Home > Storage > PowerFlex > White Papers > Using Dell PowerFlex NFS with VMware Cloud Foundation > Executive summary
VMware Cloud Foundation, or VCF, is a complete software-defined infrastructure platform that encompasses all the required components to run a private, public, or hybrid cloud. The heart of VCF is the software-defined data center, or SDDC Manager. From the SDDC Manager, the user can control all aspects of the VCF environment, providing a single management interface. The other components of the VCF platform include vSphere for compute, vSAN for storage, NSX-T for networking, and the vRealize Suite (optional) for management.
VCF uses a concept of domains. The management domain comprises the heart of the VCF implementation and requires vSAN storage. Its main function is to run the VCF environment. A workload domain is designed to run customer workloads. Workload domains are managed by a single vCenter Server instance and can consist of one or more vSphere clusters. A workload domain offers the flexibility of using various storage solutions other than vSAN, such as FC, vVols, and NFS. This permits the use of more robust storage array solutions like NFS on PowerFlex.
Network File System (NFS) is a distributed file system protocol that allows users to access files over a network. NFS is a common choice with storage for workload domains because it is simple to implement and manage. When using NFS storage with VCF, it is important to pick a platform that meets the performance and scalability requirements of your workloads. PowerFlex is the perfect solution for VCF as its NAS implementation can scale up to 16 nodes, supports both NFS 3 and 4.1, and delivers superior performance when matched with a high performance, low latency network.
This paper provides an overview of how to implement NFS storage with VCF when deployed on a PowerFlex platform. It covers deployment of both the management and workload domain, configuration of NFS on PowerFlex, and best practices when using NFS with VCF.
Note: PowerFlex does not support VMware Virtual Volumes with PowerFlex 4.x. Therefore, it is not an available option for VCF storage.