Elastic vSAN Brings Welcomed Flexibility to VMC on AWS
Don’t think VMC on AWS is a good fit for your organization? That may have been the case at one point. However, VMware has rolled out roughly 25 updates of varying scope and function to VMC on AWS since last August. With some help from our Data Center team, we decided to cover one particular string of updates that could inspire you to take another look at VMC on AWS.
Before we go any further, however, first let’s talk about the problem those updates were deployed to solve. It’s no secret that storage and compute needs don’t always grow in tandem. This presented an issue for organizations using VMC on AWS. Organizations that needed more storage space could add hosts to their environment, but this would pump up both their storage and compute capacity. Since VMC on AWS is billed on a per-host basis, organizations would see their monthly bills go up on account of adding storage space they needed and compute capacity they didn’t.
As a solution, this one wasn’t all that great. Faced with this possibility, organizations with less predictable or linear growth would simply write off VMC on AWS as an option. Then, VMware and Amazon released Elastic vSAN.
Elastic vSAN: A better, more cost effective storage solution
Unveiled earlier this year, Elastic vSAN is a union of VMware’s vSAN and Amazon’s Elastic Block Store (EBS) technologies. ESB provides secure, reliable, and scalable block storage supported by Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud. Elastic vSAN merges that with the enterprise-grade storage virtualization capabilities of vSAN.
The result is a much better answer for organizations in need of more VMC on AWS storage that would rather not incur the expense of adding hosts (and unnecessary compute capacity). Elastic vSAN makes it possible for organizations to decide early on how much per-host storage space they’ll require. VMC on AWS takes that information and populates a cluster automatically and accordingly, using native AWS tools like ESB to help carry the storage load.
Arraya’s Data Center team members have been big on the upside offered by Elastic vSAN for some time. In fact, they made sure to highlight it as one of the VMC on AWS features to watch in a blog post from this past spring. Their enthusiasm has only increased since that point.
What’s new with Elastic vSAN?
At this year’s VMworld conference, VMware announced the availability of Elastic vSAN in its fullest form to date. During the event, VMware debuted Elastic vSAN support for scaling up the storage capacity of AWS cluster hosts post-deployment. It’s worth noting this is a one-way street in that capacity can be scaled up but not down. Still, as we outlined above, this ability can make a big difference in organizational data center road maps moving forward.
Also, Elastic vSAN’s global footprint has grown in recent weeks. Upon its initial release, Elastic vSAN was only available in four AWS regions, specifically: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), and Europe Central (Frankfurt). That is no longer the case, however, as VMware and Amazon have brought Elastic vSAN to nine new regions, including US West (N. California) as well as regions in Asia, Europe, and Canada.
Given the evolution of Elastic vSAN so far, it seems the Arraya team isn’t the only one excited about what the solution has to offer.
Next steps: Is VMC on AWS right for you now?
Elastic vSAN’s ability to right-size storage capacity and cloud expenses promises to open VMC on AWS’s doors to organizations that may have otherwise been left out. If yours is ready to take another look (or a first look!) at VMC on AWS, Arraya’s Data Center team is here to help. Our experts will work with your team to analyze your existing environment and organizational objectives to determine if VMC on AWS is actually the right path. If you’d like to schedule an assessment or learn more about Elastic vSAN or VMC on AWS, reach out to us at: https://www.arrayasolutions.com//contact-us/.
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