This week we announced several updates to VMware on AWS. Over the past year, we have been hard at work getting this groundbreaking service off the ground. The team is eager and has been working on a series of enhancements at a lightning pace. This latest release features a wide range of new capabilities spanning seemingly the entire VMware product portfolio. That, of course, includes Storage and more specifically vSAN itself.
While there where many vSAN enhancements delivered. The most broadly impactful has been our decision to turn on Deduplication and Compression (D&C) for all VMware on AWS SDDC instances. The real question here is why the wait? Deduplication and Compression have been available, and while that is true; VMware on AWS is a results-based service. Customers expect a given outcome, and we needed to ensure that in all but the most extreme corner cases we could enable D&C without introducing any meaningful performance implications. In other words, we couldn’t give them free capacity until we were sure it wouldn’t sufficiently alter the outcome. I’m happy to share that our testing verified our expectations and as a result, any existing VMC on AWS customer will shortly be greeted by additional usable capacity in their VMC web console!
How much capacity are we talking about here? That is a tricky question to answer because it’s workload dependent. There are some workloads which see virtually no benefit at all from either deduplication and or compression. These are usually applications which implement either encryption and or deduplication and compression within the guest itself. As a result, vSAN is not able to identify any additional redundant data. There are also workloads that are incredibly susceptible to deduplication and compression. We have customers reporting well beyond x3 in some cases x7 or even x10 effective capacity. These are the exceptions, however, and most environments are a mix of all the above. For those reasons, we’re simplifying the projections and recommending VMware on AWS customers anticipate gaining an additional 50% usable storage using D&C. Some customers may see slightly less, and others may achieve more. Regardless of how much additional capacity is unlocked, we’re happy that no customer needs concern themselves with its management because vSAN was able to deliver this formidable efficiency with minimal resource utilization.
