My favorite announcement from AWS Re:invent 2021 was definitely the possibility to open up the NFS protocol on the VMware Cloud on AWS hosts, at least for Amazon’s Netapp ONTAP FSx service initially, and hopefully a few other validated products shortly after.
For example, data protection products cannot attach their NFS datastore to the hosts in this environment, therefore none of the data protection products (Cohesity, Rubrik, Veeam, Commvault, Avamar, etc) are able to offer their instant restore or live mount functionality (allows you to run the VM or disk from the data protection storage directly to reduce the RTO).
“Announcing preview of Amazon FSx with NetApp ONTAP Integration – an NFS datastore for VMware Cloud on AWS. With this capability, you can attach a fully managed, low cost, high performance NFS datastore built on NetApp’s ONTAP file system to the VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC and scale their storage environment as needed without the need to purchase additional host instances. Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP offers high-performance file storage with compression and deduplication to help you further reduce storage costs. It provides ONTAP’s data management capabilities, like snapshots, clones, and replication across your hybrid cloud environment that will improve staff productivity and responsiveness. Learn more
We are opening early access nominations for this capability now. So, if you are interested in learning more about the early access program, please send an email to vmc_fsx_ea@vmware.com“
Official blog with the announcement here
