Supercharge VMware vSAN with NetApp ONTAP Select

VMware vSAN is a Hyper-Converge Infrastructure solution which is part of VMware Cloud Foundation  (VCF) or VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) bundling. 

While VMware vSAN helps customer to achieve a SAN like storage pooling using local HDD on each server together, it is still limited on features it encompasses in comparison to a physical SAN.

This is where NetApp ONTAP Select which will complement the missing gap. ONTAP Select is the virtual appliance of the well known ONTAP that runs on all NetApp Unified Storage appliance.

One of the major function that ONTAP Select brings to vSAN is on Data management and Protection. This is very useful for protection specific applications especially application aware application by ONTAP Select. Some of the enterprise applications supported can be found here. A detailed kb from Broadcom can be found here.

With ONTAP Select, these applications that are supported can be protected via SnapMirror which can provide an application consistent snapshot (vSphere Snapshot is not application aware) or replication across two different cluster to another ONTAP Select cluster or ONTAP Appliance (Storage Appliance) vis SnapMirror. This gives customer not only data protection but also provide flexible option in planning for data management and disaster recovery options. Such as from edge/remote location running ONTAP Select to a main site running ONTAP Appliance, etc. Or running ONTAP on site replicating data to ONTAP file or Cloud Volume in the cloud such as AWS, Azure and GCP. SnapMirror also support with VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM).

With the ability to deploy ONTAP Select onto VMware vSAN, this increases the capability of VMware vSAN, and providing customer with some of the ONTAP features that are not available on HCI solutions.

Lastly, ONTAP integrate with VMware vCenter to help in managing the storage more efficiently. That's what we call better together.

ONTAP Select can run on KVM to provide storage protocol such as NFS and Block to any systems.

Check out some of the resources below on ONTAP:

• Requirements for ONTAP Select on VMware vSphere
• System Requirements for ONTAP Select
• Supported features for ONTAP Select on VMware vSphere
• ONTAP Select licensing
• ONTAP interop
• ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere