and strategy at Informatica, and senior vice president and general manager of Informatica Cloud. In those roles he led product strategy, product management, and go-to-market strategy. During his 14 years at Informatica, he helped lead the company through its own transformation from on premises to the public cloud, from license revenue to recurring revenue.
