6 August 2024
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OAuth 2.0 Apps for inter-service authentication. VMware Cloud Flex Storage now leverages OAuth 2.0 apps to communicate with VMware Cloud Services backend services and VMware Cloud on AWS. For current users, if your existing OAuth app expires before you are upgraded to the latest version, see Recreate the OAuth app and reauthorize VMware Cloud Flex Storage.
27 February 2024
2 February 2024
27 October 2023
17 July 2023
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OAuth app authentication replaces API tokens. VMware Cloud Flex Storage now uses OAuth for backend application authentication instead of using API tokens. OAuth app authentication never expires and is Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) compatible.
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UI health reporting. From the Monitoring page you can now view the health status of your datastores, and quickly see which need attention. Status also changes based on available storage capacity for a datastore, so you are aware when overall used storage capacity for a datastore rises above 85%.
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New AWS Region Support: Seoul, Hong Kong, Bahrain, Osaka. VMware Cloud Flex Storage is now supported in the Seoul (ap-northeast-2), Osaka (ap-northeast-3), Hong Kong (ap-east-1), Bahrain (me-south-1) AWS regions.
24 March 2023
8 February 2023
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VMware Live Cyber Recovery and VMware Cloud Flex Storage compatibility. VMware Live Cyber Recovery and VMware Cloud Flex Storage are now compatible, and you can have both services in the same organization as long as the deployments are in different regions.
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New AWS region support. VMware Cloud Flex Storage is now available in the Mumbai, Sydney, Singapore, and Tokyo Asia Pacific AWS regions.
14 December 2022 - Announcing VMware Cloud Flex Storage!
VMware Cloud Flex Storage is a Storage-as-a-Service Offering for VMware Cloud on AWS, and provides the ability to provision and scale storage independently of their SDDC hosts. VMware Cloud Flex Storage is fully VMware-managed and natively integrated, so you can cost-effectively supplement your capacity needs.
VMware Cloud Flex Storage offers a simple pay-per-utilized GiB consumption model. You can buy a subscription, or pay on demand. With this model, you can scale storage at a low cost without adding hosts, which reduces your overall total cost of ownership (TCO).
The initial release of VMware Cloud Flex Storage provides NFS datastores for workloads that do not require VMware vSAN performance for mission critical or consistent low latency storage requirements. You can independently provision and scale storage capacity external to VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC hosts, up to ~800 TiB of logical/usable capacity.
VMware Cloud Flex Storage utilizes the Scale-Out Cloud Filesystem (SCFS), which provides built-in data services and integrity features that are always on by default. Storage capacity is presented as an NFS datastore that can be attached to existing vSAN clusters in your SDDC, and is managed through vCenter and through a dedicated management interface.
You can create datastores, mount or unmount datastores for SDDC clusters, and then delete datastores when you no longer need them. Datastore monitoring provides performance statistics such as IOPS, throughput, latency, cache hit rate, and logical storage usage. VMware Cloud Flex Storage offers a simple pay-per-utilized GiB consumption model. You can buy a subscription, or pay on demand, as you need.
VMware Cloud Flex Storage supports VMware Cloud on AWS SDDCs version 1.18v3 and above running i3, i3en, and i4i hosts.
Caveats and Limitations
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VMware Cloud Flex Storage does not support stretched clusters.
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VMware Site Recovery and VMware Site Recovery Manager are supported, but VMware Cloud Flex Storage cannot be used as a VMware Site Recovery source or target datastore.
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AWS GovCloud (US) is not supported.
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PCI-DSS SDDCs are not supported.
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Cloning VMs that reside on a VMware Cloud Flex Storage requires a full data copy and hence can take some time to complete.
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VMware vSphere Virtual Volumes (vVols), vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA), and VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI) are not supported with VMware Cloud Flex Storage.
Restrictions for Creating a Datastore
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Each SDDC can be associated with up four VMware Cloud Flex Storage datastores.
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Once you create a datastore, you cannot move it to a different AWS availability zone.
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Non-ASCII characters are not supported in the datastore name.
Other Restrictions
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VMware Cloud Flex Storage does not support organization level IP Allow List authentication policies. VMware Cloud organization-level IP "Allow Lists" specify IP ranges that are allowed to authenticate using VMware Cloud Services. If this feature is enabled, VMware Cloud Flex Storage will be prevented from accessing the customer account, and you might be prevented from mounting your first datastore. If your organization leverages the organization level IP “Allow List” feature, please contact support prior to deployment for assistance.