VMware Cloud Flex Storage is a scalable, elastic, and natively integrated cloud storage service, fully managed by VMware and delivered with simple cloud economics.
These release notes provide information about VMware Cloud Flex Storage product features, system requirements and software support, caveats and limitations, and any known or fixed issues related to the service.
27 February 2024
New Supported AWS Region: Protect and recover your workloads in the Asia Pacific (Hyderabad) AWS region.
2 February 2024
Multiple datastores supported per-SDDC. You can mount up to 4 datastores per SDDC and have a total of 6 datastores per storage region.
27 October 2023
New Supported AWS Regions: Create and mount datastores in the Europe (Zurich) and Asia Pacific (Melbourne) AWS regions.
17 July 2023
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.
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%.
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
VMware Live Cyber Recovery and VMware Cloud Flex Storage compatibility. VMware Live Cyber Recovery can now protect VMs stored on VMware Cloud Flex Storage datastores that are attached to VMware Cloud on AWS SDDCs . The VMware Live Cyber Recovery protected SDDC must be in a separate AWS region from the recovery SDDC.
8 February 2023
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.
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
VMware Cloud Flex Storage does not support stretched clusters.
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.
AWS GovCloud (US) is not supported.
PCI-DSS SDDCs are not supported.
Cloning VMs that reside on a VMware Cloud Flex Storage requires a full data copy and hence can take some time to complete.
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
Each SDDC can be associated with up four VMware Cloud Flex Storage datastores.
Once you create a datastore, you cannot move it to a different AWS availability zone.
Non-ASCII characters are not supported in the datastore name.
Other Restrictions
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.
FIXED Daily Auto-support logs not being sent to to support
In one customer environment, the Auto-support service was not sending daily logs to support. This has been fixed.
FIXED Datastore creation failed
In one situation, creating a new datastore on VMware Cloud Flex Storage failed, which was determined to be caused by some changes made by AWS to timestamp format for a backend service. This has been fixed.
New: Read-only UI after deactivating/reactivating a storage region
If you deployed a storage region prior to the VMware Cloud Flex Storage 2 February 2024 release, deactivated the region, and then reactivated it, when you manage that region the UI will be locked in read-only mode. (This issue is not relevant if you have been upgraded to the 2 February 2024 release.)
Workaround: Log in to VMware Cloud Services and delete the VMware Cloud Flex Storage regional "VCDS OAuth app". These OAuth apps are named based on the region they belong to. For example, if your storage region was activated in us-west-2 region, then the OAuth app is named "VCDS OAuth app - us-west-2". After you delete the OAuth app, wait at least five minutes and then log back in.
VMware Cloud Flex Storage subscription prices not showing discounted rate
When creating a subscription for VMware Cloud Flex Storage in the Global Storage Console, the prices and total amount being shown while creating the subscription do not represent any discounts that have been applied to the subscription. This issue only affects the display of the subscription prices, and when the purchase is completed and invoiced, the correct discounted rate is applied.
Datastores list incorrectly shows physical capacity
When you select Datastores from the left navigation of the VMware Cloud Flex Storage UI, the datastores list shows shows an incorrect capacity value for the datastore. It should display the logical amount of storage being used.
To view the logical storage currently being used by a datastore, click an individual datastore and view Cloud storage.
Do not mount datastore if major SDDC operation is in progress
In some cases, if you attempt to mount a datastore to a cluster while the SDDC is running a major operation, such as adding or removing hosts from a cluster, or the datastore mount operation might have issues.
Workaround: Check your SDDC to ensure no major processes are running before you mount a datastore to a cluster on the SDDC.
