Disk pool for Azure VMware Solution now in public preview
Published date: July 13, 2021
We are announcing the preview of disk pool enabling Azure Disk Storage as a persistent storage option for Azure VMware Solution. Disk pool is an Azure service that surfaces an Internet Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI) endpoint for all underlying disks added as storage targets, enabling you to access Azure Disk Storage for high-performance, durable block storage. You can connect Azure VMware Solution to a disk pool and add disks as VMware datastores. This allows you to scale the storage of your AVS environment independent of compute resources, lowering your overall TCO. In addition to providing access to block storage on Azure, disk pool also integrates with Azure VMware Solution. It is fully managed by Azure requiring minimal effort on behalf of the Azure VMware Solution administrators.
Common use cases and scenarios
- Storage-intensive workloads: For your storage-intensive workloads running on Azure VMware Solution, you can easily reach the limits of the storage capacity and performance of vSAN built on top of the AVS nodes. With disk pool, you can scale up your storage to either host active datasets with Ultra Disk Storage, or tier cooler data to Premium SSDs for persistent storage.
- Disaster Recovery: Customers looking to use Azure VMware Solution as a Disaster Recovery (DR) site can leverage disk pools to deploy a minimal cluster comprising of 3 nodes. Once the disk pool has been setup and attached to the Azure VMware Solution cluster, you can use DR products like VMware Site Recovery Manager with vSphere Replication to replicate the storage of the protected workloads from their on-premises VMware SDDC to the disk pool attached to the Azure VMware Solution cluster. You can adjust the storage needed as your workload protection needs change, helping you to keep the overall DR TCO low.