Microsoft recently announced the preview of disk pool enabling Azure Disk Storage as a persistent storage option for Azure VMware Solution - a vSAN hyper-converged vSphere cluster. With this persistent storage option, customers have another choice for running VMware workloads on Azure.
Disk pool is an Azure service that surfaces an Internet Small Computer Systems Interface (iSCSI) endpoint for all underlying disks added as storage targets, enabling customers to access Azure Disk Storage for high-performance, durable block storage.
With Disk pool, enterprises can connect Azure VMware Solution to a disk pool and add disks as VMware datastores in scenarios such as storage-intensive workloads and disaster recovery. Moreover, it is similar to connecting VMware to the iSCSI endpoint exposed on on-premises SAN appliances. Each disk in the pool is presented as an iSCSI target and attached to the cluster as a datastore. The Disk pool hosts the iSCSI endpoint on Azure VMs.
Source: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/disks-pools
By adding disks, customers can scale the storage of their Azure VMware Solution environment independent of computing resources and potentially lower their overall total cost of ownership (TCO). Furthermore, they can leverage the Azure Disk Storage capabilities, including performance tiers, dynamic scaling, and bursting, enabling them to scale performance and optimize costs.
Customers can easily use the Disk pool feature by registering their Azure subscription for the resource providers and preparing networking and disk resources. Next, they create the disk pool and add disks depending on the workload to the disk pool. And finally, they add the disk pool to Azure VMware Solution. Note that Microsoft provides detailed guidance on this process.
Yuemin Lu, principal program manager, Azure Storage, states in an Azure blog post on the public preview:
Today, we see storage needs grow exponentially—with the world’s total data expected to grow from 45ZB in 2019 to 175ZB by 20251—and resource scalability and flexibility with the cloud has become a necessity for any enterprise. The new integration of disk pool with Azure VMware Solution combines the power of familiar VMware technology running on Azure, with efficient Azure Disk Storage.
Currently, customers can connect the disk pool to an Azure VMware Solution private cloud in one of the supported Azure regions: Australia East, Canada Central, East US, West US 2, Japan East, and North Europe. Additionally, if the private cloud is deployed in a non-supported region, customers can redeploy it in a supported region.
Lastly, the pricing depends on the underlying Azure resources deployed in a disk pool and the attached disks. More details on pricing are available on the Azure Disk Storage pricing page.