VMware Cloud Foundation 9: Now Ready For All Storage

VCF 9 is Ready for All vSphere-supported External Storage

Building a private cloud on VMware Cloud Foundation™ (VCF) 9 necessitates careful consideration of storage options. Customers must weigh the benefits of each storage option based on their specific needs and existing investments to optimize their vSphere environments.. Customers looking to rapidly adopt VCF 9 have asked for workflows to support all existing supported vSphere storage types, so in our latest version, Broadcom has significantly expanded storage options, now allowing the use of NFSv3 or Fibre Channel VMFS datastores as principal storage for the management workload domain during greenfield deployments. This enhancement builds upon the robust, automated VMware vSAN deployment capabilities already in place. 

What about iSCSI, NFS v4.1, and NVMe over Fabrics?

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9 supports a variety of storage types as principal storage (see Storage Models in the product documentation for more details). Typically, principal storage is configured during creation of the management or workload domains or when adding new clusters to an existing workload domain. These scenarios are referred to as greenfield deployments.

Additional principal storage types such as iSCSI, NFS v4.1, and NVMe over Fabrics (FC or TCP), which are not currently available in a greenfield deployment, can now be configured as principal storage for VCF 9 by converging an existing vSphere environment or by using VCF import.

If the default cluster includes multiple datastore types, VCF determines the primary datastore using the following priority:

1. vSAN
2. NFS v3
3. VMFS
4. NFS 4.1
5. iSCSI

Documentation of Support Statement 

This process is documented in KB 416270​​. This is also detailed in the techdocs under converging an existing vSphere environment into a VCF instance. Specifically “Any supported vSphere storage type” is supported. For a list of supported vSphere 9 supported storage platforms see the Broadcom compatibility guide.

What’s the simplest way to adopt, run and manage storage for VCF?

vSAN remains the most popular storage choice for new clusters being deployed, and delivers unique value. However, customers now have the ability to adopt VCF 9 with alternative storage options.