As the private cloud landscape evolves, VMware Cloud Service Providers (VCSPs) continue to look for ways to simplify operations, scale with efficiency, and deliver differentiated services to their tenants. With the release of VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.0, this is a great time for VCSPs to explore the benefits VMware vSAN offers your business.
With VCF 9.0, we’re doubling down on powerful new capabilities powered by vSAN that help VCSPs modernize their infrastructure, streamline operations, and meet the dynamic demands of modern applications. As you know, the VCF license includes 1 TiB of vSAN per core, a benefit that many VCSPs can leverage more strategically to reduce the cost of their private cloud deployments.
In this blog, we’ll walk through what’s new in vSAN with VCF 9.0 and how VCSPs can take advantage of these features to build more resilient, scalable, and service-rich storage as a service and private cloud offerings to better serve their customers.
Bringing Existing vSAN Environments into VCF
With VCF 9.0, we’re extending support beyond greenfield deployments. For VCSPs who already run vSphere environments using vSAN HCI, vSAN Stretched Clusters, or vSAN 2-Node configurations, these can now be imported into VCF. This lets you bring your existing “islands” of private cloud environments under the centralized lifecycle, security, and operational management benefits of VCF without starting from scratch.
This is a huge win for partners looking to unify their private cloud operations under a single platform while preserving their infrastructure investments.
vSAN Stretched Clusters Just Got Better
Stretched clusters continue to be a go-to solution for VCSPs serving tenants with zero data loss (RPO=0) requirements. As a service provider, your maintenance windows are critical. While customers understand that maintenance is important, they still expect their systems to stay up and running without disruption. With VCF 9.0, we’re simplifying one of the more time-consuming operations, system maintenance. Previously, maintenance meant putting hosts into maintenance mode one by one. Now, an entire site can be placed into maintenance mode at once, significantly speeding up operations, reducing admin overhead, and improving the efficiency of scheduled maintenance windows.
What’s more, vSAN stretched storage clusters can now be paired with stretched compute clusters, a major enhancement for delivering high availability across all layers of the infrastructure. This combination ensures improved uptime and data resiliency for your dedicated and multi-tenant customer workloads.
vSAN Operations at Scale
Managing diverse cloud footprints is a common challenge for VCSPs, especially those operating a mix of dedicated and multi-tenant private clouds. With VCF 9.0, multiple cloud instances can now be federated into VCF Operations, giving providers a single pane view to monitor, manage, and lifecycle vSAN clusters across environments.
And there’s more, VCF Operations now includes a powerful new feature: vSAN Performance Diagnostics. This tool can:
- Run benchmarks to optimize IOPS, latency, and throughput
- Analyze historical performance data
- Identify bottlenecks and provide recommendations
- Generate performance graphs for advanced troubleshooting
This gives VCSPs deep insight into storage performance trends and helps ensure service levels are met.
Scaling for Modern Applications: File Services for Kubernetes
As Kubernetes adoption accelerates, so do the demands on the underlying storage. vSAN isn’t just about block storage anymore. With vSAN File Services in VCF 9.0, the limit of file shares per cluster has been increased from 250 to 500, supporting growing needs for SMB and NFS file shares in containerized environments.
This enhancement gives VCSPs more flexibility to support Kubernetes-based workloads with high-density multi-tenant file services.
Multi-Tenant Storage as a Service, Refined
Let’s talk about what matters most to many VCSPs, multi-tenancy.
VCF 9.0 introduces new innovations in VCF Automation, which brings familiar capabilities from VMware Cloud Director (VCD) into VCF-native environments. Now, VCSPs can offer:
- Per-tenant Volume Services on a shared vSAN cluster
- Support for Persistent Volumes for Kubernetes workloads (ReadWriteOnce and ReadWriteMany)
- Granular storage policy control based on tenant subscription level
- Quota enforcement per tenant, with flexibility to span multiple or dedicated clusters
- Self-service storage consumption for tenant admins with provider defined guardrails
This enables a robust “Storage as a Service” model that’s scalable, secure, and customized per tenant.
Advancing Disaster Recovery with vSAN
Many partners offer highly robust Managed Disaster Recovery capabilities, backed by extensive hands-on experience from conducting DR testing multiple times each month. This brings a level of operational maturity that complements and enhances customer resilience strategies.
A solid private cloud solution isn’t complete without robust DR capabilities.
In VCF 5.2, we introduced vSAN Data Protection for local snapshots. Now, with VCF 9.0, we go a step further by enabling on-prem snapshot replication for Disaster Recovery from one VCSP data center to another, integrated with VMware Live Site Recovery (VLSR). VCSPs can now:
- Replicate snapshots for offsite protection
- Import vSAN Protection Groups into VLSR
- Orchestrate DR plans with RPOs as low as 1 minute
This empowers VCSPs to offer premium DR services with minimal data loss and fast recovery times.
See: Using vSAN Snapshots to Expand your Protection Capabilities youtube video for deeper understanding of this benefit.
Lowering your TCO
As you know, the VCF license includes 1 TiB of vSAN per core, many VCSPs who used to rely on Fibre Channel or NFS storage are looking at how vSAN can help them save money. VCF lets partners build cloud services that are easier to manage, with built-in tools to handle compute, networking, and storage all in one place.
Many partners have found vSAN easy to manage because it utilizes the existing storage in existing servers or can be easily extended with more internal drives. Plus, with vSAN’s flexibility, you can start small and grow over time using affordable, standard hardware. This helps lower the total cost of ownership (TCO) for storage and can lead to better profit margins.
Get Hands-On with VCF 9.0 and vSAN
As you can see, vSAN in VCF 9.0 delivers major innovations across lifecycle management, performance, resiliency, DR, and multi-tenant operations. Whether you’re modernizing your current private cloud or building new services for Kubernetes and DR, there’s never been a better time to get hands-on.
So, if you haven’t already, use those NFR licenses and spin up VCF 9.0 with vSAN in your lab. It’s the best way to explore all the new capabilities and start shaping your next big customer win.
Ready to build the next generation of private cloud? Let vSAN in VCF 9.0 be the foundation.
A special thanks to Steve Lord for co-authoring this blog with me and for contributing his deep domain expertise.
