Part 3: Using Pure Storage with VMware Cloud Foundation
As we covered in the introduction to VMware Cloud Foundation, Workload Domains represent three or more ESXi hosts aggregated together in one or more clusters under a single vCenter instance. They are deployed then managed by VMware Cloud Foundation administrators within SDDC Manager. These are units of compute, network, memory and storage that can be rapidly expanded and contracted, upgraded, and orchestrated via integrated connectivity to the vRealize suite. Once deployed, Workload Domains can be assigned to one or more groups of tenant organizations who can then deploy, manage, and use the VMs and applications required for their respective use case(s). A key differentiator between Management Domains and Workload Domains is that Workload Domains allow for other types of Principal Storage besides vSAN.
A brief description of the differences between Principal Storage and Supplemental Storage and how it relates to VCF is in order to set the table for the rest of this document. Fortunately, it is very easy to distinguish between the two storage types.
Principal and Supplemental Storage for VMware Cloud Foundation
Principal Storage is any storage type that you can connect directly to your Workload Domain as a part of the setup process within SDDC Manager. Today, that’s comprised of vSAN, NFS, and VMFS on Fibre Channel (as of June, 2020).
Supplemental Storage simply means that you connect your storage system to a Workload (or Management) Domain after it has been deployed. Examples of the Supplemental Storage include the iSCSI and NVMe-oF* protocols and VMware vVols (use vVols with any supported underlying protocol).
*Requires VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0+ and vSphere 7.0+
Workload Domain Deployment with VMFS on FC as Principal Storage
Using Workload Domains with vVols as Supplemental Storage