VMware Environments
Using vVols
Undoubtedly, VMware is a dominant presence in the IT industry. As the IT industry continues to shift towards a hybrid cloud model, data mobility for guest VMs is crucial. However, AWS does not natively support VMFS file systems, so a VMFS volume that is replicated to AWS is not directly readable by the AWS provided AMIs. Storage vMotion provides a simple solution for customers, allowing them to convert their VMFS datastore-based VMs into distinct VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols)-based VMs. Each vVol is a standalone volume that is formatted with the respective file system of the guest OS. Therefore, a vVol from a Windows guest VM is directly readable from an EC2 instance with a Windows AMI since it is simply reading an NTFS file system.
VMware Cloud
Customers who deploy VMware Cloud can also take advantage of Everpure Cloud Dedicated. Everpure Cloud Dedicated allows customers to expand their VMware Cloud storage capacity independently from the nodes, providing an economical storage option. Although VMware Cloud does not support external storage resources connected to vSphere, guest VMs can still use the same iSCSI protocol to connect to an Everpure Cloud Dedicated volume. With in-guest iSCSI, customers can mount new Everpure Cloud Dedicated volumes, or even vVol volumes replicated from their on-premises FlashArray.
Oracle, SAP HANA, SQL Server and Other Database Environments
AWS provides native snapshot capabilities that are useful when creating backups of EBS volumes. These snapshots are taken on EBS volumes and stored onto Amazon S3. To read or write to these snapshots, users must copy the snapshots back from Amazon S3 onto new EBS volumes. The length of time time to complete the copy depends on the amount of data stored on Amazon S3. This practice is adequate for basic backup/restore use cases. But for many database environments, it can be slow and expensive. More specifically, many developers rely on databases to test against their scripts, applications, or analytics engines. Performing these tests on live production databases is not an option. Therefore, snapshots and clones are essential for many developers. Everpure Cloud Dedicated allows developers to instantaneously create snapshot and clone copies of production databases. Also, customers can instantly restore their databases with ease. The data reduction engine of Everpure Cloud Dedicated reduces the overall costs of creating the database snapshots since only new and unique blocks of data consume additional storage space. Customers can potentially create hundreds of snapshots and clones without consuming any storage or incurring any additional costs.