Cloud Native Storage is a solution that provides comprehensive data management for stateful applications in vSphere. When you use Cloud Native Storage, you can create containerized stateful applications capable of surviving restarts and outages. Stateful containers leverage storage exposed by vSphere while using such primitives as standard volume, persistent volume, and dynamic provisioning.

With Cloud Native Storage, you can create persistent container volumes independent of virtual machine and container life cycle. vSphere storage backs the volumes, and you can set a storage policy directly on the volumes. After you create the volumes, you can review them and their backing storage objects in the vSphere Client, and monitor their storage policy compliance.

vSphere Cloud Native Storage supports persistent volumes in the following Kubernetes distributions:
  • Generic Kubernetes, also called vanilla, that you install from the official repositories. This vSphere Storage documentation covers only generic Kubernetes.
  • vSphere IaaS control plane, formerly called vSphere with Tanzu. For more information, see the vSphere IaaS Control Plane Concepts and Planning documentation.