We’re close to closing this year’s VMware Explore 2023 sessions, and it’s been an amazing time engaging with you all, educating you on our important upcoming updates, and having the opportunity to receive your feedback. As you all know, we’ve made some important announcements to the service over the course of this year’s Explore, and more importantly we’ve had the chance to hear from you all directly. Some of the feedback we’ve been receiving from customers has been overwhelmingly positive with lots of excellent questions. We’ve received several requests from folks asking us to provide public access to a demonstration on how the service is utilized and how setup works. We’ve heard you and we’d like to show you all what content we’ve been working on to walk through these areas.
So, before we dive into the demos, let’s first cover some quick background on VMware Cloud Flex Storage and how it compares to alternative options.
When is VMware Cloud Flex Storage an ideal storage option?
Although local instance storage with vSAN has been the default storage in VMware Cloud on AWS, as application workloads grow organically, some storage capacity-heavy workloads may be challenging to optimize using local instance storage with vSAN alone. In these situations, VMware Cloud Flex Storage can address the additional storage requirements for these workloads while offering customers a seamless and cost-effective cloud migration to VMware Cloud on AWS.
Unlike the original method of provisioning storage for an SDDC, which has each new host bringing storage capacity plus compute power and host memory to the overall SDDC configuration, VMware Cloud Flex Storage is ideal for situations where just additional storage is required. This new approach helps better align cloud resources with the needs of applications and data, and, because you can flexibly scale storage and compute independently of each other, you pay only for the resources you use.
Demos, Hands-On Labs and More
VMware click-through demos are similar to the resources you find in VMware Hands-On Labs, providing you with a pre-recorded workflow of the product, as well as an informative set of steps. You will find a Guide on the left that outlines the steps, with actions highlighted in orange boxes on the screens. You can locate the Hands-On Lab at: HOL-2492-01-ISM VMware Cloud Flex Storage for VMware Cloud on AWS or watch demo videos of tasks, which are posted in the VMware Cloud Flex Storage playlist on the VMware Cloud YouTube channel as well.
Ok, the easy part. Let’s get started!
It’s simple to set up the new storage service, and these click-through demos cover the basic service activation setup steps for VMware Cloud Flex Storage. The demo assumes that the service acquisition request and subscription funding aspects already have been resolved and all are ready to begin using the service.
Once you have the subscription mechanisms in place and the service tile activated, just one easy step at a time:
This click-through demo covers the basic service activation setup for VMware Cloud Flex Storage.
Step 2 — Creating NFS Datastores
Once the cloud-based service is activated, you now can create datastores to connect to existing SDDCs.
Step 3 — Managing Workloads Across Datastores
Now the demo will go through the basic steps of managing workloads in VMware Cloud on AWS SDDCs when there is both a vSAN Workload Datastore and a VMware Cloud Flex Storage datastore configured.
Step 4 — Managing VMware Cloud Flex Storage Datastores
Finally, this step will cover a few of the additional datastore management aspects with VMware Cloud Flex Storage.
What’s Next?
Completed the demo? You can also find more information on how to get VMware Cloud Flex Storage for your VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC by searching “Flex Storage” in the Cloud Service Portal view. You also can click the ACCESS or LEARN MORE links. Additionally, you can visit the VMware Cloud Flex Storage product page or the VMC Tech Zone site for VMware Cloud Flex Storage to explore more about VMware Cloud Flex Storage.
