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Learn about NetApp Workload Factory for VMware

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NetApp Workload Factory for VMware provides tools to move your data from on-premises systems to Amazon Elastic VMware Service (EVS), VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC) or Amazon EC2.

What is NetApp Workload Factory for VMware?

NetApp Workload Factory for VMware provides a planning center and migration advisors that enable you to analyze your current virtual machine configurations in on-premises vSphere environments. The migration advisors then generate a plan to deploy recommended VM layouts to Amazon EVS, Amazon EC2, or VMware Cloud on AWS vSphere clusters and use customized Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP file systems as external datastores. The planning center, acting as the Workload Factory for VMware dashboard, enables you to manage saved VM inventory datasets, and saved migration plans and provision any of the migration plans that you have saved.

Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP is an external NFS datastore built on NetApp's ONTAP file system that can be attached to Amazon EVS or Amazon EC2 instances or VMware Cloud on AWS vSphere clusters. There is no need to add more hosts to increase available storage; instead, just use FSx for ONTAP volumes as external datastores to complement vSAN datastores. This provides you with a flexible, high-performance, virtualized storage infrastructure that scales independently of compute resources.

For more information about Workload Factory, refer to the Workload Factory overview.

How the VMware migration advisors work

The migration advisors can help you move on-premises virtual machines (VMs) and their data, running on any VMware supported datastores, to Amazon EVS, Amazon EC2, or VMware Cloud datastores, which includes supplemental NFS datastores on an FSx for ONTAP file system.

Note that you can attach up to four (4) FSx for ONTAP volumes to a single vSphere cluster on VMware Cloud on AWS.

What you can do with the migration advisors

The migration advisors provide the following functionality:

  • Analyze current on-premises VM configurations

  • Determine which VMs to migrate to Amazon EC2, Amazon EVS, or VMware Cloud on AWS

  • Identify the space required on FSx for ONTAP volumes to be used as VM external datastores

  • Review resulting report to understand the deployment steps

  • Perform the actual deployment

The migration advisor supports configuration planning for a single Amazon EVS or Amazon EC2 instance or VMware Cloud on AWS cluster connected to a single FSx for ONTAP file system.

Benefits of using the migration advisors

Transitioning parts of your current infrastructure to Amazon EC2 or VMware Cloud on AWS using Amazon FSx for ONTAP as external NFS datastores provides the following benefits:

  • Cost optimization due to host and storage decoupling and advanced data efficiency

  • Ability to grow the storage capacity as needed without the need to purchase additional host instances

  • NetApp ONTAP data management capabilities in the cloud, such as space efficient snapshots, cloning, compression, deduplication, compaction, and replication

  • Reduction in management of hardware refreshes

  • Ability to change data throughput, IOPS, and the size of the file system in addition to increase or decrease the size of volumes

  • High availability supporting multiple Availability Zone (AZ) deployments

  • Cost and latency reduction from single-AZ configurations that use VPC peering without requiring a Transit Gateway

Tools to use NetApp Workload Factory

You can use NetApp Workload Factory with the following tools:

  • Workload Factory console: The Workload Factory console provides a visual, holistic view of your applications and projects.

  • NetApp Console: The NetApp Console provides a hybrid interface experience so that you can use Workload Factory along with other NetApp data services.

  • Ask me: Use the Ask me AI assistant to ask questions and learn more about Workload Factory without leaving the Workload Factory console. Access Ask me from the Workload Factory help menu.

  • CloudShell CLI: Workload Factory includes a CloudShell CLI to manage and operate AWS and NetApp environments across accounts from a single, browser-based CLI. Access CloudShell from the top bar of the Workload Factory console.

  • REST API: Use the Workload Factory REST APIs to deploy and manage your FSx for ONTAP file systems and other AWS resources.

  • CloudFormation: Use AWS CloudFormation code to perform the actions you defined in the Workload Factory console to model, provision, and manage AWS and third-party resources from the CloudFormation stack in your AWS account.

  • Terraform NetApp Workload Factory provider: Use Terraform to build and manage infrastructure workflows generated in the Workload Factory console.

Cost

There is no cost for using Workload Factory for VMware.

You'll need to pay for AWS resources that you deploy based on the recommendations from the migration advisors.

Licensing

No special licenses are needed from NetApp to use Workload Factory for VMware.

Regions

Workload Factory is supported in all commercial regions where FSx for ONTAP is supported. View supported Amazon regions.

The following AWS regions aren't supported:

  • China regions

  • GovCloud (US) regions

  • Secret Cloud

  • Top Secret Cloud