VMDC is available here.

With DII, dive deep into analyzing the workload IO profiles across virtual machines using real-time metrics.

VMDC serves as a quick first assessment step before implementing DII for ongoing monitoring and advanced AI/ML-driven analytics across heterogeneous environments.

With the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.2 comes the capability to convert existing vSphere infrastructure to VCF management domains and import additional clusters as VCF VI workload domains. With this, VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) can now fully be run on NetApp storage platforms without the requirement to use vSAN (yes, all of this without vSAN). Converting a cluster, with an existing NFS or FC datastore running on ONTAP, involves integrating existing infrastructure into a modern private cloud, which means there is no need for vSAN. This process benefits from the flexibility of NFS and FC storage, to ensure seamless data access and management. After a VCF management domain is established through the conversion process, administrators can efficiently import additional vSphere clusters, including those using NFS or FC datastores, into the VCF ecosystem. This integration not only enhances resource utilization but also simplifies the management of private cloud infrastructure, ensuring a smooth transition with minimal disruption to existing workloads.

Importing or converting existing ESXi clusters enables to leverage existing ONTAP storage as the datastore and there is no need for deploying vSAN or additional hardware resources, thus making VCF resource-efficient, cost optimized and simplified.

If VMware Cloud Foundation is a greenfield installation (creating a new vSphere infrastructure and Single Sign-On domain), then existing workloads running on older vSphere versions cannot be managed from Cloud Foundation. The first step is to migrate current application VMs running on existing vSphere environments into Cloud Foundation. The migration path depends on the migration choices—live, warm, and cold—and by the version of any existing vSphere environments. The following are the options in the order of priority depending on the source storage.

The easiest method in most cases is to use Storage vMotion. The cluster should have access to both the new ONTAP SAN or NAS datastore and the storage you are migrating the VMs from (SAN, NAS, etc.). The process is simple: Select one or more VMs in the vSphere Web Client, right-click the selection and click Migrate. Choose the storage-only option, select the new ONTAP datastore as the destination, and proceed with the last few steps of the migration wizard. vSphere will copy the files – VMX, NVRAM, VMDK(s), etc. – from the old storage to the ONTAP powered datastore. Note that vSphere will potentially be copying large amounts of data. This method does not require any downtime. The VMs continue to run as they are being migrated.
Other options include host-based migration, and 3rd-party replication to perform the migration.

NetApp offers an industry-leading SaaS-based disaster recovery (DRaaS) solution that can significantly lower the costs and reduce complexity. There's no need to acquire and deploy expensive alternative infrastructure.

Implementing disaster recovery through block-level replication from the production site to the disaster recovery site is a resilient and cost-effective method for safeguarding workloads against site outages and data corruption events, such as ransomware attacks. Using NetApp SnapMirror replication, VMware workloads running on on-premises ONTAP systems with NFS or VMFS datastores can be replicated to another ONTAP storage system located in a designated recovery data center where VMware is also deployed.

Use the BlueXP disaster recovery service, which is integrated into the NetApp BlueXP console wherein customers can discover their on-premises VMware vCenters along with ONTAP storage, create resource groupings, create a disaster recovery plan, associate it with resource groups, and test or execute failover and failback. SnapMirror provides storage-level block replication to keep the two sites up to date with incremental changes, resulting in an RPO of up to 5 minutes. It is also possible to simulate DR procedures as a regular drill without impacting the production and replicated datastores or incurring additional storage costs. BlueXP disaster recovery takes advantage of ONTAP's FlexClone technology to create a space-efficient copy of the NFS or VMFS datastore from the last replicated Snapshot on the DR site. Once the DR test is complete, simply delete the test environment, again without any impact to actual replicated production resources. When there is a need (planned or unplanned) for actual failover, with a few clicks, the BlueXP disaster recovery service will orchestrate all the steps needed to automatically bring up the protected virtual machines on designated disaster recovery site. The service will also reverse the SnapMirror relationship to the primary site and replicate any changes from secondary to primary for a failback operation, when needed. All of these can be achieved at a fraction of the cost compared to other well-known alternatives.

Detecting ransomware as early as possible is crucial in preventing its spread and avoiding costly downtime. An effective ransomware detection strategy must incorporate multiple layers of protection at ESXi host and guest VM levels. While multiple security measures are implemented to create a comprehensive defense against ransomware attacks, ONTAP enables adding more layers of protection to the overall defense approach. To name a few capabilities, it starts with Snapshots, Autonomous Ransomware Protection, and tamper-proof snapshots.

Let's look at how the above-mentioned capabilities work with VMware to protect and recover the data against ransomware.

To protect vSphere and guest VMs against attacks, it is essential to take several measures including segmenting, utilizing EDR/XDR/SIEM for endpoints and installing security updates and adhering to the appropriate hardening guidelines. Each virtual machine residing on a datastore also hosts a standard operating system. Ensure enterprise server anti-malware product suites are installed and regularly updated on them which is an essential component of multi-layered ransomware protection strategy. Along with this, enable Autonomous Ransomware Protection (ARP) on the NFS volume powering the datastore. ARP leverages built-in onbox ML that looks at volume workload activity plus data entropy to automatically detect ransomware. ARP is configurable through the ONTAP built-in management interface or system Manager and is enabled on a per-volume basis.

In addition to the multiple layered approach, there is also a native built-in ONTAP solution for protecting unauthorized deletion of backup Snapshot copies. It is known as multi-admin verification or MAV which is available in ONTAP 9.11.1 and later. The ideal approach will be to use queries for MAV specific operations.

With ONTAP One, all the security feature sets that act as an additional layer are completely free. Access NetApp's robust suite of data protection, security and all the features that ONTAP offers without worrying about licensing barriers.

OpenShift Virtualization may make sense if:

Proxmox may make sense if:

Reasons to migrate to VMware Cloud offerings:

For those customers looking to use VMware Cloud on any hyperscaler as the disaster recovery target, ONTAP storage powered datastores (Azure NetApp Files, FSx ONTAP, Google Cloud NetApp volumes) can be used to replicate data from on-premises using any validated third-party solution that provides VM replication capability. By adding ONTAP storage powered datastores, it will enable cost optimized disaster recovery on the destination with fewer number of ESXi hosts. This also enables to decommission the secondary site in the on-premises environment thus enabling significant cost savings.

ONTAP is the right platform for any hypervisor in on-premises or for any workload in the cloud. ONTAP supports prominent hypervisors in on-premises environment and has widely adopted first party offering in each cloud. This enables customers to handle the licensing changes easily by navigating through the appropriate deployment model.

To summarize, VMware continues to be the de facto hypervisor for organizations. However, every IT organization is evaluating alternate options and ONTAP will play an important role in any option they select.