You can use Filestore zonal and regional tier instances as external datastores for VMware ESXi hosts in Google Cloud VMware Engine.
To do so, you can create your Filestore instances in regions where both VMware Engine and Filestore are available and then mount them as external datastores to your existing VMware ESXi hosts in VMware Engine.
VMware Engine offers the following vSphere storage options:
- VMware vSAN. This includes the storage that comes with each VMware Engine node.
- External NFS storage. This includes the following options:
- Filestore instances used as a vSphere datastore.
- Google Cloud NetApp Volumes service instances used as a vSphere datastore.
For more information, see Filestore as storage for Google Cloud VMware Engine datastores.
What's next
- Learn more about Filestore.
- Compare the relative advantages of block, file, and object storage.
- Review the storage options for HPC workloads in Google Cloud.