Storage-only nodes

A storage-only node, also known as storage node, is a VMware Engine node type that does not have any customer-usable cores and only has customer-usable storage. These nodes can be added to a cluster of VMware Engine hyper converged nodes to increase the storage capacity of the cluster without adding cores to the cluster.

Storage-only nodes can only be added to a cluster that has at least two HCI nodes and can make up to 50% of total nodes in a cluster. A dedicated cluster made up entirely of storage-only nodes is not supported because the workload VMs can't be run on storage-only nodes.

Storage-only nodes are available using the Google Cloud CLI and VMware Engine API. The Google Cloud console is not aware of storage-only nodes and treats them the same as HCI nodes. However, storage nodes don't contribute cores or memory to the private cloud and cluster and can't run VMs. You can use the Google Cloud CLI and VMware Engine API to query the number of storage-only nodes in a cluster.

By accessing the vCenter UI, you can identify which ESXi hosts are configured as storage-only nodes by looking at tags assigned to ESXi hosts. You can query for the tag storage_only_node in vCenter and find all ESXi hosts that have this tag.

If you want to use this feature, contact Cloud Customer Care.

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