Organizations with existing on-premises VMware investments looking for efficient and cost-effective ways to modernize their deployments by migrating, bursting, extending, or protecting (backup, disaster recovery) copies on AWS have faced several challenges. With the release of Amazon Elastic VMware Service (Amazon EVS) there is now a native AWS service that makes it possible to run VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) directly in an Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (VPC).

Amazon EVS makes it possible to extend existing VCF deployments to AWS, burst into AWS to expand performance during peak usage, and entirely run VCF workloads on AWS to facilitate modernizations, data center exits, consolidations, and other use cases.

Although Amazon EVS provides strong benefits, the default hyper-converged architecture couples compute and storage, preventing independent scale of one or the other as business needs dictate. In today's data-centric world, storage demands in many organizations are higher than those for compute. However, with the VMware hyper-converged architecture, storage resources are coupled with compute resources. That means scaling storage can only be done by adding compute hosts that will never be used. It's a situation that can raise costs considerably, especially in storage-heavy workloads.

To solve this issue, AWS and NetApp offer Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP (FSx for ONTAP) as the external storage service for Amazon EVS. FSx for ONTAP is an AWS-native storage service that delivers the high performance, data resilience, and cost-efficiency features of NetApp ONTAP software. By using FSx for ONTAP as external storage, Amazon EVS users can scale compute and storage resources independently, allowing for optimal total cost of ownership (TCO).

This document will present detailed steps for creating an FSx for ONTAP file system and attaching it for use as either an Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) or Network File System (NFS) datastore for use with Amazon EVS.

This guide provides instructions on how to set up an FSx for ONTAP datastore for Amazon EVS, as well as best practices, supportability requirements, sizing considerations, and other information to help you plan, design, and implement the integration.

This tutorial is intended for Cloud Architects and Cloud Administrators familiar with VMware vSphere, Amazon EVS, the AWS Console, and FSx for ONTAP.

In this section, we will give an overview of the solution architecture for using FSx for ONTAP as a datastore for Amazon EVS.

Below you can see a high-level view of the architecture of the FSx for ONTAP datastore with an Amazon EVS environment within an AWS VPC.