Storage
End of Marketing: As of 31 October 2025, new deployments of VMware Solutions offerings are no longer available for new customers. Existing customers can still use and expand their active VMware® workloads on IBM Cloud®. For more information, see End of Marketing for VMware on IBM Cloud.
End of Marketing: As of 17 July 2025, new deployments of VMware Regulated Workloads instances are no longer available for new customers. If you are an existing customer, you can still add or delete clusters, add or delete VMware ESXi™ servers or NFS storage, and add or remove services for your existing Regulated Workloads instances. As an existing customer, you can also view or delete your Regulated Workloads instances.
IBM Cloud® for VMware® Regulated Workloads employs multiple storage types.
Management cluster
The management cluster storage is vSAN™. Security requirements mandate that multitenant shared storage is not permissible and in such cases the use of vSAN is necessary. vSAN requires deploying a minimum of four VMware ESXi™ hosts to the management cluster.
Gateway cluster
The gateway cluster uses only local data stores. Local data stores are suited to support the vSRX nodes since they do not require any vSphere DRS functions. The resiliency of the vSRX high availability cluster is a function of the clustering mechanism that is used by the vSRX and is not reliant on the underlying hosts.
Workload cluster
The workload clusters require the use of vSAN. vSAN is the only storage option on IBM Cloud that keeps all workload data within the account and delivers resiliency to the applications deployed to the workload clusters. All workload clusters are formed by using a minimum of four ESXi hosts to meet vSAN requirements.
Bare metal storage design
Physical storage design consists of the configuration of the physical disks that are installed in the physical hosts and the configuration of the shared network-attached storage if applicable. It includes the operating system (vSphere ESXi) and the disks that are used for storage of the virtual machines (VMs). Storage for VMs consists of local disks that are virtualized by VMware® vSAN.
Operating system disks
The vSphere ESXi hypervisor is installed in a persistent location. The physical hosts' boot drive consists of a single M.2 solid-state drive.
vSAN disks
VMware vSAN is the required storage platform. vSAN uses an all–flash configuration. This design allows for several configuration options, including 2U and 4U chassis, various numbers of disks, and various disk sizes.
All configurations use two vSAN disk groups of solid-state disks (SSD):
- Two disks for cache tier (one per disk group)
- Two or more SSDs for capacity tier (one or more per disk group, drive counts must match in each disk group)
All drives that are allocated for vSAN consumption are configured in single-disk RAID 0.